Enthusiastic, Expressive, Engaging
Young Writers’ Festival 2018
Art Richmond at The Exchange, Twickenham, 15th April
Review by Eleanor Lewis
Arts Richmond, as must be well known to readers of these pages, is about promoting the arts in and around the borough, but promoting the arts becomes a niche activity unless you include the younger generation from the start. Happily, we will all be OK, because Arts Richmond has this sewn up if the evidence of Sunday’s Young Writer’s Festival is anything to go by. The Young Writers’ Festival is, unsurprisingly, a celebration of young people’s writing, specifically young people between the ages of six and sixteen from a mixture of state and independent schools. Their work is assessed by three judges and then prizes, which include the titles of Young and Senior Poets Laureate, are awarded for outstanding writing.
Keith Wait has been directing this event for five years. He has the services of three professional actors – this year Catherine Forrester, Janna Fox and AJ MacGillivray, all three enthusiastic and skilled – and presents the children’s work as a rehearsed reading. This is inspired: the children see their work professionally executed which increases their confidence, and everything that’s in the work is brought out to entertain an appreciative audience.
The Festival itself is a straightforward event. Arts Richmond Chair Hilary Dodman introduced the children and explained the arrangement of year groups, and then seventeen pieces of work were performed straight through by the actors. Prizes were awarded by Her Worship the Mayor, Cllr Lisa Blakemore, at the end of the proceedings.
Poetry and creative writing is challenging for some children because unless it flows naturally, which it might not, it’s a thing you have to do with very few instructions and no manual, and that’s frightening. The children whose work was on show on Sunday however, had all risen to the challenge of expressing feelings, creating images and communicating effectively, a tribute to the children themselves and to those teachers and parents who encouraged and supported them.
There were many interesting and moving pieces of work on show. The poem Scarred by Siaraa Syed (Y8, winner of the Senior Young Laureate) with its evocative description of an unknown, sinister woman dressing for an unknown event was striking in the way it described the “smirking” woman in terms of her elegant clothes and accessories using carefully chosen words in simple statement sentences to great effect.
Archit Dawi (Y3) thrilled everyone with his energy-fuelled poem, Mission, about planning a fabulous, all-encompassing mission to have every adventure imaginable when you’re in Y3, only to be brought up short by the necessity of doing homework.
Pippi Barrow (winner of the Junior Young Laureate) remembered her grandfather fondly through a carefully observed study of his chair which “hadn’t moved for so long its footprints were imprinted in the carpet”.
Isla Rossington (Y4, year group winner) fully understood the effect of short sentences and brief descriptions with her poem about a mouse dashing about the house, just occasionally glimpsed by the humans.
Jamie Sainsbury (Y10, year group winner) created a beautiful set of images of a snowy street moving from night to daybreak, and Henry Bartlett (Y2) wrote a short, delightful poem about a kind man with a good memory.
The level of intuitive understanding present in some entries was impressive too. Camilla Salar’s story, An Old Friend, about an adult unexpectedly meeting an old school friend on a train, only to discover the friend had disappeared into the void of dementia and had no idea of their shared past history was mature, sophisticated and plausible. This little tale (from a Y6 writer) was thoughtfully introduced too with a naturally occurring comment about time flying by.
The recognition and celebration of the arts and of children’s engagement in all aspects of artistic endeavour is extremely important, particularly in these uncertain times. Arts Richmond is doing a great job.
Eleanor Lewis
April 2018
Photography by Christina Bulford
Brilliant Virtuosity, Ease and Grace
Voices from America
by William Forsythe, Jerome Robbins and Aszure Barton
English National Ballet at Sadler’s Wells until 21st April
Review by Suzanne Frost
Wow. Who knew that the 68-year-old William Forsyth in his first creation ever for ENB would show us the future of ballet? His new work called Playlist (Track 1,2) ends this mixed bill named Voices from America on such a high, that the evening goes down as one of the major successes of the season, although it is, in terms of quality, not just a mixed bill but a mixed bag.
Showcasing three North American choreographers, the evening is a celebration of the neo-classical style that originated with Georg Balanchine and Jerome Robbins in New York. Robbins is one of the creators represented in this evening. Usually so chic, so cool, full of humour and ease and nonchalant style, this work, The Cage, does not show him in a flattering light. Back in 1951, The Cage was seen as revolutionary but it has not aged well. It imagines the female ensemble, their hair combed up like crazy witches, as some kind of insects (the scenery suggesting a spider’s web) and they eat men. Crazy women who eat men – I can barely forgive this by remembering it was the 50s. The narrative outline in the programme lets us know that the Queen will give birth to a novice; and get ready, because the second the curtain lifts she is literally giving birth. To a larva-like creature who doesn’t want to eat men at first, but then her instincts are stronger and she just can’t control herself. The whole thing just stinks of horror feminae and I don’t want to think of Robbins that way. Luckily it’s all over in about fifteen minutes.
Opening the evening is Fantastic Beings by the Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton. Barton is a female choreographer (yes, that elusive species) and her dancers are also animalistic creatures but they are completely beautiful. Dressed in shimmery scaled bodysuits they look like some kind of amphibian species, while a steady stream of glitter in the back of the pitch black stage and the atmospheric music by Mason Bates suggest a sort of nocturnal rainforest living ground. The mysterious specimen grow up to be long haired ape-like creatures and I know that might sound like a ridiculous image but the dancers look absolutely beautiful, the long shiny ape coats swirling around them when they jump and turn. The final image of the apes dancing under a rain storm of glitter is spectacular.
