This year’s in-house production in the Cheltenham Everyman’s main auditorium is again one of local interest. It marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Beatrix Potter with a new and original musical version of THE TAILOR OF GLOUCESTER. The play has been written by the Everyman’s creative director, Paul Milton, and we met up for a chat about the new show which opens on 3rd August. I asked him how it all came about.

‘We wanted to do something to celebrate an anniversary and, because a couple of years ago we did WILL HARVEY’S WAR as a community/professional production, we wanted to do something similar now. So we looked at all the topical and local anniversaries and we realised that there was the Beatrix Potter birthday. She had written TAILOR OF GLOUCESTER and as we are Gloucestershire’s theatre, it really chose itself’. But do we know how the story came about? I asked Paul.

‘Miss Potter came to visit her cousin, Caroline Hutton, in Painswick at a place called Harescombe Grange. They went over to Gloucester and saw the old tailor’s shop near the cathedral. There was a real-life tailor and there is a wonderful old folk tale. His name was John Pritchard and he was asked to make a coat for the Mayor. He had cut the material and left it on his bench before going home. Later that night he was taken ill but on his return to the shop he found the coat had miraculously been sewn together and finished, apart from the last button-hole which couldn’t be sewn because there was no more thread – the famous line in the book “no more twist”. What happened was that Pritchard’s two apprentices had got drunk on the Saturday night, slept it off in the shop rather than going home and when they had sobered up, finished the coat.

‘When Beatrix Potter got back to Harescombe Grange she re-wrote the story with the shop’s mice, whom he has rescued from the cat, making the coat. In the book the naughty cat, who has previously imprisoned the mice, appears with a reel of cherry-red thread for the tailor to finish the final button-hole.’

Must be a bit tricky getting ten mice on stage. I asked Paul how they were going to do it. ‘The mice are all being played by local kids from the Janet Marshall Dance School and they will all be wearing beautiful mouse heads which are being made in-house by our own Roger Hendry who has worked here for years and is the theatre’s service engineer. He’s an expert at it, so in addition to making the sets in the workshop he is also making the heads for all the mice as well as a cat, a hedgehog and some ducks.

‘The production is being designed by two Gloucester based designers, Phil R Daniels and Charles Cusick Smith, with whom we often work and who most recently did the pantomime last year. So everything is being made here in the theatre and is going to look wonderful. I’ve written the script and Peter Banks has written the music and the lyrics. As you know the book is very short, so to make it into a two hour show we have two stories running in parallel. There’s the story of the mice and the tailor alongside that of Beatrix Potter herself visiting Gloucester, and it works very well.’

© Michael Hasted 2016. Article first published in THE CHELTONIAN July 2016 edition.