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A friend indeed

Twice a year a friend stays with us for a fortnight or so. Temporarily, we become a four person (sort of) household: My Loved One, Resident Friend, Ms Alzheimer’s and me.

RF and I were at school together (lovely, leafy – back then – Sydenham High School) and MLO has known her nearly as long as I have. She likes to spend regular time in her native London because she is mostly based somewhere else – and ours has, over the years, become her London home. It’s effectively like having a second, much loved sister who moves in at Christmas and for a block of time in the summer. She’s currently here for her summer residence.

It makes a terrific difference to me to have someone else in the house to chat to on a casual daily basis. It reminds me just how much of the ordinary companionship Ms A has leeched out of my marriage. MLO used to be my best friend. He was also my business partner. We could and would chat all the time about everything and anything. Now it’s like living with a dependent child who has, maybe, low level special needs and has to be told everything very slowly several times. I have to be careful what I tell him and how I put it. Ordinary chance remarks are off limits. There’s no longer anything equal about any of it.

I dare not, for example, mention anything which is not happening today or he’s liable to get confused. My own head is full of arrangements and plans for tomorrow, next week, next month and so on but I have to be very controlled about sharing any of it. If you can’t speak spontaneously, naturally and normally then communication is strained. Suddenly the relationship morphs into something quite different.

It’s also, I’m ashamed to admit, a pleasure to go to the theatre to review with someone who can walk up and down steps unaided and doesn’t need to visit the loo every 10 minutes. It’s almost as if RF, on holiday herself, is also giving me a bit of one just by being there. And fortunately MLO can still cope at home on his own for a few hours provided no one makes any demands on him and I leave him something very simple and pre-prepared to eat.

The other great benefit of having RF here is that she is admirably patient with Ms A’s victim. She’ll gently help him fold the table cloth after a meal for example, even if it takes several attempts whereas I’m inclined to snatch it out of his hand and snap: “I’ll do that”. She’s very willingly agreed to take him to a hospital appointment this weekend to so that I can whizz off to an all day, escapist string orchestra workshop in Folkestone. She makes him hot drinks, helps him kindly when she can see he needs it and tries to include him in activities such as collaborative crossword solving – at which he sometimes surprises us both. RF and I know nothing about cricket but MLO produced the name “Shane Warne“ without missing a beat the other day. Alzheimer’s is such an unpredictable, patchy illness.

On the other hand I am well aware that when she arrived on 3 August she hadn’t seen MLO since 01 January. Although RF and I are in touch all the time and she knows in some detail what’s going on, when she gets here I’m suddenly conscious of how things have deteriorated and what changes she will notice. Seven months is a long time when Ms A has her fangs buried in you. The deterioration is relentless.

For himself, MLO sometimes forgets she’s in the house. He’ll put cutlery on the table for the two of us and I have to remind him that RF’s upstairs and will be down for breakfast shortly. She is gloriously unfazed if she meets him wandering naked on the upstairs landing because he’s forgotten a) when it’s his turn for the bathroom and b) that there’s anyone in the house apart from me.

When I was out reviewing at the Proms last week and, unusually, both sons were staying over because they were working locally I was told afterwards about a high comedy moment when MLO turned to RF and said very politely: “Would you like to stay and have dinner with us?”

If you couldn’t laugh you’d weep. A lot.

Photograph: Resident friend taking a photograph on a trip out with me while MLO was safely at home.

SSFimage

I’m delighted to hear that two child-centred organisations whose work I’ve long admired and supported are collaborating this year – although the details of what exact form the work will take are thin on the ground at present.

The Pauline Quirke Academy and Shakespeare Schools Foundation have announced that they are to “join forces to support 30,000 students through the unique power of Shakespeare.”

Celebrating its 10th birthday this year, The Pauline Quirke Academy of Performing Arts is, of course, a national performing arts school for under 18s.

SSF, which has been running for 18 years, is the world’s largest drama festival for under 18s. Annually, it  involves nearly 30,000 young people. Every year they work with pupils from every community, background and school type across the UK. Months of preparation in school culminate in exhilarating performance evenings in over 130  professional theatres in every corner of the country.