The first offering from Forsyth is Approximate Sonata, a study on the pas de deux, in a reworked version for Paris Opera from 2016. The original piece is much older though, from 1996. It is classic Forsyth, stripped down minimalism, barely there electronic music from his faithful collaborator Thom Willems. The frankly rather ugly neon costumes make it look a bit dated though and the forced rehearsal atmosphere – at one point a couple stops mid dancing to discuss their steps before trying a sequence again – feels a tad silly. The piece falls a bit flat and a feeling of disappointment is completely justified when the curtain comes up for the last offering and you see what Forsyth is actually capable of.
Playlist had me open mouthed all the way through. It also had me grooving in my seat and I can report woops and cheers from the balcony. The (let me repeat that) 68-year-old choreographer is clearly still as tuned in to popular culture as in the 80s, when he discovered the insanely perfect marriage of electronic music and classical ballet in benchmark works such as In the middle, somewhat elevated. Now, the master has discovered dance music and hip hop. Some classical companies occasionally experiment with setting their morning class not to a piano but to pop music and the burst of energy you can get from that, a new ease of movement and sense of fun, really breathes new life into classical steps.
Forsyth puts his twelve men in stylised baseball uniforms, their names proudly emblazoned on the backs of their jerseys, if anyone needed reminding that these dancers are absolute athletes. They look at ease. These are clothes modern dancers would wear to class. They look cool. I am really pleased that one of the dancers, his jersey says Garrett, is not shaved but on stage with a hipster beard he probably sports in his daily life when not pretending to be a prince. The dancers are here as themselves and they obviously feel fantastic in the movements. They get to show off their brilliant virtuosity, precision, technical ability, ease and grace while having so much fun you wish you could join them. If there was ever a nightclub anywhere with men like that, dancing like that … it would be overrun! They bounce and bob and shrug their shoulders to Peven Everett’s Surely Shorty and Lion Babe’s Impossible remix, blending street dance moves with flawless grand jetés and fierce batterie and when they suddenly abruptly bow out, the audience goes wild. I could have watched this forever. Ditch the two middle pieces and give a whole hour to the electrifying nightclub of William Forsyth – and let the ladies join in! They got sold short.
Suzanne Frost
April 2018
Photography by Laurent Liotardo
Tricky Business
The Witches
by Roald Dahl, adapted for the stage by David Wood
Youth Action Theatre at Hampton Hill Theatre until Saturday 14th April
Review by Matthew Grierson
I’m not sure what time it was when I came out of The Witches, though it seemed to have rushed past. But the play still has all the scares, jokes and charm you would hope for, especially if you’re eight years old.
Going along at a fair lick, the story is told largely as a series of set pieces, most of them likely to be remembered from the Roald Dahl book the show is based on. The witches’ AGM is one of the most memorable: their arrival down either aisle before taking to the stage is suitably scary (the girl a couple of seats away cuddled up to her grandmother for comfort), while later on their hunt for a hidden boy made even me grip the armrests in tension.
Presiding over her British coven through this scene is the Grand High Witch, played by a flamboyant Zofia Komorowska. In a generically East European accent, she outlines her Grand High Plan to convert the UK’s children into mice before going on to subject two young unfortunates to this fate. The assembled cast of witches revel gleefully in this demonstration of her powers, although as they have their backs to the audience to enable everyone to see the presentation, some of the expository dialogue gets lost. Nevertheless, there’s no doubting that it’s a spectacle, and it is rounded off with a mischievously macabre musical number.
Were the GHW the only character from the continent, I might be tempted to read the play as an unwitting argument for Brexit – “End the migrant magician madness!” etc. Fortunately for those of a more cosmopolitan outlook, our hero, simply “Boy”, has an unaccented but indisputably Norwegian Grandmother (Rebecca Tarry) who is vital in upsetting the witches’ wheeze. This reversal takes place in the hotel restaurant when the coven themselves are rodentified. The space of the stage is here used to its full to include the kitchen and the main dining area at the front, with the high table where the witches sit behind this. As they eat their dinners, laced with the mouse-making mixture, the coven disappear from sight one by one only to pop up again in puppet form, the GHW taking central position as a meaty grey beast.
Key scenes such as these are ambitiously conceived and, on the whole, well realised. Thanks to the production’s technical trickery, the transformation of boys into mice is pulled off like stage illusions of old by bundling them into a large trunk and then having puppets spring up behind it. Meanwhile, when Grandmother regales Boy with witching lore at the start of the show, the vision of one of the devil women themselves (Nathalie Châteauneuf as the splendidly named “Display Witch”) is conjured behind the semi-transparent curtain, preening her way through the description of her gloved hands, toeless feet and baldness.
However, like the witches’ own magic, the trickery can work against its producers. For instance, given the important role of the mice it is not always clear where the puppets are. What makes it odder is that the second act opens with Meaghan Baxter and Ella Barnett as Boy and Bruno donning mousy versions of their original costumes, complete with ears and whiskers. Once this is established, why not allow them to have their exchanges with grown-ups from the lower levels of the stage? When they visit Grandmother, she is sat on an elevated platform stage left, so there is plenty of space below they could scurry around in. Instead, I strained to see the prop mice way up on her table behind the balustrade.
