Susan Elkin, Author at Susan Elkin

Kings’s Head Theatre, 13 February 2019

This is Bizet’s Carmen as you’ve never seen it before. Reworked for 2019 Britain, it opens in an NHS hospital. And it’s a bijoux version simply pared down to a 90 minute three hander love (or something) triangle. Musically, under the charismatic direction of Juliane Gallant from piano, it’s spikily strong and the new translation by Mary Franklin, who also directs, and Ashley Pearson is very funny.

What an inspired idea to have mobile phones playing Carmen tunes and blending them in. At one point the radio is playing in a bar and the presenter is announcing and playing extracts from Carmen. Dan D’Souza, a deliciously gravelly baritone as Escamillio, becomes a posturing football star (“Can I get a cup of coffee, ‘cause I’m not really fit to drive my maserati”) who sings the Toreador song badly in a karaoke bar as a way of showing off to Carmen. When Carmen is singing the Habenera, Jose bounces a rubber ball in perfect rhythm to provide a gentle percussive underpinning. The whole piece is a light, witty enjoyable concept and full of imaginative ideas until, of course, the last five minutes because, as well all know, it can’t end happily.

Ellie Edmonds (alternating at other performances with Jane Monari as Carmen) has a rich warm singing voice which she uses crisply. She sails adeptly through all the big numbers and acts convincingly which is especially important in the intimate space of the King’s Head. The absurd hip-hop dance she does to Bizet’s music at the beginning of Act II is a moment to treasure too.

Roger Patterson sang Jose on press night – the role is shared with Mike Bradley – and brings a great deal of appropriate tenor angst and passion to it. He is compelling, first as a disillusioned NHS nurse coming to the end of his shift, then as a young man in love, changed after three months in prison and eventually as a thwarted, angry man.

This is a feminist take on Carmen. Written and directed by an all-female team it presents Carmen not as a femme fatale but rather as unfortunate, very plausible, young woman who makes a few fatally bad choices. I rather like that angle.

First published by Lark Reviews http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=49

Rewind about 25 years and I’m in the Gulbenkian Theatre at Canterbury seeing, by invitation, a jolly little play about a dog. It’s for three years olds. Yes – three year olds. I’m utterly amazed at the very idea. So much so that after the show I interview both actors – it’s a Polka Theatre touring production – about the difficulties of creating work for children so young.

I suppose there was a bit of quite brave pioneering going in with that tour although early years work had started in a very small experimental way in the 1970s. But by the mid 1990s it was just taking off. Since then there has been an explosion of fine work for pre-schoolers.

And often the audience members don’t even have to be three. Some shows, largely text free and using a lot of light, sound and sensation, are aimed at babies. From M6 to Half Moon and from Catherine Wheels to Oily Cart and Little Angel there are now many dozens of companies producing imaginative early years work.

Bravo. It introduces children to theatre, acts as a powerful educative force and provides work for actors and other practitioners. But – and of course there has to be a but – the audiences that I’ve observed tend to be almost entirely middle class parents and their children, the people who want to bring their families to the theatre and can afford to buy tickets. One also sees the occasional nursery class at daytime performances – and I suspect the parents have paid for tickets because they can and want to. It’s terrific, for those children of course, but it isn’t usually very inclusive in terms of the audience it attracts.

What can be done to dent this? Well, unfortunately, although theatre tickets for children’s shows have to be kept as low as possible for obvious reasons, it costs as much to put them on as any other sort of production. Margins are, therefore, usually very tight.

I’d like to see more sponsorship offering really cheap tickets for children’s shows. If only some wealthy company would take it on and put up the money, companies and venues with shows for children could apply to be part of it.

Secondly, much more needs to be done to enable children to be transported from school to theatre cheaply to encourage more primary schools to take children to theatres. Are any of the transport companies running schemes, for example? If not why not? Surely coaches which are not in use during the day for school runs could be offered? It just needs some willing, imaginative thinking. Big profitable theatre companies could do more to help teachers with transport to their venues too. And maybe there are private sponsors, local to the schools perhaps, who would consider this if approached.

It is quite wrong for children to go through their childhood without ever experiencing the transformative magic of theatre simply because their parents aren’t very well off or don’t know much about theatre. Education is about opening doors.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz

Classical music has always been part of the glue which binds our marriage. When we met I was 14 and he was 16. We became good friends for several years before we morphed into an “item”.

