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Dangerous Daughters (Susan Elkin reviews)

Premiered in 2010 by the MTA’s inaugural intake, Dangerous Daughters (writer Nick Stimson, composed Annemarie Lewis Thomas) is a show which has matured and developed. And it’s both interesting – and a theatrical treat – to see it brought to life again, seven years on, by this year’s 19 graduates.

Stimson’s engaging narrative focuses on the Pankhurst family: Emmeline (Lydia Gardiner), her three daughters: Christabel (Georgina Young), Sylvia (Katy Southgate), Adela (Alex Mellors) and son Harry (Robbie Noonan). The wider political issues are explored via the family dynamic which is often pretty tense and tragic.

It’s an ideal show for a performing arts college with more female than male students because …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre review http://musicaltheatrereview.com/musical-theatre-academy-dangerous-daughters/

Seven comprehensive school students are preparing their GCSE music performance. They’re a mixed bunch but all committed to music and all wanting to continue to A Level. Then they learn that the school, an academy, is dropping A Level music.

Thomas Attwood (who also directs) provides a strong book with masses of scope to explore the dynamics between the seven teenagers as well as the central political issue …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review http://musicaltheatrereview.com/the-state-of-things-brockley-jack-studio-theatre/

The joke about expecting to get terrible reviews because “it’s in this show’s manifesto isn’t it?” sounds very confident. Sadly, that confidence is woefully misplaced.

Michael Head (who also directs) has reworked his former versions of The Sword and the Dope to produce a very weak political satire, mostly about Brexit and evil Conservative politicians.

Set in Arthur’s England – a stale concept anyway because Spamalot does it rather better – it feels like ‘Horrible Histories Gone Wrong’ and falls flat on its face …

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review http://musicaltheatrereview.com/the-sword-and-the-dope-waterloo-east-theatre/

In his 1903 play Man and Superman  Bernard Shaw famously observes that “He, who can, does. He, who cannot, teaches”.

And it still hits the nail on the head. If you’re trying to become an actor, singer, dancer, triple threat performer or theatre technician then you don’t want to be taught by people who have little or no direct personal experience of the industry they’re preparing you for. Apart from anything else the industry is very volatile and if your teacher isn’t bang up to date he or she could easily give you bad advice or even misinformation.

All over the country there are drama schools with full time staff who have no time or, probably, inclination to practise the art they teach – or maybe they’re not good enough anyway. That’s why it is refreshing to find one which has no truck with this approach.

TheMTA was founded by Annemarie Lewis Thomas in 2009. Now based in the Bernie Grant Centre in Tottenham it is small – a maximum of 40 students across its two year intensive, accelerated course. Everyone who teaches there, including Thomas herself must also be a current industry practitioner. That’s the deal.

It means teachers can inform everything they teach the students with their own parallel work. It puts a rather specific spin on the term “industry readiness” and may, in part, account for the fact that – to date –  every single MTA graduate has secured representation before graduation. They get plenty of jobs too –  86% of MTA graduates are in paid, professional work.

You can see it in the quality of the shows they do too.  Last week I saw Dangerous Daughters – a developed version of a show Thomas co-wrote with Nick Stimson in 2010 for her inaugural group of students. Everything about it is cutting edge because people like director Racky Plews, and others who work with the students, know exactly what the industry wants – now, in 2017 –  and how to develop new talent to work in it.

Other larger drama schools are gradually realising that this is a selling point and telling students that many of its staff have worked in the industry recently. And the best schools use – as theMTA does – huge numbers of part-timers so that teachers can fit their own professional work in with teaching commitments. Edward Kemp, director of RADA – once told me with pride that one of his hardest jobs is convening a staff meeting because of the logistics of getting such a large and disparate group together.

Good schools also import guest staff – sometimes very eminent ones – to do one-off masterclasses on some aspect of the industry. And this, obviously, is yet another way of bringing the students closer to the industry as it really is.

