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A Tale of Two Cities (Susan Elkin reviews)

Lindley Players, Whitstable Playhouse.

You can always rely on Dickens to draw a crowd. He did it in his own lifetime with readings and performances and he still does it now. Whitstable Playhouse was fuller than I’ve ever seen it for A Tale of Two Cities which must be very gratifying for the ever-versatile Lindley Players.

Matthew Francis’s faithful adaption ensures that we hear plenty of Dickens’s voice loud and clear too. Francis stops short of using a narrator as such but frequently puts third person narrative into the mouths of appropriate characters or sometimes a member of the ensemble – a well directed (by Peter Hunt and Lucie Nash) cast of eighteen in this case. It’s a device which drives the story telling on in a pacey and effective way.

Another strength is the use of ensemble to create stylised tableaux – especially at the end of Act 1 as the Revolution starts and in the guillotine scenes. What fun the large team of set constructors must have had with that guillotine too. Designed by Peter Harrington, it’s pretty convincing in action.

There are some very creditable performances in this show too. Dan Coles is variously impassioned, resigned, determined and troubled as Sydney Carton. Emma Thomas does the very best she can with Lucie Manette one of Dickens’s many wet, vapid heroines. Melanie Sacre is enjoyable as Miss Pross – a Dickensian benign eccentric and he was much better at those – in an absurd ruched lampshade bonnet (well done, costume department). Roy Drinkwater finds all the right warmth and decency in Mr Lorry and there’s terrific work from Vicky Wilsher as Madame Defarge. Often she’s an impassive, unsmiling, knitting observer. At other times she flares into unbridled passion or venomous anger. It’s a nicely judged and pleasingly controlled performance.

I’m not usually keen on background music. But Mia Soteriou’s original score – played live by Louise Blakey, Peter Bressington and Roy Brown really adds depth to the drama in this show. Ranging in style from excited to mournful and folksy to avant garde the music is quite a tour de force.

Another fine piece of work, from Lindley Players which has Boeing Boeing, Jack the Ripper: a new musical and The Lion in Winter coming up later this year.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Lindley%20Players%20Limited,%20The-A%20Tale%20Of%20Two%20Cities&reviewsID=2802

 
Presented by Half Moon. A Papertale production in association with Apples and Snakes

When I was in what we would now call Year 5, I arrived in the classroom one morning to see Adrian Smithson (not his real name) sobbing his heart out by himself at his table. We soon learned that his father had died and I think he’d been brought to school early. The point of this anecdote is that so surprised was I to see a toughie, very bright boy weeping, I remember it clearly half a century later. Had Adrian been Adriana I would, no doubt, long since have forgotten it. So conditioned are we to the view that boys and men are not supposed to express their emotions that I was shocked even at age 8 or 9, when poor Adrian’s circumstances were, of course, utterly terrible.

And that’s the point of this fine piece, Boys Don’t. Based on the idea of performance poetry it presents three deeply moving monologues which explore the idea that boys and men really do need to be able to express their feelings – by crying, if necessary. The whole work includes four monologues but the performers rotate so that only three appear at any one performance. Steve Tisane was not part of the performance I saw.

Each man – yes, it’s an all male cast and justifiably so – is a talented poet/actor who has written a story from the point of view of a young person and then performs it. Inevitably, we learn in the Q/A at the end, each monologue is firmly rooted in the performer’s own real life experience.

Thus Justin Coe recalls crying a lot as a child and finally feeling exonerated only when he saw his stiff-upper-lip, macho grandfather weeping at his wife’s funeral because a friend hugged him in sympathy. Coe has woven this into an intensely thoughtful account of a family in which all the males for many generations were “hard men, scarred men, always-on-their-guard men”. All the writing is in free flowing, occasionally rhymed verse. Coe’s is more obviously poetic than the other two.

Hadiru Mahdi’s story tells of a boy starting secondary school and feeling utterly torn between loyalty to his mother and the steer he gets from his glamorous older cousin. The result is that he ends up in a playground fight because he can’t express what he really feels. The conversation with his mother at the end of it is breathtaking in its truthfulness. Mahdi is very adept at role switching in order to keep the narrative flowing coherently.

Tanaka Mhishi describes a boy inclined to get angry and violent at home while his parents clearly have problems of their own. In the end his mother gives him a notebook and tells him to write his passion out of his system. Like the other two, it’s a poignant and very compelling piece of acting.

