The film about Nelson Mandela comes out and before the credits have rolled they announce his death.
The drama about The Great Train Robbery runs on BBC and just before they screen it the death of Ronnie Biggs is announced.
Hope they don't make a show about me, not even if I'm to be played by Dame Helen Mirren.
Showing posts with label Theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theatre. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
Sunday, 12 May 2013
Plays of the Century
A pair of plays bracket the boom years of the end of the 20th century.
The first is Glengarry Glen Ross, the David Mamet Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece which had its world premier in London in 1983. This is the eve of the spread of the mobile phone and the salesmen in the seedy office do not have them, not even smoothie Ricky Roma. Consequently they can do nothing when the telephone handsets are stolen.
In pitiless observation of their language and values, Mamet exposes what they don't want to face; they couldn't do much when the phones were there, either. They just like to think they can. The numbers don't stack up; the junk estate they manage to unload on to fools is still not enough to pay for the time they spend hunting for the next mark.
They like to think of themselves as natural raptors but at that point in history there weren't enough stupid, juicy mice to sustain them. They believe their Jedi sales skills will work for them so long as they are allocated the Glengarry Glen Ross leads but there is no good reason to suppose that those leads even exist.
The office manager thinks these leads are what the firm has bought. He has to distribute them to the salesmen who can best convert them in to sales as shown on the competition board. But there is no reason why there should be a pool of convertible leads for swampland. We never know if the land itself is real. It's possible that the leads are just a mirage the firm has bought. It's possible the firm's owners know it is a mirage and are playing their own game of pretending to have a profitable company. The only time the leads have a quantifiable value is when they are stolen and palmed-off on to the next desperate re-seller.
The only people who get anything out of it are the Nyborgs, a couple who like having the attention of a salesman and can do so in safety because it doesn't matter what they sign; they haven't got a bean and the contract isn't enforceable.
In 1987, when Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser created the character Gordon Gekko for Wall Street, they rooted him in the land speculation of the 1970s, when the early-entry gamers had parceled-up and moved on their junklands to intermediaries. Ten fictional years later, this office is a long way down the pyramid where Gekko is the pinnacle. It is the last step before the weak James Lingk (weak lingk, geddit) who is induced to sign a contract by Roma. No matter what the salesmen think of themselves, Mamet has positioned them at the bottom of the pyramid of losers, unless they manage to find the one bigger loser beneath themselves - and even then, the law will help their prey escape.
Mamet was appalled to find that far from taking the play as a warning, he had accidentally created a feedback monster and that this was used as a training manual. The latest incarnation is the Alan Sugar vehicle The Apprentice, where a group of young people are encouraged to shred each other for the edification of the viewing public. Glen Sugar.
The second play is Enron, Lucy Prebble's explanation of the collapse of the company. Although the dialogue is wonderful it has to do more technical exposition than Mamet had to because of the breath-taking scale of the fraud. How could something that big be hidden? Here we see the same kinds of people, still selling, still voluntarily blinding themselves to economic reality, only now they have a great deal more money because the boom years have persuaded them they are fantastically clever people instead of what is nearer the truth: they have been unbelieveably lucky.
The fictional Ricky Roma gave philosophical soliloquies which justified his actions; the fictionalized Jeffrey Skilling is similarly given speeches with queasy half-truths in them. Bubbles of inflated value have made things such as railway construction possible and we wanted it all to be true .
Prebble wrote a show which is geared for the modern stage using surprise motifs which wouldn't work in film. Whereas Glengarry Glen Ross is a realist drama, Enron owes more to forms such as Greek tragedy, a big canvas of tragedy compared to the intimate study of misery. Mamet takes small people and enlarges them in to monstrous detail, Prebble has to take a huge event and find a way to contain it on the stage. Alas, you'll probably have to hope somebody stages it near you or buy the script as there don't seem to be any listed productions at the moment.
This week it was announced that Jeffrey Skilling may be able to negotiate a deal which will see him out of prison earlier much earlier than his original sentence demanded. Although he presided over the biggest bankruptcy in US history, his mistake appears to have neglected to be a bank. Then he'd have been bailed out by the tax payer, probably still had his job and possibly still have been given a bonus while losing money.
The first is Glengarry Glen Ross, the David Mamet Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece which had its world premier in London in 1983. This is the eve of the spread of the mobile phone and the salesmen in the seedy office do not have them, not even smoothie Ricky Roma. Consequently they can do nothing when the telephone handsets are stolen.
In pitiless observation of their language and values, Mamet exposes what they don't want to face; they couldn't do much when the phones were there, either. They just like to think they can. The numbers don't stack up; the junk estate they manage to unload on to fools is still not enough to pay for the time they spend hunting for the next mark.
They like to think of themselves as natural raptors but at that point in history there weren't enough stupid, juicy mice to sustain them. They believe their Jedi sales skills will work for them so long as they are allocated the Glengarry Glen Ross leads but there is no good reason to suppose that those leads even exist.
The office manager thinks these leads are what the firm has bought. He has to distribute them to the salesmen who can best convert them in to sales as shown on the competition board. But there is no reason why there should be a pool of convertible leads for swampland. We never know if the land itself is real. It's possible that the leads are just a mirage the firm has bought. It's possible the firm's owners know it is a mirage and are playing their own game of pretending to have a profitable company. The only time the leads have a quantifiable value is when they are stolen and palmed-off on to the next desperate re-seller.
The only people who get anything out of it are the Nyborgs, a couple who like having the attention of a salesman and can do so in safety because it doesn't matter what they sign; they haven't got a bean and the contract isn't enforceable.
In 1987, when Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser created the character Gordon Gekko for Wall Street, they rooted him in the land speculation of the 1970s, when the early-entry gamers had parceled-up and moved on their junklands to intermediaries. Ten fictional years later, this office is a long way down the pyramid where Gekko is the pinnacle. It is the last step before the weak James Lingk (weak lingk, geddit) who is induced to sign a contract by Roma. No matter what the salesmen think of themselves, Mamet has positioned them at the bottom of the pyramid of losers, unless they manage to find the one bigger loser beneath themselves - and even then, the law will help their prey escape.
Mamet was appalled to find that far from taking the play as a warning, he had accidentally created a feedback monster and that this was used as a training manual. The latest incarnation is the Alan Sugar vehicle The Apprentice, where a group of young people are encouraged to shred each other for the edification of the viewing public. Glen Sugar.
The second play is Enron, Lucy Prebble's explanation of the collapse of the company. Although the dialogue is wonderful it has to do more technical exposition than Mamet had to because of the breath-taking scale of the fraud. How could something that big be hidden? Here we see the same kinds of people, still selling, still voluntarily blinding themselves to economic reality, only now they have a great deal more money because the boom years have persuaded them they are fantastically clever people instead of what is nearer the truth: they have been unbelieveably lucky.
The fictional Ricky Roma gave philosophical soliloquies which justified his actions; the fictionalized Jeffrey Skilling is similarly given speeches with queasy half-truths in them. Bubbles of inflated value have made things such as railway construction possible and we wanted it all to be true .
