Fired-Up Fun
The Pirates of Penzance
by Arthur Sullivan, libretto by W. S. Gilbert
Opera Anywhere, Hampton Hill Theatre, 8th October then on tour until 13th June 2022
Review by Eleanor Marsh
Gilbert and Sullivan – the very names conjure up the image of a chorus of thousands, sumptuous costumes and set, full orchestra and an audience more likely to be humming the tunes on the way in than on the way out. Opera Anywhere, however is a small touring company and a programme of one-nighters throughout the country does not lend itself to any of the above. And this company do not attempt at any point during the performance to be anything that they are not, which results in a refreshingly innovative approach to this most traditional of traditional pieces.
All credit to Tristan Stocks, who as well as playing our handsome hero Frederic, is responsible for directing the piece, which was definitely the funniest production of this old warhorse that I’ve ever seen. The device of every principal entering from the same door through the audience did get a little tired, but when it worked – and it worked best for Catrin Lewis’ Mabel – it worked well. And a little predictability over entrances and exits is a small price to pay for squeezing so much humour out of Gilbert’s libretto. There were gags where I’d never seen gags before and it did make me think how wonderful it must have been to have been in the audience for the first ever performance of the Savoy operas, when every joke was not only new, but topical too.
With a “chorus” of four, also doubling as named characters, there was never any possibility that the company would get away with just singing the notes. Those four actor-singers were uniformly excellent, not only in singing well, but also in getting all the humour out of each character they played. The chorus of ladies (who also doubled as Edith, Kate and a random policeman), comprised Freya Jacklin and Olivia Bell and they had some wonderful scene-stealing business that had the audience laughing out loud. Really excellent performances from both.
Maciek O’Shea, Mark Horner and Sam Young as the “male chorus” – and also Samuel, Sergeant of Police and the Pirate King respectively were all fine singers with excellent comic timing and all got well into their stride during the evening and by the middle of Act Two they were on fire. The courage of their own convictions would have seen them deliver performances of true excellence from the opening chorus.
It is very difficult to tour a show of this kind and the company absolutely understood that it is far more effective to rely on the material and performance and have a minimal set and basic costumes than to go overboard (pun intended) with a complicated design element to the show. This simplicity of design was mirrored in the musical supervision by Matthew Rickard who wisely kept the accompaniment to piano and woodwind. Less was definitely more and it was a real treat to see a company understand this so well.
The audience at Hampton Hill Theatre were audibly chuckling throughout the evening at a production that provided an element of fun that we’ve been lacking for the last year or so.
Eleanor Marsh, October 2021
Photography by John Alcock
Angels Dance on Pinheads
We Are As Gods
James Cousins Company at the Battersea Arts Centre until 10th October
Review by Suzanne Frost
James Cousins has been a rising star to keep an eye on for some time, and an interesting choreographer to follow. As a graduate of London Contemporary Dance School, raised in the occasionally deeply self-conscious and serious world of contemporary dance, he has lately and very consciously embraced the much more commercial sector, collaborating on big West End shows, in pop music videos and fashion. His takeover of Battersea Arts Centre, entitled We Are As Gods, is his first large scale immersive experience, intended as a celebration of dance and life after eighteen months of lockdown. “Immersive” and “Experience” are words that are being used with careless abundance these days, so it might be useful to break down what actually happens: a cast of 70 performers – nine professional dancers from James Cousins Company, over 30 students from Cousin’s alma mater London Contemporary Dance School, plus groups of community dancers from the local area – are scattered around the many halls, stairs and secret passages of Battersea Arts Centre, moving in and out of performance moments where they mainly present previous works from Cousins’ existing repertoire. So, there is not much actual new dance to see here, but the setting largely makes it a novel experience.
Read more…The Time of My Life
Dirty Dancing
by Eleanor Bergstein
Karl Sydow and associates, at Richmond Theatre until 9th October, then on tour until 18th December
Review by Mark Aspen
Dirty Dancing opened its tour at Richmond, so I took my maiden aunt. No, just kidding! But the lady I did take with me remarked “We gals thought when Aiden Turner did the bare-chested scything in Poldark that that was pretty sensational, until now, seeing Michael O’Reilly take his shirt off”. O’Reilly plays Johnny Castle, the heart-throb lead and, judging by a very enthusiastic audience, Dirty Dancing has quite an aficionado following, ladies of all ages, who know just what to expect.