Despite this missed trick, the production is on the whole boldly designed. As well as being the hotel ballroom and dining room, the stage also serves as the facade of the Hotel Magnificent, conveyed by its grand entrance doors and steps … although the pretensions of the name are shown when its sign (deliberately) falls in a perfect diagonal, leaving David Gudge as the fussy, obsequious doorman to have some fun business with a stepladder trying to put it right. When Boy and Bruno are shrunk to mice, their new life at floor level is nicely suggested by having the same stage bare and black, the pair picked out by a spotlight and a subtle echo added to their voices, before an enlarged cat’s paw swipes at them from the wings.
Again, the sound is generally well judged, though there are moments when it is too loud. Boy’s opening monologue is in danger especially of being obscured by the volume of the incidental music, and it is through this score rather than the somewhat rushed montage that I could tell he was being bundled off to Gran after his parents die in a car crash. That’s quite a lot for a young audience to take in. Thankfully, the music tends to support rather than distract from the drama in the rest of the play.
One thing that should certainly appeal to the young audience is the energy and skill of a young cast. In the central role, Meaghan Baxter is convincingly boyish, wide-eyed with enthusiasm or terror as the situation demands, and she is nicely counterpointed both by Rebecca Tarry as his twinkly Grandmother, and by Ella Barnett as the hapless and greedy Bruno. I would also highlight the sterling work of Benjamin Buckley and Emily Coates as Bruno’s dimwitted dad and highly strung mum, Timmy King and Josh Clarke as a double act of chefs who make fine work of an hilarious slapstick kitchen routine, and Daniel Lee as a froggy familiar to the GHW. But being fair, the young cast share the load fairly evenly, and are of such a consistently high standard that they should also share the plaudits.
For its brief spell, then, The Witches manages to be enchanting.
Matthew Grierson
April 2018
Photography by Jonathan Constant
Catch a Falling Star
Quartet
by Ronald Harwood
Cheltenham Everyman at Richmond Theatre until 14th April, then touring until 21st April
Review by Eleanor Marsh
“Art is nothing if it does not make you feel” is the phrase that I took away with me from Quartet at Richmond Theatre.
This is a no expenses spared production from the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham. It has an all-star cast, truly sumptuous and well thought out set and costumes that would be proud to grace the stage of the Royal Opera House.
The film version of the play, starring Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay and Pauline Collins was magical and the characters so well defined (and now so well associated with those actors) must hover over anyone taking over the roles like Banquo’s ghost. When he was asked why he took on Quartet as his first directing project at the age of 75, Dustin Hoffman said, “Do what you know” and proceeded to deliver an excellent portrayal of ageing in a humorous, sympathetic and totally believable manner. One of the film’s strengths is that as well as the four leading “stars” it is peppered with background artistes who are genuine previous stars of opera, theatre and music.
The plot of the play is simple and well executed by Ronald Harwood, who has inhabited this world and, like Hoffman writes about what he knows. Wilf, Cissy and Reggie are all past stars of opera are seeing out their days in a retirement home for musicians. The annual concert to celebrate Verdi’s birthday is looming and they are searching for something to perform. Enter Jean, the biggest star of them all in her day – and still the grandest. Her arrival means that they can recreate their finest hour, the quartet from Rigoletto. Jean, however is not playing ball. No spoilers here but the journey to the play’s lavish finale is funny and touching, giving each actor several moments to shine. In any ensemble piece such as this the true delights are in the banter and relationships between the characters.
The Everyman’s cast are all well-known television faces who have a strong pedigree in theatre and, crucially, have musical experience, which makes all the difference at the end of the play. They also manage to shed the ghosts of those film performances pretty well. Paul Nicholas excels as Wilf. He has some of the best lines in the show and is pitch perfect on delivery, with not one opportunity for a laugh missed. Not blessed with as many sharp one-liners, Jeff Rawle’s Reggie really makes the most of his comedic marmalade jar and baiting the hapless Nurse Angelique. Both actors give touching insights into the experiences that make Wilf and Reggie the characters they have become, as does Sue Holderness as Jean. Terribly well preserved and all designer shoes and handbag on her first entrance, once she drops the façade and we learn more of her recent history she becomes much more likeable. Wendi Peters, as Cissy, is hampered by being at least 20 years younger than the role she is playing. She is an engaging performer and versatile actor, but she has been directed to play most of the play as a caricature of a batty old lady, complete with “comedy walk” as opposed to a charming and talented woman suffering from the early stages of dementia. At the end of the play when Cissy is at her most vulnerable I was genuinely moved and wishing I could have seen more of this more naturalistic performance throughout the play. It was a lovely moment.
The first night of a new venue during a tour is always odd. The cast are familiar with the piece but not necessarily with the space. This production is no different. The pace was, at times a little slow but with actors this experienced it wasn’t allowed to be so for long. The pre-recorded old folks’ operatic chorus heard at the beginning of the concert was such a lovely touch that it was a shame that we heard none of the other acts in the background during the penultimate dressing room scene. The finale is a joy – all four actors in full performance mode, with Ms Holderness standing out as the diva she is.
Is it art? Did it move me? Yes, I think it is and when it really mattered it did. What Quartet definitely is, though is a genuine entertainment that is thought provoking in the best way – with humour and lightness of touch.
Eleanor Marsh
April 2018
Photography courtesy of Cheltenham Everyman Theatre Company
Compact, Unsophisticated, Delightful
September in the Rain
by John Godber
OHADS, Noel Coward Studio, Hampton Hill Theatre until 7th April
Review by Mark Aspen
As I drove through the grey Berkshire countryside to visit cousins this Easter Monday, I mused how typical an Easter Bank Holiday it was, cold, blustery, raining, floods. (To reach their village out in the sticks, we had to try four different routes in turn to get through the floods.) I can even remember one Easter rambling in the Surrey Hills in the snow, but to be fair, some rare Easter Mondays have been scorchers.
