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A Chichester Opera

I was bowled over by Chichester Festival Theatre’s Caroline, or Change this week. How could anyone listening to that score and Sharon D Clarke’s singing (think Kathleen Ferrier spliced with Ella Fitzgerald) and doubt that this is real, fully fledged opera? There is barely a spoken word and Jeanine Tesori uses counterpoint in her music to allow different characters to express individual thoughts and feelings in exactly the same way that Mozart and Verdi did.

As I’ve said before I think the division usually made between musical theatre and opera – with the implication that the former is inferior to the latter – is utterly spurious. It is all musical theatre. Opera is simply one form of it. Perhaps we should adopt Wagner’s term Music Drama and be done with it.

At the same time as reflecting on all this, I have – coincidentally – been talking, this week,  to Hilary Boulding, outgoing principal of Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and to Angela Livingstone who is Head of Opera, Vocal Performance and Choral Conducting there.  Discussing RWCMD’s post graduate opera programme, they both stress that there’s much more to opera than singing – although of course the voice and training it to fill a large auditorium without amplification are crucial. Hilary and Angela talked about the need for acting, collaboration and business skills – as well as clear understanding or how the industry works and the protocols successful performers learn to observe.

All of that was as clearly in evidence in the sparkily original Caroline, or Change – with its large, diverse talented cast impeccably directed (by Michael Longhurst) – as in any performance I’ve seen of Turandot or Fidelio. So let’s stop pussyfooting around with the O-word.

The State of Education was a ticketed panel event held at Chichester Festival Theatre on 13 May, predicated on the venue’s current production of Forty Years On. The panel consisted of Sheila Legrave, David Sword, Imogen Stubbs and me with Kate Mosse in the chair. This is the text of what I said in my five minute opening speech.

In the 1970s when I was – somewhat clumsily –  launching myself as an English teacher you could teach what you liked – and we did.

Until the students were 14 or so and hit the limitations of an O level or CSE syllabus you could teach Dickens, Shakespeare, fabulous poetry, read extracts from whatever moved you and learn to read and use lots and lots of wonderful words in imaginative ways.

Trouble was with that was that in many schools there was no syllabus at all for English.  Decisions were left to individual teachers – Some were lazy. Some were, sad to say, intellectually limited especially in the secondary modern-type school.

When I came to this very city in 1965 to do a three-year teacher training certificate the entry requirement was 5 O levels, in any subjects you liked. So, there were, when I started out many teachers who weren’t exactly academically inclined.

Then in the late 1980s came the National Curriculum which I initially thought was a good idea. It would, at last, give every child the opportunities that previously had been denied to those saddled with indifferent teachers.

If only.

What has actually happened is that the curriculum has got ever narrower and the students have ever less fun with those all-important words.

Secondary students have to do one Shakespeare play. We cheerfully did at least one a year with each class when I was in charge of an English department.

Then there’s the single pre-1900 novel and the banal list of poems. Of course, you can do more and many schools do but there’s a dispiriting sense of lowest common denominator at work.

Or to put that another way, if you don’t have to do it why bother?

No wonder student vocabulary seems to be shrinking. And at primary level there is so much focus on “learning to read” –  phonics, spilt diagraphs and all the rest of it – that in many cases they seem to forget to teach them to read – books and stories –  at all.

Well, if you stay in education for 40 years or so and stick to your guns you can reckon to be in fashion three times.

So, I’m much encouraged – as well as wryly amused – by a story in last week’s Sunday Times. Amanda Speilman, Chief Inspector of Schools is concerned that children are leaving school without the cultural knowledge they need to succeed.

Really? Well spotted Ms Spellman. Some of us have been saying this for 30 years and more.

The result is that “some of England’s leading state schools” are creating lists of books that children must read and poems they must learn.

And Sian Griffiths, the Sunday Times education editor who wrote the piece had found lots of enthusiastic teachers and students all busy reading The Mayor of Casterbridge, Kubla Khan and The Lady of Shalott. Bravo. It will lead to a deeper knowledge and understanding of words and that has the potential to enhance every other aspect of life. You need words to think with. Please let’s encourage it.

Further information about this event and the discussion it sparked will be posted soon on Chichester Festival Theatre’s website.

 

 

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Ink Pellet is an arts magazine for teachers, both primary and secondary to which I am the lead contributor.  It comes in both print and digital formats. The April/May issue includes my interview with Royal Court’s Vicky Featherstone and features about two drama schools: the Lir in Dublin and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Also in this issue is my piece about the 2017 Carnegie Medal (for a children’s book) and my interview with author Jenny McLachlan who has written a rather wonderful novel for teenagers Stargazing for Beginners about a girl who is really good at science. I review several shows and other books in this issue. You can read it all here. http://bit.ly/IP115Apr17

This bland little show is very simple and in places good fun. Keely Stevens (Katie Kerr) and Pete Bartel (David Bardsley) were a fabulously successful married double act in the early 1960s – until they divorced and it all fell apart.

