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Grimm Tales – for Young and Old (Susan Elkin reviews)

Seven dark, delicious and often funny stories, adapted by Philip Wilson from Philip Pullman’s rather wonderful retellings of stories by the brothers Grimm make for a delightful afternoon (or evening) of outdoor theatre. And the leafy sculpture park is a magnificent spot for it – each story set in a different part of the wood with characters hiding behind trees, dancing round clearings and emerging from shadows.

The seven (a mystic number in itself) stories – from Little Red Riding Hood to The Juniper Tree – present desperate childless couples, eligible princes, malevolent witches, girls who aren’t always sweet, people with cannibalistic leanings, plenty of sudden deaths and the occasional resurrection. And you’re left reflecting that there really are only a handful of base stories which underpin the whole of fiction – and Shakespeare knew them all. “Three Snake Leaves” for instance, which was new to me is The Mikado spliced with Romeo and Juliet and seasoned with Pericles.

The quality of the acting and performance in this show, confirms my view that Chichester has one of the best youth theatres in the country. Directed by Dale Rooks (Director of LEAP at Chichester) this show showcases the talents of 54 young actors and musicians over half of whom are in their first Chichester show. And the structure of the piece means that, although we see often see actors in more than one lead role there is plenty for every single member of the company to do.

Outstanding for me, was Hal Darling strutting and preening, with a voice so sexy it would seduce anyone, as the predatory wolf gobbling (or something) Little Red Riding Hood and her Granny. He is also very strong as the dishy young count in The Goose Girl at the Spring and a very charismatic, nonchalant devil (where did the Faust story come from?) in The Juniper Tree. There’s lovely work from Lucy Tebb as a long nailed, growling witch in Rapunzel too ( a different take from her interpretation of Hansel and Gretel’s witch) and Issac Sturge is fun as Hans My Hedgehog.

The real strength of this production, though, is in the polished ensemble work. They cope admirably with what Daniel Evans, artistic director at Chichester, called “outdoor audibility issues” when I spoke to him before the show. Without mics they make almost every word crystal clear despite a slight wind making the trees join in with a script of their own on the afternoon I was there. I’ve seen professionals cope less well in wooded venues. “Once upon a time” they dance/chant atmospherically at the beginning of each story to a minor key march tune. The excellent music is by Eamonn O’Dwyer. MD Miles Russell leads his accomplished young band along the path to each mini venue playing that tune as they go and the audience follows – rather like the promenade theme in Mussorsgy’s Pictures at An Exhibition. And in a way that’s totally appropriate. We are in a sculpture park seeing ten minute vignettes against that backdrop. It’s an exhibition in every sense and a very fine one.

Warmest congratulation to LEAP. I’m now eagerly looking forward to your Beauty and the Beast at Christmas.

http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Chichester%20Festival%20Theatre%20(professional)-Grimm%20Tales%20-%20For%20Young%20and%20Old&reviewsID=2951

It is Thomas Dausgaard’s extraordinary control over dynamics that I shall remember most about this concert. In the Schubert he had the upper strings whispering so softly that they were hardly there which made those punctuating sforzandos all the more dramatic. At the end of the Mahler the sound simply died away, while 5000 people waited, breath held, for the baton to drop (and it was a long time) despite the earlier inappropriate applause at the end of powerfully moving movements in both works.

It is an inspired programming idea to give us a pair of unfinished (arguably valedictory) symphonies composed 90 years apart. Here the Schubert stood gloriously self contained in its two movements – both in triple time with all that familiar B minor melancholy. Dausgaard has a knack of really making you listen (to the cello opening and the anguish in the second movement for example) with the results that this performance sounded delightfully fresh. Even the slight raggedness in the syncopated theme in the first movement was only a momentary distraction.

