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Guilt Trip (Susan Elkin reviews)

Guilt Trip
By Darren Raymond. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing
society/company: Intermission Youth Theatre
performance date: 15 Nov 2018
venue: St Saviour’s Church, Walton Place, London SW3 1SA

Intermission Theatre’s work focuses on empowering young people at risk. It’s targeted youth theatre, based at part-converted, dual-purpose St Saviour’s Church, Knightsbridge. Drawn from all over London, Intermission members, learn life changing skills through drama, mostly Shakespeare.

Guilt Trip, an imaginative show, loosely inspired by Much Ado About Nothing, is set in a hotel in Messina where a group of young women have just arrived for a “girly” holiday. Then some young men they know turn up expectedly. Devised by director, Darren Raymond and the company, it’s an ingenious way of reworking Shakespeare’s play. It uses cheerful, loud street music to cover the scene changes and some nifty solo dancing from cast members who take turns on a side stage podium. The text is Intermission’s trademark blend of Shakespeare’s language and 21st Century street-speak.

Iain Gordon is very engaging and accomplished as Claudio. He has a fine sense of comic timing and an entertaining range of facial expressions. Also strong is Sharai-Raven Mai in the Dogberry role, presented here as Head of Security complete with attitude, insouciance and malapropisms.

What this production lacks is any real sense of sparky chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick. I wasn’t remotely convinced that they were attracted to each other even as compulsive sparring partners although Jermaine Adeniregun (a notably good on-stage listener) and Andreia Chipa are each competent enough as individual actors.

There is also an audibility/projection problem. The staging for this show is end-on with the arch in front of St Saviour’s Church altar forming a quasi proscenium. Acoustics are not good and some of the sound disappears. I’m pretty sure this could have been avoided if the cast had been encouraged to slow their delivery a little – allegro rather than vivace as it were. Or maybe in-the-round staging (as for last year’s Othello-inspired Ring of Envy) is a better choice for this venue. That altar comes up trumps during the aborted wedding scene, however. The backcloth parts and hey presto we’re in a church.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Intermission%20Youth%20Theatre-Guilt%20Trip&reviewsID=3396

Hadestown – ★★★
Music, lyrics and book by Anaïs Mitchell
society/company: National Theatre
performance date: 13 Nov 2018
venue: Olivier Theatre, National Theatre

Well it’s certainly unusual. Many writers, composers, creatives and performers have had a go at the Orpheus legend: Monteverdi, Gluck and Offenbach to name but three. But no one has ever done it quite like this. Anais Mitchell’s underworld is a factory whose workers (slick ensemble of seven) provide an entertaining backdrop which sometimes, on Rachel Hauck’s set, becomes a raucous canteen area. Hell on earth?

Mitchell’s music is oddly traditional, much influenced by familiar musical theatre greats such as Lionel Bart and Andrew Lloyd Webber with set pieces that sail from lilt to belt, rap to patter and passionate to dispassionate. The very best thing about this music – immaculately played by a band split into three sections across the stage and occasionally joined from within the action by accomplished actor-musos in the cast – is the beautifully written orchestrations. In All I’ve Ever Known, for instance we get syncopated strings beneath the melody with Eva Noblezada as Eurydice and Reeve Carney as Orpheus in duet at the top of the texture and the effect is stunning.

Noblezada’s “hungry girl” who makes the mistake of selling out to the underworld and accidentally separating herself from her beloved Orpheus is arrestingly sincere. She sings with understated passion and convinces us totally. Carney plays guitar (quite competently) in lieu of lyre, and sings well enough – a very high tenor – to make it believable that extraordinary music is the only weapon in his armoury. Layered accompaniment from ensemble and band enhances it well too.

There’s a very memorable, charismatic performance from Amber Gray as a drunken Persephone teetering about, singing with blood-red, but witty despair as she seeks ways of coping with spending six months of every year in the underworld. I also loved the perfectly balanced, often funny, all singing, all dancing work of Carly Mercedes Dyer, Rosie Fletcher and Gloria Onitiri as the ever cynical, detatched three fates. They look wonderful too in shimmery silver dresses with adornments (costumes designed by Michael Krass)

Much less successful is Patrick Page as Hades. Yes, he has stage presence and manages to seem fairly sinister and ruthless but that basso profundo voice sounds strained and false as if he is out of his comfort zone consciously searching for the right note – and not, it has to be said, always finding it.

Neither did I like Andre de Shields tip toeing clumsily through the action as Hermes who has a narrator’s role in this take on the story. There is something off-puttingly hesitant about his acting.

