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Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra – Remembrance Day (Susan Elkin reviews)

Loosely, but not aggressively, themed for Remembrance Day this concert gave us the works of one composer whose pacificism drove him across the Atlantic, one who served as a medical orderly in World War 1 and one who was killed on the Somme.

Britten’s D Minor Violin Concerto was completed during the composer’s voluntary exile and premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1940. Matthew Trussler, modestly looking like a half dressed, rapidly growing schoolboy in a tight white shirt, played it with verve, maturity and impressive control. It was easy, in this performance, to hear menace and the horror of war in some of the abrupt harmonies and desperate sadness in the lyrical passages. The War Requiem might lie twenty two years into the future but the anger and distress at the futility of it all is clearly there already. Barry Wordsworth ensured this came out strongly although he also, wisely, allowed Trussler his head. The playing in the long cadenza was edge-of-the-seat stuff with exquisitely accurate trills on harmonics and the unusual technique of left hand pizzicato with simultaneous legato bowing. Even the rising and descending scales, of which there are lots for both soloist and orchestra, were made to sound musically compelling here.

The other long work in the programme was Vaughan Williams’s strident, angry fourth symphony which dates from 1935. Wordsworth leant on all the big RVW themes and played up the syncopated passages in the last movement to enjoyable effect. The central scherzo was evocative and carefully managed. For this final work in the programme the orchestra was fully warmed up.

Also appropriate in its wistful way was George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody which opened the second half. Plenty of yearning, lyrical beauty came through some fine playing.

This concert opened with Stokowski’s arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugues (more D minor) which was an odd choice. Yes, it makes a splendid opening – all drama and semiquavers – but it’s hard to listen to it, I’m afraid, without thinking of Fantasia and  irreverently expecting Mickey Mouse to appear. Moreover some of the entries were a bit ragged in the first few moments although by the time we got to the fugue, inspiringly started by the violas, it was all sailing along grandiloquently. If, however, we were meant – in part – to be focusing on Remembrance Day then this work seemed inappropriate.

Two further small observations about this concert, one positive, one less so. First, it’s grand to see and hear a selection of works which make such good use of the tuba and it’s fun to see the enormous mute going in and out of the bell. Well done,   Principal Tuba. Second, I wish they’d sort out that percussive whistle which whispers in the Dome when it’s quiet. You could hear it all too clearly during the Britten. I don’t know whether it’s the heating, air conditioning or something else but it’s always there and needs dealing with.

Death is waiting in the wings for all of us. And we cope with that reality by not thinking about it most of the time and assuming we shan’t feel the grim reaper’s scythe for many decades. Sometimes though, the young or relatively young, have to face the horror of death and that’s what Callum McGowan’s intensely powerful 90 minute three-hander explores.

Anna (Claire Corbett), 30-ish, is dying of cancer in some sort of institution – presumably a hospice. Then seventeen year old Becca (Holly Donovan) arrives in her room as temporary cleaner on a community service order. Brian (Max Calandrew) is the care assistant who has day-to-day, first line responsibility for Anna. What follows is an unravelling of the dynamic between the three of them, including an unlikely but intense and supportive friendship between the two women. The acting is stunning. Each actor plays impeccably off whoever the dialogue is with.

Corbett’s Anna is brittle and wryly funny. Loneliness is her character’s big problem along with fear of the oblivion which awaits her. We gradually realise that she has few if any visitors and has deliberately cut herself off from the world. She’s middle class in a way that Becca is not but the latter, who exudes (often amusing) down to earth, forthright common sense becomes increasingly articulate as the play progresses. Both actors manage their differentiating accents well although there was sometimes a slight audibility problem from my seat – possibly because I was immediately under the rotating fan in the corner of the space. Calandrew starts out by being kindly but distant and gradually thaws – another fine performance.