Prebble wrote a show which is geared for the modern stage using surprise motifs which wouldn't work in film. Whereas Glengarry Glen Ross is a realist drama, Enron owes more to forms such as Greek tragedy, a big canvas of tragedy compared to the intimate study of misery. Mamet takes small people and enlarges them in to monstrous detail, Prebble has to take a huge event and find a way to contain it on the stage. Alas, you'll probably have to hope somebody stages it near you or buy the script as there don't seem to be any listed productions at the moment.
This week it was announced that Jeffrey Skilling may be able to negotiate a deal which will see him out of prison earlier much earlier than his original sentence demanded. Although he presided over the biggest bankruptcy in US history, his mistake appears to have neglected to be a bank. Then he'd have been bailed out by the tax payer, probably still had his job and possibly still have been given a bonus while losing money.
Friday, 26 April 2013
Follies - Pied Pipers
The best excuse for watching a pile of old musicals on DVD is that you are swotting in preparation for a Sondheim. Then on to Cambridge for the Pied Pipers production of his 1971 elegy on the lost world of the fictional Weismann's Follies.
A musical must be accessible and Stephen Sondheim follows this rule but his intricate writing can be appreciated better if you already know about the world he set the story in. In 1971 this was part of common consciousness but that was itself 42 years ago; there is a danger that a musical about people confronting their own pasts sometime in the 1960s might itself have become a ghost.
Because he's a genius Sondheim foresaw this and also had some luck in the emergence of the video industry. Old musicals don't die although they sometimes go in to limbo. The references are always available now but he made sure he put enough in to the script even if you have never watched one. The tour de force of Loveland where the couples collide with their own memories and act out their own personal folly through popular genres of songs is breathtaking but could be baffling if you can't just let go and wallow in the lyrics. The plot is going on under there, you just have to wait until it re-emerges. The production has always divided critics, though. I think some of this is simply that Brits are sympathetic to meditations on faded glamour whereas Americans see it as a reproach.
The premise is simple; a reunion of the old Follies performers, most of them female, takes place before the theater is pulled down. There is unfinished business between some of them. It has to be finished that night because there will never be another chance. Thus the stage is set as a splendid but decayed theatre; high American Gothic. It is a ghost of the real Zeigfeld Theatre, pulled down in 1966. They will do one last performance.
Designers Andrew Feathertone and Sarah Phelps get this right when they show the damaged fabric of the theatre. The 1971 designs suggested a space which was was nearly gutted, but that would not distinguish it from any other warehouse.
Director Jacob Allan has to manage a complicated stage where the memories of showgirls past parade along the balcony like shades of Hamlet's father along the battlements of Elsinore. The younger selves of the key characters step out of the past either to show us what really happened, or sometimes to show us how they remembered it. Not necessarily the same thing.
This is not a minimalist production; although there is only one set there are numerous costume changes for the secondary characters and intricate choreography to bring the past and present characters to the right places on the stage, capturing the spectacle of the Follies. This is particularly successful in the big number "Who's that Woman?" where a tableau flows in to a tap dance which involves all the women, past and present.
As the company is fantastically devoted to performance they all give Sondheim's words the clarity they deserve but two interpretations stand out. Kirsty Smith as Solange, the French diva (who may or may not ever have been French) conveys all the flinty determination of a woman with her own brand of perfume to sell. She produces a gem in Ah, Paris!, which she delivers just fractionally flat in the correct stage-French style, the method by which millions of people have been convinced they are listening to a sophisticated Gallic chanteuse. Everything about the character is perfectly observed, right down to the dress ring over her elbow-length gloves.
Stephen Waring as Buddy Plummer has to do a superb acting job because unlike most of the other characters Plummer is not a performer. An oil engineering salesman, yes, but essentially he plays the civilian on a stage full of combatants. Even Ben Stone, played by Matthew Chancellor, is a literate, articulate character used to operating on a par with the intellectual elite in society. Waring has to portray the moderately successful ordinary guy, middle-America rather than Washington. He is therefore given one of the most tongue-twisting pieces to perform in a vaudeville number, The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues whilst doing a galumphing chase dance with the fantasy versions of the women who are driving him mad.
Full marks to the Pied Pipers for this ambitious staging. At time of writing there are only two tickets left so you'll have to lobby them to give it another outing.
A musical must be accessible and Stephen Sondheim follows this rule but his intricate writing can be appreciated better if you already know about the world he set the story in. In 1971 this was part of common consciousness but that was itself 42 years ago; there is a danger that a musical about people confronting their own pasts sometime in the 1960s might itself have become a ghost.
Because he's a genius Sondheim foresaw this and also had some luck in the emergence of the video industry. Old musicals don't die although they sometimes go in to limbo. The references are always available now but he made sure he put enough in to the script even if you have never watched one. The tour de force of Loveland where the couples collide with their own memories and act out their own personal folly through popular genres of songs is breathtaking but could be baffling if you can't just let go and wallow in the lyrics. The plot is going on under there, you just have to wait until it re-emerges. The production has always divided critics, though. I think some of this is simply that Brits are sympathetic to meditations on faded glamour whereas Americans see it as a reproach.
The premise is simple; a reunion of the old Follies performers, most of them female, takes place before the theater is pulled down. There is unfinished business between some of them. It has to be finished that night because there will never be another chance. Thus the stage is set as a splendid but decayed theatre; high American Gothic. It is a ghost of the real Zeigfeld Theatre, pulled down in 1966. They will do one last performance.
Designers Andrew Feathertone and Sarah Phelps get this right when they show the damaged fabric of the theatre. The 1971 designs suggested a space which was was nearly gutted, but that would not distinguish it from any other warehouse.
Director Jacob Allan has to manage a complicated stage where the memories of showgirls past parade along the balcony like shades of Hamlet's father along the battlements of Elsinore. The younger selves of the key characters step out of the past either to show us what really happened, or sometimes to show us how they remembered it. Not necessarily the same thing.
This is not a minimalist production; although there is only one set there are numerous costume changes for the secondary characters and intricate choreography to bring the past and present characters to the right places on the stage, capturing the spectacle of the Follies. This is particularly successful in the big number "Who's that Woman?" where a tableau flows in to a tap dance which involves all the women, past and present.
As the company is fantastically devoted to performance they all give Sondheim's words the clarity they deserve but two interpretations stand out. Kirsty Smith as Solange, the French diva (who may or may not ever have been French) conveys all the flinty determination of a woman with her own brand of perfume to sell. She produces a gem in Ah, Paris!, which she delivers just fractionally flat in the correct stage-French style, the method by which millions of people have been convinced they are listening to a sophisticated Gallic chanteuse. Everything about the character is perfectly observed, right down to the dress ring over her elbow-length gloves.