Now, reunited for one more big TV concert five years on, we see their relationship for what it really is; both through the songs – a mixture of contemporary and new – and through their increasingly embittered asides [book by James Hindman, original music by Patrick Brady, original lyrics by Mark Waldrop and Patrick S Brady] …

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Read the  rest of this review at http://musicaltheatrereview.com/pete-n-keely-tristan-bates-theatre/

Photo by Johan Persson

What is education for? Is it a way of putting ideas into people’s heads or a system for reinforcing the rigid status quo? It’s classic Bennett territory and his first full-length play, dating from 1968 presents a challenging confrontation between the reactionary and the progressive although of course the issues are far from black and white.

We are just forty years on from the end of World War One. The traditional (unchanged in many decades) boys’ school atmosphere with organ loft, lecterns, and desks which whizz on and off stage is so well evoked by Lez Brotherston’s set and the well sung (in harmony) evocative hymns that you can almost smell the floor polish and the chalk. The very well directed and choreographed community ensemble of school boys adds a lot of authenticity and makes imaginative use of the CFT’s big playing area.

At the heart of the play is the retiring headmaster – one of the best theatre roles of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Richard Wilson really runs with it: strangled heightened RP, every vowel distorted, every consonant spat out to the accompanying click of loose dentures. Be-gowned and in mortarboard, he dictatorially represents pre-war insular values. The tension between him and his deputy Franklin, about to become headmaster (Alan Cox – very accomplished) is nicely caught as the central dramatic thrust. He will, as Wilson’s character observes tartly soon abolish corporal punishment, games and the cadet force because that’s “what liberal teachers do.”

Meanwhile Franklin is mounting an an end of term play which, very episodically and in no particular order, recounts the twentieth century history of both Britain and the school. Whenever it strays towards something the headmaster disapproves sexually or ideologically, he stops it thereby arresting progress towards a more enlightened future.

The whole concept is hugely ambitious. And although many of the play-within-a-play episodes are very funny (Danny Lee Wynter hamming up Oscar Wilde and Michael Lin’s tap dance, for example) the general effect is pretty bitty. Yes, as we sail through first war tableaux. Virginia Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, TE Lawrence and much more we are meant to marvel (I suppose) at the advantageous breadth of a really freed up education. Actually it comes across as a busy production of a busy play which would benefit from being a bit calmer.

Music, as so often with Bennett, is crucial to the action and there’s a lot of live music played on stage which certainly contributes to entertainment value.

The production is an undeniably enjoyable piece of theatre although there is a sense that its director Daniel Evans in his first season as artistic director at Chichester may be trying just a tad too hard. And his blatantly political ending – (nearly) fifty years on from Forty Years On, as it were – is cheaply cheesy.
 First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?reviewsID=2829
 

No student should apply to audition for a college place he or she has no intention of accepting. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, effort and money. And it’s very rude. It’s also so shabby, dismissive and manipulative that it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

Yes, of course it’s customary to apply for as many schools as you can afford to audition for – choosing, wisely, one hopes, courses which really match what you need. Then, if you’re both talented and lucky, you might end up with several offers and have to make a choice. That’s fair enough. All the colleges accept it and if you’re destined to be the next Summer Strallen or Charlie Stemp then the colleges you didn’t choose will be very sorry to have missed out on you but, no doubt wish you well anyway.

That’s a far cry from auditioning at college X because you’ve heard good things about their audition days and it will be good practice for your audition in College Y which is where you really want to go. Never should a student be encouraged to work the system in this cynical, destructive way. It does serious damage to smaller colleges and it’s inappropriate behaviour. If you’re up to scratch then apply for College Y and be done with it if that’s what you want.  And if you’re not upp to scratch well … time to think of a different career maybe.

Sadly I regularly now hear not only of students doing this quite calculatedly but – even worse – staff on some foundation courses are actively encouraging it. Some are telling their students to use certain colleges as audition practice but not to contemplate accepting a place there. What a message to give your students – that’s it’s fine to use colleges you’re definitely not interested in to suit your own ends. Think of no one but yourself and don’t bother about ethics, rights and wrongs or anything remotely relating to morality. Just do your own thing. Me, me, me.