The Mahler, in contrast, was presented here as completed by Deryck Cooke and a team of three others as it almost always is. This version was first played at the Proms in 1964 and this was its seventh performance there. The opening adagio (pretty much pure Mahler) with its unusual gift to violas at the start gave Dausgaard plenty of scope to squeeze out every drop of dynamic contrast although sadly, when the music is as quiet as that one becomes more conscious of audience noise and fidgeting. Both scherzos and the playful but doom laden Purgatorio added to the sense of Mahler’s anguish – when this symphony was drafted he was both dying and dealing with his wife’s infidelity. This felt like an authentically autobiographical performance and a poignant one.

The high spot of Mahler 10 is, of course, the moment when the second scherzo, the fourth movement, gives way to the finale. Dausgaard, who described the music in this symphony as “transcendental” in conversation with Sean Raffery on Radio 3’s in Tune last week, really leaned on  those extraordinary resonant silences which lurk menacingly in the dialogue between bass drum and tuba. Yes, we were suddenly a very long way from the Schubert we’d heard an hour earlier.

Congratulations to the BBC Scottish Symphony orchestra for all of this. The Mahler, in particular, is an exhausting work to play but there was never any sense of dipping energy levels. Rather the playing (Charlotte Ashton’s long flute solo in the Mahler, for instance) was always fine and often exciting. If this is the quality they can achieve with their new chief conductor then I look forward to more.

http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?cat=3

I write in praise of Chichester Festival Theatre’s Learning, Education and Participation (LEAP) department. Led by Dale Rooks, it reaches 800 young people and I think it is one of the best youth theatres in the country.

Last week I was in Chichester for Grimm Tales for Young and Old, a stage adaptation by Philip Wilson of seven of Philip Pulman’s retellings of stories told by the Brothers Grimm. The open air, promenade setting was seven different, stunningly atmospheric, leafy spots in the Cass Sculpture Foundation on the top of the Downs at Goodwood. There, 54 young actors and musicians, 29 of whom were taking part in their first CFT show, demonstrated what they can do. And it’s considerable.

I – alongside an enthusiastic and engaged audience of children, grandparents and parents plus Daniel Evans, CFT’s artistic director, musicianJoe Stilgoe, and various CFT professionals and trustees – watched the young cast chanting, narrating, dancing, speaking with audible aplomb over the rusting trees and captivating everyone present with these quirky, often dark, sometimes funny stories including Little Red Riding Hood, The Juniper Tree and Hans My Hedgehog. A band of young players led by professional MD Miles Russell, led us from place to place with Eamonn O’Dwyer’s haunting music.  The piece is a wonderful choice for a youth theatre – so much casting scope amongst all those eligible princes, witches, cannibals, predators, childless couples, troubled kings, strange offspring, scheming girls and more.

And the standard they achieve is remarkable. Now, I honestly don’t believe that the young people in West Sussex are actually more talented then their counterparts anywhere else. No. this is down to skilled, charismatic leadership (Rooks herself directs Grimm Tales) and the committed investment by CFT in this aspect of its work.

Each Christmas the main house is given over to LEAP to stage a production which becomes CFT’s Christmas show – you could say it’s a leap (sorry) of faith but it pays off in spades. Last year thousands of local people enjoyed LEAP’s excellent Peter Pan and there’s a production of Beauty and the Beast coming up this year which I’m looking forward as keenly as I would anything else CFT mounts. Running Wild which transferred to the Open Air Theatre Regents Park and has done very well on tour, began life here too.

LEAP also feeds into other CFT productions. There are two children in the opening scene of The Stepmother, which I saw on the same day as Grimm Tales. They (there are two pairs who alternate) are recruited from the youth theatre. So were the boys  in both last year’s The Enemy of the People and this season’s Forty Years On. It’s very encouraging to see a company not only, doing all it can to provide astonishingly high quality learning and development opportunities for young people, but also occasionally giving them “real” professional work.

Of course there are plenty of other good youth theatres run by venues up and down the country. I’ve seen lots of them in action and admired their work. Nonetheless I think Chichester is pushing the boat out further than most because it’s an integrated part of the organisation not something earnestly bolted on. And the difference shines out.  Warmest congratulations to LEAP and all who sail in her.