There are two episodes in No Place Like Hope which will stay with me for a long time. First was the moment when Becca eventually tells Anna about the devastating incident which has made her what she is – and it was nothing to do with kidnapping an ill treated dog and getting a CSO for it. I was, literally, on the edge of my seat all the time she was speaking. And you could feel sudden audience stillness too. The other is when Brian and Becca share a sneaky cigarette at Anna’s window while Anna is elsewhere. He tells Becca why he doesn’t believe in God and how he copes with working with the dying every day. And it’s riveting.

This is a beautifully written play and I’m not in the least surprised to learn that it won the Lost Theatre’s One-Act Play Festival in 2015. Now, after, a huge amount of work by Holly Donavan as producer, it is getting a well deserved London run until 25 November. It isn’t often that you’re part of an audience which is so stunned at the end of a play that they just sit quietly in contemplation rather than leaping to their feet and charging out. Neither is it often, hard-bitten critic as I am, that I weep in the theatre but …
 First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-West%20End%20&%20Fringe-No%20Place%20Like%20Hope&reviewsID=3038
 
 
 
 

Max Stafford-Clark is a fine director – innovative and influential. The industry has much to thank him for. Our Country’s Good and years of other fine work at The Royal Court and Out of Joint among other things.  Somehow we have to learn to separate that excellence from his revolting lechery.

It’s the same with Kevin Spacey who did, among many other things, an splendid job at The Old Vic. His foul and probably criminal, sexual preying on young actors is a separate issue. Of course it musn’t be belittled but it’s nothing to do with his artistic achievements and ability. Yet his scenes have been “cleansed” from the new Ridley Scott movie, All The Money In the World and Netflix isn’t doing another series of House of Cards.

And now this weekend we hear that the BBC has pulled Ordeal by Innocence, which was scheduled for Boxing Day because Ed Westwick has been accused (not tried or found guilty, please note) of sexual assault.

This is all getting absurd and very sinister. Witchhunts are never just or reasonable because they’re a kneejerk reaction. I don’t want to live in a world of Orwellian “unpersoning” either whatever the targets of it have done.

Don Carlos Gesualdo (1566-1613) murdered his wife and her lover. He was by all accounts either mad or evil or both. But that doesn’t detract from the quality of the marvellous music he composed. His glorious madrigals are played quite often on Radio 3.

Richard Wagner seems to have been a nasty piece of work too. His views are said to have inspired the Nazis. But that isn’t going to stop me listening to or loving, for instance, Tannhauser. Nor should it.

My father – ex RAF and very much of his generation – was a lifelong homophobe and I recall having exactly this discussion with him quite late in his life. He felt physically sick, he said, watching Charles Laughton in a film and thinking about the filthy … Well, I don’t need to spell out his offensive views here. “In that case you’d better stop listening to Tchaikovsky, looking at Michelangelo’s art or watching anything with John Gielgud in then” I told him tartly knowing that he probably wouldn’t know much about the sexual orientation of any of them. “You simply can’t judge people’s art by what goes on their personal lives” I said in a tone which, I hope, brooked no argument.

And exactly the same principle – although there the comparison stops, of course –  applies to sexual predators who make other people’s lives a misery with their assaults, gropes and comments. Yes, it’s appalling and they must be stopped. Their victims must be encouraged to speak out. In some cases prosecution and imprisonment will follow.  But that doesn’t mean we have to throw the artistic baby out with the toxic bathwater.

As it is I’m just waiting for the iconoclasts and vandals (probably paid out of licence fee money) to arrive at the BBC with sledge hammers. The frieze around the front of the building is by Eric Gill and is a pretty wonderful work of art – especially the statues of Prospero and Ariel over the main door. Gill, we now know from Fiona McCarthy’s 1989 biography, was a paedophile who abused his own daughters. Reading the details, which he described proudly in diaries, left me feeling shaky, clammy and utterly outraged. But I can still admire those sculptures.

