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Want diverse audiences? Cut ticket prices.

I spend a lot of time and energy talking to theatre pros of one sort and another. Most are so passionate about the power of theatre that they want to share it as widely as possible – or so they say. Conversations with directors, dramaturgs, facilitators, outreach managers, education managers and so on are studded with words such as “accessibility”, “inclusivity” and “diversity” especially when we’re discussing young people.

So how on earth do greedy producers justify their obscene top ticket prices? Last week we heard that the best tickets for Hamilton are now £250 each. OK, so I know you can sit elsewhere in the theatre with poorer views for less but NO theatre seat is worth a quarter of a million pounds.  It is sheer unadulterated greed. And it conveys all the wrong elitist messages to ordinary people who can’t possibly pay these sorts of prices – the very ones the industry claims to be trying to attract.

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Of course there are excellent schemes to make theatre affordable to all – Travelex at the National, for example or the Globe’s excellent Playing Shakespeare With Deutsche Bank which, each March, gives free tickets to thousands of London and Birmingham secondary school students. Mousetrap Theatre Projects takes lots of families to the theatre too. And, obviously there are others.

But the greed is widespread. A few years ago we wanted to take two granddaughters to see Billy Elliot at half term. There was a deal for two adults and two children – brilliant, I thought, until I realised that the offer didn’t apply during half term week, the one time that families could make extensive use of it. How can any producer who does that possibly pretend to care about making theatre accessible? In the end the afternoon’s treat cost me over £300. The girls loved the show and still talk about how special that afternoon was. I resented the cost but forked out. What about families who simply can’t?   In effect they are precluded from most top west end shows, the ones they’ve read most about and desperately want to see?

It’s high time some producers climbed off their hypocritical high horses. They need to recognise that if they really want, as most of them claim, to make theatre accessible to all because the arts matter, then they must stop exploiting the public. Healthy profit is one thing. Using the “market forces” argument as an excuse to inflate prices to a bloated level is another. I used to define “hypocrisy” for my students as saying one thing and doing another. QED.

This conventionally structured concert – a concerto sandwiched by two symphonies –  presented the BPO pared down to classical chamber size, which  ensured a very enjoyable afternoon of crisp incisive clarity.

It is not easy to open a concert with one of Haydn’s wafty, exposed introductions – marked largo in this symphony – but it held its own until the movement danced away into the vivace. Michael Collins is a batonless, businesslike, unfussy, measured conductor who went on to bring out all the contrasting charm of the rippling string work in the 6/8 adagio before heading cheerfully into the elegant, nicely played minuet and the chatty presto finale ( prestissimo in this performance) with all its jokes and general pauses.

It’s fun to hear Mozart’s clarinet concerto played on a basset horn. “Quite a beast” joked Michael Collins in his spoken introduction and of course he’s right. The tones are “autumnal” because the range allows for some passages to be played an octave lower than they usually are. He set a lively allegro tempo for the first movement which also featured some fine horn work in passages which sometimes get played down. It’s an art to conduct an orchestra without looking at them. He faces the audience but still manages to hold it all together especially in the notoriously difficult middle movement whose 6/8 is so very slow that it’s almost in 12. He’s a foot tapper – perhaps that’s the secret – bringing out all the wistful beauty of the pianissimo recapitulation complete with grace notes. A delightful performance was rounded off (no pun intended) by a lively and light rondo.

And so to Beethoven’s smiling first symphony which he made sound daisy-fresh rather than something many of the (pretty full) Dome audience will have been listening to all their lives. It’s such a vibrant, happy piece – written long before Beethoven’s demons were biting too hard. Michael Collins, sparky as ever, can even do andante cantabile so that it sings and soars without sounding maudlin. Then came a jewel-like minuet and a lilting finale graced by the sort of playing which makes even a hard-bitten critic grin.

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

Adapted for stage by John Hewer from Ray Galton & Alan Simpson. Produced by Hambledon Productions. The Comedy Museum (26 Jan 2018 and touring)

The relationship between father and son who both love and loathe each other may be timeless but I’m afraid rag and bone men are ancient history. A lot of the material which made Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s Steptoe and Son so apt, well observed and funny in the 1960s has not stood the test of time.