So how fitting then that OHADS opened its production of Godber’s compact two-hander, September in the Rain, the day after a very very wet Bank Holiday. You see, this delightful nugget of nostalgia is set at the British seaside during a series of holidays in the decades after the war. To those of a certain age, it is a damply cosy and all-too familiar scene.
It is both certain and familiar to the married couple, bluff Yorkshire coalminer Jack, and his wife Liz, a working class housewife, indelible stamps of their time and place. For their holidays, the hesitant highlight of each year, they unwaveringly head for Blackpool, brash, big, and bold, a town, even now, totally unapologetic for being what it is, as proud as its famous Tower. (Eat your heart out Eiffel Tower, Blackpool is much more fun!)
However, under John Godber’s skilful pen, Jack and Liz’s annual trip to Blackpool is more than a holiday: it is a metaphor not only for their marriage but for their life as a whole, and, by extension, to the marriages and lives of all of us. This bitter-sweet comedy holds up a mirror to us, truthfully and uncomfortably. After all, what married couple has not squabbled over trivia, regretted it, and then enjoyed the making-it-up-again.
The holidays start as newly-weds, and continue with a young family and on into later years. With a backdrop of stars or raindrops and a hint of the Blackpool illuminations (alias Malcolm Maclenan’s lighting) we follow the hopeful journeys there and the weary ones back, to “get away from the Bingo and the slops”. The journey is the source of many squabbles; firstly how: by Wallace Arnold coach or by the fitful Ford Popular. Car wins, for although Liz complains that at first it “smells of newness”, Jack is his own man and wants to stop when he wants to stop. However, actually moving is often the problem. A prang in the pouring rain when stuck in a crawl through the “Preston bottleneck” gives Jack chance to vent some aggro on the following lorry driver. Perhaps this is as well, as his frustration is often expressed against Liz, usually not deserved, although locking the car keys in the boot was a step too far.
Within the times and the culture, feelings are repressed, left bottled up; although sometimes vented through metaphoric Preston bottlenecks. Jack resents the decades of working “in a hole in the ground”, his hands that the fortune teller would not be able to read through the callouses, the blue steaks of coal dust ingrained in his back which, even on a beach holiday, he is loath to expose to the sun.
Liz’s repressions are of a different nature. Queuing for an ice-cream gives an opportunity to eye up the physiques of young men passers-by, and she even dares a little flirting. However, when she casually comments favourably on the good looks of the waiter in the Tower tearooms, we see the green-eyed monster just squinting into the picture.
In this finely crafted mood-piece, the thin vein of sadness that runs through the hefty seams of saucy seaside postcard humour is the irony that Jack cannot allow himself to express his feelings for Liz, whereas Liz, who needs that expression, cannot allow herself to expect it.
Any release of their true feelings is vicariously, through third parties, such as the fictitious protagonists of The Student Prince, which even, in spite of himself, draws a tear or three from Jack; or through reminiscences of their toddler daughter in a talent show shyly singing “My girl’s a Yorkshire gal”.
Nevertheless, under their tough carapaces, we see that they are all too human and their vulnerability aches.
Godber’s September in the Rain is an exceptional observational study, and is brought into sharp focus in director Helen Smith’s OHADS production, in which she is blessed by two fine actors, Andy Smith as Jack and Helen Geldert as Liz. They work in well-honed unison to give just the right balance of humour and pathos in well-studied performances.
Andy Smith’s Jack is a man of great humanity at heart, but totally buttoned-up, exhibiting what elsewhere would be called stiff upper lip, a grittiness that belies one’s feelings as somehow unmanly. Smith depicts with great accuracy Jack’s falling back on aggression as his panacea, when he is not a violent man in the least, and on sarcasm when he is not really a cynic.
Helen Geldert’s portrait of Liz is as a warm and loving wife and mother, whose passions are as equally sequestered in her heart as are those of the husband, who she deep down fervently believes she could be closer to. Gelert puts across that pragmatism and the acceptance of the situation typical of a woman in her station at that time. As a bonus, we get some very nice singing to boot.
Both actors have great comic timing for, in spite of my heavy analysis, September in the Rain is a very entertaining comedy, foil to the pathos perhaps, but true knockabout broad humour.
So we have little interpolated sketches, the joys of paddling in the sea (cold and with vicious jellyfish), the visit to the waxworks (not convincing until we reach the “anatomical” section) and the loin wrenching ride on the big-dipper (bloody ‘ell, how high is this going to go?). Comedy spices the stark reality: eating fish and chips from the newspaper flavoured with cold vinegar and rainwater; or being buttonholed at the breakfast table by another couple, whose main topic of conversation is Sam, the sanitary man’s recounting of his freeing massive turds from manholes.
Notwithstanding the jellyfish, waxworks and fairground rides, the culmination of the manufactured thrills in Jack and Liz’s life is going to the top of the Tower, an allegory for what they ought to have achieved, and the thrills that they might have achieved. But once only, before pushing out a figurative boat with a visit to the Tower Ballroom for the last, the very last, waltz.
September in the Rain is a well-crafted tale of unabashed and unsophisticated simplicity. Great comedy yes, sobering pathos certainly. One can almost feel the warm spring sunshine slipping out from behind the Easter rainclouds.