I continue to appreciate the work of  theatre people like Max Stafford-Clark, Kevin Spacey – and no doubt others yet to come – too.  We have to hold on to a balance. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs you’ll be a man by son”. Or even a woman.

This curate’s egg of a show is the inaugural production at The Playground Theatre, an engaging new space in NW10 artistically directed by Anthony Biggs and Peter Tate. It’s a former bus depot, and once you’ve found it, it’s hard not to be captivated by the venue.

Peter Tate himself plays Picasso in a 70-minute play by the late Terry d’Alfonso which focuses on Picasso’s insatiable, and often ruthless, appetite for women and the effects it had on his art. Tate is a cerebral actor who listens intently so that attention is always expertly focused where it needs to be. On the other hand, this is meant to be a man who had women – dozens, hundreds maybe – happy to succumb to him. None of that sexual charisma comes across here. Instead we see a curmudgeonly, often very cruel man treating women appallingly and you’re left wondering why they don’t simply walk away.

Three women appear with Picasso as wives and mistresses in this four hander. Alejandra Costa is outstanding as Jacqueline Roque to whom he was married for the last twelve years of his life. She is variously needy, cunning, devastated, manipulative and passionate. The strength of her performance, though, tends to overshadow both Adele Oni and Genevieve Laporte and Claire Bowman as Marie-Therese Walter.

Some of the background to the story – featuring three other actors – is clumsily presented via video behind the action as if it were memories unfolding. Not a good directorial decision (director: Michael Hunt) because it simply looks like a cheap, clunky way of trying to widen the action while keeping production costs down. It doesn’t hold up narratively either because we see Tate still being Picasso on screen as he is “now”. Has he not aged since he first married Olga Khokhlova (played on screen by Milena Vukotic) when he was 37?

Other puzzles include the sandpit which forms the set’s main feature. Characters pick up handfuls and make vague shapes. I presume it is meant in some loose way to connote creativity, art and what have you but it takes a big leap of imagination.

First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Playground%20Theatre,%20The%20(professional)-Picasso&reviewsID=3030
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Iain Burnside is a commensurate communicator. Witness his often quirky, but always fascinating, programmes on Radio 3 over the years and his 5 star piano playing especially when he’s accompanying and particularly in lieder. Lucky are the students who study with him at Guildhall School of Music and Drama where he is a professor.

Swansong is, at one level, a warm and vibrant recital of Schubert’s last fourteen songs which the Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger hooked together and marketed – very profitably – as Schwanengesang after Schubert’s death. At another level it’s a piece of musical theatre. Six actors deliver short monologues between the songs so that suddenly we see them from many different angles like a cubist painting. At a third level it’s a real joy to see yet another work devised and directed by Burnside in which the Guildhall musicians work with their counterparts in drama to present something which is as integrated as it is enlightening.

The piece is scored for a singer, a pianist and six actors. In fact here we get two excellent pianists (Michael Pandya and Dylan Perez) and four singers alongside six actors playing characters who all have a view about the composer and/or his songs over nearly two centuries – Brahms, Ivor Gurney, Haslinger, Franz von Schober, a cleaner and a modern student.

Harriet Burns, soprano, brings lots of warmth and passion along with a knowing twinkle in both eye and voice to the opening song Liebesbotschaft. James Robinson’s tenor and both baritones, Andrew Hamilton and Henri Tikkanen pack plenty of drama and colour especially in Die Stadt. All four voices blend well in the final Die Taubenpost.

Each of the actors does a fine job too. Burnside has ignored conventions of period so that all the speech is very modern, along with the costumes. It reminds you – rather neatly – that nothing changes and yes, the laundry maid would have known all about Schubert’s sickness once she started finding mercury stains (“they mix it with lard and rub it on the sores”) on the sheets.  Jordan Angell’s Haslinger is a spivy type who tells the audience to “cut me some slack, will you? And Declan Baxter’s Gurney, complete with authentic Gloucestershire accent, locked in City of London Mental Hospital, is both appealing and pitiful. The trouble with this approach is that without a programme you might struggle to work out who is who but it’s a minor gripe

Overall this is a pleasingly original, high quality hour of music and drama – not quite a concert, not quite musical theatre and not quite an illustrated talk. Maybe Burnside has invented a new performance art form?