Stephen Waring as Buddy Plummer has to do a superb acting job because unlike most of the other characters Plummer is not a performer. An oil engineering salesman, yes, but essentially he plays the civilian on a stage full of combatants. Even Ben Stone, played by Matthew Chancellor, is a literate, articulate character used to operating on a par with the intellectual elite in society. Waring has to portray the moderately successful ordinary guy, middle-America rather than Washington. He is therefore given one of the most tongue-twisting pieces to perform in a vaudeville number, The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues whilst doing a galumphing chase dance with the fantasy versions of the women who are driving him mad.
Full marks to the Pied Pipers for this ambitious staging. At time of writing there are only two tickets left so you'll have to lobby them to give it another outing.
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
Footloose - Irving Stage Company
To the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds for the opening night of Footloose performed by the Irving Stage Company.
Those who know this 1998 toe-tapper adapted from a 1984 dance movie will be familiar with the big numbers "Footloose" "Holding Out for a Hero" and "Let's Hear it for the Boy". The company has to get the energy up on these because they are the feel-good spine of the story which holds against the very dark background of mourning, fear, and entanglement with a violent young man.
As it was opening night the company was coltish, wobbly on its legs to start with, so it was with great pleasure that the audience could see them hitting their stride as the company orchestra, directed by Mark Jefferson, went through the score faultlessly, sweeping them along. During 'Holding Out for a Hero' the company began to relax and swing in to it. By 'Let's Hear it for the Boy' they were a unified force on the stage.
The glossy programme (designer Camille Berriman) with thoughtful notes recounts that the show is animated by the fact that this really happened; a tiny town in Oklahoma had banned dancing and a youth there challenged the edict and won. The writer and composer Dean Pritchford then built a classic conflict and resolution plot around that. It isn't candyfloss - there's a proper play in there and Shakespeare would recognise it.
The strength of the plot makes great demands on performers. There is only one unambiguously bad character, all the rest are very good people but mistaken. This is a greater test of acting ability that goodies and baddies; the players have to hold our sympathy especially when they are wrong. The toughest job on stage is managed by Daniel Bunker as the middle-aged Reverend Shaw Moore, doubly difficult where the musical is performed in a country where the audience may not understand American reverence for Christianity. Bunker carries it superbly as he has to confess to the audience how close he is to breakdown when his whole life is built on his ability to be strong for other people.
Brian Carmack, who really is from Chicago, plays the outsider Ren McCormack, moved from Chicago to a very small town indeed, one even smaller than Bury St Edmunds. He provides a tuning-fork for the company; without this there is a danger of a rag-bag of cod-American impersonation. Accent coach Darian Vomund orchestrated the speaking voices convincingly and exploited Carmack's voice to create a an audible difference between the out-of-towners and the sharply-spoken city boy.
Carmack and Josie May Harrington as Ariel Moore have to lead the youth side of the story. They must capture how dangerously naive the highschoolers are. This is tricky for director Sian Couture to pitch correctly as it can all go 'a bit Operation Yewtree'. Although the Ariel Moore character can be assumed to be over the age of consent, she's close to it and has tangled herself up in to an exploitative and abusive relationship with a Chuck Cranston, played by Ben Child.
Within the story it is made clear that Cranston is a youth but Ben Child gives him a harder edge which is more credible in its manipulation. Cranston pretends to be concerned for Ariel's welfare but he knows what he is doing when he goes out of his way to tell the Reverend Moore that his daughter has lied to her parents. His aim is to inflict as much damage as possible on the family out of pure spite, particularly towards the reverend's grieving wife, played by Angela Grant.
The sub-plot of Rusty and Willard, played by Serena Grant and Ben Musgrove, requires that both of them bring an audience to its feet, which they do. Willard's character arc is also demanding. Musgrove has to persuade us he can go from tongue-tied country boy to the spinner of shrewd folk wisdom. He does this via the superb number 'Mama says', full of glorious one-liners set in a slapstick routine. Luckily it has a short reprise after the audience has finished clapping - we could easily stand see the whole thing again, particularly the line "Mama says the things you believe are the only things you really own". Discuss.
Keeping the stage relatively bare and moving a few props and a little scaffolding, the sets were created quickly by lighting so that the action kept moving. Special congratulations for choreography by Sian Couture and Christine Glancy. Inspired use of Achy Breaky Heart resolves the stage in to waves of line-dancing which perfectly express the universal appeal of dance.
Footloose is on until 27 April, so get in quickly. Don't forget your check shirt and cowboy hat.
Those who know this 1998 toe-tapper adapted from a 1984 dance movie will be familiar with the big numbers "Footloose" "Holding Out for a Hero" and "Let's Hear it for the Boy". The company has to get the energy up on these because they are the feel-good spine of the story which holds against the very dark background of mourning, fear, and entanglement with a violent young man.
As it was opening night the company was coltish, wobbly on its legs to start with, so it was with great pleasure that the audience could see them hitting their stride as the company orchestra, directed by Mark Jefferson, went through the score faultlessly, sweeping them along. During 'Holding Out for a Hero' the company began to relax and swing in to it. By 'Let's Hear it for the Boy' they were a unified force on the stage.
The glossy programme (designer Camille Berriman) with thoughtful notes recounts that the show is animated by the fact that this really happened; a tiny town in Oklahoma had banned dancing and a youth there challenged the edict and won. The writer and composer Dean Pritchford then built a classic conflict and resolution plot around that. It isn't candyfloss - there's a proper play in there and Shakespeare would recognise it.
The strength of the plot makes great demands on performers. There is only one unambiguously bad character, all the rest are very good people but mistaken. This is a greater test of acting ability that goodies and baddies; the players have to hold our sympathy especially when they are wrong. The toughest job on stage is managed by Daniel Bunker as the middle-aged Reverend Shaw Moore, doubly difficult where the musical is performed in a country where the audience may not understand American reverence for Christianity. Bunker carries it superbly as he has to confess to the audience how close he is to breakdown when his whole life is built on his ability to be strong for other people.
Brian Carmack, who really is from Chicago, plays the outsider Ren McCormack, moved from Chicago to a very small town indeed, one even smaller than Bury St Edmunds. He provides a tuning-fork for the company; without this there is a danger of a rag-bag of cod-American impersonation. Accent coach Darian Vomund orchestrated the speaking voices convincingly and exploited Carmack's voice to create a an audible difference between the out-of-towners and the sharply-spoken city boy.
Carmack and Josie May Harrington as Ariel Moore have to lead the youth side of the story. They must capture how dangerously naive the highschoolers are. This is tricky for director Sian Couture to pitch correctly as it can all go 'a bit Operation Yewtree'. Although the Ariel Moore character can be assumed to be over the age of consent, she's close to it and has tangled herself up in to an exploitative and abusive relationship with a Chuck Cranston, played by Ben Child.
Within the story it is made clear that Cranston is a youth but Ben Child gives him a harder edge which is more credible in its manipulation. Cranston pretends to be concerned for Ariel's welfare but he knows what he is doing when he goes out of his way to tell the Reverend Moore that his daughter has lied to her parents. His aim is to inflict as much damage as possible on the family out of pure spite, particularly towards the reverend's grieving wife, played by Angela Grant.