And music was key to all of that although we came at it from different angles. I was discovering Messiah, The Creation, Noye’s Fludde, Brahms’s Requiem, Schubert’s Unfinished and a lot more through singing and playing them at school. I also came from a home which rattled with music. My father was a semi-pro Ceilidh band leader and a lover of mainstream opera. And I’d heard it all like wallpaper for years.

The boy I’d recently met at a local youth club (who turned out to be from a family my father and uncle had known well before the war) was just a geeky teenager who’d turned his back on popular culture, thought he knew rather more than he did, and was busily building a vinyl library including the entire Ring Cycle conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

So we went to lots of concerts together, mostly at Royal Festival Hall (affordable for teenagers back then) and the Proms. We listened to music together too. He was very keen on several second hand record exchange places in central London. Eventually I started going to some of those with him. On one occasion we popped into a Soho shop where he knew the enthusiastic man quite well – or maybe not. Said man took one look at me, became very distant and I was told later, cooled from then on. The truth was, of course, that the shop owner was gay and thought MLO was too. I’d been taken there that day as a covert message. Hmm.

But I digress. The point I am making is that we’ve been sharing a love of music since 1961: concerts, CDs, radio programmes and lots more. For years he read The Gramophone regularly and rarely missed Saturday morning’s Building a Library on Radio 3 (to which all our radios have always been set). On our travels in the last 20 years or so we’ve also attended concerts in exciting overseas concert halls such as Sydney Opera House, Musikverein in Vienna, Berliner Philharmonie, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and big halls in, for example, Chicago, Boston and Hobart.

It seems, alas, that all that is now over. Ms Alzheimer’s, who lives with us these days, is not keen on classical music. MLO is often restless. He often wanders aimlessly round the house fiddling with things in search of something to do. So, trying to settle him, I say something like: “Why don’t you go and sit in the sitting room and put some music on?”

He has forgotten how to switch it on so I generally go and set it up for him either via our new TV, which does all sorts of wonderful things, or sometimes I leave him with my iPad on which I have a fair amount of music downloaded. “What would you like?” I ask, usually trying to encourage him towards something very familiar such as a Beethoven symphony. So far so good but ten minutes later he’ll be drifting round the house again, clearly uncaptivated by the music. “What’s the matter?” I ask. “You used to spend hours listening to music? Why have you left that symphony?”

The chilling answer last week was a casual “Oh I don’t seem to be interested in anything like that any more”. WHAT?

You bloody swine, Ms A. Did you really have to take that from him (us) as well?

It’s a fairly recent development. Last summer, when I reviewed a number of proms I had only a single ticket for most of them, so MLO would listen to the live broadcast on the radio at home. I could ring him in the interval and say “How about that, then? Wasn’t it fabulous?” and he’d be able to have a sensible conversation with me about it. It’s going to be very different this summer.

Of course I still take him to concerts when I can and he sits there conventionally but doesn’t seem to engage with the music. He certainly can’t discuss it afterwards. I suppose I just have to be thankful that he enjoys it in his own way “in the moment” although how long will even that last?

This musical closing down comes and goes in and out of focus, like every other aspect of the cognitive decline which characterises this appalling illness. At the weekend I heard, by chance, on Radio 3 the Gulda cello concerto, which was new to me. I’ve moved MLO’s precious BOSE into the kitchen because he never now listens to it and it means that I can – and sometimes he’s there too. Now, that concerto includes some virtuoso cello work which is so sparky and flamboyant that it literally stopped me in my tracks. I caught MLO’s eye and, briefly, we shared the “wow!” moment as we always would have done. Be thankful for the occasional, small things, Susan.

Shakespeare has Portia refer, in completely different context, to “a swanlike end, fading in music.” Yes, that’s a good a summary as any.

Let’s hear it for pub theatres. Unheard of when I was a London teenager in the 1960s, there are now over 70 of them across the capital and they’re beginning to mushroom in other big cities too.

In my youth there was a pub on almost every corner – many of them filthy, smoke-filled dives which “nice” girls like me were advised to avoid by, for example, parents, teachers and the police. The bigger Victorian ones had rooms above which you could hire for a pittance or sometimes book free for a meeting or function on the assumption that the people attending would buy drinks downstairs. And those are the rooms which in some cases now function as fringe theatres – returning to a tradition linking inns, theatres and story telling which goes back at least to medieval times.

