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Do you keep your theatre programmes?

So what do you do with theatre programmes aka playbills (in the USA)? They make nice souvenirs of an evening out but what if you’re in the theatre working three or four times a week? You’d soon need a very large rented storage facility to accommodate them unless you own a mansion.

For decades I scrupulously kept mine and I still have some interesting old ones such as the one relating to the production in which Simon Ward played Richard II at Alleyns School in about 1963. Then there was Stravinsky’s last concert in London at Royal Festival Hall in 1965  and the original 1979 Amadeus at National Theatre with Paul, Scofield, Simon Callow and Felicity Kendal in the cast.

About 15 years ago, however, I realised that I simply couldn’t go on accumulating them so I had a big clear out of all but the most memorable ones – aware, even as I was doing it, that I was throwing away an archive and potentially useful resource.  Every now and then someone donates a fifty year programme collection to someone and there it is – theatre (and maybe musical) history and I reflect wistfully that we’re simply not all the position to do that.

Today, I see the show, write the review, keep the programme for a week or two in case there’s a query and then put it – with a pang – in the recycling bin.

Programmes matter. They often include interesting essays and interviews relating to, say, the play, the production or the company. I’ve even written a few of those over the years. I used to advise students whom I took on English Literature theatre trips (many were also doing Theatre Studies) always to buy a programme so that they could read such pieces and, I hoped, get beyond the confines of the syllabus which prescribed whatever play it was we were seeing. If money was an issue I suggested they shared the cost in small groups and bought just one programme between two or three.

When you’re reviewing of course a programme is an essential source if information. As I sometimes have to tell box office or other staff in theatres you can’t review without one. You need the names of performers and creatives. If it’s particularly way-out new play even a plot summary helps. Usually there’s a press desk and you’re given a programme with the tickets. If it isn’t press night the efficient marketing department will have left you a programme at the box office – or at least you hope they will. Best, under these circumstances, to arrive early in case there’s a hiccough.

But I digress. The point I’m really making is they end up binned and that seems a real shame. What a pity there isn’t some intra-theatre recycling system so that you could return your programme when it was finished with. It could then, now a second-hand item, be sold – perhaps at half price for a charity – at a subsequent performance. Tricky logistics but couldn’t someone come up with  a way of making it work?

I know how Alice felt. Conversations between My Loved One, Ms Alzheimer’s and me become “curiouser and curiouser” by the day. I now get so many surreal non-sequiturs in response to casual remarks along with strange comments and questions that I can almost feel the walls racing past as we fall together further and further down the most famous rabbit hole in fiction. Sometimes, as in Wonderland or beyond that crazy Looking Glass, it’s quite entertaining. More often it’s pitifully puzzling.

Here are ten examples from the last week or two:

  1. I’m trying to explain (and I’ve also written it down) that I’m off to review a show and that a carer will arrive in an hour’s time to spend two hours with MLO. His comment: “Well I don’t think it’s on any sort of syllabus.”
  1. I say I’ll make us a mid morning hot drink. Him: “Good idea because I can hear a dog barking.” (Shades of Sherlock Holmes, curious incidents and the like?)
  1. Me, dizzy with tiredness in the middle of the night and getting a bit fraught, when he’s laboriously trying to get up for about the fourth time in an hour: “PLEASE stay in bed.” Him: “Well are you doing all the proper things?” When I press him about what these duties might be, he replies seriously: “Well, like mending the potholes.” I can’t resist observing tartly that I’m a very busy woman trying to spin a whole cupboard full of plates but that, thank goodness, pothole repairs aren’t on my job sheet. I just drive round them. And now, for goodness sake, let’s go to sleep.
  1. I’ve just helped MLO to shower and into his underwear. I say: Now go into the bedroom and put your trousers on while I fetch a clean shirt” whereupon he asks me anxiously: “We’re not expected to bow to anyone are we?”.
  1. I tell him a decorator is coming to give me a price for painting the ramps our elder son recently built for his father’s safety round the house. “But are you sure that’s OK?” MLO asks, worried. “Have you checked with the management of this place?” This is an ongoing problem. He often thinks we’re in some kind of holiday let. So I painstakingly explain for about the 35th time that we own the south London house which we bought in 2016. I am – effectively – the “management”. I need no permission from anyone else to make changes. “Oh I see.. .” he says mildly.
  1. It’s 2.am and we’re in bed but MLO is fidgety. I say for the fifth time that it’s the middle of the night and therefore time to go to sleep. “But what about the benchmarks?” he says anxiously. Me (weakly): “Benchmarks?” He fires back witheringly: “Yes. Surely you know what benchmarks are?”
  1. I make him a nice cheese sandwich for lunch all cut up neatly. Eventually he sits down to eat it but something is clearly bothering him? “What’s the matter?” I ask, so patiently that I’m quite impressed with myself. “I think it’s about nine and a half per cent” he says earnestly”. Have we reached the Mad Hatter’s Tea party, do you think?
  1. MLO is havering and hovering aka as “faffing about”. I tell him, several times, to sit down and eat his breakfast. “Yes, we’ve had the message haven’t we?” he mutters mysteriously.
  1. I’m in my office, trying (with great difficulty) to get a bit of Real Work done. I hear MLO come out of the dining room downstairs and laboriously start to climb the stairs. My heart sinks. When he arrives – and it takes several minutes – beside my desk it’s to ask me earnestly if there’s a WC in “this place”.
  1. A folded piece of paper has arrived on my bedside table. On it – in MLO’s now very spidery hand – is written: 2+ chile whilrst. No, I haven’t got a clue either. Perhaps Humpty Dumpty is right when he tells Alice that words mean what you want them to mean.

I’ve thought a lot about Charles Dodgson – Lewis Carroll – lately. I reckon, tucked away in that Oxford college (Christ Church) of his, he would have known all sorts of eccentric reclusives some of them quite elderly and perhaps afflicted with what we now know as dementia and a symptom of Alzheimer’s. Now that I have to live, partly anyway, in a sort of parallel Wonderland universe I can hear the echoes quite clearly.

To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh dear. The production which originated at the Open Air Theatre, Regents Park in 2015 before touring nationwide including to the Barbican, is now dead. It was due to tour again (now produced by Jonathan Church Productions, The Curve, Leicester and Open Air Theatre) this spring. Now it has been cancelled.

The problem is the rights to Harper Lee’s famous 1960 novel. The OAT production used the late Christopher Sergel’s adaptation – with performance rights agreed with his estate, obviously. Then after Lee’s death in 2016 Scott Rudkin acquired the performance rights to her novel.  His Broadway production is due later this year and he has threatened to sue any British theatre which stages the older version on the grounds that they do not (or no longer, anyway) have the performing rights.

Cue for a great deal of understandable distress and anger. Nine children (three teams of three) had been cast and rehearsed. It was huge thing for them. Adult actors have been left jobless and a number of regional theatres now face a “dark” week in their schedules which they can ill afford.

I can see this from all points of view. Of course I can understand why the proud parents of those nine children are vociferously furious in their disappointment. On the other hand, Scott Rudkin has every right to enforce the deal he presumably did with the Lee estate in order to give his production the best possible chance. It’s regrettable – shameful, even –  that no one noticed the problem until the last minute, though.

I once taught in a school in which an over-enthusiastic musical theatre buff on the staff (she wasn’t even a drama teacher) decided to stage a production of Oliver!. Two days before the opening show – tickets printed, posters out etc – there was a call from the rights holders. Some anonymous person had tipped them off because of course Mrs P hadn’t applied for performance rights which weren’t available at the time anyway. So the show was cancelled and large numbers of students and their families desperately upset.

Well, that was a long time ago and back then I knew little about these things. But I knew enough to know that Mrs P had put herself and the school in breach of the law and that she should have known better. I was also clear that the situation was not, definitely, not the fault of the person who reported the breach. And I kept pointing that out to colleagues and parents who were bandying the word “spoilsport” about.

No one wants keen young people to be disappointed in this way – whether it’s a medium scale professional show or a very modest school production – but it’s no good blaming the law makers and people who justifiably defend their rights. If there’s a fault, it lies with the producers, at whatever level.