Hadestown is a strange show. In some ways it’s innovative but in others you feel as if you’re in a 1970s revival.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-National%20Theatre%20(professional)-Hadestown%20-%20%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85&reviewsID=3394

Off the Grid – ★★★★
By David Lane.
society/company: West End & Fringe
performance date: 11 Nov 2018
venue: Half Moon Theatre, 43 White Horse Road London E1 0ND (part of a UK tour)

This gritty two hander for 13+ explores difficult issues. Connor, 14 (Bradley Connor) and Kelly, 4 (Jesse Bateson) are abandoned by their parents. Connor determines to look after Kelly “off grid” without consulting or succumbing to any sort of authority. They have no income or source of food so they forage in bins and make up stories as form of emotional comfort. Eventually it all goes hideously wrong and they are separated, each with a very different outcome. Finally there’s a terrific scene at the end when he is 24 and she 14.

The story is told immersively with audience standing around the edge of this 60 minute show, sometimes being asked to hold things or to sit on the set. Guy Connelly’s sound track is key to the style of the production – sharp, harsh, raucous bursts of electronic sound seem, initially like technical errors, until you realise that they connote the disturbance and disruption in the thoughts and lives of the two main characters as well as acting as scene markers. There’s music too, including singing by both Bateson (lovely) and Connor (adequate but that’s probably the point.)

Connor as Connor (yes, that’s right) handles the oddly lyrical, idiolect David Lane gives him to speak with great conviction. The scenes between him and Bateson as Kelly are adeptly directed (by Chris Elwell) and very naturalistic – particularly the final one when she sensitively conveys the awkwardness Kelly is feeling along with warm affection.

The two actors play several other parts as well – adopting slightly different clothes (casually pulled from a couple of linen baskets at the edge of the playing space), voices and stances. They become, at one point, for example. a middle aged couple who are foster parents and Bateson also plays a friend called Layla who turns into something else. While both actors carry this off well enough the changes are quite low key so that it is slightly and potentially confusing. I hope it won’t put off the teenage audiences at whom this is aimed.

Of course – this is Half Moon after all – the research for this piece was all local. And in Tower Hamlets 53% of young people live in poverty, some of them inevitably off the grid because they fall through gaps and disappear. It’s that realism which makes this show so powerful. Elwell has said that he hopes it might encourage people to become agents for change. I hope so too.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-West%20End%20&%20Fringe-Off%20the%20Grid%20-%20%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85&reviewsID=3382

society/company: Artform
performance date: 09 Nov 2018
venue: Broadway Studio Theatre SE6 4RU

The jarring, incongruous horror of the juxtaposition of a Pierrot pier show and the death of ten million people (plus twenty-one million injured and seven million missing) worked in 1963 when Joan Littlewood first devised it and it works now. And, of course, Artform’s thoughtful staging of it this week – as the world commemorates the Armistice centenary – is no coincidence.

With a cast of just fourteen and a side stage band of five Artform find ways of presenting this ambitious piece in the very restricted space (if only the seating area were less cramped…) of Catford Broadway Theatre’s downstairs studio space. They use arches, simple props and minimal – often frighteningly hilarious costume add-ons – to tell the story of the 1914/18 war. And as they cavort on stage the news, facts and archive photographs are projected behind them so that you never lose the sense of loss without being allowed to sentimentalise for a second. Projection is provided by Sound Choice Hire Ltd and managed by Benjamin Essenhigh with advice from Lee Waddington – a fine job all round. We still need to be reminded, for example, that 1.3 million men died on the Somme for no gain.

There’s some very pleasing singing in this show especially from Alexandria Wharram, Nadine Plater and Elaine Boxall Lewis. Performers work without radio mics which creates a freshness and intimacy you don’t often get in musical theatre too. The ensemble work – and of course this is every inch an ensemble show – is imaginatively directed by Matthew Westrip who neatly exploits the many and various talents of each cast member.

Accent and language work, for example, is notably effective. The British have always been weak linguists and have always made fun of themselves in a rather it-doesn’t-matter-much-because-we’re-British way. The proposal scene in Henry V is a good example and there’s a funny one in Oh What a Lovely War. But congratulations to the British actors in this cast who speak French or German very convincingly when they need to. There’s a strong scene featuring doomed Irishmen in a trench too. Susan Booth, in particular, masters a whole series of accents including Scots.

When James Harrison-Baker starts the show as a compere/warm up he’s quite funny but I honestly thought for a minute that we’d seen the extent of his work. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He slips in and out of cameos for the whole show, using a wide range of voices, accents and stances. As the chilling Douglas Haig, for example, he is outstanding and he has a fine singing voice.

