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Carry on caring

Finding, hiring and working with carers is a whole new ball game and one which – until recently – I never imagined I’d ever have to play. My Loved One and I were supposed to grow old together – the sort of couple people marvel at because they’re still striding about busily in their nineties, indestructible on their vegetarian diet. Alas, fate and Ms Alzheimer’s have decided otherwise. And I can, it seems, now add “carer management” to my growing CV.

Most people in our position just want a bit of respite care so that the retired carer-partner can pop out for an escapist lunch with friends. Me, I’ve always been a stereotype defier. What I need is a “man-sitting” service while I go out to work and that means a wide range of erratic hours including a lot of evenings especially in the busy run-up to Christmas. MLO has been more or less OK left at home by himself in the warm with food put ready until this last month during which his health has. I’m afraid, plummeted quite dramatically.

He is now very uneasy if he’s on his own for long. Cue for panic calls to me, which I can’t answer, of course, if I’m in the theatre, so he often starts anxiously phoning round the family to tell them he doesn’t know where I am or “what’s going on”. I ring him all the time but it’s an increasingly stressful situation. Time for carers. Definitely

I found a website which operates like Checkatrade or Right Trader – but for carers. I was irritated that they really wanted me to pay a thumping annual membership in order to get information but signed up for the basic – free – service. Having explained my requirements I got over 30 responses over the course of a week or two. Well, we live in inner London’s deep south and carers who live in Enfield, Kingston or Erith were clearly never going to be able to provide the service I need, whatever they said. So using location as the lead criterion I picked two very local ones and invited them to come (separately) to meet us. They’re very different types but I liked them both and MLO – while not fully grasping what I was trying to do seemed fairly relaxed about it.

In the last week both have been here and done shifts for me. I was adamant from the outset that I didn’t want the sort of standard carer “package” which involves someone from an agency who would dash in for 10 minutes, make sure MLO was alive and shove a sandwich at him. I’ve seen too much of that with friends, relations and neighbours. I wanted people who would spend substantial blocks of quality time with MLO and that’s what I’ve got. He needs unhurried calm reassurance and company.

I’ve also met and “hired” an impressively competent student from a local drama school who, for family reasons, is very used to looking after people. I’ve always argued that drama-trained people are some of the most capable you could meet and she is a case in point. She’s going to bring Carry On films to watch with MLO – the two of them were chuckling about it even before she left. One of the others wants to know where I keep our board games so that she can play them with the patient. Hurrah. I would no more think of sitting down and playing a board (bored) game with him than running naked along the South Circular but I bet he’ll enjoy a round or two of Sorry or Scrabble.

That gives me a list of three carers to call on and I’m actively searching for a couple more so that I can get cover for any sort of work commitment. All quite encouraging.

On the three occasions so far that I’ve had one of them in all seems to have been well. “She has a very full and interesting life” MLO told me later about one of them so he’d clearly listened and retained some of what had been said – which is a nice change from him telling me continually for 8 hours on Sunday that he was frightened of the water and was afraid he wouldn’t see me again. He’d been dreaming and thought, unshakeably, that he was a refugee on an escape boat – starting at 4.00am.

Having carers in, though, is not for the financially faint-hearted. I’ve worked hard all my life and am not short of money. We also have Attendance Allowance because of MLO’s illness. Nonetheless if I have to pay a minimum of £9/10 per hour every time I go out it’s soon going to clock up to hundreds of pounds every week just for the “privilege” of working. And I don’t think most of my editors would wear my charging the care fee as expenses either. They would simply – as would I in their position – get an unencumbered reviewer instead of me.

In short I’m in the position that many mothers find themselves when they return to work after maternity leave. The cost of childcare – or carers – is so high that the work ceases to be economic. The point is, that like many a newish mother, for me working is about a great deal more than money. It is actually what is going to stop me going completely dotty and that’s really rather important under the circumstances.

Terra nova.

A few years ago there was a lot of anxious talk about worsening skills shortages in the performing arts industries. Young people know about acting, singing and dancing but they tend not to be aware of the importance of stage managers, scenic constructors, directors, producers, costume makers, make up artists, lighting technicians etc. Then there’s the whole field of design.

Theatre, as I wrote in my 2013, book So You Want to Work in Theatre (Nick Hern Books) is like an iceberg. For everything you can see there’s an awful lot going on behind the scenes which you can’t.

Well, much has been done to dent those skills shortages since then. There are some excellent apprenticeship schemes at, for example, National Theatre and Royal Opera House and in regional theatre all over the country – working in almost every aspect of theatre making. Creative and Cultural Skills has beavered away very successfully to provide courses, create opportunities and raise awareness. And drama schools such as Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Mountview and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire run fine theatre arts courses. So, incidentally, do Wimbledon College of Art, London College of Fashion, Nottingham Trent University and Plymouth College of Art – among many others.