Adapted by John Hewer (who also plays Harold), this short, two-act show has no coherent story line because it tries to feature the best bits from the original seven series. It ran on TV in 30-minute episodes and the seams are clearly visible here.

The first problem is whether or not the actors (quite well directed by Rachael Hewer) should actually try to mimic Wilfred Bramble and Harry H Corbett who created these roles for TV or whether they should take the script and try to do something fresh with it. This show seems to have opted mostly for the former.

Jeremy Smith hops about gleefully, screwing up his eyes and delivering inappropriate remarks with cheerful malice – and he looks and sounds very much like Wilfred Bramble in role. It’s a noteworthy imitative performance.

John Hewer as Harold is passionate, yearning and unable to laugh at his own absurdity. I had forgotten, too, just how articulate Harold is with his knowledge of history, literature and all the rest of it as he constantly tries to better himself only to be – predictably – thwarted by his father. Hewer’s problem is voice. He seems to be aiming for the very distinctive voice Corbett found for Harold – high pitched, cockney overlaid with schooling and a pronounced, peculiar nasal whine close to a speech impediment. Occasionally Hewer gets it. Often he doesn’t. It would be better, I think, if he simply did his own thing. As it is, his mish-mash accent is a distraction.

Together, with Peter Hoggart (good) who plays minor roles such as the milkman, the vicar and a news reporter, they create situation comedy which occasionally amuses although it’s very clunky for the first twenty minutes. The best bit is the scene with the vicar whom Old Steptoe delights in trying to shock – to Harold’s predictable, embarrassed consternation.

A nostalgia show aimed at people who remember comedy before we had four letter words on TV, set in the days when learning to dance the foxtrot was the way to your girl’s heart? Maybe, but it’s so long ago in every sense that I suspect, that for many audience members, it needs foot notes. And a lot of it is no longer funny anyway.

The Museum of Comedy, new to me, is a delightful little venue by the way. Situated in the “undercroft” (basement) of St George’s Church, Bloomsbury it is very attractively converted with a good bar area, an interesting exhibition about the Georgian building and a pretty little proscenium auditorium.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-West%20End%20&%20Fringe-Steptoe%20And%20Son&reviewsID=3086

 

My paternal great grandmother lived until I was 16. Throughout my childhood I watched my grandparents carefully and lovingly looking after his mother even when she was difficult (which was often). A few years later, her son, my grandfather succumbed to throat cancer. Cue for us all to rally round and be there for him and for his widow, my beloved Grandma, who lived on into her 90s and my 40s.

Although we weren’t quite so local by then I used to visit Grandma every couple of weeks and spoke to her on the phone weekly. And she would come to stay with us regularly. Meanwhile our own boys were growing up and willing and able to be involved. In fact, with strange generational symmetry, our eldest son was 16 when his great grandmother died, exactly as I had been.

Since them, inevitably, all four of our parents have died (most recently, Father-in-law in 2014) and again as a family we have all – in our different ways – been there to support each other though illness, sadness, loss and loneliness quite often tempered, of course, with jokes and laughter. My father used to tease his grandmother rotten – no one else could have got away with it – but by golly he loved and looked after her. And I saw exactly the same pattern in our sons as their own grandparents gradually ailed.

It’s like a baton in a relay race. One generation observes how the previous one does it and then takes it forward.  Or at least that’s how it seems to have worked for us – over and over again.

And now that Ms Alzheimer’s has staked her claim on My Loved One, it is our turn to be supported and looked after. I’m sure our sons, partners and children (our oldest granddaughter is 19) have talked about it quietly amongst themselves because I see kindness and astonishing acts of support all the time despite the fact no one lives particularly close. “Pay-back time” I suspect they call it.

The “boys” who have, between them, enough practical professional skills to staff an entire building company, have each done an enormous amount of work in the house we downsized into 16 months ago. And they’re been on hand to advise almost continuously. I’d never have got it sorted out and created the lovely home it now is without the pair of them.