Mark Aspen
April 2018
Images courtesy of OHADS
Fling Wide the Gates
The Crucifixion
by John Stainer, libretto by William John Sparrow-Simpson
St Mary’s Extended Parish Choir, St Mary’s Church, Hampton, 25th March
Review by Mark Aspen
In 2018, the supreme sacrifice may seem a concept almost infinitely remote for most of us. But, the ultimate sacrificing of one own life for another is part of the implicit covenant made by all recruits into the military, and what parents would not risk their own lives for those of their children? Taking the place of another who is facing death is perhaps a step further, but not remote.
Just a day before Palm Sunday 2018, when the extended choir of St Mary’s performed Stainer’s oratorio, at a supermarket near Carcassonne, the French gendarme Arnaud Beltrame did just that. He offered himself instead of the young woman being held hostage by a terrorist gunman, and was brutally killed as a consequence. (A few days later, President Macron was to place France’s highest award for bravery on Beltrame’s coffin as he was posthumously made a commander of the Legion of Honour.)
In a reflection in the brief mediation that preceded the oratorio, Ben Lovell, the Vicar of St Mary’s paid homage to Beltrame, whose actions mirrored the even greater sacrifice of Christ, which would be marked that coming Friday. On Good Friday Christ offered himself for all of mankind, as God’s gift at Easter.
The reading in the mediation was from Isaiah 53, a passage well-known not only to the faithful, but also to all aficionados of the oratorio through the most sublime passages in Handel’s Messiah, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief … despiséd”.
Under the inspired leadership of St Mary’s Choir Director and Organist, David Pimm, an occasional series of sacred choral music, requiems and oratorios, has gained a wide following amongst music lovers and those who are moved by these remarkable works.
Musically, the Palm Sunday concert was magnificent. Even before entering the church, the evening’s music was embellished by ringing of the changes by an extended team from the Middlesex Bellringers on the church’s Major of eight bells, cast by Thomas Mears in 1831.
This was a significant year. The organ, restored in the summer of 2017, was a gift from King William IV, and the present church was consecrated on 1st September 1831, exactly one week before William’s coronation. Moreover, as Duke of Clarence, he had been instrumental in the church’s rebuilding.
Not only is the organ an outstanding instrument, but for Stainer’s Crucifixion is was played by Nat Keiller, an award-winning Royal College of Organists graduate. As introductory music before the service, Keiller played Charles John Stanley’s Organ Voluntary No 3 from his Opus 5 Ten Voluntaries for Organ (1748).
Stainer’s Crucifixion is a wide–ranging piece for the organ, with a number of virtuoso passages. The St Mary’s organ was extended shortly after the oratorio was first performed at St Marylebone in 1887, when Stainer was Professor of Music at Oxford. Whilst in the format of the various Passion oratorios by Bach and others of a century and a half previously, Stainer’s Crucifixion is typical of the expressive church music of the late 19th century, with its unshakably ardent believe in the Gospel. It is this that makes the piece so remarkable in its range from aching tenderness, through painful despondency, to majestic triumph.
The oratorio is very much an ensemble piece, choir and organ working in a finely entwined discourse, which is most evident in the powerful chorus piece, Processional to Calvary, which opens with a solo organ overture, expansive and stately, rising to a forte trumpeting, before the chorus demands, “Fling wide the gates”. This is almost immediately juxtaposed with a beautifully expressive solo, originally written for tenor voice but here transposed for the choir’s outstanding lyrical soprano Fiona Rowett.
Much of the work however, takes the form of dialogues between male soloists and narration involving the chorus. The majority of this interchange was undertaken by Jonathan Williams, an assured and accomplished tenor soloist and William Ormerod, who is remarkable in being able to extend the baritone register both high into the tenor range and down towards the bass. The Agony, written as tenor and bass solos and chorus, and based on text from St Mark’s gospel, which opens the piece, is a case in point. Ormerod develops the weightiness of the mood as it descends in questioning desolation though Christs’ words interspersed with the chorus’ reflections, and narrated by Williams’ recitative, with the cynical taunting of the Pharisees provided by Graham Beresford’s rich bass. The increasing abjection of Christ is underlined by the descent of the organ down through its own voice register.
The tenor solo The Majesty of the Divine Humiliation was finely delivered by Williams, pointing up the oxymoron in the contrast of majesty and humiliation, sustaining “sublime” in “Thou art sublime, far more awful in Thy weakness”, and rising to a strong crescendo as “crownless” is surmounted by “in glory interceding, Thou art King”! This then develops into the centre-piece of the oratorio, God So Loved the World, taken from St John’s gospel, a lyrical a-cappella chorus figure, opening pianissimo, rising to a forte crescendo with the words “everlasting life”, before a diminuendo into silence.
The dialogues depicting the first hours of the crucifixion, “Father, forgive them”, a tenor and male chorus recitative, and the bass and male chorus, “One of the malefactors” gave further demonstration of the strengths of St Mary’s choir, with the secure bass of John Sutton and the distinctively decorated tenor of Nally Fernando.
The final hours on the cross are largely depicted by the organ, notwithstanding fine passionate chorus and solo singing, such as the “When Jesus therefore saw His mother”, a tenor solo with male chorus, and the “Is it nothing” baritone solo. When the organ lowered its voice in “There was darkness over all the land”, the atmospheric rumbling shaking the building was awe-inspiring.
The “Is it nothing” motif is picked up in the chorus’ The Appeal of the Crucified, in a pianissimo “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?”, which builds brutally into the cry of the crowd “Crucify!!” Then the music and words fade away with “for why will ye die” … “Come unto Me”.