The sub-plot of Rusty and Willard, played by Serena Grant and Ben Musgrove, requires that both of them bring an audience to its feet, which they do. Willard's character arc is also demanding. Musgrove has to persuade us he can go from tongue-tied country boy to the spinner of shrewd folk wisdom. He does this via the superb number 'Mama says', full of glorious one-liners set in a slapstick routine. Luckily it has a short reprise after the audience has finished clapping - we could easily stand see the whole thing again, particularly the line "Mama says the things you believe are the only things you really own". Discuss.
Keeping the stage relatively bare and moving a few props and a little scaffolding, the sets were created quickly by lighting so that the action kept moving. Special congratulations for choreography by Sian Couture and Christine Glancy. Inspired use of Achy Breaky Heart resolves the stage in to waves of line-dancing which perfectly express the universal appeal of dance.
Footloose is on until 27 April, so get in quickly. Don't forget your check shirt and cowboy hat.
Thursday, 11 April 2013
Back to The Minack
The Minack Theatre opened the 2013 season in chilly but jolly form with Craig Johnson's Squashbox Theatre giving morning performances aimed at teenies.
Children wrapped up against the blow from the sea settled down round him looking like woolly cupcakes round a candle. The wind was so fresh he had to have an assistant keeping the scenery on the ground. Johnson's nemesis is a sea anemone brought out from his rock pool for our delight, but he's also taunted by an ocean full of limpets, sea-squirts, crabs and his seagull friend, Ruan.
As he takes us through his Cornish world we meet fishwives, sailors and the enchanting mermaid Morwenna. I can't tell you what she said - it's a spell, you only know you've heard one - but I can tell you that the man in the next family nearly burst with laughter. He was a helpless jelly the way a four-year old goes when something strikes them as impossibly hilarious. She must have reminded him of an old girlfriend.
Squashbox's theatre contains improving elements of education, but you won't notice them as he handles them with a supreme lightness of touch. If it gently reminds children - and adults - to put litter in the bin then I'd much rather it was done this way than by repeated ugly nagging, which doesn't work.
If you don't have or can't borrow any children, go anyway because Craig Johnson does magic before your very eyes, conjuring an alternative reality out of his imagination.
The Minack is looking very spruce indeed this year with a few new seats added. There is also a weekly feature on Saturday mornings on Billy Rawlings, who came as Rowena Cade's gardener and handyman then moved heaven and earth to build her a theatre.
Mark Harandon has researched and re-created the character of Billy and will lead you
around the theatre telling stories and reminiscing about how it was built. Come along between 10am and 2pm and catch up with ‘Billy’ in the theatre to hear his stories.
Children wrapped up against the blow from the sea settled down round him looking like woolly cupcakes round a candle. The wind was so fresh he had to have an assistant keeping the scenery on the ground. Johnson's nemesis is a sea anemone brought out from his rock pool for our delight, but he's also taunted by an ocean full of limpets, sea-squirts, crabs and his seagull friend, Ruan.
As he takes us through his Cornish world we meet fishwives, sailors and the enchanting mermaid Morwenna. I can't tell you what she said - it's a spell, you only know you've heard one - but I can tell you that the man in the next family nearly burst with laughter. He was a helpless jelly the way a four-year old goes when something strikes them as impossibly hilarious. She must have reminded him of an old girlfriend.
Squashbox's theatre contains improving elements of education, but you won't notice them as he handles them with a supreme lightness of touch. If it gently reminds children - and adults - to put litter in the bin then I'd much rather it was done this way than by repeated ugly nagging, which doesn't work.
If you don't have or can't borrow any children, go anyway because Craig Johnson does magic before your very eyes, conjuring an alternative reality out of his imagination.
The Minack is looking very spruce indeed this year with a few new seats added. There is also a weekly feature on Saturday mornings on Billy Rawlings, who came as Rowena Cade's gardener and handyman then moved heaven and earth to build her a theatre.
Mark Harandon has researched and re-created the character of Billy and will lead you
around the theatre telling stories and reminiscing about how it was built. Come along between 10am and 2pm and catch up with ‘Billy’ in the theatre to hear his stories.
Monday, 16 April 2012
Titanic at the Minack Theatre
Last week I achieved a lifetime's ambition and finally saw a full-scale production at the Minack Theatre.
The Minack is that most English of things which rooted and blossomed in the magical kingdom of Cornwall; a private obsession which chimed with others and called them to itself. Miss Rowena Cade, an amateur producer, offered the use of her garden to the local players for a production of The Tempest. They had done well with A Midsummer Night's dream in a nearby meadow. The garden of Minack House, however, did not readily offer somewhere to seat the audience. Cade looked in to what was then a gully above a rock used by fishermen and wondered if a stage could be built down there, where the sides suggested a natural amphitheatre. Where better to place Prospero's island but on a rock jutting out over the Atlantic Ocean?
Miss Cade and her gardener set about sculpting the theatre and in 1932 The Tempest was performed - by moonlight. The Times noted the event and a dream became flesh.
That dream was nearly wrecked by WWII, but Cade, who had by now lived through two wars, set about re-building the theatre. She did not know the meaning of "Give up" but the phrase "The Show Must Go On" was written on her heart and, in most cases, her own wallet.
The theatre is open air - although Cade had some ideas late on for adding bad- weather covers - and that means that you take your chances. All tickets come with a warning to wear suitable clothes and that umbrellas are not to be put up in the auditorium as it intereferes with the view. In extreme weather they might cancel but normal rain is ignored.
On Monday 9 April the pleasant Cornish spring weather scuttled off to be replaced with bluster and sudden showers of extra-wet rain. Stopping to pick up a picnic, the lady in the bakery said her friend was a producer and he had called her to say the Minack was experiencing winds sweeping the drizzle down on to the upper terraces, where by coincidence I had a seat to see "Titanic - the musical". I bobbed over to the sailing shop and explained the situation to the lady behind the counter. She sold me a showeproof suit and a Frosty Fox snood in a piratical stripe to keep my hair out of my eyes.
Sitting on a rolled-up mat on the terrace, in my survival suit and wrapped up in a waterproof-blanket, I settled down to watch the matinee performance of a lifetime and got it buckets.
The musical has been performed frequently around the world since its slow start in 1997. This production was by the local Atlantic Theatre Company. Using an amateur cast emphasises the ordinary lives of many who died rather than the extraordinary lives of passengers such as the campaigning editor and journalist W T Stead, who perished on the night he might have written his greatest scoop.
An ingenious stripped-down set had been developed to create the bridge of the doomed ship and to focus on the poignant performances. History records that the night of the disaster was unusually calm; the water was oily flat as the air, although freezing, was static.
The Atlantic was not having this. This was its big chance to be seen in daylight instead of gleaming in the velvet darkness, and it wanted to be in the performance so it gathered itself in to swollen rollers and flung spray up over the Minack rock below the stage. The wind hummed loudly over the orchestra, tugging at our hoods and bringing us a taste of salt.