It all needs to go further though, in my view. I’m unconvinced that anyone who – in Shaw’s terms – “cannot” should be telling others how to do it. Yes, I know that teaching is a different skill from, say, performing but the best people can do both. And they’re the ones who should be developing the talent of the next generation.

As always on the penultimate night of the world’s biggest classical music festival, the atmosphere in the Royal Albert Hall was up several notches as the capacity audience settled down and the Vienna Philharmonic filed in.

Michael Tilson Thomas (how like the fondly remembered Otto Klemperer he begins to look – same sort of charisma too) made sure we heard lush precision in Brahms’ Variations on the St Anthony Chorale. The woodwind section players were almost dancing by the time we got to the vivace in Variation 5. It’s a fine work to begin a concert with because the score (not that TilsonThomas was using one) provides so much for everyone to do. It’s almost as much of showcase for instruments as is Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a theme of Purcell aka TheYoung Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.

Then, the orchestra was slimmed down for Mozart’s piano concerto No 14 in E flat major, K449. Written in 1784 in Vienna this elegant, if shortish, work is an apt choice for a VPO concert although it isn’t one of Mozart’s most familiar concerti. Emmanuel Ax was an unshowy soloist who played Mozart’s own cadenzas with authority and lightness of touch. The dialogue between piano and orchestra, especially in the andantino middle movement was nicely balanced and it’s good to see Ax so engaged with the orchestra that he was virtually conducting from his piano stool when he wasn’t playing himself.

The advertised part of this fine concert ended with Beethoven’s Symphony No 7, as glorious and joyful as ever. Tilson Thomas’s interpretation, however, is more grandiose than frothy. His tempi, in the first three movements are gentle. He spares us those ultra-fashionable Norrington-esque hurtles in pursuit of Beethoven’s original metromome markings. The result? You could hear every delightful detail in the texture including lots of fine flute work, strong contrast between brass interjections and  woodwind rejoinders  along with the rich, but spirited string sound for which the VPO is famous. He gave us plenty of speed and lots of the prescribed brio in the allegro to round off a pretty splendid account of a popular work which manages never to sound hackneyed. I do wonder, though, about the wisdom of lining up horns and trumpets, five big steps above the strings. It means they can see and be seem, obviously. But it also means that you can hear their parts so clearly it’s as if you’re reading their music and sometimes it’s obtrusive rather than blended into the sound.

Tilson Thomas introduced the encore On Hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring as “a piece you will all know very well” – a hint that he, an American, and the VPO do not. In fact I discovered afterwards that the orchestra had never played it before. Well of course Delius is a long way from Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven in terms of both time and place but the VPO played it with tender respect and it was a fitting end to a most enjoyable concert.

Lovely to see the VPO in London again, by the way. This time I counted seven women players: four second violins, one first violin and two cellos. Things are gradually equalising but they still have a way to go. I’m sure there are plenty of eager, talented female brass and woodwind players in Austria and elsewhere just waiting for a break …

First published by Lark Reviews http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?p=3777

I heard the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on their home turf in Amsterdam in June so it was a real treat to catch them on their first Proms outing since 2009, only a few weeks later – this time with their chief conductor, Daniel Gatti – and the choice of programme, definitely not mainstream, was interesting too. Wolfgang Rihm, born 1952, and Anton Bruckner are not obvious bedfellows but in combination they provided quite a showcase for this fine orchestra.

Like most people in the hall, I was hearing Rihm’s In-Schrift (loosely translated as Inscription), premiered in 1995, for the first time. It requires a chamber size orchestra without upper strings but includes six percussionists and six trombones, two of them bass trombones. The starring role belongs to the percussionists who at one point lead a magnificent quasi-cadenza on five side drums. Mesmerised by the sheer excitement of it, I was also glad that I didn’t have to count for the entries in such an episodic work full of tempo changes. I was almost relieved to see Gatti counting the bars with his fingers for the percussionists as they reached the turning point in their big moment. There’s a lot of finely nuanced dialogue in this piece as it works through its many moods and tensions. The principal flute, who led the orchestra for this piece, for example, has a lot of interplay with trombones, woodblocks and tubular bells (5 sets). If you want drama in music, there was no shortage of it here.