My review of Grimm Tales for Young and Old http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/reviewmenu.php?REVIEW-Chichester%20Festival%20Theatre%20(professional)-Grimm%20Tales%20-%20For%20Young%20and%20Old&ProductionID=18274

Sod you, Ms Alzheimer’s. Time for some positive thinking. Whatever you say and do there are still, at the moment, plenty of things My Loved One continues to do quite happily. Here are ten of them.

He can still:

  • walk the mile from our house to Beckenham alone (and come home safely!) and do a job when he gets there – provided he doesn’t have more than one purpose. So he can take a parcel to the post office, buy some biscuits in M&S or get his hair cut – but not more than one of them. If he tries to do both X and Y, one or other will be forgotten.
  • remember routes provided he’s known them for a long time. Driving from Elephant and Castle to Waterloo the other day, I was thrown by an unexpected road sign and turned the wrong way. “It’s OK,” MLO said, quick as a flash, “there’s a roundabout round the next bend. Then you can peel off to the right towards Waterloo Bridge.” Spot on.
  • recognise everyone we know and greet them by name although it was very funny the other day when our second granddaughter popped her head unexpectedly round the dining room door where we were breakfasting. (Her dad has a key and had come to do some work in the house but he weren’t expecting his lovely daughter). She was wearing dark glasses and her father’s company uniform and for a moment neither of us recognised her.
  • enjoy a favourite meal and eat very well. It’s a joy to see him enthusiastically tucking into, say, sautée potatoes and fried eggs. He also eats things that he’s always refused to touch in the past such as tomatoes and beetroots – bit of a bonus from the cook’s point of view.
  • trundle his old chap’s trolley to the supermarket and buy most of what’s required reasonably efficiently – provided it’s a fairly short list and he can go at his own adagio pace. I now have all the bulky stuff delivered and send him just to choose, for example, nice apples.
  • quote poetry and songs he learned as a child such as The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck, Ozymandias and some filthy ditty he learned in the Scouts in which “venus” rhymes with “penis” – well you can’t expect callow, pubescent youth to have mastered the finer points of poetics.
  • do lots of household tasks provided they are very clearly explained and assigned one at a time. “Can you go and collect the windfall plums and put them in the compost bin please?” or “How about you vacuum cleaning the inside of the car?” are fine but it’s no good asking him to do first one and then the other in the same conversation. It’s very much like dealing with a child on the autism spectrum. In fact, isn’t about time someone researched the similarities between autism and Alzheimer’s?
  • get me a cup of tea. A non-tea-drinker himself, MLO has twice in the past week got out of bed while I’m still sleeping off the previous night’s show and subsequent late night review and returned with a mug of tea. Bit heavy handed with the milk and not all that hot because he moves pretty slowly but I’m touched that a) he thinks of it and b) still makes a reasonable fist of doing it.
  • get a lot of pleasure from a walk round the park. It’s a simple thing but he likes seeing trees, wildlife, flowers, children having fun and all the rest of it. There’s a circular walk round Beckenham Place Park we do fairly often and this week we revisited Horniman’s for the first time since we moved back to our native South London last year. It all helps with fitness too which is meant to be a way of helping to distance Ms A.
  • Make me laugh. Quite often there’s flash of how he used to be. He’ll come out with some silly pun or a chunk of WS Gilbert (who had a witty comment on almost everything) and we giggle together. Long may it last.

Jackie Palmer Stage School in action.

I visited High Wycombe last week on what was probably the wettest day of the year. I could have done with flippers. Despite the weather, it was very enlightening to visit (for the first time) the famous Jackie Palmer Stage School (JPSS) whose former students include James Corden and Eddie Redmayne and many other performing arts successes along with hundreds who have gained confidence, had fun and then taken their skills into other professions.