The music is famously mostly based on arrangements of very familiar World War One songs beautifully played in this production by MD James Hall and his four fellow musicians – good, incidentally, and quite unusual to see a female drummer (Janette Williams). The immaculately ironic hymns scene in which the elegant women safely at home sing the real words of Onward Christian Soldiers, What a Friend We Have in Jesus and The Church’s One Foundation while the weary, battle torn men on the opposite side of the stage sing graphically irreverent ones is one of the high spots.

The most moving moment of this show comes at the very end. We’ve laughed, gasped in horror and maybe even shed a tear or two for two and a half hours. Then the cast just melts away. There’s no cheerful, smiling, curtain call. You leave the theatre, exactly as Joan Littlewood meant you to, reflecting not on how accomplished the performers were but trying to get your head round how, for example, 60,000 men could be killed in three hours while those giving the orders cared so little.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Artform-Oh%20What%20A%20Lovely%20War&reviewsID=3380

A pleasant enough concert but I have to say that, given the date, to programme Rossini, Beethoven and Dvorak all in fairly upbeat populist mood seemed a very odd choice indeed. Was it the only concert – or event – in the country on that date not to acknowledge the centenary of the 1918 Armistice? Most of the performers and audience were wearing poppies but beyond that: nothing.

It meant that the whole afternoon felt a bit understated although the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra was in excellent playing form as ever – this time with pianist, Freddie Kempf on the podium.

We began with Rossini’s spritely, witty overture to Semiramide which was delivered with colourful brio. I particularly liked the pizzicato and piccolo sections and of course the playful dynamics of those famous crescendi which Kempf brought off with promising aplomb. It was an encouraging start.

Then it was reduced forces and a great deal of stage management ready for Kempf to direct Beethoven’s third piano concerto from the keyboard. Well, it’s been done many times before but one felt that the multitasking was a challenge too far in this case. Of course Kempf can play the concerto perfectly, as we all know, but on this occasion leaping up from the piano stool to face the orchestra and dropping back for his entries resulted in too many wrong notes and sometimes hesitant orchestra entries because the direction was unclear or fractionally late, especially in the largo. And in places the overall effect was mechanical. Nonetheless the first movement cadenza was pretty spell-binding and I liked the way he used his head and eyes to communicate with the orchestra while seated.

Dvorak 7 with its melodious, Slavic D minor should have been the high spot of the concert. Sadly, for me, it wasn’t. It may be a matter of personal taste and interpretation but I like my Dvorak much more lightly joyful than Kempf’s account of it. It’s admirable that he focuses on the beauty of the detail and refuses to overindulge in gratuitous prestissimo but much of the first movement was far too portentous and I didn’t care for the unusually grandiose adagio. Even the scherzo, competently played as it was, seemed to be a lot of excitable revving up without ever quite achieving vivace lift-off. Not until the final movement did the Dvorakian aircraft really fly with some memorable brass moments and lots of very precise allegro string work. There was a finely managed intersectional acoustic balance at this point too – but it had taken almost all afternoon to get there.

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

It’s now 19 months since Ms Alzheimers’s official arrival in our household although of course, with hindsight, I now realise she’d been hovering on the horizon for quite a while before Diagnosis Day. And I marvel at what a lot I’ve learned – the practical stuff, the theory, the trivial and the serious. Above all there’s the acquisition of new and often quite surprising, self knowledge.

And I’ve been more aware of all this than ever in the last three weeks during which Ms A has suddenly tightened her grip and we’ve seen marked deterioration. At the time of writing it’s nine days since MLO has left the house.

I have, for example, learned that:

1.I can talk about death in a calm, matter-of-fact way which I would never until now have imagined that I could. Of course, I’ve thought quite a lot in the last year or two about widowhood and how I might/will cope with it. Several times recently MLO has raised the subject of his own death so I know that he is beginning to think about the inevitable too. Gently, but truthfully, I have astonished myself with how straightforwardly we can talk about it when he raises the subject. No tears. Just honesty.

2.I have morphed into the kind of person who can march into Sainsburys (where, I’ve discovered, they’re 25% cheaper than in Boots) pick up three huge packets of incontinence pants and saunter out via the checkout without batting an eyelid.

3.Yes, I can survive and still work reasonably efficiently in the daytime even if I’m woken and have to get out of bed to help MLO half a dozen times during the night. I seem to be adjusting to getting my sleep – up to 7 or 8 hours maybe –  in one hour bursts. Moreover I can now go back to sleep almost instantly (just I did when I had babies) which I haven’t been able to do for a very long time.