And, although budgets are usually precarious, they hang in there and go on producing interesting work. I’ve seen some fine shows, for example, at the Finborough, near Earls Court and the Old Red Lion, Islington (which has a dog on its old external sign board just to keep you on your toes) and it’s almost always worth the hike to Highgate for anything staged by Upstairs at the Gatehouse.

A recent discovery, since I moved “home” to London in 2016, is the Bridge House in Penge where I’ve seen several strong shows and where they make the best pot of tea I’ve had anywhere. (How pubs have moved with the times.) Few of these places have decent loos, of course. Witness the Old Red Lion, for example, where the word “jakes” comes to mind but hey you can’t have everything and the shows are good.

I’ve often travelled around London for shows at, say, The Landor in Clapham, The Hope in Islington or the nearby Hen and Chickens. It’s a really rich seam of theatre but, sadly, people who aren’t really steeped in theatre often don’t know about it. Thousands travel in from the home counties for National Theatre or the West End. They don’t, on the whole, do it for The Rosemary Branch, The Oxford Arms in Camden or the Brockley Jack. Yet, it’s such a well established phenomenon now that there is even a very informative magazine London Pub Theatres (@pubtheatres1) devoted to it.

Last week I was at the King’s Head in Islington for an enjoyable production of Carmen, reworked and scaled down for 2019 Britain. The King’s Head claims to be the oldest London pub theatre, Fascinatingly and ironically it soon won’t be. This year it is to move into new, purpose built premises in Islington Square. So that’s a successful pub theatre which has outgrown its origins. Thus our industry goes on cyclically reinventing itself. And pubs have morphed into respectable places to go.

So was a week in a very rural, holiday-let house on the Dorset/Wiltshire border a good idea for a man into whom Ms Alzheimer’s fangs are now deeply embedded? Well, yes and no. Curate’s eggs and the like.

We were away all last week, with my (younger) sister, C, and her nonagenarian husband. For most of the time we were also joined by his elder daughter, M, whom I’ve now known for years. What this boiled down to was three chatty, lively, healthy 60+ women and two elderly chaps with very little energy, often confused/irritable or both and in need of a lot of help with things like negotiating steps in an unfamiliar environment. Interesting dynamic and it meant that much of the caring could be shared. Partial respite. Never let its importance be underestimated and grab it when you can.

One of the downsides – maybe – was that we did very little. My Loved One and I have always done a fair bit of travelling about to see or do things when we’re on holiday but perhaps I have to accept that those days are over. C and I went for a few good walks and sometimes she strode out with M while I stayed at base. We tootled about a bit making local forays in different combinations – coffee in Tisbury, the very pretty nearest village, or a light lunch in nearby Shaftesbury for example. One day I drove C and MLO to South Dorset for a nostalgia trip to recall childhood holidays. MLO looked mostly pretty bemused whatever we did and wherever we were.

We spent a lot of time inside the (very comfortable) house we’d rented, however, not least because of some pretty wet and blustery weather. Thank goodness for newspapers and wifi. C did a big jigsaw. M, who is self employed, found time for some work. I read three novels and also did a bit of writing. We listened to a lot of music, the others watched TV most evenings and it was fun to play violin duets with C, something we don’t get enough opportunities to do. It all meant, of course, that I actually got a bit of a rest which I sorely needed although, as regular readers may have gathered, I am not very good at idling.

MLO, meanwhile, takes ever longer to do the most elementary task. I would, while we were away as at home, shower him (literally – like hosing down, say, a car) dress him and then go off downstairs leaving him to put his pullover on. Twenty minutes later I’d go back up to make sure he was OK only to find him just wriggling into the sleeves or wandering puzzled round the bedroom and no sight of the pullover.

The nights were very disturbed. Typically, both at home and away, I have to get up three or four times in the night to help him in the bathroom. He’s usually lost in some dream which won’t lift and hasn’t got a clue where he is or what he’s meant to be doing. Again and again last week I’d say to him, in our en suite bathroom “OK job done – back to bed now, please” only for him to stand in the middle of the bathroom unable even to find his way through the bathroom door and into the bedroom. Sometimes he would point questioningly at the bath or the towel rail. I see a bit of this in our own house, where the bathroom is across the landing, but it was much worse in an unfamiliar environment.

The most chillingly depressing moment in the whole week came when I was helping MLO to sit down at the breakfast table one morning. He looked me straight in the eye and asked: “Has Susan gone out? Will she be back soon?” That’s a first. And, I suppose, the beginning of a new stage in this horrible, hideous, hateful illness.

