Merrily We Roll Along (Susan Elkin reviews)

Theatre ticket prices are loaded with extras and they shouldn’t be. If a seat is priced at, say, £50, then that’s what the purchaser should pay. A venue or company which actually needs to charge £55  should write it on the ticket. We need transparency. For most people many tickets are obscenely expensive anyway without their being topped up with what one waggish mate of mine disapprovingly dubs “the ticket tax”.

It’s rife in London and in major venues elsewhere. I recently bought a pair of £44 tickets for Theatre Royal Brighton. That’s £88 I was spending. I did it online and printed my own tickets which is, obviously the easiest and cheapest option for the theatre as well as being convenient for me. It costs nobody anything. So why did I have to pay a £3.50 “transaction charge” on top of the £88?

Yes, I know this is so common that many purchasers don’t even notice but think about it for a moment. Just imagine the outcry if you or I tried to buy a pullover, book or toaster online or in a shop and were told that we had to pay an additional £3.50 on top of the purchase price just for the privilege of buying the item. Outrageous? Definitely, and exactly the same applies to theatre tickets.

Then there’s the restoration levy – sorely needed, maybe, if it will help to prevent any more bits of theatre ceiling dropping onto punters and preserve our historic theatres for future generations. But, if it’s not voluntary it should always be incorporated into the stated price of the ticket and never added on as a compulsory extra.

Want your tickets posted to you, in the old fashioned way? Well you will pay at least double what it actually costs to put the tickets in an envelope and frank it at business rates. So part of what you pay becomes yet another component of the ticket tax. In some cases that’s three additions to the stated ticket price – almost as bad as the so called “budget” airlines. And sometimes on top of all this, the organisation has the temerity to tell you that it would welcome a tip – sorry, voluntary donation –  as well.

We worry a lot in this industry these days about inclusivity and attracting new audiences. Ticket pricing which is at best opaque and, at worst, little short of dishonest, is not likely to help.

I see a great deal of theatre for young audiences, most of it imaginative and enjoyable. In some ways it’s the most challenging work a performer can undertake because the younger the audience members the less conditioned to politeness they are. If you fail to engage them they will simply switch off or worse.

That’s why the best work for very young audiences is multi-sensory with plenty of interesting sound, visually engaging things, touchable items and even smells and tastes. For older young audiences theatre has to offer experiences the audience is not expecting. And of course that often means live music. Welcome to the world of the actor-musician.

An actor who can play musical instruments, as many as possible,  and use them as part of his or her acting, is currently in high demand. Yes, these things go in fashions and a few years ago everyone wanted acrobats. In five or ten years’ time fashion may turn elsewhere. But at present actor-musos are more employable than their friends who can’t do music, especially, but not exclusively, in shows for under 21s although I’m seeing ever more family and adult shows featuring actor-musos – Once which I wrote about last week, for instance.

So how do you become an actor-muso? Well of course there are actors who happen to play a musical instrument and who are therefore able to use that skill as part of their work. Every drama school acting class includes some students with quite high level skills on musical instruments. You only have to read the CVs in graduate showcase programmes to see the evidence  although there aren’t many actor-pianists about. Most musically inclined acting students seem to play portable or orchestral instruments.

Increasingly, actor-musos are coming through drama school courses specifically designed for them.  Mountview, for instance, offers a BA Hons in Performance: Actor Musician. Rose Bruford’s has a  well established BA (Hons) in Actor Musicianship.  GSA has a newer one through which very employable performers are now coming into the industry.

There has always been scope for the informal development of actor-muso skills if you train to act in a conservatoire which also trains musicians – Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – and more recently Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

It cuts both ways too. Sometimes musicians, normally in a pit or on balcony, have to come on stage and do a bit of acting. It happens at The Globe all the time for example. It makes sense to allow the training to overlap a bit to maximise every student’s employment potential. Actors and musicians no longer live in precious watertight boxes – if they ever did.

If you’ve long since trained and are working or wanting to be, all is not lost either. Actors who haven’t really done any musical playing for a long time can, obviously, self-help. If you played trumpet, cello, flute or whatever even at a very basic standard when you were a child, what you learned is still hardwired into you somewhere because that’s how music works. It’s worth digging out the instrument, or getting another one, and working up those skills again now. Get a few lessons. Practise. Act confidently with it and it might help you to get a job you wouldn’t otherwise have got. A lot of the music used in shows, especially for young audiences, is not particularly complicated. It just needs playing with panache.

Be adventurous too. People who’ve once, even many years ago, been taught, say, violin can often teach themselves the guitar, ukulele, banjo, rhythm double bass and more because they know how to hold strings down. It’s quite common for people who play reed or brass instruments to be able “to find their way around” close relatives of the instrument they originally had lessons on. Most accordionists start on piano. And any competent performer can play non-pitch percussion and sing. I’ve seen literally hundreds of actors in children’s shows in recent years knocking or shaking out rhythms in cast bands. And they didn’t all attend the Royal Academy of Music. Some have had no musical training at all.

My observation is that the days of acting as a tightly focused single discipline are well and truly over. The more strings you have to your bow – literally perhaps – the more likely you are to be able to pay the bills. So if you’re still at school and have an eye on a career in acting for goodness sake don’t give up the trombone.