After an interval to digest the impact of the Rihm, we were back to a more conventionally configured full orchestra, although Gatti splits his violins and puts his double basses behind the firsts. Bruckner’s unfinished ninth symphony in D minor (homage to Beethoven, he said) is not one of his best known works. Written at the very end of his life, it feels like an autobiographical retrospective which works well in three movements – two slow ones sandwiching a contrasting scherzo and trio.  Gatti, who conducted this without a score, coaxed a sound from the orchestra which managed to be both crisp (those repeated chopping down bows in the middle movement) and velvety with a pleasingly warm brass sound, suitably plangent in the first movement and like melted chocolate in the adagio. Clearly a charismatic musician, Gatti sometimes beats time clearly and at others reduces his hand movement to a minimalist, understated twitch. He is, presumably, communicating with his eyes which, of course, the audience can’t see. At 65 minutes this is a very long, concentrated work and although Gatti ensured that it held the attention and was pretty moving, it might have been better to have cut some of the repeats, especially the one at the opening of the third movement.

First published in Lark Reviews:

Sometimes I feel that our marriage is over. Something else has replaced it although I can’t quite put my finger on what. Have I really morphed, in just a few months, into a Joyce Grenfell-style nursery manager cum hearty carer?

Take the night last week when My Loved One staggered off to the bathroom in the early hours as usual. When he opened the bedroom door on his way back, the room was flooded with light. “Can you just turn the bathroom light off please?” I said. “But there are people in the bathroom” he replied, glancing back anxiously over his shoulder. Well, I couldn’t help wondering just who these imaginary  2.00 am revellers occupying our bathroom might be in the fog of a demented mind but I needed to be practical. “No, there’s no one in the bathroom.  Turn the light off please” I said in my best grown up, kind ( I hope)  but no-nonsense voice. I could hear myself going straight into dispassionate, assertive classroom mode without an ounce of wifeliness. Yet another thing Ms Alzheimers has stolen.

In a long committed marriage when both partners are well and thinking straight, there is a lot of shorthand communication. A raised eyebrow, a joke shared a glance, a knowledge of each other which goes hundreds of miles beyond sex. That depth of integration which is what earlier forms of English (in the 1611 Bible for instance) really meant by “knowing”. It means you sense things about each other and understand things which may never have been discussed. It’s the marital dynamic which people who have serial relationships or who remain single or have part-time partners can never get their heads round. On a very trivial level I’ve never forgotten, some years ago,  a quasi daughter-in-law being astonished when I sent MLO off to settle the bill in a restaurant using my card. “But surely he doesn’t know your pin number?” she asked. Yes he did. And he knows almost everything else about me too. There are no secrets. It’s called trust.

Then along comes Ms Alzheimers, in her perniciously determined way, and puts her oar in. Of course, I still trust him implicitly but it’s no longer an even thing. He has no choice but to trust me more than ever – I even have Power of Attorney over his bank account, I make sure he takes the right pills and that the house is securely locked when we go to bed at night. Every day he arrives in my office with papers which have just come in the post, about, say, the burglar alarm or a magazine subscription, muttering “I’m worried about this” only for me to say tartly “Well you needn’t be. I’ve already dealt with it.”

We now have daily briefings – which takes me back to one school I taught at in which the head required all staff in the staff room for a few minutes before registration to be told what was what for the day. It’s very institutional and formal. I tell him, for instance, that the cleaner is coming at 10.00 and/or I am leaving to review a show at 4.30 and/or he has an optician’s appointment at noon – all of which is also on a large calendar in the kitchen. Retention is poor. Last Sunday we (or rather I had and delivered it as a fait accompli) planned to go to Ightham Mote, a National Trust property in Kent. We’d talked about it for several days. I reminded him at breakfast time, then raced about doing various domestic and professional jobs which needed to be done before we left. At 10.30 I said. “Right, let me just put some make up on. Ten minutes and I’ll be good to go.” In reply I got a very distracted “Are you going to tell me where you’re going and when you’ll be back?”