It’s a shame about To Kill a  Mockingbird though. It was an exam syllabus stalwart in the UK for decades (until a decision was made to distinguish more clearly between English Literature and Literature in English) and is still quite widely taught. I wrote three versions of my Philip Allan (now part of Hodder) study guide to the novel and two versions of Teacher Resources. And because of the popularity of the novel there was a lot of demand for them.

So it’s a novel which is firmly under my skin too and I admired the Christopher Sergel adaptation and the OAT production. But you really do have to check legalities at the beginning of the process – every single time, it seems.

Meanwhile I sincerely hope that those nine talented children will get another exciting opportunity very soon.

The Dome, Brighton, 20 January 2019

The highlight of this concert was an enjoyably intelligent account of Mendelssohn 3rd Symphony – the Scottish – with which it ended. After a slightly wobbly start to the ever-challenging opening andante, Thomas Carroll found lots of colourful detail in the scherzo and the closing maestoso. And third movement, the allegro cantabile (surely one of the most lyrically eloquent and sublimely beautiful movements ever written?) was in very capable hands here: plenty of tender power coaxed out of every player.

I was less happy about the Schumann cello concerto which Carroll conducted from the cello. Of course he played this undersung, and actually rather underwhelming, concerto well enough but the orchestra was, at times, audibly rudderless. It took a while to coalesce and settle, although it warmed and thickened as it progressed through its three, continuous, quite succinct movements. There are plenty of precedents for cellist conductors (Rostropovich, Alfred Wallenstein et al) but I think in this case, one or the other might have worked better. Multi-tasking isn’t always a good idea musically.

Over two thirds of this concert was in A minor and, as Carroll pointed out when he addressed the audience before the Mendelssohn, the concerto and symphony have a lot in common which was the rationale for programming them together. Both works, for example, start on the same four notes, have a movement in F major, include a fugue and conclude joyfully.

It was refreshing, therefore, to precede them with something completely different – another key (D Major), country, century and mood. Prokofiev’s first symphony makes an good  concert “overture” (as it were). As in each of the three works in this concert the first few bars were disconcertingly uncertain but then we got lots of delightfully insouciant leggiero string playing, some bouncy, syncopated woodwind work in the elegantly delivered gavotte and a saucy molto vivace which included some nifty flute playing.

First published by Lark Reviews: http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?cat=3

Baal
by Bertolt Brecht | Translation by Peter Tegel
society/company: Sedos
performance date: 22 Jan 2019
venue: The Bridewell Theatre, Bride Lane, London, EC4Y 8EQ
 
I can think of few amateur companies who would, or could, take on the challenge of Brecht’s first play but ever-versatile, adventurous Sedos have staged it with confidence, verve and a lot of talent.

Written in 1918 when Brecht was twenty, Baal wasn’t premiered until 1923. It tells the story of a dissolute young poet whose journey of self discovery includes seedy bars, several love affairs, at least one murder and a great deal of gin. It’s raw Brecht.

Using Peter Tegel’s translation, this production reworks most of the poetry in a musical format. Almost everyone in the cast is an actor-muso so they sit alongside the action providing music and sound effects in authentic Brechtian style Several of the cast, including Ben Woolley as Baal are pretty competent singers. And there are three musicians who aren’t actors.

The main playing area consists of a titled platform, under which there is space to crawl, with scaffolding at the back which forms a cage, prison or indoor area and, in the second half incorporates a rather spectacular ‘river’ with proper wet water.

Woolley excels as Baal, unlikeable but oddly vulnerable: the victim of his own excesses and shortcomings. He writhes, struts, lurks and sings. It’s a fine piece of acting. And he’s ably supported by the strong, impeccably directed (Robert J Stanex who also designed the set) ensemble who really run with all the stripped down physicality that Brecht advocated. They also act as a chorus, Unfortunately some of the choral speaking was pretty ragged on opening night. Let’s hope it coheres in subsequent performances.

