Keith Bollands
To mark the group's 100th production in 1989 the comedy A Chorus of Disapproval was selected. It tells of a new member of an amateur society who arrives at a rehearsal and soon takes over the lead in "The Beggar's Opera". Keith arrived at our auditions for the play and although not cast in the central role, featured strongly in the final production - his first for the group. It was almost a case of Life imitating Art!
That initial performance showed clearly Keith's gift for comic timing and characterisation. He made very funny appearances in Woman in Mind, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Noises Off, Twelfth Night and Neville's Island.
But he has scored equally highly in serious plays such as Terra Nova, Fool for Love and The Night of The Iguana. Indeed it was in a serious role he won the Best Actor Award at the 1998 Spelthorne Festival as the title role in Arthur Miller's The Last Yankee. He also gave a marvellous impersonation of Stan Laurel in Another Fine Mess for which he jointly won the Adjudicator's Award at Woking Festival in 1993.
Other notable appearances include major roles in Privates on Parade, Arcadia, Amy's View, the insufferable Colin in Absent Friends and the lonely Brian in Dead Funny. More recently Keith appeared as Mason, the droll cook in Journey's End, as an oleaginous film director in the toe-tapping musical Mack and Mabel and the very funny bigoted Yorkshire man in RolePlay. Contrast came again later in 2009 when he played the desperately arid Rev. Parris in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. and the sinister Goldberg in Pinter's The Birthday Party. Work commitments lead to a three year gap but in 2014 Keith showed that he had lost none of his sense of comic timing when he appeared in the farcical Alarms and the award-winning Definitely The Bahamas. Way back in 1989 Keith's first appearance with the group was in A Chorus of Disapproval which tells of an amateur opera group staging The Beggar's Opera. Things went full circle when in 2016 he appeared in our production of John Gay's famous play. Work commitments have made his RDG appearances more infrequent but we delighted that his returned with all his old comic expertise in our classic romp Volpone. In 2023 Keith scored a great hit in two very funny cameos in Under Milk Wood.