Well call me old fashioned but you won’t shake me from the view that before you apply for any sort of course (it applies beyond performing arts too) you should be seriously considering signing up for it if you get the chance.  You are not the only pebble on the beach as my grandfather used to tell me. To do otherwise is quite wrong. And, just remember that this industry relies on teamwork and collaboration. If your attitude is so self-centredly flawed before you even start training then you’re not likely to get far.

For many years now I’ve written about theatre and education and it seems to be an unusual combination for a journalist. I started out as a teacher of secondary English and somewhere along the way, theatre got into the mix big time as I gradually switched professions.

The overlaps between theatre and education are many and various. Whenever I sit in on someone’s rehearsal and watch a director at work with a group of actors, I notice the similarity to classroom work. Said director, like a good teacher, is leading, pushing and probing with skills which allow the actors to discover things they need to know about themselves, others, situations and so on.  And as for teachers well, obviously, they direct their classrooms too. And sometimes they morph into performers themselves. School assemblies, for instance, and I’ve taken hundreds of those in my time, are essentially a form of theatre.

Then there’s the education and training of actors and other theatre professionals which occupies a lot of my working life. Most actors have to be formally taught and/or helped to learn their craft. Drama schools are not called “schools” for nothing and, over the years I’ve visited many dozens of these multi-faceted learning environments which do a great deal more than teach people how to work in the performing arts industries.

Consider too the education, learning, participation, community etc etc projects which theatre companies now run and which reach and benefit huge numbers of people of all ages. From very small beginnings, education is now a massive part of what theatre is about. Take Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education at RSC, whom I interviewed again recently. She now heads a team of 16 full-timers and 35 freelances many of them RSC actors who are trained in RSC education methods. There’s a similar picture at the National under Alice Fowler-King. Much work goes on in the education departments at theatres such as York Theatre Royal and Marlowe, Canterbury too. In 2017 it would be a rare company or venue, however small, which wasn’t trying to engage with education wherever possible.

Many companies take work into schools too – I regularly see shows staged in school halls when someone is kind enough to invite me. And of course there’s always preparatory and  follow-up work for the students.

And what about plays about education? I seem to see plenty of those too. History Boys has become a perennial. Still with Alan Bennett, Forty Years On – currently at Chichester, directed by Daniel Evans – asks questions about education among other things. What is it for, for example? And, from a playwright at the other end of his career Alex MacKeith’s School Play, which I saw earlier this year at Southwark Playhouse, explores similar territory in a completely different way.

I rest my case.  There is so much cross-over between theatre and education that for me at least, they are simply different slants on the same thing. And I think that’s exactly as it should be. We do far too much compartmentalising.

Drama Games for Actors

These are just some of the interesting performing arts books which have winged their way to my desk in recent weeks.

A study of Nick Hytner’s Shakespeare work is timely, for example in the week that the opening programme – to include a promenade version of Julius Caesar – is announced for his and Nick Starr’s Tower Theatre for later this year. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Nicholas Hytner by Abigail Rokison-Woodall is published by Bloomsbury in its Arden Shakespeare series.

Then still on Shakespeare (and partly on Hytner who writes the foreword) comes, from Nick Hern Books, a volume comprising twelve in depth interviews with leading actors about specific roles. Julian Curry’s Shakespeare on Stage Vol 2 gives us Zoe Wanamaker on Beatrice, Michael Pennington on Timon, Eileen Atkins on Viola – and nine others, all of them illuminating.

And before we leave England’s greatest playwright I also enjoyed Stanley Wells A Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Oxford). Like all the other titles in this extensive series it manages to say a great deal in 120 uncompromisingly informative pages. As always “very short” certainly doesn’t mean “dumbed down”.

I have a couple of useful how-to books for actors too. First there’s The Process: the secret of successful acting by James Bowden  co-founder principal of Dorset School of Acting who has an impressive record for getting his foundation course graduates into top vocational schools so he’s well worth heeding.  And actors, ever in search of ways of honing their craft, developing useful rehearsal techniques and so on  are likely to appreciate the latest in Nick Hern Books’s Drama Games series. This one is Drama Games for Actors by Thomasina Unsworth who teaches at Rose Bruford.

Play texts are always interesting. (We should all read more plays). Current crop of new ones includes Leopoldville by Jaki McCarrick (Samuel French)  which Papatango premiered at Tristan Bates Theatre in 2010. Mike Bartlett’s very funny and provocative Cock which opened at Royal Court in 2009 is published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama in its Drama and Performance Studies series. Also new from Bloomsbury is a useful volume consisting of three monologue plays for women all commissioned and produced by Fishamble. They are The Wheelchair on my Face by Sonya Kelly. Charolais by Noni Stapleton and The Humours of Bandon by Margaret McAuliffe.

Happy reading!

Shakespeare on Stage