Jim Greenhalf talks to Jean Oldfield, veteran committee member of The Priestley Centre for the Arts, former star actress and director, and looks back at her career which started in 1937.

J B PRIESTLEY'S comic novel of theatrical life, The Good Companions, which established both his name and fortune, was published in 1929.

The same year the Bradford Playhouse, an amateur company of actors, put on its first production, Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour.

Four years later in 1933, J B Priestley, on his way round England for a state of the nation report called English Journey, returned to his native Bradford. "I have never known anything like it. Operas, musical comedies, farces, dramas, the place hums with them," he wrote. "All the town's a stage."

Jean Oldfield was 11 when the mighty J B observed Bradford's astonishing appetite for the theatre. In 1937, at the age of 15, she joined the Playhouse and during the next 61 years became one of the pillars of the place, both on and off stage.

"We did a new play every four weeks, 13 plays a year. The enthusiasm was enormous," she recalled, as we sat in her flat over-looking Bingley Road, the green sofa strewn with albums of photographs, cuttings and programmes illustrating her career.

She's not the oldest surviving member of the theatre in Chapel Street, since renamed The Priestley Centre for the Arts: that distinction belongs to John Parkinson, still building sets, and actress Audrey Sykes, who next month stars in one of a triology of Alan Bennett's 1988 Talking Heads. She's playing the old lady in A Cream Cracker Under the Sofa, the role made famous by Dame Thora Hird. Bennett has written six more Talking Heads, which will be screened on BBC2 this autumn.

Nevertheless, this year Jean Oldfield was made a Life Member of the theatre, partly for her work on the Green Room Committee, which teaches drama, and the Artistic Committee, which selects the programme of plays, the directors, as well as the actors from the theatre's acting list.

Above all, she was honoured for her work on stage which began in 1940 and ended in 1979 with her production of Peter Shaffer's play Equus. The 39 years between those seminal dates, Britain's crisis year in World War II and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, saw Jean star in the greatest hits of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Orton, Rattigan, and many others.

For the 1951 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the director David Giles, now directing some of the Hetty Wainthropp Investigates series on BBC1, had Jean play Titania in a swimsuit decorated with strips of green and grey material and leaves.

In 1969 the T&A's late drama critic, Peter Holdsworth, rated her performance as Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as "surely the best of her career". Eleven years earlier in December 1958, he had declared that she was "Actress of the Year" for playing the roles of Sibyl and Anne in Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables.

Holdsworth also nominated Jean's husband Ivor as "Best Supporting Actor" for his role in Peter Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet.

Jean, a widow for 31 years, recalled her late husband's initial resistance to the idea of the Playhouse. "When we were engaged at 18 he said, 'I'm not going down there y'know, it's full of suede shoes and cissies'." The house manager used to wear a tuxedo as well.

In 1963 Jean and her daughter Janet were on stage together in Turgenev's A Month in the Country. The following year, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, Ivor played a Roman soldier while Jean starred as Cleopatra in the only production of Antony and Cleopatra ever staged by the Playhouse.

Looking back, she sees a career illuminated by glorious roles and companionable fun. Looking forward, the future is more difficult to predict.

"The fire (in July, 1996) has done us a lot of harm. The audience gets out of the habit of going to the theatre. It's been a struggle to get going again.

"It's a warm and welcoming place. The bar is bigger. There is always something to do. A little achievement is worth a lot and better than none at all. When people do things they communicate, and they'll have such fun, they really will," she said.

endorsing the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd.

She hopes the five-night run of Alan Bennett's Her Big Chance, Bed Among the Lentils, and A Cream Cracker Under the Sofa, from September 29 to October 3, will give the new season a cracking start, and provide the impetus for a year of inspiration in 1999 - the theatre's 70th anniversary.

She'd like to see a production of J B Priestley's Johnson Over Jordan, the only play of his which his son Tom has never seen in the theatre. From Jonson to Johnson in 70 years. The symmetry would have pleased J B, the original Playhouse's first president.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.