For Barbara Jones, a passion for sewing began at the tender age of three when her mother bought her a toy sewing machine to make dolls clothes. She was born in St Albans in Hertfordshire, England, to a decidedly untheatrical family. Her mother was a housewife and her father worked in the Inland Revenue Service.
As a young woman she decided to study medicine for pragmatic reasons as she was interested in the life sciences but knew that medicine would pay better than research. It was still a male dominated world, only ten percent of students at Cambridge University were women; in medicine she was outnumbered two-to-one by men.
She said it made her very competitive. She had to be better than the men just to be treated equally.
It wasn’t until her first year at Cambridge University studying science and medicine that her interest in sewing merged with a taste for drama. It was then that she joined a university theatre group as a costumer for Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’ in contemporary dress, that toured Europe during winter vacation. Despite the chill of European theatres in winter, the experience hooked her on theatre.
In her career she specialised in anesthesia and intensive care medicine and moved to Bermuda in 1978 to work at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in the anesthesia and intensive care department. To meet new people, she answered an advertisement in The Royal Gazette to help with the costumes for the rock opera ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ being put on by the Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society (BMDS) jointly with the Studio Foundation for the Arts, in May 1980. She made costumes for Caiphas, Annas, and the priests.
This was a groundbreaking play, because BMDS was the first theatre group in the world to put on an amateur production of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. The royalties were donated to Bermuda for free by Robert Stigwood who was the producer and owner of the play. He was then a Bermuda resident. His only caveat was that auditions had to be open to the entire community.
“Then I got hooked on theatre all over again,” she said. “BMDS and the Daylesford Theatre is a wonderful way not only to indulge your passion in theatre, but also to meet people.”
Thirty-one years after her first production in Bermuda, Barbara, now retired from medicine, worked again on the recent production of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ (by the Gilbert and Sullivan Society), this time as the stage manager.
Over the years she has done costuming for numerous productions in Bermuda. One of her most complicated pieces was a costume for Elizabeth I in the ‘Shakespeare in Love’ fundraiser put on by the Bermuda National Trust a few years ago. It copied the white costume that Elizabeth I is often depicted wearing, with intricate pearls and a big ruff. Later, the same costume was used again in a Famous for Fifteen Minutes play at Daylesford.
Although she originally started in costuming, she branched out into other areas of theatre, because she found costuming to be quite isolating. A lot of the work was done at home by herself, “hunched over a sewing machine”. She turned to stage managing.
“Like being in charge,” she said with a shrug. She ran most of the shows put on by BMDS during the 1980’s, but eventually decided to try acting. Her first role was fittingly a doctor, albeit a mad psychiatrist, in Durrenmatt’s ‘The Physicists’ directed by John Zuill in 1987.
The next logical step was directing. In 1990, she directed the BMDS pantomime, ‘Aladdin’, at City Hall. she went on to direct many more plays including ‘Death and the Maiden’ by Ariel Dorfman, ‘The Trojan Women’ by Euripides, ‘Frozen’ by Bryony Lavery, and Mamet’s ‘Boston Women’. Barbara found directing to be a lot like sewing; you take the flat page of the script or the piece of fabric and create your own vision from it.
When the BMDS ‘Famous for Fifteen Minutes’ playwrighting competition started up ten years ago, she wondered if she could write a play. It seemed that she could, as her first attempt, ‘These Things’, was the opening play of the evening that year, although it didn’t win an award. Since then, several of her plays have been performed during ‘Famous’, and she would like one day to win the much-coveted Golden Inkwell award but isn’t very hopeful.
The pinnacle of her theatrical career so far is “Wrecked on the Rock’, a full-length play that she wrote, directed and costumed. It was performed outdoors at Fort St Catherine in 2009 to celebrate Bermuda’s quadricentennial. It followed the lives and loves of the company on the ‘Sea Venture’ between its shipwreck in 1609 and their escape from Bermuda on the ‘Deliverance’ and the ‘Patience’ in 1610.
In 2008 her talents were recognized when The Bermudian magazine named her ‘Thespian of the Year”.
Now that she is retired, she is able to indulge her other great love, traveling, which is why she is not present for this awards ceremony. She should be at sea somewhere cruising on the Pacific Ocean.