This working of volumes, of amplitude and silence, is one of the many strengths of the work, and indeed after the final recitative “After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished”, Stainer’s score implies silence. Silence from choir, from organ, from congregation … and by implication, from the world.
Mark Aspen
March 2018
Photography courtesy of Hampton Parish Church
Open Wide For a Deliciously Wicked Dose
George’s Marvellous Medicine
by Roald Dahl adapted by David Wood
RTK and Curve, Leicester co-production at The Rose Theatre, Kingston until 7th April, then on tour until 21st April
Review by Mark Aspen
(See also Evie Schaapveld’s review)
Do not do this at home! This was how I was going to begin this review immediately we got into George’s Marvellous Medicine. Then the show concluded with the cast singing together “Do not do this at home”. I was upstaged. Nevertheless, I am going to reiterate: DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME!
The Easter holiday show at The Rose is so full of that wicked anarchistic deliciousness which children of all ages enjoy, that the fourth wall soon collapses and the audience is revealed to be full of excited children and even more excited sourpuss adults (for there are plenty of home truths here).
The theme of Roald Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine is the power of imagination. The eponymous George would prefer to spend his Easter holiday reading; reading fantastical book such as his favourite, about Bully the boy magician and all the wonderful things he can do. His thoughts sail on a sea of his own imagination and he introduces himself by singing about it, “There’s a story in my heart, and I’m its narrator”. You see, George Kranky only has his imagination to keep him company during the school holidays, as he lives away from town in an isolated farmyard.
And what a farmyard it is! A funky towering edifice, mischievously metastable, it could have come from the purple palette of Gerald Scarfe or Heath Robinson. But this is the ingeniously inventive creation of award-winning designer Morgan Large and his large (no pun intended) team that that produce the lighting, video, sound, props, puppets, wardrobe and more in a set that combines a kitchen, milking-shed, bedroom, caravan, and porta-loo, all under a exotically elaborate well-head and wind pump, and all appropriately lit in purple by lighting designer Jack Weir, enhanced by Andrzej Goulding’s video designs and David Gregory’s sound.
The whole Kranky family muck-in (reasonably) contentedly into the daily chores of a working farm, and there is much excitement, ranging from from birthing piglets (“all squelchy”) to capturing a raging bull (not That one), a nice cameo from Matthew Coulton as the scarlet taurine terror. However, for George there is usually time to settle his imagination into a good read, between spells as midwife or matador.
Then this ramshackle idyll is shattered by the news of the imminent arrival of George’s Grandma. This is not exactly welcome news for anyone in the family, who all know her to be a cantankerous, selfish bully, “with a mouth all puckered up like a dog’s bottom” adds George’s Dad. Panic ensues as a taxi arrives and disgorges Grandma, who makes an impressive entrance like Mad Max on a mobility scooter with dangling dolly-dice, clad in faux-leopard skin and bulging with bling. She does not like the bucolic life, prefers girls to boys, needs tea every two minutes in cups not mugs, medication reminders every five minutes, and flowers make her sneeze. She bosses George and bullies him, using her lazy-tongs like a Kalashnikov and summoning him with a loudspeaker. This is child abuse par excellence, a million miles away from your average kind and cuddly, loving lady that one hopes for as a grandmother. Lisa Howard has a ball as George’s Grandma. It is a part that you cannot overact, and she gives it full welly, full of luscious loathing, savouring the succulent spitefulness of Grandma.
Dad decides that a distant field needs urgent tending, while Mum hurries off to the supermarket, leaving the hapless George to look after Grandma. George’s defence is to retreat into his imagination. Firstly he try to imagine a grandma like all the other children’s, the kind kind of grandma: one who enjoys his presence, even gets up and boogies to his favourite music and, yes, gives him a £20 note to spend on himself! That dream is shattered when she complains that he is bigger than when she last saw him, “growing is a nasty childish habit”. Secondly, to imagine that she is a witch. This is too close to the truth when she wakes up and tells him how she likes eating slimy slugs and brittle beetles, “I never joke”.
This is too far, and George’s imagination takes its third flight into pharmaceutical fantasy. “If you only knew, Grandma, what George has in store for you?” Well it becomes quite a concoction brewed up in replacement for her own medication, every liquid, powder and paste, garnered for every room and outhouse; sanitary, culinary, toiletry, and veterinary. The result is momentous, a fifty foot Grandma and, on double checking its efficacy in the hen-house, a five foot chicken. Playing a five-foot chicken is mean feat, and it is a (chicken) nugget of part for Chandni Mistry. Her highly animated, very funny and somewhat aggressive fowl no doubt greatly extends the roles she prepared for at drama school, and is definitely no paltry poultry.
George’s Mum and Dad return. Getting over the shock with remarkable equanimity, Mum turns to practical issues, but when the super-economy sized chicken lays an egg the size of a, well, medicine ball, Dad’s thoughts turn to the commercial possibilities. Catherine Morris’ dynamic depiction of a supercharged Mum (most Mums need to be turbocharged at least), panicky pragmatic or perturbed by turns, is amazing. Justin Wilman is very impressive as Dad, not only accurately portraying the down-to-earth son-of-the-soil struck with vaunting ambition, but wowing with musical virtuosity. Wilman is a celebrated musician and demonstrates the breath of his skills by playing a plethora of different instruments. I counted, clarinet, violin, flute, recorder, guitar, and electric violin: there may be more from his rack of instruments stacked on the apron of the stage. Playing Tasha Taylor-Johnson’s especially composed music creates a wonderfully atmospheric ambience.