So I want to go on a music course in May. “Just send me the dates” says our elder son who means he will come and stay with MLO and Ms A while I’m off duty. When the arrangement I’d made collapsed, he has willingly agreed to do likewise next month while I visit a friend in Yorkshire too

Then there’s the week in April when MLO and I are on holiday for a week. No sooner had I booked than I discovered that I couldn’t get Catus Domesticus into the cattery which had the effrontery to be fully booked. “Oh don’t worry” says elder son immediately. “I’ll base myself in your house and work from there”. That’s yet another week away from his own family although I hope his wife will join him for a London weekend with shows and so on. It also means we get a house sitter as well as a cat minder. And, I expect, odd jobs will be done in our absence. Hero! I shall make sure there’s plenty of beer in the fridge.

We have decorators in at present. “I’ll pop up in the morning between jobs and take that radiator off the wall” said younger son last week, casually referring to a 60 mile Brighton/London trip. “I don’t want the decorators messing about with it.” And he and his partner (who have a very young family) cheerfully put up with us taking over their house every time I review a concert in Brighton which happens frequently. His long suffering partner never complains if he comes to us to do a job which overruns so he ends up staying the night either.

In short, life is not always easy these days, but we are blessed in our fantastic children and their families and that’s an inestimable bonus. People in the know often say “I hope you’re getting the support you need”. They mean from health services, voluntary organisations, social services and so on and I know that such things will be there when we need them. At present yes, we are getting a terrific level of support – all home grown. And I am learning to feel deeply grateful and accept it with grace while never taking any of it for granted.

Thinking about the past and watching the patterns repeating themselves over the generations I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a case of reaping what you sow. Or doing as you would be done by. I’m not sure, though, that cantankerous old Great Grandma ever said thank you. I do. Often. And my goodness, I mean it.

Lots of Elkins, soon-to-be Elkins and close-to-Elkins at Margate in summer 2016.

I often visit performing arts training providers. I always set off enthusiastically hoping (expecting) to find excellence. Often I am disappointed. But that was definitely not the case when I travelled to Milton Keynes for a quick look at Arts1 last week – where I actually felt encouraged and uplifted by what I saw and heard.

Arts1 is a privately run, but publically funded, performing arts further education college. Because it draws down state money for its 16-19 year olds who are doing a Level 3 BTec in Performing arts the training is free to the consumers – exactly as it would have been if they’re stayed on at school and done the qualification in a sixth form.

“We keep numbers fairly low because we want to know them all as individuals and give each of them the support he or she needs” says Mountview-trained James Grimsey co-founder of Arts 1 and Creative Director. Twenty one students completed the course last summer.  Around twenty students per year is usual.

“We began back in 2006 with a part time school says principal Rebecca Carrington, Grimsey’s wife and Arts1 co-founder. “That continues to thrive from the classes for four years olds right through to the adult choir. Something for everyone!”  She, incidentally, also trained at Mountview and has a good CV as a performer including working on Cunard cruise ships so she knows what she’s talking about. Both are very well connected and there’s a goodly list of industry pros including a number of drama schools who have given masterclasses at Arts1 in the last eighteen months.

The idea for the full time FE training came about partly because some of the part-timers showed interest in continuing into vocational training. “Today we get applications from all over the country” says Grimsey. Carrington explains that she has a network of local families who provide safe, reasonably priced accommodation for students who are new to the area. And Arts1 is signed up to the Time4Change charter so that there’s genuine awareness of every student’s mental health needs.

So where do they go when they have completed this course? “Last year every single student got an offer for the next stage of training” says Carrington. Grimsey, on cue, then produces a photograph and introduces me by name to each of last year’s leavers telling me as he goes what offers they received and where they chose to go. It’s always a good criterion to judge a college by – how well the people in charge know their students – and on this occasion I was warmly impressed. Rose Bruford, Fourth Monkey, Millenium, East 15, ALRA and GSA were all on that list, by the way, and that’s only a sample.

I sit in, for a few minutes, on Grimsey’s choral training session with most of the college (mixed first and second years) who are rehearsing for a forthcoming event. He’s a vocal coach who really knows his stuff and I have to sit on my hands and clamp my mouth shut because it’s infectious and I’d really like to join in. Then several of his students treat me to their audition songs and the standard is generally high.

Grimsey and Carrington had asked me when I arrived if I’d be prepared to do a short Q/A with the students so that’s what we finished my visit with. What a delightful lot! Their questions ranged from how I started writing to what to look for in a drama school and it was fun to talk to them.