On the other hand it was very touching (and supportive) to see both C and M being heart-warmingly kind to MLO, taking him by the hand, helping him up from chairs, doing up his seatbelt, making him drinks and a lot more – especially as my brother-in-law really needed to be their top priority. Even MLO commented on how gentle and tender C was with him. “How old was she when I first met her?” I was asked at one point. “Eight” I reminded him.

Communication was even worse than usual during the week away, though. MLO seems to be losing oral volume so I often can’t hear him and my very deaf brother-in-law rarely can so it’s hard for the two of them to communicate with each other. Add to that the fact that MLO’s sentences often make no sense anyway and – try as everyone did to be inclusive – conversation tended to be mostly the three of us women discussing our own interests, concerns and preoccupations with each other rather than with either man.

And as for food, well we kept it casual and low key, more or less taking it in turns to sort dinner. Lots of options seemed to be the way forward especially as MLO and I have been vegetarian for 40 years but Brother-in-Law, while enjoying eggs on toast and jacket potatoes, is noticeably suspicious of anything relating to the V-word.

So was it a success and would I do it again? Yes and yes. I suspect it’s about the best I’m going to get on the holiday front for the forseeable future and the opportunity to relax was very welcome. So was all that chat because I’m somewhat short, these days, of ordinary conversation at home. Wish I’d been able to spend more time out in lovely Dorset but I’ve seen most of it many times before and in my situation you have to make the best of compromises.

I’ve seen several plays recently (no names no pack drill) in which I have missed an occasional line. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, wrong with my hearing. It’s simply that some actors sometimes fail to make themselves heard in the theatre. I am not morphing into Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells and of course I understand how naturalistic 21^st century theatre works. But I think we should consider the issue very seriously because there are implications both for the way we train actors and for the future of live theatre, which will die if audiences give up – as they surely will if they can’t hear the dialogue.

Ah yes. The audience. Let’s think about that word for a minute. It comes from the Latin verb audire which, of course, means “to hear” and lives on in English words such as “audiologist”, “audible”, “auditory” and so on. Traditionally a group of people came to a play to hear it rather than see it. When Puck says he’ll be an auditor he isn’t planning to check anyone’s accounts. He means he’s going to eavesdrop at the Pyramus and Thisbe rehearsal in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In a sense, audiences still come to listen. If the piece is text driven, as nearly all plays are to a greater or lesser extent, it’s the words which provide the crux of the plot however much accompanying visual spectacle there might be. If people who’ve paid to be there, even in the cheaper and more distant seats, can’t hear the actors then they’ll vote with their feet and their money. Result? Even more unemployment in this industry than there already is.

Part of the problem is, I think, that a great deal of actor training now relates to screen rather than the stage. Naturalism – often with a hint, or more, of “method” acting – is the key word. It’s what TV casting directors are looking for and that’s the work which most graduating drama school students aspire to. “Realism” drives most work opportunities for actors.

Obviously some of that intimate realism transfers to stage very successfully especially in smaller, more intimate spaces. No one wants declamatory Shakespeare or samey, twee drawing room dramas and formulaic farces any more. But surely we could still train actors to speak in a way which fills the theatre?

You cannot speak at the same pitch on stage in a big theatre as you can in, for example, a bedroom scene in a film. We still need stage whispers. Moreover there is something to be said, even in 2019, for stage directors’ insisting that actors don’t, in general, turn their backs to the audience when speaking unless there’s a very good reason for it, in which case pitch adjustments must be made – old fashioned and unsexy perhaps but still relevant. It’s – literally – a completely different scenario from a film when you can move the camera with the actor.

It can be done too. Shakespeare’s Globe is a cruel space to fill with voice. Not only are there all the problems associated with a roofless acoustic but actors have to compete with aircraft coming up the Thames into Heathrow, surveillance helicopters, sirens, revellers on the river path and mewling seagulls. But voice coaches and directors are evidently scrupulous about articulation and pitch and I have never had difficulty hearing at The Globe although I often do elsewhere, especially in larger venues.

Another part of the problem is the current overriding popularity of musical theatre for which every actor is fitted with a radio mic. It works well and, obviously, the amplification is part of the style. No wonder, though, that some actors then find it difficult to do a “straight” play and fill, say, a 1000 seat theatre with voice alone. Are we inching towards a world in which every actor will need to be amplified irrespective of the style of the piece?