Well of course I know that he’s not going to go trying his luck with another woman or waltzing off to the Caribbean with our savings. That sort of trust is rock solid. But the day to day unreliability militates against trust at other levels and is hard to live with – the doors left unlocked, the forgotten bag in a coffee shop, the items on the shopping list he omits to buy and dozens more ordinary things which I took for granted for nearly half a century. In practice I have to issue constant reminders about where to put things, what to do and where to go. And I have to tell myself continually that I am not Joyce Grenfell and I am not running a nursery class although the similarities are hideous.

And one of the hardest things is coping with the decline of real, intuitive communication –  Shakespeare’s “marriage of true minds.” A friend who lives in Australia and is in very similar situation commented recently. “I feel so angry. This is not what I signed up for”. I know exactly what she means but I try very hard to be resigned, practical and loving rather than angry. If only I always succeeded.

It’s dead easy to get into university. It’s very hard to get into a good drama school. Why?

Applicants should reflect on the reasons as term starts this month for many and the next batch begin to fill in their UCAS forms for next year.

All you need for most non-Russell group universities is a couple of low grade A levels or equivalent. Huge expansion in recent years, and the trebling of the tuition fees in 2012, has made universities very hungry for students. They have to pay the massive salaries of their Vice Chancellors, somehow after all.

This year university application numbers were down on previous years which led to some universities lowering their admission criteria.  Fill the coffers at any price?

It doesn’t do much for standards of course. And only last week  a report (commissioned by Joe Crossley, Business Development Director of QUBE Learning https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/top-10-pointless-degrees/05/09/)  listed the ten most useless degrees and yes, drama studies was on the list, along with acting, film studies, dance/choreography.

If you really want to perform, or become a theatre technician, then you almost certainly need the hands-on approach of a drama school with at least 30 hours tuition a week, people with proper industry experience to teach you, lots of opportunities to perform and all the rest of it. It must be practical if it’s to be vocational.

The fact that most drama schools now give you something called a degree at the end of it is merely a technicality originally introduced to get funding for drama school students. The training is about as far from a handful of hours a week in lectures on a university drama degree as you could possibly get.

And at the end of drama school training, you have some chance of working in your chosen industry. Your theatre job prospects at the end of most university drama degrees are minimal.

The evidence is in every theatre programme you pick up. The cast have almost always trained at one of about 30 well known drama schools. That’s the traditional 20 or so which used to form Conference of Drama Schools plus a handful of others which really deliver the goods. When did you last see an actor, designer, composer or other creative declaring that he or she trained at some minor university? I’m not saying it never happens but it’s pretty rare.

This, of course, is why most acting courses in drama schools get around 2000 applicants for 30 places. I rest my case: it is much more difficult to get a place in a drama school than in a university. And for very good reason.

Two caveats. There are a few universities which vociferously claim that they train performers as well as developing academic interest in drama and developing “leaders and thinkers”. Some of them seem to be doing a reasonable job but – if performance is your passion and you want to work professionally – quiz them very hard indeed about how many of last year’s graduates are now working in shows as performers and technicians. Insist on hard facts before you agree to sign away nearly £10,000 per year.

Second, a number of very famous drama schools have merged with universities. East 15, for example, is part of the University of Essex and Guildford School of Acting is part of University of Surrey. University of London is Royal Central School of Speech and Drama’s parent body and the former Birmingham School of Acting is now part of Birmingham Conservatoire which “belongs” to Birmingham City University. In practice, such drama schools usually occupy separate or discrete premises and plenty of autonomy to run their courses as drama schools traditionally do rather than being under pressure to reduce teaching hours and get the students to write lots of essays. It wants watching though – question the staff carefully about the pros and cons of being part of a university before you decide to apply.

And never lose sight of the fact that if you get a place easily it probably isn’t that you’re supremely talented (although you might be). It’s far more likely to be that they want your money. Buyer beware.

Illustration: Drama Studio London combat class