I left Arts 1’s tidy, neat but modest premises – Box Studios on a small industrial estate close to Milton Keynes’s city centre – warmly confident that these young people are getting fair, thorough professional training.

[email protected]  01908 604756

Arts1’s 2017 production of 9 to 5. Credit: Scott Rylander

Much ado about light bulbs in this household recently. Back in the days when Mr and Mrs E were able to manage their own lives and act on their decisions without a fuss, light bulbs were not an issue. Now that we have Ms Alzheimer’s living with us, they are.

Light bulbs used not to be on my job sheet. He bought the ones we needed, made sure we had spares and fitted them as required. And I, of course, took it completely for granted. It’s different now. So I have acquainted myself with lumens, found out what they mean in terms of the wattage I grew up with and bought bulbs for every room in the house that we moved into 16 months ago.

But I didn’t get it quite right. Some are too bright and harsh. Others are so dim you can’t see to read a book. Then I had an idea. I said: “While I’m busy writing this review could you do a little job for me? Please swap the centre light bulb in the sitting room with the one in the spare bedroom.” I really don’t think I could have expressed it any more clearly. And it’s really vital, I’m sure, that My Loved One is allowed to feel there are helpful things he can still do.

When I looked up from my work half an hour later, I could see – through my office’s glass door – that he was on the landing, removing the light bulb. Very carefully and earnestly on a small set of steps he was trying (but failing!) to be useful. When I raced out to see what was going on I found he had taken centre the light bulb out in our bedroom and the dining room too with the result that I then had no idea which bulb was where anywhere in the house. I sorted it in the end of course – by doing it myself on the steps but it took a while.

It was a worrying indication of the uncomprehending fog that Ms A has generated in MLO’s poor, tired brain. He had, I fear, no real idea what I had asked him to do but didn’t want to say so. He simply had a vague idea that I wanted light bulbs swapped so that’s what he was doing – more or less at random. It is, for anyone whose brain is functioning normally, almost impossible to imagine how this muddy muddle must feel to the victim of this horrible illness.

Then, this week, came a light bulb moment of a different sort, courtesy of a The Daily Telegraph story. It was the first Alzheimer’s research report I’ve read which made any personal sense at all. A UCL/Kings College London study of 3,400 civil servants conducted over 30 years has established that in some people, retirement triggers dementia. Use it or lose it seems to be the message and they don’t mean word puzzles and sudoku.

My Loved One was made redundant (by a new-broom CEO) in 1992  from a busy job as education officer for a professional body. It took him routinely all over Britain and, on one occasion, to the Far East to meet his institute’s students. He was very busy, focused and dynamic. When the axe fell he was in his late forties.

It wasn’t, in the early 1990s, an easy age at which to start again. There were a couple of short term contracts but nothing more. So, for many years – until Ms A arrived – MLO worked in my growing writing business. He did accounts, invoices, filing, admin (booking hotels, rail tickets et al on my behalf for example) and doing some of my more straightforward information-gathering research and interviews. He also ran the domestic side of our life like clockwork so that for decades I never ironed a shirt, changed a bed or bought a potato.

It was, however, all home-based and not – I suppose – the intellectual stimulation that going out every morning, be-suited with briefcase, and working with lots of other people had been. Some would say that, effectively, he retired before he was 50.

Could it be that over 20 years at home has triggered the arrival of Ms A at a relatively young age? MLO was 71 when he was diagnosed last year. We shall never know. But, as far as I’m concerned, it vindicates my own decision (made long ago) that, while I can possibly manage to work at all, I am most definitely not going to retire. My friends, many of whom seem to be having a lovely time doing not a lot, disapprove with passion. But we’re all different and I am certain that this is the right thing for me in my situation. I often say, flippantly, that’s it’s work which keeps me sane Perhaps it’s truer than I realise.

Arts Theatre, 23 Jan 2018

This slickly directed (by Jane Jeffery) showcase featured ALRA South’s 23 graduating students – fifteen male and eight female. That rather unusual imbalance meant that the twenty three extracts (mostly duologues) found more for the men to do than the women.

I would have liked, for example, to have seen Victoria Priddice in a third role. She was a delight as Caitrin in that showcase old favourite the weeing-in-the-graveyard scene from Love Steals us From Loneliness and then very strong as Amanda in Jack Stacey’s Filthy. In the latter she and Conrad Williamson as Robbie were listening attentively to each other and making accomplished use of silence.