For years, and with good reason, drama schools were criticised for turning out mannered (hammy?) stage actors lacking the skills to adapt to screen, an issue which some of these institutions seemed to think was beneath their notice. And musical theatre was barely acknowledged in vocational colleges as a serious form of theatre. Have we now swung too far the other way?

When you get an Alzheimer’s diagnosis the medics quickly and brightly tell you that it’s an unpredictable disease and that some people stay in much same place without getting worse for 20 years. It’s called trying to put a valiantly cheerful spin on a hideously unpalatable situation.

Well of course I Googled it. Within hours of My Loved One being diagnosed on 29 April, 2017 – just 21 months ago – I knew that the average time an Alzheimer’s patient survives after diagnosis is four to eight years.

And averages, as every sensible person knows, can be very misleading. For everyone who falls within the parameters of the given average there are others at both ends. That’s how averages work.

MLO, sadly, is declining far faster than that average suggests. We haven’t even reached the second anniversary of the diagnosis and there are things he can’t cope with now which would have been OK just a few weeks or months ago.

Did I really, for example, take him to Washington DC as recently as September 2018? Well, thank goodness I did because it would be unthinkable now. I have no idea how I’d manage his incontinence on a 7/8 hour flight and he’d find the travel unbearably tiring. He’d also have very little idea of where we were and why and I certainly don’t think that it would now be safe to leave him resting in a hotel room while I pottered off on my own as I did several times last autumn.

Until last summer he would walk, alone with one of those four wheeled shopping trolleys, a mile to Sainsburys each Sunday morning to get the fruit and vegetables which I preferred not to have delivered. Now he goes out only if there’s someone (usually me) with him.

We could still share a joke, even a feeble one, until recently but that now seems to have gone too. Earlier this week I was on all fours on the floor in front of him putting on his socks. “There!” I said, brightly. “I’m kneeling at your feet just as you’ve always wanted.” He just looked at me with that awful blank stare – increasingly his default expression.

For some reason I don’t understand at all he can no longer make table cutlery do as he wants it to either. Everything falls off it. Ms Alzheimer’s attacking the connections in the brain which control co-ordination? I’ve suggested he use a spoon and fork instead of a knife and I’ve bought an easy grip set but it makes little difference. I now routinely cut his food up for him – even the Fiorentina pizza he’s so fond of in Pizza Express causes big problems although I always ask for a pizza wheel and a spoon.

Oh and that’s another thing. I do all the talking, ordering, bill paying and so on in restaurants (usually pre-show although he comes out with me less and less often) because he and I both know he’ll get lost in his sentence long before he can get out what he’s trying to say. It seems to be a mixture of memory loss and articulation failure.

Not that he has any day-to-day money any more. And I manage his bank accounts through Power of Attorney. It’s one of the many things I have to tell him he’s “retired from.” And I’m grateful to our elder son for nailing that kind way of putting it. ES was with us the other day when MLO started fretting about keys and locks. I told him not to worry because he doesn’t really do keys anymore. “You’ve retired from keys” chipped in ES with a cheerful twinkle, managing as he usually does, to keep things light and good humoured. In fact MLO has “retired from” most things in the last few months.

The one-mile-per-hour trudging gait has worsened noticeably too. So has the painfully slow speed at which MLO does any tiny task. He makes the slow loris look like a boy racer. A ten minute struggle to get himself into a pair of pull-on jogging trousers before eventually giving up and asking me to help him is the new norm. He still shaves himself (thank heaven) when directed to by me. It takes around 40 minutes. Then there’s all the help he needs with what the professionals tactfully call “personal hygiene” (a nightly bath and a morning shower in this case). And so it goes on. 24/7.

Presumably – gloomy thought alert – in a few weeks’ time I shall be reflecting how easy things were back in early February compared with how they are in the future/ present time of writing whenever that might be. It’s all relative.

By the time you read this we shall be in a holiday let cottage in Dorset with my sister and her husband. She and I are hoping that MLO and my very elderly but reasonably “with it” brother-in-law will be able to look out for each other while we escape for walks in Hardy country. There’s another family member joining us who might help too.

I’m not holding my breath about any of this though because I suspect that MLO will find being in a strange house very disorientating – although it was more or less all right when we did this on our own in Northumberland nine months ago. That’s relentless deterioration for you.

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