At the interval the rain started, through which gulls plunged in to the waves, fishing as the incoming tide brought a shoal close to the Minack rock and within reach. The gulls circle lazily until they see where dinner is, then fold their wings and dive in to the water with a tiny ring of white to mark where they vanish, clean as an arrow.
In the second half the weather threw itself at the performers who continued, cold, soaking wet, the wind plastering their clothes to their bodies. This was not historically accurate but it conveyed a sense of impending shipwreck; the sea and the sky produced spectacular special effects but at the cost to the cast of them being only a little warmer than they would have been had they been dunked in the sea that fateful night.
It has been dismissed as grief-porn, this picking over of a century-old civil disaster but that is to miss what even Goebbels - who later commissioned a film about it - realized. The disaster was capable of being read several ways and has been over the century. Jared Poley tells us that in 1912 the dominant theme was that of nature triumphing over man but by the 1940s Goebbels used it to amplify what was true; much British self-confidence had gone down with the ship.
Friday, 30 March 2012
POSH - coming in May
The Royal Court Theatre takes POSH back to the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, from Friday 11 May to Sat 4 August and booking is already brisk for the opening month.
An elite set of Oxford students arrange a private drinking party and startling events ensue.
If staged badly this could be a crude piece of Conservative-bashing propaganda but staged properly it can be a much more complex play, so let's hope the Royal Court rise to the challenge.
I had the advantage of seeing it at Cambridge, performed by Cambridge students with special insight in to the script. Yes, there is some chippy caricature but they also managed to breathe sympathy in to the behind-each-other's-back stabbing, the ragging - some of it downright hostile - and the insecurity of a generation who cannot rely on the automatic entitlements they once thought the world owed them. It's also farcically funny at points as this uber-group see their plans for the event work out in a way not necessarily to their advantage.
An old-money element is the youth who will be expected to take over the crumbling family pile and waste the rest of his life trying to maintain it. "Always the roof" he wails, drawing a sigh of identification from anyone in the audience who has ever had to deal with property maintenance - and that's nearly everybody.
The weakest element of author Laura Wade's thesis is that these students have a unique sense of entitlement, although it was treated as a revelation in 2010 when the play opened. In fact rather a lot of students think this, Oxford or otherwise. The Cambridge production had an extra edge because of the historic competition between the universities. They are not the same; not inside and not outside. Cambridge remains snootier about its intellectual capacities but is otherwise a meritocracy, Oxford retains the underlying tang of social snobbery but has gone to far greater lengths to insist that so long as its entry qualifications are met, all are welcome to apply.
Spoilers sweetie but this is not a comedy. If you haven't seen POSH, grab a seat now and decide whether it is a fair representation of the cabinet, or whether they embody the character traits of the 646 who represent us in the House of Commons, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum.
Thursday, 22 March 2012
Equus
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| (c) London Classic Theatre |
The London Classic Theatre production of Equus is part way through its national tour; there is still time to catch it.
But has the nearly 40-year old play has escaped its age? Not every play travels through time, the hallmark of a classic.
The horrifying premise is simple: a teenage boy has blinded six horses to which he was devoted and refuses to say why he inflicted this appalling cruelty. The child psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Malcolm James) has to find out why.
Optimistically - or perhaps arrogantly - both he and the referring magistrate think that the psychiatrist can fix whatever has gone wrong in young Alan Strang's head (Matthew Pattimore).
The first sign of age is that in 1973 people apparently had faith in psychiatrists, or at least Sir Peter Shaffer wrote it that way. I doubt if psychiatrists now would see themselves as quite so confident that they could fix behaviour just by unravelling motives and talking about them, if they ever did. However, in 1973 such theories were achingly fashionable so an audience would not necessarily have spotted this as a theatrical effect rather than an accurate representation of what a psychiatrist does for a living.
The second difficulty is that one of the formative moments in Alan Strang's life hinges on a chance meeting. Spoilers sweetie - you need to see it because the staging is wonderful - but it is a victim of time. An event which might plausibly have happened to Alan around 1960 could not happen to the infant Alan in 2000. If it had, the parents would be shouting about something other than class war. Our reality has shifted too much in specific aspects to accommodate the assumptions underpinning the play in 1973.
These, however, are minor quibbles which could be got round by simply setting the play in the past, which as we all know, was another country. It wouldn't take all that much; Alan Strang would wear flares and a hideous acrylic jumper, Martin Dysart needs a kipper tie and the lady magistrate should wear a skirt rather than trousers.
Everything else works as it stands because the designer Kerry Bradley has done a bang-up job of producing a flexible but monumental set which allows the meetings to happen with simple movements and careful lighting and not the slightest delay between scenes, whilst still clearly indicating where changes have happened. These open sets carry a risk that the audience will miss the signal that a location or times has changed; never once does the set, the lighting or the direction trip over itself leaving the audience behind and thinking "Eh, where are we up to now?" Moreover, the set is in units which allow it to fill various stage sizes, creating the illusion of a classical amphitheater even in a small space.
For the most difficult query I had to seek an opinion from a Yout of Today. As Philip Larkin pointed out, sexual intercourse began in 1963 so there had been barely a decade of it by 1973. A play about myths and sex had great power in those days. Plays about myths still might, but sex? Can it really still be a credible dramatic motive in an age when you can't open an email account without immediately being offered dodgy products?
Da Yout of Today informs me that it can be, and moreover it has to within this play or else Strang won't play-off properly against Dysart who spends much of the time bemoaning his own arid personal life.
Dysart is the heart of the piece. Ultimately it isn't the psychoanalysis of young Alan Strang which matters; that's only solving the headline puzzle. The driving complexity is the aging, raging Dysart, chasing himself about the stage, able to see his own difficulties but unable to do anything about them. Malcolm Jones carries the demanding role with honour, never letting it tip over in to a cartoon shrink but depicting a man standing on the edge of insanity for a living.
Equus is already on the list of the 100 plays of the 20th Century as too are Peter Shaffer's "Royal Hunt of the Sun" and "Amadeus". Both of those are in historical settings in which the audience automatically colludes with creating another time and place. Equus uniquely challenges the director to keep the play current, not let it slip in to a being a period piece. This production manages that - it was only me who noticed that the audience had changed - and therefore grab the chance to see it in case we have to wait another 40 years for it to be staged competently.
Here is a surviving dubbed fragment of The White Horses (1965, aired in Britain in 1968) which the young Alan Strang was not allowed to watch. It gives a flavour of the aspirations of the time the character was formed in.
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Sammy Davis Jr.
During the week the name of Sammy Davis Jr. was mentioned and someone said they hadn't realized he was more than a somewhat mannered singer. This is an easy mistake to make; Britain did not receive the quantity of shows which demonstrated his ability. Let's put that right now that by thanking the uploaders and his estate who have made material available so that we can glimpse how this major talent worked and begin to appreciate that he was one of the very best popular entertainers which America has ever produced.