Mentioning this sets the atmosphere for the fast-paced, high-energy show that opens the theatre’s own autumn programme, and opens the doors of the magnificent and much-loved Richmond Theatre after over eighty weeks of Covid closure, dark days now blown away by the light and sound and life of a dynamic musical.
Read more…Firmly Anchored
Der fliegende Holländer : Preview
Normansfield Theatre, Teddington from 22nd October
Preview by Thomas Forsythe with Tamara Ravenhill and Alan Bain
Opera critic Thomas Forsythe discusses Rose Opera’s forthcoming production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer with the Artistic Director of Rose Opera Tamara Ravenhill and the Designer, Alan Bain
TF: May I say how much I enjoyed the Rose Opera Gala 2021 back in June. No Wagner there though, so I was wondering, why did you choose Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) as your main opera for this autumn? It is surely a challenge to produce for a smaller company and it doesn’t at first seem to be one of the crowd pleasers which are frequently produced by such companies?
TR: Thank you. When founded, Rose Opera aimed to explore unusual and challenging grand opera repertoire in an accessible and affordable way. We would like to show that some pieces which by reputation are “difficult” can be presented by smaller groups in a compelling fashion, making these operas better known and loved by wider audiences. With this opera we are fortunate in many ways – a powerful story from the lore of the sea and an exploration of love and redemption. As an early Wagner (as is Wagner in general) it is vocally very challenging, yet lyrical and melodic. Rose Opera is fortunate to have capable singers to sing this repertoire well, both principals and chorus. This opera contains a very substantial part for the chorus (ships do need sailors!) so needs a capable chorus who like a challenge. In many senses it is a crowd pleaser, but not one that is performed frequently; it was last seen at the Royal Opera in 2015.
Perfectly Carved Cameo
The Browning Version
by Terence Rattigan
The Questors, at the Questors Studio, Ealing until 9th October
Review by Emma Byrne
Watching the perceptive and penetrating The Browning Version with our 21st century mind-set, it is almost impossible to believe that Kenneth Tynan once dismissed Terence Rattigan as one of a slew of Non-Controversial Western Playwrights. This perfectly carved cameo of a one-act play exposes themes of gender, repression, and desperate compromise.
Simon Taylor as Andrew Crocker-Harris carries the emotional weight of the evening in his portrait of a man who has built a façade only to see it become a prison. We see him pinned between the casual cruelty of his wife Millie (Caroline Ash) and the careless condescension of Dr Frobisher, the Headmaster (Robert Gordan Clark). Although the play takes place in real time, the slings and arrows of two decades of life are revealed. The younger, more confident master, Hunter (James Burgess) is Ægisthus to Crocker Harris’ Agamemnon, but Rattigan is bold enough to conjure a different ending, which Burgess and Taylor play with a deeply moving connection.
Read more…Wake the Soul
Grand Opera Gala
Instant Opera, Richmond Theatre until 25th September
Review by Mark Aspen
“To wake the soul with tender works of art”. Alexander Pope’s words, inscribed over the proscenium arch at Richmond Theatre, could not ring more true as the theatre reopened to the public once more after 555 dark days of the pandemic. As its doors flung open, there was a general feeling of elation, not only from the arriving audience, but from everyone in the theatre. “One of the most completely preserved Frank Matcham theatres” was back. In the 122 years and 8 days since its doors first opened, nothing, including two World Wars, had forced its closure for so long.
So it was with a great sense of occasion, and a palpable excitement, that the audience took its seats for Instant Opera’s Grand Opera Gala. For a theatre so firmly grounded in the local psyche, it was appropriate that the honour of being the first production back on the baize went to an opera company that has flourished since it was founded just under five years ago, decamping from its usual local home at Normansfield Theatre in Teddington.