The two organisations say they share a similar vision: “an aspiration to provide young people with life skills through performing arts training.”

And, obviously, Shakespeare is a significant contributor to both theatre and to the English language. Studies show that learning Shakespeare can have a wonderful effect on children – in fact, evaluation conducted by SSF shows that 99% of teachers said their students’ confidence increased, and 97% of teachers agreed that their students were better at working together as a team as a result of taking part in the Festival.

Meanwhile students at PQA learn skills valuable skills for everyday life, not just the performing arts. Presumably SSF shows will now be made available to PQA groups who can then take part in festivals. I hope that’s what this collaboration means because  taking a bow at a theatre full of people applauding you builds confidence like nothing else.

Speaking of the new partnership, actor Pauline Quirke said “We were looking at ways to celebrate our 10th anniversary and we decided that we wanted to support a children’s educational charity. We met with Ruth, the CEO of SSF, and really liked the amazing work they do and the impact they have on children’s lives.”

Shakespeare’s plays really are uniquely life changing and if this collaboration means that more young people will have access to their power then that can only be a Very Good Thing.

 

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Based on Kahlil Gibran’s 1912 novel, this curiously old fashioned (traditional?) musical is touching without being mawkishly sentimental.

The autobiographical source material tells the story of Gibran’s returning to his native Beirut after spending most of his childhood in America. He falls in love with a girl who is then married against her will to a philandering, rich man who believes that “married men are more desirable” …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review: http://musicaltheatrereview.com/broken-wings-theatre-royal-haymarket/

Osmo Vanska

Minnesota Orchestra

An all American evening, this concert was an interesting reminder of just how intangibly distinct American music is. In its way it’s as recognisable as, say, almost anything Russian or French.

The highlight of the evening was Charles Ives’s second symphony. Written in 1902 and then substantially revised forty years later, it wasn’t premiered until 1951 when Leonard Bernstein took it up. It still doesn’t get as many outings as I now think it deserves.  It has been played only once at the Proms before (Leonard Slatkin with Pittsburg Symphony Orchestra in 2006) and was completely new to me.

Osmo Vanska achieved an impressive balance of sound (cellos next to first violins with seconds to his right) in the fugal minor key opening and nice lightness in the first chirpy theme. The adagio cantabile was delicately played and I loved the focus on all the melodies – some of them borrowed from elsewhere in the American tradition in the last movement. In many ways this symphony’s melodious and witty fervour reminded me of Dvorak and this orchestra and conductor has clearly made the work very much its own with lots of enjoyable panache from brass and percussion.

The concert was loosely themed on Bernstein, whose centenary is being celebrated this year. So we began with the Candide overture, which, of course, never fails. Osmo Vanska and his band cheerfully gave us all those syncopated tunes and ideas and played them with terrific polish.

In the middle was a workman-like performance by Inon Barnatan of the Gershwin F major piano concerto. His percussive broken rhythms in the opening movement were competent if a bit lacklustre but the adagio – with its elegant string quartet section and excellent trumpet solo – was enjoyable. Once Barnatan got into the third movement, however, there was plenty of very apt agitato and some impressive virtuoso playing. His encore was fun too – a set of deliciously showy variations on I’ve Got Rhythm.

The encore at the end of the concert was also fun – and moving. The Minnesota Orchestra is about to embark on a tour of South Africa to commemorate what would have been Nelson Mandela’s hundredth birthday. They played a short piece based on a traditional African tune with bold drum work followed by the whole orchestra singing rhythmically before they picked up the melody on their instruments. It made a rather joyful end to the evening.

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

Tete a Tete: The Opera Festival
McCaldin Arts
Holy Cross Church, Cromer Street, London

He who tires of London tires of life. Well it’s certainly never short of surprises. This is “my” city and yet hardly a week goes by without my discovering a venue, space or place I didn’t even know was there. The rather beautiful Holy Cross Church in Cromer Street, King’s Cross, for example, was completely new to me. Built in the 1880s by Reginald Peacock it provided a surprisingly apt backdrop for a short operatic piece about Mary Tudor – aisle, pulpit, chancel steps and a handy prie-dieu all had a part to play.

