First Person: Drama teacher turned playwright, Vic Mills

We lived in a rambling property by the church surrounded by fields. It was a fantastic place to grow up.

Both my parents were farmers from mid-Wales. They shaped me in a lot of ways as they were both performers by nature and language-oriented.

I think I always had an interest in performing and singing from an early age and when you are brought up in a chapel background there are endless opportunities to perform.

My parents didn’t have a television in the house and I think that made for a very active childhood as I was always reading and playing sport.

It probably had a big influence on the person I became.

I wrote my first play in 1979 as part of a drama course at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and although it wasn’t particularly successful it did give me the bug for writing.

It was a 35-minute one-act piece and as I had just started acting I was looking for something to act with a friend so I wrote a piece specifically for the two of us. It got performed about 10-12 times.

Titled, The Eclipse, it followed two hippy youngsters who travel to India looking for the meaning of life and finding some kind of meaning in the darkness of the eclipse. So it’s pretty awful.

I spent a lot of time in that era writing short stories and poetry and after that I didn’t write anything serious for the theatre until 1990, which was over 10 years later.

After university I started writing a series of poems about the decline of the South Wales Coalfield and that ‘disappearing world’.

I worked for the National Coal Board (NCB) for a while hoping to get taken up as an artist in residence but the project fell through.

The coalfield was in a bit of a mess at that time and it was right in the middle of the Thatcher era with all the strikes. Perhaps someone producing poetry about it wasn’t what they wanted.

Following that I became a teacher. After getting my first post on a maternity leave at Tredegar Comprehensive I became head of drama at Fairwater Comprehensive in Cwmbran.

Acting is something you can teach but when I meet students for the first time I can tell you within an hour who is going to be able to act.

It has nothing to do with self-confidence. I think very confident people can be shocking actors and very shy people can be incredible actors. It’s very difficult to say. You either have it or you don’t.

At every school I have worked at there have been a lot of support for the arts and I think that they’re very much at the top of the agenda in Wales.

After working in Monmouth I moved to teach in a school in Bridgend where I recently retired last year as deputy head. I have been teaching there since 1997.

I first became involved with Blackwood Little Theatre (BLT) in 1987 when another drama teacher asked me to bail someone out as they needed another actor. I got involved very heavily quite quickly.

The BLT company is close to 100 years old now and they have been in their current building – a former church – for about 65 years.

When I went to the theatre it was a traditional world of amateur drama and the people involved were those types of people – a social club that put on four plays a year, every year.

They tended to be relatively well-to-do people who were around 60 years old and very easily offended so you couldn’t do anything at all different and if you swore, people would have walked out.

That was the kind of theatre it was for a long time but if it had remained like that, it would have closed a long time ago as society doesn’t operate in that way anymore.

So I suppose one of the most exciting things was becoming a different kind of theatre that also promotes new writing.

If you hit the right note then you can get people interested in theatre but you do have to go to something that they’re interested in and find ways of connecting with them.

Since around 1997/98 we have looked at producing new work and doing something that is more challenging, relevant and cutting edge in a sense.

One of the things that we have worked on is bringing a first experience of theatre to school children and we have worked very hard at putting on stage versions of set texts for schools.

The novel Of Mice and Men has an enormous appeal to people who don’t liking reading literature at school.

Very often you may have low ability disenfranchised teenage boys who you can’t imagine having any interests in theatre thinking that the play is absolutely unbelievable.

We also raised over around £16,000 recently in an appeal to raise money for our theatre roof, attracting support from an appeal video that was shared on Facebook. The truth is the appeal video was completely improvised.

Myself and BLT chairman Neil Maidman were standing outside the theatre and he asked me if I wanted to do a Facebook live appeal and put me on the spot. Perhaps that’s why it was appealing. Neil is one of my closest friends and directs all my plays. That partnership was very important to me and to us as a theatre.

We had a lottery grant for the theatre in 1990 and built a new bar, changing rooms and a new floor but we haven’t really done anything since then and with a building of that age it constantly needs money spent on it.

As a result over the years we probably haven’t looked after the building well enough and seen things coming. We’re so busy thinking about the next play we’re going to put on and have full-time jobs.

Our main purpose is to put on plays and everybody who is involved in the theatre is there because of that, they’re not interested in raising money to look after a building.

What we should have done over the last 20 years is always saving for ‘some job’ but we didn’t and when we got to the point where we might have to close over this we became desperate.

We have had people join the theatre who have driven the fundraising which has been fantastic. An ex-pupil of mine who is now a student and from a poor area, even sent in a cheque for £100.

Thinking back, the best feeling wasn’t raising the money but just finding out how much BLT mattered to so many people.

I’m in a very fortunate position now in that before I write a play I know that I can have it staged, find an audience and perform it in festivals and there aren’t many playwrights who are in that position.

But my plays have only been published because they have been performed through BLT and festivals. I feel like it’s my theatre company in many ways. I’m the writer, I have my group of actors and my director and for the last 20 years it’s been a very big part of my life.

My wife, Lisa Roberts-Mills, a maths teacher, originally from Bridgend, is also a fantastic support. She is the first person who reads my work and always gives me feedback.

My 29-year-old daughter Portia recently asked me to have a look at a play she had been writing. That was fantastic as I never pushed her in that direction. Such a special moment.

We all feel very optimistic about the theatre. The youth side has grown, the fundraising has raised a lot of community awareness and we hope to use the building for community activities in future.

I met my oldest friend at the BLT in 1987, a guy called Pete Musto, and he had been with BLT a long time before that.

Now he is 77 years old and is still as committed and involved with the theatre as he was 20 years ago.

I would really like to be in his position in the next 20 years – That is, being involved with BLT, mattering to the community and continuing to take plays around the world.

I have always felt that there is no other theatre in South Wales that produces the same quality or interest in performing original work.

So I have never wanted to go anywhere else.