Those who knew him insist that he was in fact the greatest; talented in an over-arching way that was difficult to see it all at once.
Exhibit one is a section of a 1963 show he did with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Despite the natural competition between them, they knew who was the talent on that stage. Sinatra pleads "What do you waaaant of us?" They go through their joshing and party pieces in the time honoured "Hollywood Party" mode, then at 6:14 Davis produces Marlon Brando.
He doesn't just impersonate a character; he acts it for both good and ill, showing the power but also the incoherence in that style of theatre. Impersonations, my foot. Right there in a tiny link you have a profound critique of the method school of acting; Davis was never incoherent in his life and he's not convinced that it is of any value. Dammit, this is supposed to be performing for an audience, not modelling.
The Copa Room, Sands Hotel, 1963 part 3
Item 2. This interview ought to be compulsory viewing for every grunting youth in the land. Pay attention boy, this is how articulacy makes people forget about the looks of the person in front of them. Although Davis regularly joked about race - it was, and is, a major political consideration which can get in the way of a performance - it is known that what he was particularly sensitive about was the glass eye he was obliged to wear after a car accident. Although he walked in rhythm, it's observably the case that he was no raving beauty. Perversely, that was lucky. A prettier face might have found it impossible to cope with the disfigurement. As it turned out, people were not all that bothered; they wanted him to joke, to dance and to sing. Luckily, so did he.
Wogan interview with Sammy Davis Jr. 1989 (part 1 of 4)
His signature song, Mr Bojangles, has many versions available. This one is from 1985 and is remarkable for its simple orchestration which never overpowers the poetry. When lesser performers attempt it they misunderstand it to be a schmaltzy tum-ti-tum. Davis shows that it is in fact an intimate monologue delivered to you, personally.
Mr Bojangles 1985
A Youtube search now shows the major performances of his life and The Estate of Sammy Davis Jr. has archive photography and further material. In 1964 Ed Sullivan knew he had created a special moment when Davis and Ella Fitzgerald appeared together for him. He says that when the audience grows up, it will tell its children they saw them perform. What Sullivan could not foresee is that the recording survived and is here.
Those who knew him insist that he was in fact the greatest; talented in an over-arching way that was difficult to see it all at once.
Exhibit one is a section of a 1963 show he did with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Despite the natural competition between them, they knew who was the talent on that stage. Sinatra pleads "What do you waaaant of us?" They go through their joshing and party pieces in the time honoured "Hollywood Party" mode, then at 6:14 Davis produces Marlon Brando.
He doesn't just impersonate a character; he acts it for both good and ill, showing the power but also the incoherence in that style of theatre. Impersonations, my foot. Right there in a tiny link you have a profound critique of the method school of acting; Davis was never incoherent in his life and he's not convinced that it is of any value. Dammit, this is supposed to be performing for an audience, not modelling.
The Copa Room, Sands Hotel, 1963 part 3
Item 2. This interview ought to be compulsory viewing for every grunting youth in the land. Pay attention boy, this is how articulacy makes people forget about the looks of the person in front of them. Although Davis regularly joked about race - it was, and is, a major political consideration which can get in the way of a performance - it is known that what he was particularly sensitive about was the glass eye he was obliged to wear after a car accident. Although he walked in rhythm, it's observably the case that he was no raving beauty. Perversely, that was lucky. A prettier face might have found it impossible to cope with the disfigurement. As it turned out, people were not all that bothered; they wanted him to joke, to dance and to sing. Luckily, so did he.
Wogan interview with Sammy Davis Jr. 1989 (part 1 of 4)
His signature song, Mr Bojangles, has many versions available. This one is from 1985 and is remarkable for its simple orchestration which never overpowers the poetry. When lesser performers attempt it they misunderstand it to be a schmaltzy tum-ti-tum. Davis shows that it is in fact an intimate monologue delivered to you, personally.
Mr Bojangles 1985
A Youtube search now shows the major performances of his life and The Estate of Sammy Davis Jr. has archive photography and further material. In 1964 Ed Sullivan knew he had created a special moment when Davis and Ella Fitzgerald appeared together for him. He says that when the audience grows up, it will tell its children they saw them perform. What Sullivan could not foresee is that the recording survived and is here.
Tuesday, 14 February 2012
StageFright
Set 1894 during the run of Sir Henry Irving's "Faust", the action takes place on a night with winter weather so foul that it traps Sir Henry and his theatre manager, Bram Stoker, in an attic dressing room in the eaves of the Lyceum theatre in London.
By coincidence, the temperature on Saturday in Suffolk was -7C during the day and -12C at night, so the audience came in having just experienced the sucking cold of an icy grave.
Bram Stoker was writing Dracula in those days, summoning him up from the influences of theatre, religion, secular philosophy and his own Irish talent - under-estimated by Iriving - so that there seems to be another character, one who never appears, threaded through the work.
It is believed that Irving disapproved of Dracula - he is said to have walked out of a reading and never played the part, although it would have been natural to offer it to him. It is also possible that Conan Doyle saw the pair working and fed that in to his own creations, Holmes and Watson, recognizing it to be much more than a case of an employer and a technical manager.
Irving was a self-made man and he knew exactly what he was doing; creating effects on the stage. Even his name was partly an illusion, re-fashioned because it sounds so much better than John Henry Brodribb. Michael Punter gives Irving all the doubt and superstition which goes with the job of acting no matter how hard Irving tries to stick to rational responses. If you spend your working life summoning up illusory characters, isn't there a risk of calling up something real, Irving wonders, of speaking the Devil's name and having him answer. Perhaps he is always listening for the invitation, like an actor waiting for his stage-call on the other end of a speaking-tube?
Stuck for that freezing night in an attic, the pair of them begin to discourse on this - or rather, Irving declaims and Stoker sets up the lines for him, because that is how their relationship works. They think they are alone but an empty theatre is never completely empty; you have to be careful what you do, what you say because you never know who may be listening. Could a building record the events which happen in it, Irving muses. If you ask the staff of Marks and Spencer just a few yards away in the modern shopping centre in Bury St Edmunds they will tell you yes, and the building doesn't even have to exist any more. They still get half-ghosts of monks wading through their sales floor and sinking down staircases which have not existed for centuries.
The snow falls outside and soon Irving and Stoker begin to suspect they are not alone.
The Theatre Royal is an 1819 building, beautifully refurbished for a modern audience, so that this is the perfect intimate place to watch a play which aims to recreate the conventions of Victorian stage and parlour magic. The set has been constructed to nudge out in to the auditorium, dissolving the line between stage and seats so that we are invited to float in the dingy cluttered room, a spectral presence, as if hovering at a seance table. This is the world where lighting is by gas; that is the product of science and an advanced economy but gas light is still soft and variable and is delivered in fittings which resemble the old oil lamps. We are looking in to a dusty jewel-box of enchantment and treasure.