So it’s a simple, set free show whose only prop is a huge tube which makes a rain-like sound when tilted. This is passed like a baton between actors as a linking device and there’s also a short shared intro, repeated at the end. Beautifully directed (by Rosemary Harris) as it all is, this was the only part of this otherwise excellent show which felt pointless and contrived. It would have worked even better if we had simply launched into the first monologue.

Boys Don’t is a play which speaks to boys and men. But it’s not intended exclusively for them. Girls need to think about these issues too. I rather wish I’d seen it when I was in Year 5, in fact.
 
 First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-West%20End%20&%20Fringe-Boys%20Don%27t&reviewsID=2794
 

There’s a lot of nonsense talking about teaching reading. Of course children, with the help of parents and teachers, need to learn to decode the squiggles on the page.

But phonics, “tricky words” and toiling through boring little books for homework- familiar to every parent of a Key Stage One Child –  are the beginning of the process not the end.

It’s what comes next which matters. And too often the education system fails to unlock the reader who lives in every child – and that’s where parents can help.

Once Max or Mabel has cracked the code then it’s time for him or her to learn to read read. Really read. And it’s something every every parent can support.

Somehow we have to lead these children from careful translation of code into language to an effortless world of imagination, pictures and ideas. They need to be strong swimmers in the reading pool.

Deep end readers can explore unfamiliar times, places and people. So how do we get their feet off the bottom?

First, at that crucial tip-over point from decoding to reading let them gobble up as many easy books as they wish. Just give them their heads so that they forge on and stop subvocalising (reading aloud in their heads.)

Confident readers see print and translate it into images and ideas instantly so they don’t (usually) need to articulate the words either mentally or aloud. Subvocalisers are always slow, and often reluctant, readers. You want to move your child on from that as soon as possible.

Second, take a real interest in what your children are reading. Read  lots of children’s books yourself so you can  discuss them with Freya or Felix and make recommendations.

Third, always let your child choose their own books and never “rubbish” their choices. The only way you learn to distinguish good writing from bad, or to work out what sort of things you personally prefer, is by reading eclectically. Don’t rely on the limited suggestions made by some teachers either. There are many thousands of books out there to choose from. Use the public library.

Fourth, limit access to distractions such as TV, computers or tablets although a basic electronic reader such as Kindle can be useful when you’re trying to encourage Yasmin or Freddie to read. You can carry a whole library of books in your pocket on a Kindle-type device.

Fifth, never underestimate the importance of example. Children need to see adults – at home and at school – engrossed in books. Give them the message that reading is a vital, enjoyable, compulsive part of adult life.

If you give the impression that you are too busy for books then the child is conditioned to think that reading is a childish thing to be given up as soon as possible.

Teachers who, for example, do marking while their pupils are reading silently in class should be dismissed. Every primary and secondary English classroom should have blocks of time when everyone – and I mean everyone – opens a book and climbs into it.

Lastly, share the sheer excitement of the printed word with children and do it with exuberance. Why do think every chapter of every English textbook I’ve ever written is based on one or more pieces of writing? And the criteria for choosing these extracts? They are all passages I love and I’m not afraid to let my enthusiasm show.

 

MTA students at work

I caught up with La La Land on a recent long-haul flight. It’s a pleasant enough film with some interesting performances although I can’t for the life of me see why it won all those Oscars. What did strike me forcibly though is that it really illustrates how the triple threat has come into its own. Every performer in that film can act (really act), sing and dance and the three disciplines just segue seamlessly into each other so that the audience is barely aware ot it.  Each performer has to be able to do it all to the highest possible standard. And it’s a good illustration of how things are going right across the industry.

No one wants people who can act “straight” but who won’t sing and can’t dance. Today you need to be multi-skilled.

Whenever I see Imelda Staunton, Judi Dench Julie Walters or Meryl Streep – to name but four and there are many others of course – in action I marvel that they can be such terrific all rounders. Take Staunton, for instance. Last year she was astonishing audiences with the quality of her simultaneous singing acting and dancing in Gypsy. Now she’s doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  (more high octane anguish) without a song in sight.

In theory, then, musical theatre training ought to be the way forward because it gives you everything. Not so, it seems. I’ve been talking to actors and other professionals about the way musical theatre training is regarded in the industry. Apparently there is still a stigma because of a perception that some musical theatre courses don’t teach acting properly. If you’ve just graduated from a musical theatre course your chances of getting an audition for role in a straight play are slim because some casting directors are sniffy about musical theatre training.

