Believe in the Great Adventure

The beginning of a NewYear and, as with every new year, a time to reflect - a time to look forward but also a time to look back.  I am sure you do the same, but in my case I have been especially looking back for a few good weeks now. 

Every year without fail, as the corks pop and the fireworks crackle, I cast my mind over the previous year, often feeling sad at the dwindling amount of professional work, if any, that I do now, whilst at the same time looking to the new year with hope of a sudden change when work will come in again and the creative urge within me will be fed and watered.  Lady Luck is just around the corner I say!   However, this year it is different.  I feel more reflective and a nagging voice in my ear, one I normally manage to sweep aside and ignore, is whispering ‘Time to stop kidding yourself Jean. The writing is on the wall.’ So is it?  That is the question.  Time to retire? A word I never thought I would contemplate and one that frankly fills me with horror.

What has prompted this shift in my previous blindly trusting, ever-hopeful attitude was a hand written letter sent me long ago on 23rd of October, 1991 which I recently came across.   When it was written, I had just left Yorkshire Television’s soap series Emmerdale, after playing Dolly for nearly eleven years and I  remember feeling pleased and touched to receive it.  It was from my very first employer George Harland who ran the Castle Theatre’s weekly repertory company in Farnham, Surrey. He had offered me the position of Acting ASM (Assistant Stage Manager) for £5 a week.  In my last term at drama school I had leapt at the chance.

So there I was on the beginning of my Great Adventure.  A year in which George artistically directed me in an eclectic mix of plays from Whitehall farce to murder mysteries, Pantomime playing Cinderella,  Kitchen sink dramas like Jo in ‘A Taste of Honey’ and even a production of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ playing Bianca.  With the legendary touring Actor Manager, Anew McMaster, coming out of retirement to play the Moor of Venice on the tiny Castle Theatre stage, his resonant, theatrical voice booming around the 160 seater auditorium, what a historical treat for a nineteen year old, and, all rehearsed in five days and played for only a week, what an education!  After six months George took me off ASM duties and elevated me to juvenile lead.  I was in heaven!

Now reading his words,  written thirty years after he had ‘launched’ me, has certainly set me thinking.  His words are so encouraging.  Just what I need. Many creatives, especially performers like me, will understand how easy it is to think the business has abandoned you because you are untalented.  But I know I can still do it -  make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry!  But the business is brutal.  So much rejection - too short, too tall, too young, too old, too good, too knowing, too like the lead, too working class, too much competition, too few opportunities etc etc.  and whatever happens you just mustn’t let any of that make you lose faith in yourself, and not just if you are an actor, but whoever you are and whatever you do. Just remember the encouraging words you have had in the past and follow your dreams.  As for a performer, if you can still remember your lines and be professional, that, with faith, is enough.

George had written to me at the York Theatre Royal where I was now playing Fay Hubbard in Ayckbourn’s  ‘Chorus of Disapproval’ and Jean Louise in ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’.  He said he had intended writing to me for a while to say how much he had enjoyed my performance in Emmerdale.  “How right you were to leave! The character had been lost.  The developer’s were quite untrue to Dolly, and I got the feeling they did not know what to do with her - and what they did do was quite out of character!” How perceptive of him and it is reassuring now to know my own feelings of frustration at the time were not born of vanity but of my love and protection of the character I was playing who was like a sister to me.  The truth though, of course, was that I was still soldiering on as the new producer dismantled Dolly’s character and it was HE who had  let ME go.

Those who are old enough will remember the creator and presenter of BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, Roy Plomley.  He was a playwright as well as a broadcaster, a sweet man and I was fortunate to play a young Regency character in one of his new plays, ‘The best Hotel in Boulogne’, and it is something George referred to in his letter, that I was unaware of at the time, that caused all this soul searching.   George had said, “I hope your career will blossom in the theatre, you certainly deserve it.  Roy Plomley always used to talk about how good an actress you were and that you deserved better than what was offered you!” 

Looking back now I realise I was to find out, working again in the theatre which I loved, that being 50 was not a good time for a woman in our industry to start finding work   opportunities.  Also, moving down south again, I sadly discovered most of my previous contacts had retired,  moved on or had died.

So what is the answer after all this navel gazing? Well, no I am not retiring!  I might slow down a bit, who knows?  But I refuse to lose my confidence.  I know deep down I can still do it, want to do it and should do it. I shall go into 2026 ever hopeful but also knowing that my career, though professionally cut far too short and wasted, like so many women’s, has still been a Great Adventure, with successful moments and wonderful people; that I can still hold an audience’s  attention whether it be with poetry or prose; move them to tears or make them laugh; that acting is what I was born to do - I knew that when I was nine.   In the end it would be ungrateful not to believe in myself.  I hope you feel the same.

Happy 2026 everyone.  Hold on to your dreams. Hope, joy and peace!

Jean Rogers