Mary’s Hand, with words by Di Sherlock and music by Martin Bussey, is a musical monologue about Mary Tudor – a sort of autobiography in words (mostly sung but occasionally spoken) and music. It seeks to make us think about very familiar mid 16thcentury events from the point of view of someone who has been, generally, demonised by history. Yes, Mary ordered the execution of the “protestant martyrs” (not what she called them) but as talented mezzo Claire McCaldin sings with angry passion. “Archbishop Cranmer? He made me a bastard.”

The piece is predicated on Mary’s passion for card games and McCaldin occasionally invites an audience member to draw a card which she then attaches to a display screen and moves on the next section of her story. This device determines the order in which the sections run but the 80 minute opera would have worked perfectly well without it.

It’s quite a performance from McCaldin who wears a fabulous brown and cream dress with fur sleeves, modelled on the 1553 portrait by Hans Eworth and paid for by crowd funding. The dress then gradually comes apart to symbolise what’s happening to its wearer. At the end she walks back down the aisle in a simple white undergarment (shroud?) carrying a candle like Lady Macbeth.

McCaldin is variously eye flashingly sexy, imperious, wistful, resigned and angry. And she maintains a remarkable level of energy given that this is effectively an 80 minute solo. Her voice includes some ruby red impassioned low notes and some fierce, sometimes hysterical, high ones.  She manages the emotional contrasts with verve.

She is accompanied by an all female  trio – hidden behind a pillar and therefore invisible from my seat, unfortunately – consisting of trumpet, cello and oboe/cor anglais. Martin Bussey’s evocative music uses some interesting effects including col legno cello, rapid pizzicato, lots of off beat blasts and a strange purring tongued effect on the trumpet. Words and music complement each other seamlessly. Don’t go to this if you want melody and “numbers” but it’s worth catching if you’re looking for passion and convincing acting within eloquent music.

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

Royal Albert Hall, Saturday 28 July

When Richard Morrison interviewed the Greek/Russian Teodor Currentzis for The Times, ahead of the latter’s Proms debut Morrison told us to expect “Beethoven as you’ve never heard it before.” And he was right.

This concert which featured the second and fifth symphonies gave us highly charismatic playing and two very individualistic, exaggerated performances. Anyone who can – upper strings, woodwind, some brass – stands to play in Currentzis’s original instruments band from Perm in Siberia. There are few chairs on stage. The result is a lot of passion and free movement so that the rhythm becomes visual as well as aural. Sometimes it’s almost balletic.

Tall slender Currentzis himself is pretty dramatic too. Clad in a short shirt, leggings and silver shoes he has a strange habit of starting the music very abruptly almost before he’s reached the podium. He uses a lot of baton-free impassioned gesture, including much expressive face work and sometimes, when he wants a piano so soft that it almost disappears, he stands virtually still. And of course he rarely does anything as pedestrian as beating time.

The quality of the sound is often magical. The sombre gentleness of wooden flutes, oboes and bassoons combined with gut (or some appropriate substitute?) strings ensures a warmth and intensity you don’t often hear in orchestras using modern instruments. And, as you’d expect, Currentzis takes every allegro at the sort of breathtaking speed  adherence to Beethoven’s metronome markings requires – although it’s not, even today, what we’re used to. I remember Klemperer’s Beethoven, for example, and most of us own recordings which take much of these works at a pretty leisurely pace, despite the efforts in recent year of conductors such as John Eliot Gardiner and Roger Norrington to change our perceptions.

High spots included the final Allegro molto in the second symphony which never lost a scrap of precision despite the dizzying speed. I also appreciated the well judged quiet wittiness in the larghetto. These people can make a simple scale sound like the pinnacle of musical inventiveness.

After the interval, the opening of the fifth symphony sounded joyous rather than portentous – just lots and lots of brio. The andante was very memorable too with a strong sense of duet between first and second violins, split across the space either side of Currentzis. There was also some lovely work from the wooden piccolo and some flamboyantly pointed dynamics in the final allegro. I was puzzled though, by a persistent vibratory buzzing in the fortissimo passages which I found distracting.