I also gather than some musical theatre grads wanting to keep their work flexible and versatile are pretty frustrated about this. Some are retrospectively vexed that acting was so thinly taught on their courses.

There is also some concern about preparation for film work. After all there are plenty of musical films being made and recognised – La La Land for one. And look how successful Les Miserables and Mama Mia have been in their film versions. Well done, ArtsEd then which has long taught film acting and which takes acting within its musical theatre courses very seriously. And bravo Musical Theatre Academy (The MTA) which splits its course equally between film amd stage work. Many of the MTA’s graduates have gone on to get work in straight plays too.

Such enlightened course planning is far from general though and there’s still work to be done to break down workplace prejudices. After all if you can do what they want then the details of your training are irrelevant. The trouble is you have to be invited into the audition room in order to be able to demonstrate that and, too often, it all becomes a vicious circle.

Oxford School of Drama which remains defiantly independent of degrees but is rated one of the world’s top five drama schools

At last. The government has announced that universities and other higher education institutions must offer two year year degrees. The end of the three year stranglehold is in sight.

Now that fees are close to £10k per year on top of which the student has to keep him or herself, it is utterly scandalous that the three year closed shop has lasted so long. It’s a long ignored example of restrictive practice.

Any good course is intensive.  Many three year courses are anything but. Three years of fewer than five hours a week of tuition, the occasional essay and hours and hours to spend in bars is completely bonkers. Yet this is how many (most?) university courses operate. Of course nearly every course could be telescoped into two years if students were provided with three proper 14 week terms each year (42 weeks with ten weeks holiday) and given  a much more structured  programme while they were in session.

And yes, it can be done for vocational drama training just as readily as for any other course. Students do not need four months “off” in the summer. Yes, they might need to earn  a bit and might want to take a show to Edinburgh but ten weeks’ “leave” a year – still far more than most people get in the real world of grown up work – allows for both.

Do the sums. Unlike many other students, drama trainees need all day practical tuition – a minimum of thirty hours per week. As things stand most work short terms (including half terms) and get around 700 hours per year. That adds up – very crudely – to, say, 2,100 hours over three years.

Can you teach, half of that, 1,050 hours a year effectively in order to fit it into two years? I reckon so. You’d need to do about 320 hours each term and that’s easily doable if you stick at it for ten weeks.

The student might get less time to earn money but he or she pays one year less in subsistence and is industry ready, and able to start paid work, a year earlier. Fees ought to be a bit less too. These are huge advantages.

Of course it means staff will have to work harder but I’m not losing any sleep about that.

What does concern me – and it must be watched very carefully – is that some schools and other providers will simply offer a second rate,  two thirds, watered down two year degree course rather than giving two year degree students everything which they would get on a three year course. It needs tight timetabling and a willingness to think openly and forget the scandalous rules which have prevailed for far too long.

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So you’re good at football? Or blogging? Or acting? Good luck to you but it doesn’t make you a worthwhile children’s novelist.

The current trend for celebs to lend their names to second rate stories for young readers is detrimental to children’s literacy. A survey last month noticed a decline in the reading age of secondary school pupils.

From books by Zoe Suggs, who calls herself “Zoella” to Jessica Ennis-Hill, Frank Lampard and others, we’re seeing a ruthlessly commercial trend in publishing. It cares nothing for quality, children, education or wellbeing.

TV and radio presenter Dermot O’Leary is the latest. A series of books about Toto the Ninja Cat has just been announced.Comedian David Walliams has been at it some time: his five titles have made £2.2m in four years.

Zoe Suggs who has, somehow turned banality into an artform, is a vacuous publishing phenomenon. Her first “novel” (it barely justifies the word) sold millions in its launch week.

The language in Girl Online and Suggs’s two later efforts is so bland and colourless that it makes the average Mills and Boon title read like War and Peace. Do we really want our teenagers wasting time with clichéd tripe such as “His blond surfer-dude hair is perfectly tousled and his blue eyes are sparkling like the sea in sunshine”?

The language is trivial, boring and samey too. Short sentences and a very limited vocabulary spell dumbing down with two capital Ds. “I get up and quickly scramble out of my school uniform and into my snow leopard onesie.” Penguin Books who publish this junk should be ashamed of themselves. Instead no doubt they’re gleefully counting profits.