It is commendably edgy to usher the audience out to the interval (and again at the end) while the cast is still singing full belt. Then when we return the cast are sitting with insolent nonchalance in auditorium seats from which in due course they emerge making the piece seem suddenly quite immersive.

Baal is an interesting theatrical curiosity and, no doubt, very satisfying to take part in. I hope lots of A level theatre studies students get to see it because Brecht is usually on the syllabus and this is an unusual opportunity. Having said that, though, it isn’t exactly great drama and, stylistically, the piece isn’t quite my cup of tea.
 First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Sedos-Baal&reviewsID=3458
Violet – ★★★
Music by Jeanine Tesori. Book & Lyrics by Brian Crawley. Based on the short story The Ugliest Pilgrim by Doris Betts. Produced by Charing Cross Theatre Productions Limited, co-produced with Umeda Arts
performance date: 14 Jan 2019
venue: Charing Cross Theatre, London.
 
 
Photo: Scott Rylander

★★★

Violet is a strange quest story. It’s 1964. The titular young women has, or is supposed to have, an axe scar on her face from a childhood accident – invisible to the audience which is distinctly odd. She travels from North Carolina to Tulsa in Oklahoma on a Greyhound bus in search of miracle healing from a slimy TV charlatan preacher (Kenneth Avery-Clark – good). Of course she’s disappointed but in another way she succeeds. Think The Wizard of Oz spliced with a William Styron novel.

Kaisa Hammarblund is strong as Violet – angry, feisty, vulnerable, anxious and with a face which lights the room when she smiles. She also has an interestingly wide and colourful vocal range which makes her singing unusually impassioned. There’s some attractive duet work too especially when Hammarblund sings with Jay Marsh who is warm and appealing as Flick.

Most of the action is driven by the slick ensemble – eleven in the cast – who play a wide range of other parts between them including the saccharine choir supporting the healer, bus passengers, hotel guests at the overnight stops and so on.

In general, Jeanine Tesori’s music is competent but unmemorable although there’s some nice country and western style fiddling (Corey Wickens tucked away upstairs with the rest of Don Jackson’s nine-piece band) and some enchanting violin/cello continuo during Violet’s Lay Down Your Head number.

There were things which puzzled me about this show. Why go to all the bother and expense of configuring the Charing Cross Theatre with seating banks at both ends of a central playing space and putting in a revolve to make so little use of it? The use of a child to play young violet (Amy Mepham doing a fair job on press night) is initially quite confusing and she isn’t visibly scarred either.

I left the theatre thinking about curate’s eggs.

Matthew Harvey (Monty) Kaisa Hammarlund (Violet). Photo: Scott Rylander
First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-West%20End%20&%20Fringe-Violet%20-%20%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85&reviewsID=3457
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Alzheimer’s is not a bundle of laughs. But it isn’t without humour, most of which, in my view comes from the wacky (straw-clutching?) suggestions made by research projects and the journalists who report on them. It’s comic relief in disguise.

On 17 January The Daily Telegraph, for example, ran a short piece headed “Housework may protect elderly against dementia”. There, I knew it. I should have made My Loved One, when he was well, work far harder at vacuuming, mopping and scrubbing. Why did I waste all that money employing cleaners? When I’d stopped giggling and actually read the piece I learned that this was a twenty year US study which found that physical activity – even housework – can, for some people, keep Ms Alzheimer’s at bay. Not the same thing at all. It’s hardly an original observation either.

The Times (18 January) reported the same research with a different spin. What you mustn’t do, apparently, is to allow yourself to get frail. “Ageing badly” (whatever that means) makes people more susceptible to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Researchers measured their studied individuals against a “frailty index” (who knew?) and then brain scanned them when they were dead which is a bit, err, final.

Frailty thy name is dementia? I have to say that MLO is now frail by any standards but I’m not at all sure what he or I was supposed to do to prevent that. He was always active, ate healthily, drank only modestly and has never smoked.