All in all it was a most interesting evening – and certainly one which will stand in the memory. I’m not sure, however, I’d want my Beethoven served up like this all the time. There is a faint whiff of arrogance about Currentzis. It came through in Morrison’s interview and I felt it from the podium – a sort of messianic self belief as if he thinks he has all the answers. There is room for as many interpretations and approaches as there are conductors and orchestras. Currentzsis’s take is an intriguing exploration of possibilities. It isn’t the last word on Beethoven.

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

I don’t think it would have occurred to me until recently that being diagnosed with a serious, degenerative, ultimately terminal condition would generate a load of paper work but believe me it does.

Take attendance allowance – which is paid via the Department of Work and Pensions to people who are seen to be need of extra help which may have to be paid for. It seems to open doors to other support so I thought we’d better apply.

Now, one hears a lot of things about this process. The rumour is that the decision makers are very wary and that it’s difficult to get your application “right” so you’re advised to get Age Concern to help you.

Well I downloaded and printed off the form – all 29 pages of it. Reasoning that I’m an educated woman and, a professional writer  for goodness’ sake, I decided that I could and would tackle it by myself to which end, earlier this year, I sat down with pen and plenty of tea one Sunday afternoon and got going. Surely it couldn’t be that difficult? It wasn’t but it did take me three hours.  My Loved One wanted to sign it himself so we did everything according to the instructions (me writing as if I were him, for example) and sent it off.

A week later, to my astonishment, we were informed that we’d been awarded the higher level of allowance. It felt like winning Wimbledon. Something had gone right for a change. Hurrah. It was the principle I was most pleased about but, obviously, it also means that there’s some spare money if we need anything extra – I’m beginning to think about an additional handrail on the staircase, for example and MLO quite often needs a taxi these days. I might, at some point, have to pay someone to come in and help in if I’m out working too. Worryingly, only this week, he burnt out a saucepan because I left him some potatoes to cook to go with his salad – for instance.

Having sorted the attendance allowance I thought we’d do the Blue Badge for parking next. One of the eligibility criteria is receipt of attendance allowance. I filled in the forms, photocopied things like the consultant’s diagnosis letter and sent it all off to Lewisham Borough Council.

I was a bit irritated that they summoned him for an assessment by a physiotherapist as if they didn’t believe either me or the consultant although she was very courteous when we got there. Having watched him on stairs, taken him for a walk round the car park and asked lots of questions said physio was evidently convinced because a week later we had a letter telling us we could collect the Blue Badge after a specific date.

I was annoyed with LBC about that too. In this borough Blue Badges can only be collected IN PERSON (imagine the complications if someone were really badly incapacitated) at set hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Even if the badge is for a child, he or she has to be with you  so presumably you’re expected to take your offspring out of school which I think is outrageous.  When we collected ours the administrator told me firmly – it’s obviously a script – that if I abused the badge then I’d be fined £1000 if I were caught which I thought was both insulting and rude. That information was included in the pack anyway and I’m literate.

For the record, my brother-in-law in South Kent was recently  sent his Blue Badge through the post as was a friend with a disabled child in Hertfordshire so this is obviously LBC being unnecessarily hostile and obstructive.

Finally I thought it was time I applied for council tax exemption for MLO which several people had advised me to do. More forms which I got endorsed by some unknown (to us) signatory at our GP practice. Silence. I only knew that LBC had processed it when I received a council tax statement on which the reduction showed. He is now deemed a “disregarded person” which seems unpleasantly Orwellian to me. You’d think someone could come up with a more tactful term. Or perhaps I’m being oversensitive.

It’s been a lot of tedious work but it’s oddly satisfying when it achieves its purpose.  Of course I wish desperately that we weren’t entitled to any of these things but given the situation it feels as if I’ve done the right thing. I’ve learned a lot along the way. None of this, for example,  should be the post code lottery it appears to be with so much depending on the whims and prejudices of remote decision makers.

Photograph: Happier times. 70th birthday in 2015

It’s a good time to be a female actor. It would seem that, suddenly, all the barriers have lifted. This year saw Golda Rosheval at Liverpool Everyman playing Othello as a female general in a lesbian relationship with her white Desdemona. Last week we heard that Kathryn Hunter is to play Timon of Athens for the RSC and that Jack Lowden and Hayley Atwell are to alternate the roles of the Deputy and the Novice in Donmar Warehouse’s forthcoming Measure for Measure. Michelle Terry has played Hamlet at The Globe this year too. And don’t let’s forget Glenda Jackson’s recent, award winning Lear at The Old Vic.