As the eponymous George, Preston Nyman whizzes around the stage with engaging eagerness and boyish innocent charm that sweeps the show along. And my, he knows how to work his audience, which is just as well, as in this production the fourth wall vanishes as the audience helps out in the second half, which is the denouement of the plot. While Dad hopes for a knighthood, Nobel prize and canonisation for solving the world’s food shortage, George struggles to remember what he put in the brew.
Here’s where we all help, with every member of the audience from seven to seventy shouting out the ingredients. (Being at the top end of this age range, I was pleased to do this sort of memory test, the type they use to check the marble count of us septuagenarians, and get it right!) Inhibitions fly to the wind and tears run down the cheek in a great family entertainment. Director, Julia Thomas and her company have clearly had great fun putting this show together, and it is epidemically infectious.
Does the second batch work? Well, suffice it to say that, as attested by a mesmerised whistling giant chicken (one has to suspend a bit more than the usual amount of disbelief), it doesn’t. The late Roald Dahl didn’t do gentle endings. The result is even more deliciously disastrous. Go and see for yourself, but if you go to the bar in the interval, give the gin and tonic a miss.
Mark Aspen
March 2018
Photography by Manuel Harlan
In, Out, Shake It All About!
George’s Marvellous Medicine
by Roald Dahl adapted by David Wood
RTK and Curve, Leicester co-production at The Rose Theatre, Kingston until 7th April, then on tour until 21st April
We asked one of our younger reviewers to share her thoughts on George’s Marvellous Medicine, to complement Mark Aspen’s review. Evie writes:
Review by Evie Schaapveld (aged 8 -just)
I was very excited to go along again to The Rose Theatre to see George’s Marvellous Medicine, as I knew Roald Dahl’s book.
Before I watched the play, I wondered how they would make the granny grow really tall, so I really loved how they made the granny and the chicken grow big. The big chicken was really funny and weird, and she acted it very well. She high-fived the audience although I was sitting a bit too far back to get a high-five.
I liked joining in and shouting out. It was very fun when we shouted ‘in’ or ‘out’. George was making a magic potion to make his grandma nicer, so he went round the house to collect some ingredients for the Marvellous Medicine. You had to yell ‘in’ if you wanted the ingredient in, or ‘out’ if you wanted the ingredient out of the potion.
I loved the songs and I liked the dancing, and I loved how George’s dad played lots of musical instruments. I especially liked the electric violin because it was really cool and I’ve never seen one like that before.
I thought the funniest bit was when the chicken went small after George gave her the medicine again. I liked how the puppet animals were so cute.
Evie Schaapveld
March 2018
Photography by Manuel Harlan
Dealing with Dementia
Banana Crabtree Simon
by David Hendon
Rigmarole Productions at Drayton Arms Theatre, South Kensington, until 14th April
Review by Georgia Renwick
Dementia. Whether we are at an age where we fear it for ourselves, or whether we fear it for the sake of our loved ones, dementia has a foreboding, threatening presence in the lives of millions of families. Whether you have read in the headlines that diagnosis is on the increase (the UK is estimated to reach one million people living with the disease in the next two years) or have first-hand experience, it is a difficult subject fraught with emotion.
In this new play from David Hendon (a finalist in The Kenneth Branagh New Drama Writing Award in both 2016 and 2017), 50-year-old Alan is facing an early-onset dementia diagnosis. The words ‘Banana Crabtree Simon’ all mean something to him, they are the three words that repeated over and over keep him resolute that he isn’t losing his mind. But they are slipping; he is slipping. His past is melding with his present as his future slips through his fingers, and he is agonisingly powerless to stop it.
Holding court for an hour, CJ de Mooi delivers a well-paced and sensitively executed performance. He has reached TV fame for his memory as a panellist on the BBC show Eggheads and off-screen has competed as a professional quizzer. Perhaps it is this experience he draws on in his performance as the cruelty of the disease plays out. Mooi, who more than most must have come to rely so heavily on the sharpness and accuracy of his memory, captures in raw emotion the horror and betrayal Alan must feel as his memory becomes more unreliable, but his conviction in it remains unwavering. Mooi’s likeable and upbeat portrayal of Alan must gradually give way to a character almost unrecognisable, which he performs with sensitivity and emotional dexterity. It’s a frankly exhausting range of emotions to go through without even leaving the stage. Alan’s dramatic change of character is a cruelty anyone who has been there to support a dementia sufferer will surely recognise. Regardless of experience, you can feel the audience willing the bright-eyed Alan from 40 minutes earlier to come back.
Hendon’s script does not shy away from dementia’s cruelties and we must watch Alan suffer as he relives some of the worst days of his life over and over again. Yet, through Hendon’s writing we can see patterns emerge. There is a comfort and a hope to be found in the measurement of life in increments of births, weddings, of deaths; in life renewing and repeating itself over and over again.
Hendon also finds humour in the bleakness. There are episodes you might recognise from your own life including “Where are my glasses?” You probably don’t need me to tell you the answer: they’re on your head. Or, have you ever woken up feeling ready to go to work, only to remember you’ve already retired? The very real fear of what constitutes ‘normal’ memory loss and what invisible line you must cross to be tested for dementia, is captured in these moments.