This review was first published by Lark Reviews http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?cat=3

 

 

Cabaret is a marvellous show for students. No wonder it’s so popular with drama schools. Joe Masteroff’s powerful, poignant book with John Kander’s tuneful music and Fred Ebb’s cuttingly witty lyrics work together like alchemy.

And it comes with plenty for everyone to do: principal roles to die for, lots of potential-laden cameos and bags of scope for a talented, well-directed (Lotte Wakeman for ArtsEd) ensemble.

We are, of course, in Berlin in 1929 …

Read the rest of this four star review at Musical Theatre Review http://musicaltheatrereview.com/arts-educational-schools-cabaret/

 

Wrath. Anger. Fury. Temper. I do them all every day. Expertly. And it’s all very well St Paul, a single gent who didn’t have to live with Ms Alzheimer’s, telling the Ephesians – many of whom would have been married – to resolve their quarrels before bed.  I bet some of them were jolly irritated. “What does he know about it?” I can hear them muttering down a couple of millennia.

Of course, if your life, marriage and home is invaded and occupied by Ms A, then you simply have to learn to put up with rubbish, recycling, food waste and garden stuff being put in the wrong bins. And it’s infuriating. Then there are the items on (very short and simple) shopping lists which are ignored, drawers and cupboards left open and things being “put away” in all the wrong places. You know it’s all going to get worse, too.

Add to that what’s said or not said. When you’ve been asked the same question – such as “Is anyone coming today?” –  four or five times it’s hard to answer with calm patience and equanimity. My Loved One would really, in his heart of hearts, like me to give up work and everything else I do so that I’d be continuously available with kindness, cups of coffee, chocolate biscuits and various other forms of sweetness and light, but that is not on the cards, I’m afraid. If I didn’t work I wouldn’t be me and then there would we be?

The frustration is dreadful. I explain over and over again that, for example, that a company’s coming to collect some rubbish this afternoon. Or that I have two tickets for a show tomorrow so we’ll both go. I do my utmost not to make a fuss when my best (almost new) omelette pan is burned out because MLO tried to make himself an omelette and walked away from it.

Then there’s speed. Or lack of it. I have always been a fairly nippy  mover when I’m walking along a street or round the house for instance. And I’ve had a rule for decades whereby I don’t use the car if it’s less than a mile. I routinely take stairs instead of escalators as a way of trying to get some exercise as I go along and all that sort of thing. Until recently MLO was the same. Now he does everything very, very slowly and I’m constantly looking over my shoulder to see where he is. If I hang on to him, it’s like taking a very reluctant dog for a walk.

I automatically went bounding down the long staircase from the new platforms at London Bridge the other day. And then had to wait for two full minutes at the bottom until he had cautiously negotiated every step. I should have put him on the escalator of course but didn’t, for a moment, remember how things now are. Then I get stressy and remind myself that when I plan these excursions I now need to allow an extra half hour from the time we leave home. And the awful and devastating truth is that these days it’s actually much easier and better all round if I go on my own.

I try very hard not to let any of this show.  But of course, after a bit, human nature, bursts forth and I blow up like a volcano about something really trivial. Then, like Etna, I’m inclined to smoke and smoulder for days. My personal tectonic plates are pretty volatile. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath? If only.  Ms A. meet St Paul. St Paul meet Ms A.

At the weekend MLO was upset because I’d done my Etna thing about something very minor that he’d forgotten to do. “I try bloody hard to look after you, be there for you, do everything else that has to be done and keep smiling but it’s an uphill struggle” I snarled.

“Well you’re failing” he said. Great.