The training opportunities are lined up but there is still ignorance at school leaver level. Many teachers and careers advisers know very little about the creative industries (including performing arts) which contribute £250 billion per year – that’s 14.2 % – to the British economy, The sector is growing faster than the economy as a whole and is one of Britain’s strongest exports. Who says it’s not a good area to work in? Unfortunately too many school staff merely know that actors are often unemployed and try to put thespy kids off. So how to we get the message to young people who often don’t have the experience to know what goes on beyond the visible performance?

Theatrecraft, the annual careers fair, which I attended last week, is doing a fine job by getting around a thousand young people through the door every time. It’s now in its 13th year and I’ve been to most of them. The event has – encouragingly and rightly – grown over the years. This year, as last, the main stands and some of the events were at Waldorf Hilton Hotel, Aldwych with some of the seminars and workshops in nearby theatres.

It was good to see so many young people talking earnestly about courses to staff from, for example, LIPA, East 15, GSA, Central and RADA. Organisations such as National Youth Theatre (excellent backstage summer courses) and Roundhouse which runs a far reaching opportunity-rich education programme were present too. And I stress that those are just examples. It was a very busy, buzzy event graced by 61 stands.

The eclectic workshop/seminar programme was impressive too. I dropped in on some sessions and was particularly taken with Nigel Lilley (MD on Company at the Geilgud Theatre) talking with animated charisma about the role of the musical director. I thought I had a pretty clear understanding of how musical theatre works but I learned loads in 20 minutes.

It’s quite a bonus for young people to get all this free. Some come in school or college groups and others as individuals. And they range from enthusiastic 16 year olds though to researching 20 somethings who may already have trained in theatre or something else and are now seeking a next step.

Look out for next year’s Theatrecraft – usually a Friday in mid-November. It’s doing an excellent job. I just wish more careers advisers and teachers were there gathering information to take back to students who couldn’t make it.

theatrecraft.org

The Wind in the Willows – ★★★★
by Toby Hulse. Based on the novel by Kenneth Grahame
society/company: Polka Theatre
performance date: 17 Nov 2018
venue: Polka Theatre, Wimbledon

The first Christmas show of the year (for me, anyway) is an utterly charming celebration of friendship and inclusivity which also manages in a timely and timeless way roundly to condemn the worst traits of human beings. The decent animals in Toby Dulse’s play regard behaving like humans as reprehensible (although, obviously talking is OK). Thus the more “human” Toad becomes the worse predicament he’s in and must be saved from. I like that take on Kenneth Grahame.

The lovely opening of this show, directed by the ever reliable Roman Stefanski, rivals The Lion King for dramatic impact as the cast come in from the back singing (one of Julian Butler’s usual sparky songs) and with magnificent bird and insect puppets which “fly” and bob over the audience. When they reach the stage the set is in two halves because the Polka playing space is very deep. Designer Liz Cooke provides a huge, titled sawn off tree trunk upon which much of the action takes place with an imagined river around it and another space upstage which becomes, for example the depth of the Wild Wood or Toad Hall. I lived the ferret puppet masks with their lit red eyes too. This The Wind in the Willows is beautifully designed.

The other unusual but very successful concept here is that the animals are scaled so that they are in miniature world of their own. So when Toad is imprisoned it’s by a disembodied child who sees him in a toy car, captures him and puts him in a jar. Later Toad invents a silly human story about a prison and escape dressed as a washerwoman for a totally unconvinced Ratty and Mole. Ratty’s boat is the sort of paper one a child would make from a sheet of newspaper and he rows it with a feather. The ducks (more exquisite puppets) are larger than Ratty and Mole. Toad’s motoring helmet is made out of a prickly conker shell and so it goes on.

There are some nice performances here too. Andrew Chevalier as Ratty, for example, whom I’ve seen before in very serious classical roles with the Faction Repertory Company, is warmly entertaining and, I think, enjoying himself. He sings adequately too. Andrea Matthea-Laing, in her first professional role, gives us a charming and near-perfect Mole: nervous, entranced and gaining moral strength as a play progresses. Phil Yarrow as a fine Toad does, among many other things, the best toddler tantrum I’ve ever seen on stage. Every child (and parent) in the house recognised it with glee. Kara Taylor Alberts and Jessica Dennis competently play all the minor roles and form an ensemble. Alberts is fun, for example, as the angry ferret made to pull Toad’s caravan because a horse would be too big.

Edd Muruako is a gravelly Badger who uses a northern accent spliced with Caribbean. He’s a big chap and looks good because he dwarfs the smaller animals but his acting is a bit wooden which is a pity.

The singing in this show is generally more enthusiastic than musically accomplished but actually in this context that matters very little. While some of the solo work is iffy, the choral singing works pretty well and it all adds to a deliciously homely two hours of thoughtful escapism. The rest of this year’s Christmas shows are as pleasant as this I shall be a happy woman by 25 December.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Polka%20Theatre%20(professional%20productions)-The%20Wind%20in%20the%20Willows%20-%20%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85&reviewsID=3399

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