Director Daniel Phillips’ has maximised a small studio set by cramming a host of domestic items into it, succinctly capturing the domestic environment of Alan’s life. We see him thumbing lovingly through a box of photos, the tactility of which allows the monologue to bring the family into the room with him through the memories he shares. It isn’t of course just Alan who is living with the disease, but his wife, son and granddaughter along with him. It’s somehow even sadder to watch the disease unfold from the comfort of his armchair, surrounded by his belongings. We don’t need to see hospitals or doctors to realise the seriousness of his condition. We are reminded by this familiarity that it could so easily be us. I am also reminded of the cancer campaign you often see around at the moment: Alan is still Alan, even with dementia, but is there a crossover point? A point of no-return where he isn’t there anymore? Our memories define us, so who are we when they disintegrate?
The searching questions Banana Crabtree Simon raises will only become more pertinent as more patients are diagnosed, and more friends and families must rally to cope. Hendon’s play offers the kind of emotional insight into the experience of those diagnosed with dementia and those supporting them that cannot be wrought through pamphlets. It is this kind of brave and thoughtfully crafted theatre which should in turn be supported.
Georgia Renwick
March 2018
Photography courtesy of Rigmarole Productions
Buds to Blooms.
Rose at Ten
RTK’s anniversary exhibition
The Rose Theatre, Kingston until 29th April
Mark Aspen celebrates a local treasure.
“It might not have happened”, said The Rose Theatre Kingston’s Chief Executive, Robert O’Dowd when looking back on the ten years since The Rose was officially opened on 16th January 2008. The occasion was at a reception last Friday (23rd March) to thank some of the people who had helped make sure that The Rose, Kingston’s treasure of a theatre, did happen, and happen with resounding success.
Some representatives of those he wished to thank were there to raise a glass to their theatre, artistic teams, staff, volunteers, donors, audience, sponsors, Kingston University and Kingston Council, and others. Even theatre critics were included in the others! But then again, The Rose can be confident in the high quality of the work that it produces or hosts.
That The Rose did happen, Chris Foy, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees recalled, was initially due to campaigning by well-known broadcaster the late David Jacobs, who in 1989 became the first Chairman of the Kingston Theatre Trust, which was instituted to bring back a professional theatre to Kingston since the demolition of the Kingston Empire in 1955.
The area situated between Kingston’s ancient market square and the River Thames at its confluence with the Hogsmill River, then largely scattered with rundown timber buildings, was acquired by property company St George plc. As one of the concessions for St George’s construction of Charter Quay, an award winning residential and commercial development, was that the shell of the building was to be provided to the Trust for at no cost. It was handed over in 2003. Charter Quay later won architectural and other awards for its site that comprised 238 apartments, five town houses, river moorings, restaurants, bars, and cafés, a piazza and a waterfowl conservation area, as well as the theatre shell, which was to be called The Rose, after its illustrious Tudor namesake in Southwark.
The community in Kingston rallied round with fund raising events and shows, such as Don Juan in Kingston, in the spring of 2004, which took place in the shell of the uncompleted building, with no seats, no loos and temporary lighting. The theatre was still very much in the raw just before Christmas that year, when Sir Peter Hall was invited to direct a production of As You Like It, now with porta-loos for the audience.
The theatre had gained an auditorium of 900 seats around its wide, thrust stage when it was officially opened on 16th January 2008, again with Sir Peter Hall directing, this time Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in co-production with English Touring Theatre.
Foy paid tribute, not only to Sir Peter Hall, but to other eminent directors who had lifted The Rose to its present high standing, including amongst others, Stephen Unwin (who was present) and Sir Trevor Nunn.
The Rose’s Executive Producer, Jerry Gunn, speaking in celebration of some of the milestones in the theatre past ten years, gave an optimistic outlook for its future, although noting that it had at times had a bumpy ride. Highlights of the past decade included Sir Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which had starred Dame Judi Dench as Titania. It was this production that propelled The Rose to international fame, following its transfer to Broadway, although it was admitted, by the subterfuge of describing The Rose run as a London opening, hence not untruthfully fulfilling the requirements of the US promotors.
Other landmarks included the trilogy The Wars of the Roses, first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and adapted from Shakespeare’s history plays, which was directed by Trevor Nunn; and the world premiere of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, adapted by April de Angelis, presented in the spring of last year.
Looking forward to the coming year, Gunn mentioned that, specifically to mark the Rose’s tenth anniversary, a major revival of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Much Ado About Nothing, in the spring paves the way for the autumn’s blockbuster, the world premiere of a double bill written by Nick Dear, Hogarth’s Progress. This a follows one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, William Hogarth, on two of his benders, one at the beginning of his career and one at the end. It promises political satire, boisterous romps and sleaze!
On that note The Rose’s tenth anniversary was toasted, followed by the cutting of a remarkable cake, which was decorated with images of the plays presented at the theatre over the past decade.
Replete with cake, the guests were able to wander amongst the exhibition, The Rose at 10, which continues until 29th April. One comes face to face with Sir Peter Hall on the stairs, in a full length portrait, before coming across Titania’s dress from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was worn by Dame Judi Dench.
Among the assorted costumes and props, the set models and plans, and the press cuttings and behind-the-scenes photographs some surprises jump out. Is that Bill Clinton visiting The Rose, with his family? Yes, it is, what else does a US President do on a night out in Kingston? (Bill and Hilary Clinton actually visited the Rose and saw the production of As You Like It when it transferred to New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) And does that chest really contain a wooden leg and a lobster? Yes, from Treasure Island (2009). And the steampunk tea trolley? The last Christmas show, Alice in Winterland.
The exhibition holds a cornucopia of rich pickings, all gleaned from what “might not have happened”. But it did … … Happy Anniversary, The Rose!
Mark Aspen
March 2018
Mark Aspen 