The director and author were adamant; to capture the rich flavour of High Victoriana it had to include stage illusions which the Victorians would have expected in a theatre they would have recognized. Drama had not yet reached the naturalistic psychological approach which is most common today. Stoker and Irving squabble about this; Stoker has all the best technical arguments but Irving's case is made in the play itself; there's no mistaking the jump of the audience when .... spoilers, sweetie.
The premier run of Stagefright is at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds
From Tuesday 14 February until Saturday 25 February
Tickets cost between £8 and £20 depending on seat and performance, bookable online (scroll down and select date).
For some locations in Suffolk, the theatrebus deal is available which includes transport, the ticket, a drink and the programme. All tickets: £23 For under 26’s: £11.50
Concessions are available including the £5 on-the-day for under 26 year olds, but must be booked via the box office: 01284 769505
The performance is suitable for anyone over 8 years old but is genuinely frightening.
Monday, 28 November 2011
A Golden Age of Live Theatre
Hat tip: The Jolly Lion
We are living in a golden age of live theatre. For the price of a dvd you can see an entire company produce magic in front of your very eyes. They are doing it in village halls, school halls, regional theatres , stately homes, cricket pavilions and pub courtyards. The Internet has helped enormously; the tiniest venues still rely on local papers and selling tickets through local shops, but any theatre which has an on-line booking system is immediately in a better position to fill the seats.
One of the reasons I don't bother with TV soaps is that it is painfully obvious that many of our so-called professionals are nothing of the sort. They could no more deliver a line than I can sing opera and the clunky direction gives them the fluidity of a call centre slave in India trying to scam you. Pause....click...Good evening Mam, am I speakin' to Mrs Raft? No, sorry, you are not.
You will experience more in a single evening spent watching a local company, which will show performances ranging from the competent to the breath-taking, than you will in a month of Shouty Cockerneys. There's something for everyone; companies are refusing to stick to the tried-and-tested popular productions and tackling new works written by company members. Obviously, that's going to be a mixed bag; there is always an element of lucky dip about a new work but who knows, one might see a little slice of theatre history being made. You hadda be there.
Beloved of all is a farce: these work best where the audience can see the actors sweating to bring the staging to the correct point to make the joke. Farce is the theatre magic where you have to see most of what the conjurer is doing because the audience is in cahoots with the company. The ignorant character, the one who is going to get the surprise, is on the stage, which reverses the traditional expectation that it is the audience who will receive the revelation when a secret escapes. Doing it on telly is cheating; we all know they can cut away and come back tomorrow - where's the panic in that?
Down in Paignton the Bijou Theatre Company is performing a pre-Christmas farce of impeccable pedigree "The Happiest Days of your Life" by John Dighton, which hinges around school inspections, disapproving parents and people's careers hanging by a thread. That should bring a groan of recognition to the throats of teachers everywhere, but it is still very funny (unlike real life).
Previewed by The Jolly Lion - who is in it - the production is at the Palace Theatre, Paignton and runs from
Wednesday 30th November - Saturday 3rd December 2011 - 7.30pm
Tickets cost £11 but concessions are available
Telephone Palace Theatre Box Office on
01803 665800
Sunday, 20 November 2011
Basket Case
To Cambridge for Basket Case , the new rom com by Nick Fisher. A kitchen-sink comedy of middle class folk. Guy and Miranda are divorced, not on very good terms and now the family dog is ill. Miranda feels obliged to call Guy to let him know. It is, after all, Guy's dog.
The audience was unsettled to find that studded between the jokes Nick Fisher had left his trade-mark needle-sharp observations. Fisher has a wicked ear for the cadences of the John Lewis catalogue classes - to whom he sells cookery books - and Liz Ashcroft, the designer, realizes their vision on the stage. Yes, we all laughed but there is an unnerving thread of criticism. For example, Fisher allows the characters to use bad language and graphic sexual imagery. The audience came out muttering about it being "close to the knuckle" but it's not so much the f-word which bothers them but the way the conflicted children - whom we never meet - have turned out.
All the performances are competent - which is no less than you'd expect - and Nigel Havers is allowed to give throat to the frustrations of the successful white male. Because he is expected to put bums on seats, Havers has to soften the character slightly, which is a pity because Fisher has written it with the capacity to be a glittering monster instead of chap who gets things muddled.
It's a hard call for director Robin Lefevre; make this play as hard-hitting as it could be and it would be up there with the flinty social realism gang and the critics would love it. Unfortunately, the audience would hate it and throw boots at the stage; they like the John Lewis adverts and aren't paying good money to see themselves reflected unflatteringly.
Besides, Nick Fisher is no stranger to middle-England fatwahs and doesn't want another one - he once wrote a sex education guide for teenagers which nearly got him lynched. So a compromise is reached; you can read it as a light comedy or much more if you care to look at the references, such a Miranda being surrounded by thirty grand's-worth of kitchen in which she bakes two quid's worth of muffins and even then doesn't have the blueberries or pecans to make the cakes properly. Beautiful set dressing btw - right down to this-year's must-have, fluted, jug-handled mixing bowl.
Guy's costume is the one formulated by Paul Weller a million years ago and worn by Jeremy Clarkson ever since; denims and suit jacket with tassel loafers. He also delivers trade-mark motor-mouth tirades. Yes, Guy is popular and successful but if I were Jeremy Clarkson I'd be squirming in my seat; of course it isn't Clarkson, but as a portrait of a man skidding towards being old enough to be a grandad whilst having made a lot of money but arsed-up in key areas of life.....well, any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Although old smoothie-chops is there to provide male glamour, the one we've all really come to see is Graham Seed, late of Lower Loxley Hall in the county of Borsetshire. Wisely, Fisher doesn't move Seed, playing Martin the vet, too far from the audience's expectations and puts in a couple of pointed in-jokes. Fresh from being the nicest man in the world to be pushed off a stately home roof, he's now the nicest vet in the world who has to deal with the tantrums of the clients while being obviously much more attuned to the patients.
Although we are explicitly supposed to see Martin as in love with Miranda from a distance, this line isn't picked up and Martin is left with a hint of sexual ambiguity, an awkwardness. Because the play doesn't have much in the way of a plot - it's more of a character study - the supporting characters are there for contrast and to elaborate themes rather than do anything which twists the story round. He is therefore entrusted with illuminating what Fisher really wanted to portray; the enduring relationship of people and animals.
It turns out that there was a reason why Seed was able to make a clottish toff a favourite character for thirty years; He Can Act. Here he slides down the social scale a little, cautiously knocking some of the patrician accent off his most famous role but he's absolutely serious that there will be a vet on that stage. Seed's show reel gives a respectable selection from a certain type of character actor but it can't show what has happened to him in the past year; there is the potential for greater depth and conviction just waiting for a role.
Seed could play Richard III now and project all that rage, frustration and attraction which the historical character undoubtedly had - along with the ruthless determination to wear a crown. As the 2-i-c to Edward IV, Richard had spent a lifetime playing second fiddle to his brother, fighting wars on his behalf, administering the country and doing Edward's dirty work. Did anyone seriously expect him to do all that then hand it on to his brother's whelps, acting as the trustee for their estate? C'mon.