4.I (we) have some fabulous friends and an amazing family (nearly) all of whom are ready to drop everything and do everything they possibly can to help me when I need it. They astonish me continually. I’ve said this several times before but it can’t actually, in my view, be said too often.

5.If you’re catering for someone who needs as much fibre as you can cram in then you can make variations on an Elkin beans on toast theme. MLO doesn’t actually like Heinz beans but he does like hummus. I’ve discovered that you can mash any sort of tinned bean with any sort of nut butter seasoned with a few herbs and a dash of, say, basalmic or soy sauce and pile it onto toast. Infinite variety. Borlotti beans with almond butter anyone?

6.I now know how to turn the TV on. I’m with Cilla Black on this one. Remember when her beloved husband Bobbie died and she couldn’t get the news on because he’d always “driven” the TV set? Everyone derided her but it was the same with us. We’ve never been in the habit of much TV and I didn’t operate it often enough to remember. Well it took several texts to and from long-suffering sons but I have now got the hang of it. I’m trying to persuade MLO to watch gardening and antiques programmes which won’t disturb or distress him because he no longer reads much and I need entertainment for him which won’t fuel his Alzheimer’s-driven, frightened imaginings about crime and violence.

7.I’m much more patient than I often give myself credit for. I find I can usually repeat the same thing several times without getting cross. I do all this crawling out in the night, mostly without grumbling. I generally manage not to rush him – although he’s painfully slow at everything he does now. I probably blow about one time in twenty. Not bad really?

8.A trivial (but tiresome) health problem of my own worsens if I allow myself to get angry or stressed. I have only recently worked out the connection. It’s a good reason for taking a deep breath and smiling rather than flipping my lid.

9.I can now write features, reviews and articles despite being repeatedly interrupted and called away. I used to be quite precious about needing, say, two hours entirely to myself to get a piece of work finished. These days MLO appears frequently: hovering in my office looking troubled, anxious or vacant. “Can you help me please?” or “Is it nearly time for ‘them’ [usually an imaginary visitation] to arrive?” or “I just wondered what you were doing?”. So I have to stop, deal with him and recover my train of thought ten minutes later. And it’s OK. Usually I can.

10.It really doesn’t matter much if he forgets I’m his wife and thinks I’m a carer. I know exactly who I am, and who he is, so that will do for both of us. I just chuckle at him when he says things like “Do you help many people like me?” because I know – at present anyway – that I shall probably get him back at some point later. Today for example he pointed to the pendant I’m wearing and beamed. “I bought you that, didn’t I?” It was only a few weeks back too, in a jeweller’s in Chichester, so that was a good moment.

Stop learning stop living?

20181120_095311

A nice memory of how things used to be. I took this photograph in Penang in (I think) 2004. Doesn’t he look well!

It isn’t every day I stumble across a strong new vocational training opportunity which is almost free to the participants. I refer to the Lyric Ensemble which piloted in the 2017/18 academic year and has just started work with its second group.

Fifteen young actors, aged 18-25 are recruited to form an ensemble, Director of Young People at the Lyric, Nicholai La Barrie tells me he auditioned 80 earlier this term for the new 2018/19 cohort . “They include writers, actors, film makers, musicians, people who are interested in directing or producing” says Nicholai. “It’s a very rich mix of talent and our catchphrase is ‘training to perform’ ”

The idea is to find people with real potential who haven’t accessed training before and aren’t likely to. “It’s a way of opening up the industry to young people who are prevented from going to drama school by perceived or actual barriers” Nicholai explains. Some of the fifteen are supported by bursaries but even full fees are very low. “Right across the education and learning work we do here the average fee is £4.00 a session” observes Executive Director, Sian Alexander as the three of us sip tea in the Lyric’s rather nice café area.

The 15 ensemble members come to the Lyric two evenings per week for nine months at the end of which they create a studio show. Along the way they also take part in intensive weeks of training “And of course we keep an eye on production values, standards and rigour” Nicholai adds, explaining that last year there was a lot of focus on, for example, movement, improvisation, text and character. “What they do  has got to be good. We’re a professional theatre”. This year the emphasis is political so the end result show will be different. Next year (2019/20) it will be something else again, thematically, depending on who directs it.

Casting directors came to last summer’s shows. Nicholai assures me happily that each individual actor “shaped up” and that almost all got some sort of representation at the end of the course.  “They were snapped up” he says.  And that, obviously, is the acid test. Without an agent your chances of getting professional work are infinitesimal.

The groups are gloriously diverse and inclusive. They include people – often from youth theatres – of all ethnic and economic backgrounds as well as LBGT and people with disabilities.

