Growing Up Onstage (1963–65)

With Oliver! behind them, the family kept working. Beryl, having found her feet in the chorus, moved through a run of Brickhill-Burke productions — A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Oklahoma! among them — her voice increasingly put to use in the ensemble singing.

Virgil, at eight years old, appeared twice on stage in this stretch — first as the Changeling Child in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Alexander Theatre, playing the disputed ward of Oberon and Titania while both his parents took minor roles in the same production; then, remarkably, entirely on his own, as the son of “Little Chap” in Stop the World – I Want to Get Off — the boldly presentational, one-man-narrated musical written by and originally starring Anthony Newley, among the most avant-garde hits of the London stage at the time to make it to South Africa. It would be Virgil’s last stage role — he left theatre at ten and picked up music instead at fifteen — but for a few years, three generations of the family were, quite literally, all on the boards together.

Beryl’s Return to Musicals — The Sound of Music (1965)

By 1965, Beryl had folded her folk career (covered elsewhere) into a return to book musicals, joining the cast of The Sound of Music as one of the nuns of Nonnberg Abbey — a role she would return to decades later, in a very different capacity, when she took on a major role in a later production of the same show.

The Cabaret Duo (1966–69)

Somewhere in among all this, Aubrey and Beryl began performing together as a duo — she on vocals, he on guitar and voice — building a folk-leaning cabaret act that steadily worked its way up the venue ladder: from the coffee bars of Johannesburg, to a season at the Mayfair Supper Club in Durban, to Bretts nightspot in Salisbury, Rhodesia, where one reviewer called them “the hit of the varied floor-show,” praising Aubrey’s controlled tenor and Beryl’s “delightful” if quieter voice. Their signature closing bit — a comic rendition of the old folk song “Chastity Belt,” worked with cheeky asides — became memorable enough in its own right that it would eventually lend its name to this whole chapter of the family’s story.

The pair also stepped onto proper stages together: as two of the four leads in Finger Trouble Mark Two, a topical satirical revue alongside Elaine Lee and the well-known satirist-composer Robert Kirby; and took featured roles in the Brickhill-Burke musical Robert and Elizabeth, based on the Brownings’ love story, at the Alhambra and then on tour. Aubrey added brief credits in Rashomon and The Student Prince — smaller roles, but part of the same steady run of stage work in these years.

By the time Louis Burke and Joan Brickhill began auditioning performers for their first Minstrel show in 1966, Aubrey and Beryl were already seasoned, versatile performers — ready for the show that would define the next decade of the family’s life.