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…Honest Raw Reflections
Roger McGough Poetry Celebration
Arts Richmond at the Exchange Theatre, Twickenham, 4th September
Review by Simone De Almeida
(See also a review by Denis Valentine.)
Earlier this month I was lucky enough to attend the awards ceremony of the highly anticipated Roger McGough poetry competition. Though a little further spaced out than we once might have liked to be – our smiles now covered with masks – the afternoon was no less special, and there was a certain sense of community as we took our seats. Perhaps inspired by this year’s theme of ‘identity’ no doubt, my mind was instantly drawn to one thought: so many people, from so many different places – such different walks of life – all here to celebrate the one thing that unites us all, and has united us through these unparalleled, and at many points quite frightening, times: our love of poetry.
The concept of identity being so fundamental to our very sense of self, one would think that we would consider it far more frequently than we do, but having grown up in an age in which we consume far more from our screens than we do the world around us, I am almost ashamed to admit that I spend far more time contemplating the character of others than I do myself … ah, the burden of the introvert! I can only imagine the level of self-reflection and introspection it must have taken in order to capture such honest, raw reflections on who they are, and where they’ve come from.
One of the poems that earned third place, Riding Tandem by Tony Trafford, was a personal favourite of mine; telling the beautiful, tragic story of a first romance – a harsh reminder of both the beauty and pain which coexist in our world, leaving both fond memories and heartbreak in their wake.
Read more…Barking up the Wrong Tree
A Dog’s Solution
by Richard Franklin
Charterhouse Square Productions at Baron’s Court Theatre, The Curtains Up until 2nd October
Review by Eleanor Lewis
Beyoncé is a street-dweller, she has a home but it’s chaotic and she prefers the street and the companionship of her ‘dog’ Jimmy. Alongside this she worries about the state of the planet and where climate change and other related world issues will lead. Over the course of an hour and a bit (including a ten-minute interval), and with the help of Jimmy and several other characters, Beyoncé examines the future of the developed world via a mix of metatheatre, a little pantomime and a dash of school play. Such is A Dog’s Solution, which is running at Baron’s Court Theatre until October.
Opening with what might be a conventional story line the play then widens out. Two young men appear from time to time and offer small vignettes and explanatory asides as chorus characters. There is also a mysterious Old Bag Person with philosophical insights (and a rich father), a Lobbyist and a suited corporate-type to complete the spectrum of present day world influences. After the interval the audience is involved in the proceedings, voting, winning virtual prizes etc, in a section that’s valid but needs a clearer point than it currently has.
Read more…Complementary Insights
Roger McGough Poetry Celebration
Arts Richmond at the Exchange Theatre, Twickenham, 4th September
Review by Denis Valentine
(See also a review by Simone de Almeida, one of our younger reviewers.)
As theatres, performance spaces and the arts in general begin to reopen and become accessible again, it was a wonderful to spend a day in a theatre auditorium being entertained and engaged by a host of wonderful poets, poems and readers at the Exchange Theatre in Twickenham. The Roger McGough’s Poetry Celebration afternoon and wonderfully hosted by the man himself (who interludes throughout and offers at times his own masterful works), is aptly named as the feeling is just that, a day to celebrate poetry and what can be conveyed in the works it allows.
Each poem read in their category complements each other, as they all offer an insight into a different aspect of the topic they cover. Whether it is issues of blatant racism in the “Differences” category being immediately followed by that of accents and misplaced remarks, or the journey of finding one’s own self in the “Identity” group to also exploring issues of breeding and purpose, each poem offers another part or perspective on the spectrum it’s covering.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 