The bookish equivalent of the worst sort of junk food is churned out in the name of Frank Lampard too. Scholastic Inc is his publisher. Shame on them. The books are all about children and football and consist mostly of tedious, flat writing such as “Charlie followed Louise through the French doors and into the yard, but first Frankie went to the back of the kitchen”.

The best children’s books trigger the imagination. They don’t just churn out pappy drivel about the world the child already knows. That’s why JK Rowling scored with Harry Potter. The whole concept takes the reader to another world.

Or take Sarah Crossan who won last year’s Carnegie Medal – Britain’s most prestigious prize for a children’s book – with One. It’s about the plight of conjoined twins and it’s written in verse.

Books worth reading don’t have to be “worthy” or difficult. But anything we encourage children and young people to read should use words which develop the reader’s own language. That means the occasional unfamiliar word used in context, for instance. It also means sentences which don’t all begin “He went …” “They sat …” or “Dad waited …”

Most “celebrity” books do none of this. They are like cheap crisps or fizzy drinks. They might taste OK for a few minutes but they don’t nourish.

It’s partly because they are nearly all written to a formula by a ghost writer. The celebrity merely allows his or her name to go on the cover.

Zoe Suggs’s books, for example are actually written by Siobahn Curham although Miss Suggs insists that she thinks of the stories herself. Frank Lampard’s books are written by his “editor”. He told a BBC interviewer in 2013 that “I would love to get to the stage where I could write a whole book myself”. Jessica Ennis-Hill’s Evie’s Magic Bracelet publishes next month (Hodder Children’s Books),“co-written” with Elen Caldecott.

Celebrity publishing for children is nothing more than a shallow branding exercise. Children are attracted by the names they admire. But they’re being conned if the books aren’t even written by their heroes and heroines.

Even when they really are written by the Big Name the quality often isn’t great. David Walliams doesn’t use a ghostwriter. Instead he comes up with twaddle such as “His mum burst in holding a big piece of lycra that looked ominously like his ‘Love Bomb’ outfit” all by himself.

It’s saccharine and boring. It’s also perniciously addictive. That’s why so many kids lap it up and making vast profits for exploitative people stronger in commercial sense than writing talent.

Our kids deserve better.

 

Former director, Lucy Kerbel has – commendably –  turned gender equality in the theatre industry into her life mission. First came her enlightening 100 Plays for Women. Now we have All Change Please. Both titles are published by Nick Hern Books.

Six years ago Kerbel stopped directing shows and founded Tonic Theatre, an organisation which works with theatre companies, venues and practitioners to find practical ways of granting the fifty per cent of the population who don’t have a Y chromosome the same opportunities as those who do.

Hang on a minute. Are we suggesting that the industry deliberately shuts women out? Because that just doesn’t ring true. Well of course, Kerbel reasons, it’s a lot more complex than that. One of her most interesting observations – and something I have to confess I hadn’t previously thought about – is that youth theatre of all sorts is dominated by female participants, many of them very talented and focused. So are many drama school courses. But by the time these same people are in their early twenties artistic posts – acting, lighting, sound, directing and so on – have gone to a higher proportion of males. So where have all those women gone? Mainly, Kerbel contends, into administrative work in theatres. As soon as you look at marketing, education departments, box office, front of house and the like you find far more women than men. And that allows theatre companies to claim – and indeed firmly believe – that they are committed equal opportunities employers. Kerbel, of course, wants to change that and find ways of  getting relatively equal numbers of women and men working in both artistic and management roles.

Stressing that this isn’t a how-to book she then suggests ways of changing your thinking. Set yourself small achievable goals. Read one play a month by a woman playwright, pre-dating 1950, for example. More broadly we – and a critic I’m as bad as anyone at not doing this – should accept that the traditional concept of what “good” means is no longer enough. The established classics are limiting and we need to add other sorts of plays to the mix. That means we must read them, produce them and go and see them.

On the other hand we can – and should – also think more radically about the classics and how we do them. Why does Juliet always have to be played by a petite actor? Is there any reason why she shouldn’t be size 18? Can Mercutio be played by a woman? Kerbel mentions in passing the work done at the Donmar by the company directed by Phyllida Lloyd and led by Harriet Walter. She also acknowledges that huge strides have been made even in the two years it has taken her to write the book.