Founded in 1971 by Jackie Palmer (who died last year aged 95) and her daughter Marylyn, the school has occupied various premises in and around High Wycombe. Today it has spacious, immaculately converted studios in a former motorcycle showroom. Also on site, and part of the enterprise, is local radio station Wycombe Sound. Marylyn continues as principal and her husband/colleague Chris Phillips runs the radio station with the help of 100 volunteers.

JPSS offers part-time classes in dance, drama and singing for school age children. There are also two full-time courses – a BTech for post 16s and a “gap year” course. The school has a flourishing agency too.

Now Marylyn has teamed up with children’s casting director Jo Hawes in a new venture. The two women have known each other, and been friends, since they met at Theatre Royal Windsor when Jo, now 57,  “was 15 and Marylyn, err, wasn’t”. This is the project I went to High Wycombe to learn about.

The Rep Company starts next January and will offer intensive performance-based training for 6 months based in the High Wycombe area, using various venues across Bucks and Berks. This is a quasi pilot. The plan is then to continue it as a one year scheme from September 2018.

“Students leaving school or even graduating from drama school often know a lot about acting but, in my experience, they have little idea how to function effectively as part of a team putting on a show” says Marylyn firmly. She has strong views about making yourself easy to work with and not behaving prima-donnishly if you want to succeed in the performing arts world.

Jo concurs. “If you can’t be part of a team then you’re in the wrong industry”.

The Rep Company’s mission is to teach team work and show participants, through experience, how professional shows work “Everything will be performance based” says Jo explaining that the company’s  rep season will include a farce, a pantomime, a Shakespeare (probably open air or site specific or both), an Agatha Christie, a musical, a devised piece and, of course, a radio play since the facilities are on the premises.

“And they need to learn that at the end of the show everyone has to help clear up, for example.“ says Marylyn who tells me that she once saw Judi Dench cheerfully sweeping the stage thereby setting quite an example to everyone else involved in the show.

Because Jo and Marylyn are planning to bring in professional directors and teachers there will be a cost attached to the training – probably in the region of £5,000 per participant although that is not fixed yet. Ticket sales will, they hope, cover venue costs.

The pair have industry contacts coming out of their ears and seem totally confident that they can draw in casting directors and agents to see, and maybe snap up, their “graduates” at the end of the season. Even I have promised to be at Theatre Royal Windsor next year for the musical, probably Guys and Dolls.

So who are they hoping to recruit? It looks set to be a pretty mixed bag of around 20 people. They want school leavers and drama school graduates. Then there are actors, who have taken time out perhaps for family reasons, looking to get their skills back up to scratch. There has also been interest from some much older people which is good news as far as Marylyn and Jo are concerned. “It means we can cast shows much more realistically and the wider the diversity the more everyone can learn from everyone else.

Jo and Marylyn are recruiting this autumn for January starters. Tempted? Phone 01494 520 978  or email [email protected]  http://www.therepcompany.co.uk

Dave squaring up to Berlioz

When I was a child whimsical adults would talk about benign fairies coming at bedtime to scatter sleepy dust on us. How sweet. Well, hateful Ms Alzheimers is certainly armed with pocketsful of sleepy dust but it’s no blessing. More like a malevolent curse.

My Loved One, until recently an active. quite energetic man, is now tired all the time. If he sits down he nods off and that’s despite also sleeping well all night.  Take, for example, the night last week when Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust was on at the Proms. MLO and Dave the cat repaired purposefully to the sitting room to listen to it. Now, I have to say that Dave is not a very discerning music lover. He’s as happy with Elvis as Wagner, just as long he’s got a warm, cuddly, relaxed human being to lean against. And he certainly had it during said Berlioz. When I popped downstairs from my office half an hour later in search of a sustaining cup of tea I glanced through the sitting room door to see them both fast asleep. Chin uncomfortably on his chest, MLO wasn’t hearing a single note of Berlioz’s masterpiece.