Lyric Hammersmith will be enrolling its 2019/20 group in September next year. Some applicants will, predictably, already be Lyric Hammersmith members. But it’s open to all. Give it a whirl if you or any West London young person close to you is looking for a way of training without either leaving home or incurring debt

Vivid dreams – effectively nightmares – are one of Ms Alzheimer’s less welcome bestowals. And I hope the people who think this dreadful disease is just memory loss and cognitive decline are listening.

Whenever My Loved One falls asleep he disappears into a weird, disconcerting alternative world. And he sleeps a lot: most of the night and increasingly often for a couple of hours in the morning, afternoon or sometimes both. He’s perpetually tired and, now often also complains of feeling dizzy or says he has “the shakes”. When he surfaces he’s lost to me, sometimes for several hours, and the last ten days or so have shown a sharp decline.

Take the night last week when I drove to Canterbury to review Glyndebourne’s touring production of La Traviata. MLO should have been with me but decided on the day (like the Duke of Edinburgh except that HRH is 97 not 73) that he didn’t feel up to it. I rang him on the hands free as I left the Canterbury car park after the show. “I’ve had a terrible evening” he said agitatedly and in considerable distress. “People are coming and I’m really worried. I’ve phoned the NHS mental health people and they’ll be here soon to take me away” I knew immediately he’d been dreaming and that he couldn’t possibly have phoned anyone – he’s no longer capable of looking up a number and dialling it independently. So I went into teacher/professional mode and simply kept him talking, reassuring him until he seemed calmer. It took to the Medway Bridge to achieve that by which time I was only 40 minutes from home.

Since that night I’ve been repeatedly told that a crime has been committed and that we shall both end up in prison and that he can hear voices in the house and once he has to get to the bank for George (referring to his father who died four years ago). Sometimes it can be quite funny. When I pressed him about the aforementioned crime, at a less confused time when he’d been awake for a while and wasn’t quite so distant and distrait, he told me it was bigamy. “Gosh! How exciting” I said. “Perhaps we should write a novel because it’s all fiction. Neither of us is a bigamist. Trust me!”

One morning, also last week, he woke up very puzzled – he often thinks we’re in a hotel or holiday let and that he can hear other guests. I said firmly “No. There’s nothing to worry about. Nobody lives here except you, me and a big tabby and white cat”. Pause while he processed the information and then: “Well, it would have been frowned upon even 30 years ago.” My turn to be bemused: “What would?” Him: “Living together like this” Well that did make me laugh. I held up my left hand and said as cheerfully as I could: “Darling, we’ve been MARRIED for nearly FIFTY YEARS. Wedding rings and all that. We’re having a family celebration in the spring”. It was his reaction that chilled me. “Oh really?” he said clearly surprised and unconvinced.

It’s both hilarious and utterly tragic because in his more lucid moments (and even that is relative) he knows that sometimes (often) he talks nonsense. “I have a different narrative running in my head for much of the time” he said recently and, on another occasion “It’s as if I’m two people isn’t it?” Yes, dead right it is but I’m seeing the “normal” one less and less often. My least favourite thing is when he wakes me in the small hours stumbling round the bedroom in a panic because he can’t remember where the bathroom is or anxious and alarmed by something in his alternative world he can’t explain to me so I have to talk him back to calmness. A couple of nights ago I was out of bed with him half a dozen times between midnight and 3.30 am – it reminds me of having a fractious baby again but I was 24 and 28 when I dealt with that I knew it would only be for a few weeks. It’s not quite like that now.

So, we have to do things differently from here on. I shall obviously have to rethink some of my work habits. I am frequently out all day and all evening and that’s too long to leave a man with worsening dementia alone in the house. It was all right for a while but it isn’t now.

I am also looking into what is euphemistically called “help”. I need to hire a very reliable person who will “mansit” while I’m out in the evenings. Various avenues to explore. I certainly don’t want the standard “carer” who drops in for ten minutes, mutters some hearty platitudes and races off to the next client.

Sometimes I dream too – of how things once were – as an escape from the nightmarish reality. The other day I was just walking out of the door and realised I hadn’t made sure MLO was wearing one of the just-in-case pads I prefer him to wear when I’m out.  “Have you got a pad on?” I asked. “I think so” he said uncertainly. Hmm. Without thinking, I undid his fly to check. It felt vaguely familiar. What did it remind me of?  Oh yes (blushing, but not much) I remember … a very long time ago (or so it seems) … and in a completely different life …

Who was it who said that a young man needs a lover and an old man a nurse?. Been there. Done that. All of it. From romantic frisson to incontinence pads.