Another one to watch is Matthew Farmer who gave us three very different roles. He glistened slimily as a fly art dealer in Ten Storey Love Song by Luke Barnes, became an urbane, rather tricky doctor in Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange and a very plausible ex boyfriend in Marine Parade by Simon Stephens. He’s a fine actor.

So is Victor Oisin, who commands the stage whenever he’s on it. His turn as actorly-voiced Ira Aldridge, sacked for playing Othello too well in Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet, was so powerful and convincing that I wanted to see him to the rest of it.  In complete contrast was his gor-blimey Tom in Occupied by Carla Grauls, including his mincing about pretending to be a girl. Expect to see more of this one.

I also admired Stefan Race’s work. He has a very unusual – and no doubt castable – face topped with Simon Rattle style curly hair. He gave us a dictatorial theatre director in the opening Mephisto by Ariadne Mnouchkine followed by an anxious schoolboy in Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing .

It’s always a treat (and not that common) to see Shakespeare in a showcase and Eve Humphreys found exactly the right level of vulnerable disdain for Olivia in Twelfth Night – speaking the verse with measured, incisive confidence.

Twenty three extracts in under an hour meant that this showcase was a bit bitty and a tad indigestible but that’s a generic showcase problem. It isn’t a criticism of ALRA. And I liked the framing, short, dialogue-free films at the beginning and end which allowed us to see their faces close up –  in some dramatically interesting situations.

PICK OF THE BUNCH: VICTOR OSHIN

Last week I attended an RSC education briefing event at the Barbican. There were nice sandwiches and a complimentary ticket for Titus Andronicus (deftly done for all its gore and David Troughton is, as always, extraordinary) immediately afterwards. So it’s a pity there weren’t more people there.

The handful of us who were heard Jacqui O’Hanlon, the RSC’s dynamic and passionate Head of Education, describing the growing number of partner schools her department works with. They provide resources, support, workshops based on rehearsal techniques and sometimes performances. All this and more helps children to start Shakespeare earlier, do it on their feet and see it live as set out in the RSC’s 2006 Manifesto, Stand Up For Shakespeare.

But the best thing of the evening – even better than Troughton’s Titus in its way – was hearing Azita Zohadi, headteacher at Nelson Mandela School in Birmingham and two of her pupils. Azita and her colleagues are totally committed to using the arts to raise standards and to develop whole children rather than crammed automata – she didn’t say that last bit but it was definitely implicit. In order to do this the school has many partner organisations, one of which is the RSC.

It’s a two-form entry school in which every single pupil has English as a second language. Yes, I queried that too. Had I heard aright? I had. The school website corroborates that 100% of the children at Nelson Mandela School have a first language which isn’t English. The school also has a higher than average number of socio-economically disadvantaged pupils with, for example, many of them entitled to free school meals. And large numbers of the children are underachievers when they start school.

When they leave it’s a very different story. The school’s results in reading and maths are way above the average for their local authority and Ofsted judged the school “outstanding” when it was last inspected in 2009/10.

And Azita thinks Shakespeare can take much of the credit because discovering him and finding that you can work with him builds confidence, does wonders for literacy and – transferable skills and all that – convinces children that there no limits to what they can achieve. Shakespeare might, in places, be difficult but provided no one tells you that when you’re say 6 or 7 you’ll just take it in your stride, enjoy the stories, relish the powerful words and shrug your shoulders or beam with glee.

Azita told us about a child in Year 2 (that’s aged 6/7) who was asked by an inspector who her favourite author was. “William Shakespeare” she answered promptly. When the sceptical adult pressed her she reeled off the names of lots of plays and explained what they’re about,

Then Azita’s pupils spoke – a boy and a girl each aged about 10. Understandably nervous, they’d clearly thought carefully about what they wanted to say. Both had seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford and been captivated, especially in the girl’s case, by Bottom. Both stressed that they think Shakespeare is utterly wonderful and said how he had helped them to learn. It was heart warming stuff.

If only Damian Hinds, new Secretary of State for Education, could have been there to hear all this. Theatre in general, and Shakespeare in particular, are educators par excellence. They’re a lot more fun than being relentless drilled for tests too.

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