Anne Engel on the final chapter in the life of Mrs Worthington’s Daughters:
‘And then there was a sort of tragedy because Ruth Marks died [Mrs Worthington’s Daughters, along with many other emerging companies of the time, was vigorously championed by Arts Council officer Ruth Marks who sadly died young] and she had been our key supporter and had worked with us on the next play, Greece, which at the time was a big joke on the musical, and it was about Greek gods having control of the media……we did a treatment of it, this was very ambitious, a woman called Jenny Spritz wrote the outline ……we were going to work with a bank of televisions and they could rewind and fast forward the gods, and the present would change and all that. It was wonderful, a really, really good idea and we’d lost our officer, and we got a new officer who hadn’t seen our work, and were told it was too frivolous. We were absolutely furious because at that time the RSC had been funded to put Les Miserables into the West End and all sorts of stuff… We had long heart felt debates and we thought ‘well we can’t go back to profit share’ because we were that late – we were ready to go when they pulled the funding; it wasn’t revenue funding, we’d applied for project funding. We were very confident because we’d had such success you know [with previous funding applications]. We just thought, ‘We can’t start again, we can’t,’ and we’d also become very aware of things going on too long in the past.’
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