Earlier this month a study in Rio de Janeiro was published. It identified a hormone produced by exercise which can, it seems, benefit mice with neuro-degenerative disease. Its production is linked to a gene which can be faulty. Having genetically engineered their hapless rodents to be susceptible to Alzheimer’s (which The Times cheerfully informs us leads to “brain atrophy and memory loss leading to dementia, disability and death”) by suppressing said gene, they then restored it – and bingo. Of course this sort of thing is never going to benefit MLO and it will be a long time, I presume, before it might help anyone else. It’s a lengthy road from mice to people. But it supports my contention that there’s an entertaining Alzheimer’s research story almost every day.

Meanwhile a Chinese research group has identified a gene variant that plays a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s in Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China. Apparently, until now, none of the genes linked with Alzheimer’s in European populations could be “validated” in Chinese equivalents. Golly, what a lot you learn when you get involved with this horrible illness.

Only this week, British research has suggested that blood tests – snappily known as “serum neurofilament dynamics” – can now spot Alzheimer’s etc up to ten years before symptoms arrive but only, at present, in those tragic “early onset”  cases where the disease kicks in, say, during the patient’s thirties or forties, I struggle to understand why it’s an advantage to know that, yes, you’re going to get a neuro-degenerative disease years before you do so since every medic or support worker you speak to stresses bluntly that “there is no cure”. It isn’t like cancer when early diagnosis can often get the thing zapped before it spreads.  But I suppose they know what they’re doing.

One day, maybe, there will be a real breakthrough although realistically it’s more likely that lots of different studies and approaches will come together to chip away at the illness and gradually reduce its effects. Miracle cures are (usually) the stuff of science fiction.

And it’s anyway far too late for any of it to make any difference to MLO who’s firmly on a downward trajectory whichever way you look at it. So, thanks research guys. Anything which makes me chortle – however ironically and hollowly –  helps in a tiny, unintended way. Laughter, best medicine and all that.

The Stage used to review drama school showcases regularly and a large number of them fell to me. They’re not the easiest sort of show to review appropriately because sometimes the performers are sold short by poor choice of material or misguided direction. Nonetheless I strove always to be scrupulously fair, praising the ones who were doing really well and tactfully not mentioning any who weren’t. Thus every word was positive.

Then The Stage changed its reviewing policy and decided to drop student showcases completely.

After a while I began to miss them. It’s quite fun and very satisfying to see a young actor excelling at showcase stage and then, a few months later to spot him or her in some plum role somewhere. And they’re anyway rather pleasant quasi-celebratory events.

So I emailed the colleges and offered to review as many showcases as I could get to here on my own website using a format very similar to the one formerly employed by The Stage. I honestly thought the schools would bite my hand off.  Well, a few of them did and I reviewed a handful of showcases last year.

Most, however, declined the offer on the grounds that they don’t want the students exposed to external critical appraisal at this delicate point in their careers, just as they are graduating into the profession. Well that seems a pity to me because many a graduand has been helped on his or her way by an upbeat quotable comment from me or a colleague in The Stage or elsewhere.

Even odder, in my view, is the attitude of many drama schools to student shows. They routinely invite people like me (bums on seats?) to see the work but then when I agree to come in order to review they say that they don’t want their students critiqued at this point.

OK, a handful of schools have always taken this line but in recent months three more,  some of whose shows I’ve happily reviewed in the recent past, have told me that they too no longer want journalists commenting on their students’ work. The message is that I’m welcome to come but on condition I don’t write about it. Well no – like all journalists I’m interested in things which generate copy. If they don’t, then frankly I’d rather do something else such as read a book, practise my violin or have a nap.

What on earth is going on? Is this some new joint policy dreamed up by that strange new organisation The Federation of Drama Schools?

Students in drama schools are being trained to work in an industry in which, by definition, their very public work will be exposed to detailed scrutiny. Some of it will be harsh, upsetting and off-putting. There are journalists out there who delight in trying to seem clever by rubbishing others (although I’m not one of them) but even if criticism is simply truthful performers have to learn to take it on the chin. That’s the nature of the world these students are entering.

Surely it’s part of good, thorough training to prepare students for the critical world by letting them experience it before they graduate – even if you invite in only those critics you can trust to be fair? To do otherwise is to over-protect. I think the colleges – or too many of them at least –  have got this wrong.

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s 2016 production of King Lear.