The same thing often happens these days at live concerts, plays and films – and that would have been laughably unthinkable even two years ago. As a reviewer I sometimes see two shows on one day –  typically a matinee following by an evening performance. I wouldn’t now dream of asking MLO to accompany me on such a long day because I know he’d find it unbearably exhausting. Frailty, thy name is man. Especially if Ms A has got at you.

Then there are shows which entail a long journey home. The later it gets the tireder he becomes and sometimes, anyway, I’m allocated only a single ticket. I’ve lost count, for example, of the number of times this year I’ve driven solo home from Chichester pounding along all those As and Ms – A27, A24, M23, M25 and A 22 – with only late night Radio 3 for company. In another life I would have stayed at the Premier Inn in Chichester and driven home in the morning but am now uneasy about leaving MLO at home overnight. I have two double show days coming up actually in Chichester – so that’s the problem compounded.

One of the saddest things is to watch MLO – a lifelong reader – struggling to read books through his fatigue. He has had the same two books, which he also carries around the house during the day, on the bedside for around three months. He reads a page and then the book falls from his hand as his head droops in sleep. I suspect – although I haven’t asked the question and don’t really want to know the answer at the moment – that he can’t actually remember what he’s already read when he picks up the book. It reminds me of the weak teenage readers I used to teach in secondary schools who would come to class with the same “private reader” all year – until I intervened and told them to give up and get something short, easy and do-able to build confidence. It’s a very different situation when reading ability is declining because you’ve got Ms A chewing away at your brain.

I first noticed this uncharacteristic  somnolence two years ago when we were on holiday in Arizona. Every night after dinner we’d return to our hotel room to read for a couple of hours – me seated at the in-room desk and MLO on the sofa. Within a few minutes I’d glance over my shoulder and he’d be asleep. At the time I just thought it was mildly amusing – the desert air and all that. Little did I know. I seem to have watched him – still only 72 –  age twenty years in just a few months.

Well  this disease is a one way street. He isn’t going to get any livelier – although the medication he’s due to start next month could, just possibly, stop him getting any sleepier for a bit. Meanwhile the hardest part is the poignancy of his saying, quite often, that he hopes to be better soon. If only. The bitter truth is very hard to accept especially when you’re the person it’s happening to.

society/company: Chickenshed (directory)
performance date: 20 Jul 2017
venue: Chickenshed Theatre
 
David Walliams’ surreally bonkers but heartwarmingly hopeful story of friendship could have been written for Chickenshed with its “no pigeon holes” mission of inclusivity. Five children, one of them seriously, probably terminally, ill are in an old fashioned hospital ward presided over by a draconian, comically nasty, Miss Trunchbull-like, matron played by Sarah Connolly. Four of the children – and eventually all five – form a rolling “midnight gang” which involves creeping, strictly against the rules, round the hospital after lights out in search of imaginative adventures as a form of escape from the misery of life on the ward which includes cornflakes soused in cold tea for breakfast.

Yossi Goodlink as Tom gives a warm performance as a chirpy boy injured by a cricket ball and thrilled to escape from his ghastly boarding school, although sad that his parents have apparently abandoned him. Tamika Armstrong creates a feisty girl – all four limbs in plaster – who happily leads the group. Finn Walters is good as the temporarily blind Robin who wants to be a musician and George (Joe Booth) is a plump boy with a penchant for chocolates and a flair for making cutting comments – and cunning plans such as drugging the chocolates which he knows Matron will confiscate, scoff and then fall asleep. The fifth child is Sally, played by Chloe Stevenson, whose dream future life is dramatically and movingly enacted for her at the end by which time each child has seen a heartfelt wish come true.

There’s delightful work from Ashley Driver as Hospital Porter who lives and breathes for the hospital and is much loved despite his “ugliness”. And the moment at the end when Michael Bossisse’s hilarious (ham West Indian accent) Tootsie coyly invites him to sleep on her sofa packs a very powerful message.