Of course, none of this is new. Frances de la Tour played Hamlet in 1979 and Fiona Shaw did a stunning Richard II in 1995. Maxine Peake gave us her Hamlet in 2014 and Michelle Terry’s Open Air Theatre Henry V was memorable in 2016. And I could cite other examples all the way back to Sarah Bernhardt.

It’s just that now it seems to have become so ubiquitous that it’s if no director or casting director dares cast a Shakespeare play conventionally.  And it all feels to me a bit  manic and contrived – a sort of industrial over compensation for several centuries of doing plays according to the conventions of the social period in which they were written. I also sense some vying with each other to see who can come up with the most unlikely bit of gender blind casting.

I don’t want to see women side-lined, obviously, and there are some fantastic plays with plum parts for them –  all of Ibsen, Alan Bennett and Oscar Wilde for example to cite just three random examples. And Shakespeare did give us Cleopatra, Juliet, Viola, Isabella, Katerina and many more. Then there are dozens of roles within the plays which really can happily be played by either sex. Victoria Blunt, for instance, at Watermill Theatre this year was one of the best Bottoms I’ve ever seen. I saw a brilliant female Banquo (sorry – I don’t remember the actor’s name and I no longer have the programme) at Open Air Theatre a few years ago. And has anyone ever done a female Shylock? It could work well because there are no sexual politics in the role.

But when it comes to sexually charged roles such as Othello or Angelo then changing the genders completely alters the thrust of the play and flies in the face of the text. Measure for Measure is a case in point. Angelo is, initially to his own surprise and chagrin, a ruthless sexual predator. It’s Harvey Weinstein stuff. He’s a powerful male, threateningly and manipulatively demanding sex with a young woman in a vulnerable position. That’s the situation. It’s all in the script. Perhaps I’ve led a sheltered life but in my experience even the most tyrannical of women can’t actually force an uncooperative man to have sex with her whatever she promises him. She can’t rape him. And even if she could  there’s arguably less at stake for a man than a woman. But I digress. None of that it what the play is about.  And that is my point.

Actually if you want to cast Measure for Measure gender blind you could do it, successfully with almost any other part – The Duke, Escalus or Pompey, say – but not the two central ones. And that’s just an example of a single play. How long will it be before we see a contorted, distorted gender reversed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth  or Gertrude and Claudius and a text which has had to be heavily doctored to make it make any sense at all?

There is room, obviously, for as many interpretations as there are directors and actors and it’s good to experiment with innovative ways of doing these plays. But surely that’s all it should be? It seems neither sensible nor balanced to allow it to become the norm and if you have to rewrite the play to accommodate your innovation then perhaps you should do a different play altogether?  Personally I don’t want us to get to the stage that you actually have to hunt for a production which is remotely conventional in its casting and telling the story which Shakespeare dramatised.

I think the industry needs to be careful too. It’s all very well taking the view that you should cast as many women as possible even in wildly unlikely roles because we’re all very PC and liberal. What about the audience? I had lunch recently with a distant cousin whom I hadn’t seen for decades. To my delight she’s morphed into an enthusiastic theatre goer and we talked about lots of shows she’d seen. But she was utterly scathing about Sally Cookson’s Jane Eyre, which for the record, I liked very much. She dismissed it as “modernised and ridiculous with lots of running up and down ladders”. In other words, her tastes are traditional. I hate to imagine what she’d think about some of the more extreme gender-blind casting around at the moment. And there are millions of ticket buyers exactly like her out there.

A few years ago I saw a production of Don Giovanni in a gay night club (Heaven, at Charing Cross). All the genders were reversed except the title role. It was an interesting and quite enjoyable experiment although some of the numbers were in changed keys to accommodate different voices which took a while to get used to. Fun, but of course I don’t want all my Mozart served up like that. It’s the same with other forms of performing arts. We need balance and we need choice. The trouble with common sense, as Voltaire reminded us, is that it isn’t very common.

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