Marital bliss: Matthew and Bernie Strachan feel right at home at the Orange Tree
The outpouring of goodwill towards the Orange Tree during its recent funding crisis has proved just how central the theatre is to local people's lives.
Especially composer Matthew Strachan, half of the husband-wife writing team behind the venue's latest show, Next Door's Baby.
"I was four when I first started coming here when it was still a room above the pub," says Strachan. "My dad is a theatre director, so as a child I was always in the dressing rooms or backstage. It's the only workplace I know."
His author wife Bernie agrees: "You can't have anything to do with the Strachans without the subject of the Orange Tree coming up pretty often. So it's lovely to be here."
It certainly is this morning. The Orange Tree team have just received their reprieve from the Arts Council and spirits are high, both up here in the office and downstairs in the theatre where final rehearsals for Next Door's Baby are in full song.
A musical based on the radio play Bernie wrote in 2001, the show tells the story of the Hennessys and the O'Briens, two neighbouring families in 1950s Ireland whose already fractious relationship threatens to implode entirely at the local Bonny Baby Contest.
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"I don't really like musicals," says Bernie, "but Matthew persuaded me that this was a good idea. I wrote this play just a week after my mum died. She was Irish and it was a way of thinking about her without getting too sad, I think."
The show is the couple's first collaboration. They met in 1995 when Matthew approached Bernie for representation while she still worked at the Noel Gay agency. She did not bite, but five years later, they met again through a mutual acquaintance and, as Matthew puts it, "I decided that I wanted her to be my girlfriend."
"You were wearing a terrible jacket - a leather blouson," recalls Bernie, 45, before Matthew, 37, interjects: "Hey. It wasn't good but it wasn't as bad as a blouson!"
The Strachans now live in Kingston with their four-year-old daughter Niamh and despite the Scottish surname, the household is unmistakably Irish in sprit.
"My dad was from Mayo, my mum from Dublin and I still have about 85 cousins out there," says Bernie. "So I do feel very Irish and all the more as I get older. But it's been fascinating for me to have been brought up in England because the two countries are both similar and dissimilar. I think there's a lot of art to be created in that middle rift."
Seeing their work brought to life at the Orange Tree has been an emotional process. "I'm not happy unless I make people cry with my songs," says Matthew. "And I'm an easy target," says Bernie. "I've seen it done at least fifty times. But I just discreetly dab away."
Last week, they invited the whole cast back to Kingston for a good old-fashioned knees-up.
"There's a lot of Irish stew eaten in the play, so we thought we'd have them over for some more" says Bernie. "We've got this old wooden dining table in our kitchen and when I looked down at them, it was like watching the O'Briens. Everyone was hitting each other with spoons."
Next Door's Baby, Orange Tree Theatre, 1 Clarence Street, Richmond, Wednesday, February 6 to Saturday, March 8, £8-£18, call 020 8940 3633.
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