Yes there’s a lot of interesting stuff here and I agree generally with the thrust of most of it. I do think, however, that she rather glosses over the key thing which most assertive feminists tend to make light of because it’s inconvenient. Biology is a stumbling block. Women and men are different – not better or worse but different. And it is always going to be harder for women in the workplace because they, and only they only, can produce and breastfeed children. And the vast majority want to do more for their offspring than take three weeks off work before dropping the newborn into the hands of carer, even if that carer is a willing and supportive partner. Although we must all do everything we possibly can to equalise opportunity that fundamental is not going to change.

Making such a point is, however, probably a no-brainer because Kerbel would almost certainly attribute it to “unconscious bias” of which she argues that we are all guilty. And perhaps she’s right.

A few things have occurred to me – or things have simply occurred – since my earlier piece from Mutiara Taman Negara. So here is a second despatch from the Malaysian jungle before we head back to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow.

The trees fascinate me. Yes, I can remember learning at school that the tallest, most successful trees burst through the luxuriant vegetation to get light from their uppermost leaves. This makes them very tall and straight. I drew a picture of it all in my geography book, aged about 11. What I had forgotten, or never knew in the first place, is what wonderful bases and roots they have. Each tall tree is supported by a powerful pattern of huge pale grey – slender but strong stablisers, like dinosaur shoulder blades.

I was taken to see the tree which claims to be the tallest in the forest and its “stabilisers” are about eight feet high, each one powerful enough to hold up a  heavy 200 foot tree for many years.

Then there was the boat trip. Four of us sat, legs akimbo in the bottom of long thin craft. Would we call it a skiff? Then we (life jackets on) shot down the Timbeling river at high speed. Propulsion depends on a skilled combination of the right number of revs from the man with the outboard at the back and adept punting by the chap at the front for all the world as if we were on the Cam on a prim, spring English afternoon. Thus we scraped through shallows in which the stones grated on the underside of the craft and darted through deeper stretches, constantly weaving from one side of the river to the other.

In places the canopy meets over the river creating dappled tropical shade. Elsewhere it’s full sun as we ricochet round the meanders. Everywhere the vegetation merges with, and feeds, the river just as the river nurtures the plant life. Trees sit at strange angles like a damp game of giant spillikins. Gigantic rotten branches are in the process of melting away into the water. I know there are crocodiles in this national park but of course, common sense tells me they’re aren’t likely to be any in this relatively built up section which attracts tourists. Nonetheless I look (Kipling and Roald Dahl have a lot to answer for) hopefully at every log. Otters do live around here though and of course the bird life is abundant. No shortage of insects either – 150,000 different species in the National Park and the repellent I bought back home at the supermarket doesn’t always seem to be up to the job.

Several times we’ve crossed the river (ferrymen are terse but plentiful) and tootled around in the hire car. The warning sign about elephants crossing the road made my day. I also love driving on these roads – immaculately surfaced and maintained –  no sign of the signature potholes we’ve grown so used to in the UK.

And in between times we walk into the forest on the boardwalk. Nearby is the world’s longest canopy walkway. There’s an ancient hide overlooking a salt swamp too built by the British before independence when this area was called the George V National Park. I’ve seen nothing at the hide, despite trying at dawn, but I’m told there are often deer there and that some tourists reported a puma sighting in January.

As for the Mutiara itself well – with a few very minor caveats – I think they’re doing a pretty good job. The joy of this place is that there is nothing to do – except relate to the jungle and what it offers. The company, which has eight other more conventional hotels elsewhere in Malaysia, has wisely resisted the temptation to add pools, gyms, children’s play area or anything else which doesn’t directly relate to its raison d’etre. The accommodation is more than adequate for two tired people in search of an escape and a completely undemanding rest in a pretty idyllic location. Ants in the bathroom add to the natural feel  although I could have done without a visit from a huge spider which we failed to catch and then worried that, still at large and close by, it could be venomous.

We’ve had a lot of very courteous attention from staff, especially from Rohaizam Bin Idris, food and beverage manager, who has personally ensured that we, as vegetarians, have had plenty to eat during the week we’ve spent here.

Yes, come here to learn about the jungle – as many school parties and youth groups from all over the world do. Come as an energetic young tourist to hike and photograph. Or, as we did, come and switch off. It works – really works – at many levels.