Image: Actor-muso, Dannie Harris

My father, Ken Hillyer, was an accomplished folk fiddler and ceilidh band leader. He formed a group called the Southerners, the other members of which became almost part of the family.  They played for dances continually in the 1960s and 70s, made records, went on radio and TV and occasionally toured abroad. (And that wasn’t even his day job!) Inevitably as we grew up, my sister and I, who both had violin lessons at school, got peripherally caught up in all this and sometimes played with our Dad and his band. I taught myself guitar and sang solo folk songs at related gigs too. (Just don’t ask me to do that now!)  British folk music, we often say, is in our blood. My sister, interestingly, has returned to our roots and now plays for a local morris team. I cheer her on occasionally but simply don’t have time to do it myself at present although she and I often play classical music together.

Well, all  those memories came flooding back last week when I reviewed Once at Fairfield Halls in Croydon at the start of its big national tour. The hugely enjoyable show, based on John Carney’s film, is a love story about music making and set in Dublin. The 19 strong cast – every one of them a competent musician and some, including four violinists, very good indeed – were jamming trad stuff on stage as the audience found seats and I was so transfixed by the energy, vibrance, excitement and familiarity of it all that I sat mesmerised and forgot to get my notebook and pen out.

Once the show begins, Peter Rowe’s direction allows the music and musicians to become almost part of the set sitting at the sides and back, playing continuo or interjections and then occasionally, quite literally, moving into the spotlight. There’s unusual beauty and elegance in such seamlessness.

Watch out, in particular, for Hannah Khogali, fresh from GSMD. How many actors do you know who can play the violin, sing and jump up and down in rhythm all at the same time? And she does it with arresting energetic aplomb. She looks as if she’s enjoying every moment and perhaps she is. It’s jolly infectious.

Towards the end of the second act there’s a number in which the whole cast sings an unaccompanied number in harmony. Goodness knows how they keep it together as tightly as they do but “When you’re staring out to sea” sung at dawn as they look towards Dublin is perfect. Yes, I’ve done an awful lot of choral singing too and I was lost in admiration for the quality of this moment.

I loved Once, and  gave it a rare five stars. I have already recommended to several people that they pick it up on tour, not least because the music spoke to me so personally. Life really does go round in circles.

International folk festival on Levkas, Greece in 1966. Me with guitar, my sister in hat and our father on far left.

What do you do with theatre programmes after the event? As a professional reviewer I am always given one because, obviously, I can’t review without cast and creative details. Actually a single sheet of A4 rather than the full-Monty glossy job would do perfectly well and in fringe theatre quite often that’s what I’m given.

Even so, if I kept every single sheet, booklet or whatever, I’d be neck deep in paper. I reviewed 153 shows and concerts last year ranging from drama school shows (single sheet, usually) to Proms and large scale shows such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat and  Mary Poppins.

There was a time when I kept and neatly filed every single one. Not any more, I’m afraid. After a couple of weeks – once I’m sure there won’t be a query on the review or an interview opportunity arising from the show – I put them firmly in the recycling bin.

Wasteful? Yes, programmes are a useful resource. When I was teaching and regularly taking school groups to the theatre I used to suggest to O Level (that dates me). GCSE and A level classes that they bought a programme in order to read the usually informative background information about the play we were seeing and studying. “It can be expensive so I suggest you buy one between three or four of you and then pass it round afterwards” I’d advise. Some teachers would, I suppose, have bought one with petty cash, photocopied anything useful therein and distributed it. As a writer myself I was always too mindful of copyright to do that. Anyway I didn’t believe in spoonfeeding my students any more than I did my own children.

It’s also a dreadful thing from an ecological point of view that so many trees die to provide peripheral theatre programmes. I’m sure I bin a whole tree every year all by myself – a small forest over a lifetime. Why isn’t there greater emphasis on downloading paper-free programmes in advance? That would work perfectly well for me as reviewer but it rarely seems to happen.

On the other hand  proper programmes or playbills are an interesting record of old shows. Every now and again someone donates a collection of historic programmes to some archive or library – potential gold dust to students of theatre history. There will be less of this in future, if people do as I now have to do, and simply bin them. I hope they’re all digitised somewhere.

Meanwhile I still have a few. My late husband was very keen on keeping them and I have several boxes in my loft which survived our ruthless 2016 downsizing. They include an Alleyns School programme for Richard II starring a very young Simon Ward – he and Mr E were near contemporaries at school. Then there’s Maxim Shostakovich conducting his father’s fifth symphony in Royal Festival Hall and an RSC programme for Antony and Cleopatra starring Judi Dench and Antony Hopkins among many others. We were never sure why neither of us kept the programme for Stravinsky conducting his own work on his last visit to London – probably the most memorable concert of all. Perhaps, for teenagers, the tickets were so expensive (cheapest £1. We usually paid 7/6) that we couldn’t actually afford to buy a programme.

I sometimes wonder what I’m throwing away now which posterity would rather I had kept.

Not many programmes in the photograph because, of course, I have thrown away most of the 2019 ones!