Singing into the darkness
Jessica Cale and George Ireland
Opera Live at Home, St Pancras Clock Tower, then online from 28 September
Review by Matthew Grierson
It must be quite daunting to sing into a webcam; even if you can make out the faces of the audience who have their cameras switched on, they’re surely postage stamp-sized. But as soprano and pianist alike reflect in the Q&A following the recital, performing takes them half out of their surroundings and into the world of the opera itself. Mind you, Jessica Cale and George Ireland are coming live from the St Pancras Clock Tower, which seems a suitably dramatic venue in which to imagine the sung action.
By concentrating on soprano arias, tonight’s recital juxtaposes lone women from across the repertoire. It would be too easy to suggest that they were all as a result lost or abandoned characters, though there is, necessarily, a common theme of isolation. But in their different responses to literal or figurative solitude, we see a greater variety of female agency than one might imagine in opera, their modes ranging from lament and vengeance to playfulness and daring.
Read more…When the Lights Go Out
The Children
by Lucy Kirkwood
Richmond Shakespeare Society at the Mary Wallace Theatre until 25th September
Review by Patrick Adams
Richmond Shakespeare Society presented a fine play, The Children, by Lucy Kirkwood, ‘who has firmly established herself as a leading playwright of her generation, the writer of a series of savagely funny, highly intelligent and beautifully observed plays that tackle the pressing issues of our times’. The Children displayed all these qualities in dealing with the effects of nuclear contamination.
The play, directed by Michelle Hood, is set in the kitchen cum dining room of a remote cottage on the coast, with the kitchen area set along the back wall, having a central window overlooking an effective view of the sea and a rocky promontory holding back surging waves. The whole area is rather ramshackle, in keeping with the story that unfolds.
Read more…Extraordinary Poetry of the Ordinary
Ordinary Days
music and lyrics by Adam Gwon
BROS Theatre Company, Hampton Hill Theatre, until 18th September
Review by Mark Aspen
Stand back and look at a big city. It can seem cold and impersonal; its people are overwhelmed by its demands, yet feel anonymous. But look closely and see the individuals there. They are trying to make sense of their lives, to make their own mark, each to have a meaning and a name.
One such city, New York, is the setting for Ordinary Days, a neatly paired-back musical about four individuals, their relationships with each other and with that city during the tense late 2000s, when the city was still coming to terms with the aftermath of that cataclysmic assault that we know simply as “9/11”.
BROS’ set for Ordinary Days, designed by its director Wesley Henderson Roe, is simple, subtle and stylish. On low multi-levels, it is black and white, silhouetted against the cyc, which is lit in purple (an ambiguous colour of mourning, or hope, or reflection?). A series of representational paintings of New York are seen through free-standing doorframes. The set becomes the participants’ apartments, the street, the rooftop of a high-rise building, or galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This is where our four individuals live out their lives. They are intelligent twenty-thirty-somethings, at the time of life when they are establishing their futures. What they have in common are that each is trying fulfil greater or smaller ambitions, and that each is struggling to express themselves fully.
Read more…Yesteryear Lives Now
Barons Court Alive
Star Child, at Baron’s Court Theatre, The Curtains Up until 11th September
Review by Vince Francis
A balmy September evening, a quirky pub in a side street in Barons Court, a darkened, vaulted cellar, with a small stage illuminated by an artfully placed light string. Add in a poetic girl with flowing red hair, dressed in paisley top and pyjama-striped trousers, delivering heartfelt folk-based compositions whilst accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, supported by a stylish young chap on a jazz-voiced electric guitar. Top it all off with a decent pint and one could seriously be back in 1966. But this was no mere flibbertigibbet fantasy, no boozy bagatelle; no, indeed. This was Baron’s Court Live at The Curtains Up Theatre (and pub) and the aforementioned songstress is the lyrical Aurora Manola, who, with Deniz Stern on electric guitar, make up Star Child.
The theatre at The Curtains Up is in what was the cellar for the pub and, OK, the ceiling technically isn’t vaulted, it’s supported by brick arches. But, whatever, it is an intimate space and I’m sure you’ll forgive the poetic licence. Old cinema chairs form the short rows around three sides of the playing area, adding to the feel of a different era.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 