Keith Dunne’s set is quite something too. It has the name of the hospital in reverse and a clock tower above the internal set which has a lurid institutional turquoise floor and is dominated by clinical wall tiles – from which emerge various smaller items as imagination takes over.

Lou Stein, Chickenshed’s newish Artistic Director, directs this show and ensures that the acting quality is such that the diverse cast of 14 blends well together. Many of them have been Chickenshed members since childhood. Several have completed (or are working towards) BTEC or degree qualifications at Chickenshed. Several have stayed on as members of staff.

Lots of delighted laughter bubbled from the children in the audience on press night, an occasion made special by the presence of Walliams himself. He posed for lots of photographs with his young fans in the interval and spoke at the end of the show, publicly telling a thrilled cast that he liked this production better than any other adaptation of any of his other books.

First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Chickenshed-The%20Midnight%20Gang&reviewsID=2909
society/company: Garsington Opera (directory)
performance date: 30 Jul 2017
venue: Garsington Open-Air Opera Pavilion, Wormsley
 
This was undoubtedly the most uplifting and moving evening I’ve spent in the theatre this year. A community opera with an all-age cast of 180 (youngest child on stage appeared to be around a year old), Silver Birch, directed by Karen Gillingham, tells the story of Jack who served in Iraq, all set again the community and family he leaves behind. Jessica Duchen who wrote the libretto based Jack’s story partly on the experience of Jay Smith, ex Irish Guards, who was in the audience the night I saw Silver Birch.

The juxtaposition of the children back home playing and taunting in the playground and the horror of the front line – one of the most effective on-stage evocations of war I’ve ever seen was almost unbearably poignant. Roxanna Panufnik’s fine music is full of mood change too. She gives us, for example, a sparky setting of the traditional Soldier Soldier Will You Marry Me? contrasted with the acrobatic, squaddy sequence with chanting and marching to tattoo-style music. It is, incidentally, remarkable what high quality work a highly skilled movement director (Natasha Khamjani) can get from a group of young non-professsionals. There are several series of make-you-gasp flips and somersaults from younger marchers too.

Underlying and underpinning the plot is the ghostly presence of Siegfried Sassoon (Bradley Travis) and quotations from his poetry are woven into the libretto. I saw Silver Birch on the day when people were amassing in Belgium to mark the 100th anniversary of Passchendaele. The futility and sameness of war could not have been clearer.

Six professionals, mostly seasoned Garsington performers, are at the centre of this show and there is a strong collaborative sense of everyone learning from everyone else. Sam Furness (tenor), whose character is deeply damaged by the war, sings with cracking emotion as Jack. Darren Jeffrey (bass) is strong as his father, bullying but actually troubled, Victoria Simmonds delights as his anguished mother, Sarah Redgwick as his teacher and there’s a nice performance from James Way as the (slightly) younger brother who goes to war with Jack and returns injured. On the night I saw the show William Saint played the child, boy-treble little brother, Leo, and Katya Harlan was sweet and feisty as the family’s youngest child, Chloe. She keeps in touch with her favourite brother while he’s away using the password “silver birch” because the nearby tree has grown to maturity during Jack’s lifetime. It, like Jack, is damaged at the end but there’s hope for both.

Part of the aim of Garsington’s community opera (usually once every three years) is to bring in participants and audience who might not usually have anything to do with opera. It seemed to be succeeding at every level. At the beginning we were introduced to some of the people involved including several of the young people (there are young players alongside professionals in the orchestra too), a woman who has “historic domestic abuse issues” and a man related to Seigfried Sassoon. It was also good to see the stage manager, Paul Carr, entertainingly explaining what he and his colleagues, including some youngsters, do.

I really hope that this fine work does not begin and end at Wormsley with three Garsington Opera performances in the heart of idyllic Oxfordshire countryside. It deserves many more outings – soon.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Garsington%20Opera-Silver%20Birch&reviewsID=2921