Then, the next day, a bit diffidently: “If I could remember what I said that upset you, I’d apologise.”  In the end the sheer ridiculousness of life with Ms A made us both laugh.

PS Sunday Telegraph (5 November) had a strapline about a “vampire cure” for Alzheimer’s. A leftover from Halloween or is 5 November morphing into the new 1 April?

Image: Mount Etna, Sicily, in an angry mood.

 

 

Phil Daniels (Fool) Ian McKellen (Lear) Sinead Cusack (Kent) Chichester Festival Theatre 2017 production. Credit: Manuel Harlan

“Pray you, undo this button: thank you Sir” is probably not the most memorable line in the play although it’s a neat example of Shakespeare tucking his stage directions into the script as usual. Lear is at the very end of his life and physically weak. So he asks Kent and Edgar for a tiny bit of practical assistance.

I first saw King Lear when I was about 15, performed by quite a talented sixth form cast at Alleyn’s School. It was the nearest comparable boys’ school to my girls’ grammar and most of our brothers and boyfriends were pupils there. I read the play at about the same time in a fairly perfunctory way. I don’t think I noticed the button line.

Two or three years later, though, by then at teacher training college with English as my main subject I read it properly and studied it in detail with the excellent Miss Hiller (if I ever knew her first name I’m afraid I’ve long since forgotten it) as a set work. I still have the pencilled notes in my old Arden copy from those generally pretty enlightened sessions.

The button was commented on and we were told that Shakespeare is highlighting Lear’s regal status and remoteness from ordinary life. He would always have had a valet and never had to deal with buttons. Well it didn’t ring quite true to me even then. It’s hard to believe that anyone, however elevated, would be unable to push a button through a hole, It’s a bit like that (apocryphal, I’m sure) story about the young George VI not knowing how to turn the lights on and being too nervous with his stammer to summon a servant to do it. It just doesn’t add up. And after all in Lear’s case, he’s quite recently been able to rip off all his own clothes – “off ye lendings –  in the storm and his madness.

Fast forward nearly half a century (I know, I know …) from when I was puzzling over Lear at college and I have a problem in my thumbs, especially the left one. I assume it’s arthritis, which my mother had quite badly years before she reached the age I am now. It doesn’t show on X-Ray, though, and I’ve been referred to a rheumatology consultant for scans etc. The effect of it is that it hurts to move my thumb laterally across my fingers which makes lots of every day things painful and difficult – turning pages, pulling sticky tops off jars and bottles, carrying anything heavy and, worst of all, doing up buttons. Every time I struggle to button a blouse or fasten those fashionable sleeves which hook up on a tab to make them shorter I think of poor old Lear.

I know now for certain why Shakespeare’s saddest geriatric protagonist needs help with that button. He has arthritis in his thumbs and the treatment and exposure he has undergone by this stage in the play has made it worse. Fastening a button really hurts if you have arthritic thumbs and sometimes you need several stabs at it. Cold and damp, of which Lear has had plenty, exacerbates the problem.

King Lear was written at some point between March 1603 and Christmas 1606, according to Kenneth Muir who edited the original Arden edition. Shakespeare would have been somewhere between 39 and 42. In an era when people aged faster and died younger he could well have had arthritis in his own hands by then. And if he hadn’t, well he would have observed it plenty of others. This is the man, after all, who wrote Jacques’s speech in As You Like It. He understood the ageing process.

And come to think of it, what about Macbeth and those “weird women” and their “pricking in my thumbs”? More arthritis besetting older women living rough and probably desperately undernourished? What a perspicacious writer he was. He still makes me gasp aloud quite often.

Well, there’s no rule of thumb (sorry) or right or wrong answers as I used to tell my students.  Insights into Shakespeare’s work – and possibly even his life – come from unlikely sources sometimes. And they go on coming irrespective of how well you know a play, how many times you’ve seen or read it.  That, I think, is one of the things which makes Shakespeare unique