Let's hope someone gives Seed the chance to tackle the classical roles and get his name up there with Jacobi - they were both in I Claudius two thousand years ago - and the heavyweight actors of his generation.
In the meantime, catch the remainder of the run at:
Monday 21 – Saturday 26 November
CARDIFF New Theatre
Box Office 029 2087 8889
www.newtheatrecardiff.co.uk
CHICHESTER Festival Theatre
Box Office 01243 781312
www.cft.org.uk
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Dick Turpin's Last Ride
A story that has been 306 years in the making.
No true blogger can resist this illumination of myth creation, that of the Dandy Highwayman. The writer (Daniel O'Brien) brings together three real figures to debate their approaches to Dick Turpin.
The three are contemporary historian Thomas Kyll, who was at the York assizes when Turpin was sentenced, the 18th century catch-penny biographer Richard Bayes who either knows rather a lot or is making it up, and the romantic novelist William Harrison Ainsworth who came along in the 19th century and filleted out the saleable story of the fabulous ride from London to York.
The beef which Kyll and Bayes have with imagineer Ainsworth is that his fiction is so good that it has swamped the real story and, moreover, his commercial success was based on leaving out the crucial relevant facts about Turpin: he was a thug with no redeeming features whatsoever, and there was no heroic ride.
When I told Nana Raft I was going to see a story about Dick Turpin, she said
"We've seen Black Bess's grave".
"Nana, I hate to tell you this, but there wasn't really a Black Bess"
"No? So you tell me what's down the hole, then - it's a huge gravestone" in that tone of voice when people use when they've got a knock-down argument. Ainsworth is correct - people want Black Bess to exist.
The disputants then re-animate Turpin to show the story from each viewpoint and to argue about the details and what this means for posterity. Is Ainsworth right when he says that Turpin paid for his crime at the end of a rope and that the story is an entirely separate issue? He is, after all, a romantic novelist, although he has certain views about his source material.
Director Abigail Anderson skilfully handles Jack Lord's performance as Turpin as he has to swing between graphic nastiness and the romantic highwayman of the story. Perhaps best of all, they invoke the real Turpin, the butcher-turned-thief who was not dramatic at all.
Richard Pepper as Kyll strikes the most sympathetic note with conscientious bloggers; that need to get the facts down at the time as far as possible, knowing that somebody else is going to spin them later. Julian Harries as Ainsworth portrays literary glamour, Morgan Philpott as Bayes is the everyman, the rough sort, and credibly claims to know what he is talking about. He is closer to either a tabloid journalist or someone who has had help with writing a memoir. Ainsworth speculates that there may be an explanation for how he got his information, and it's not the official explanation Bayes offers. Astute writing, that is, considering the current questions in the papers. How else do people suppose stories are verified if not by bending the law round corners?
All the performances are absorbing. However, if you are going to appear on a stage with the stunningly beautiful Loren O'Dair, who plays her fiddle, dances, sings, is an acrobat and portrays a mythical horse, then you have to accept that she's going to run away with the show.
The cast of five canter the story through a scaffold set, playing multiple parts and instruments, punctuating the story with music drawn by Pat Whymark from English folk songs - no, it's alright, not the ear-achy nasal ones - proper songs which are complex and melodious. The skill in the stage craft keeps the story moving; there are no disconcerting blackouts. The scenes are conjured by acting, minimal props and subtle lighting which helps keep the accounts separated.
There's just time to catch performances at Ipswich and Eastbourne.
Book: Dick Turpin - The myth of the English Highwayman
James Sharp, Profile Books, 2004
ISBN 1 861197 418 3
Update 1 Jan 2012: An old story turned up in a search about e-fits. York Castle Museum used descriptions issued at the time by the Government and the London Gazette to create a modern e-fit of Turpin.
No true blogger can resist this illumination of myth creation, that of the Dandy Highwayman. The writer (Daniel O'Brien) brings together three real figures to debate their approaches to Dick Turpin.
The three are contemporary historian Thomas Kyll, who was at the York assizes when Turpin was sentenced, the 18th century catch-penny biographer Richard Bayes who either knows rather a lot or is making it up, and the romantic novelist William Harrison Ainsworth who came along in the 19th century and filleted out the saleable story of the fabulous ride from London to York.
The beef which Kyll and Bayes have with imagineer Ainsworth is that his fiction is so good that it has swamped the real story and, moreover, his commercial success was based on leaving out the crucial relevant facts about Turpin: he was a thug with no redeeming features whatsoever, and there was no heroic ride.
When I told Nana Raft I was going to see a story about Dick Turpin, she said
"We've seen Black Bess's grave".
"Nana, I hate to tell you this, but there wasn't really a Black Bess"
"No? So you tell me what's down the hole, then - it's a huge gravestone" in that tone of voice when people use when they've got a knock-down argument. Ainsworth is correct - people want Black Bess to exist.
The disputants then re-animate Turpin to show the story from each viewpoint and to argue about the details and what this means for posterity. Is Ainsworth right when he says that Turpin paid for his crime at the end of a rope and that the story is an entirely separate issue? He is, after all, a romantic novelist, although he has certain views about his source material.
Director Abigail Anderson skilfully handles Jack Lord's performance as Turpin as he has to swing between graphic nastiness and the romantic highwayman of the story. Perhaps best of all, they invoke the real Turpin, the butcher-turned-thief who was not dramatic at all.
Richard Pepper as Kyll strikes the most sympathetic note with conscientious bloggers; that need to get the facts down at the time as far as possible, knowing that somebody else is going to spin them later. Julian Harries as Ainsworth portrays literary glamour, Morgan Philpott as Bayes is the everyman, the rough sort, and credibly claims to know what he is talking about. He is closer to either a tabloid journalist or someone who has had help with writing a memoir. Ainsworth speculates that there may be an explanation for how he got his information, and it's not the official explanation Bayes offers. Astute writing, that is, considering the current questions in the papers. How else do people suppose stories are verified if not by bending the law round corners?
All the performances are absorbing. However, if you are going to appear on a stage with the stunningly beautiful Loren O'Dair, who plays her fiddle, dances, sings, is an acrobat and portrays a mythical horse, then you have to accept that she's going to run away with the show.
The cast of five canter the story through a scaffold set, playing multiple parts and instruments, punctuating the story with music drawn by Pat Whymark from English folk songs - no, it's alright, not the ear-achy nasal ones - proper songs which are complex and melodious. The skill in the stage craft keeps the story moving; there are no disconcerting blackouts. The scenes are conjured by acting, minimal props and subtle lighting which helps keep the accounts separated.
There's just time to catch performances at Ipswich and Eastbourne.
Book: Dick Turpin - The myth of the English Highwayman
James Sharp, Profile Books, 2004
ISBN 1 861197 418 3
Update 1 Jan 2012: An old story turned up in a search about e-fits. York Castle Museum used descriptions issued at the time by the Government and the London Gazette to create a modern e-fit of Turpin.
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