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Pink Thunderbird (Susan Elkin reviews)

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Lindley Players at Whitstable Playhouse

What a playwright James McClure (1951-2011) was. This pair of linked one-act plays are skilfully constructed with impeccably observed naturalistic dialogue. And they’re in good hands with Roy Drinkwater directing six talented actors. Each of them knows how to listen and react so that audience attention is focused – something which is often missing even in professionals.

In the first play Bourbon and Laundry we’re in a small town in 1970s Texas where three women, who’ve been to school together, meet in Elizabeth’s hot, sunny back yard. They chat, drink whisky, quarrel and fold laundry as their past is gradually revealed. Troubled, enigmatic, pregnant Elizabeth (a very convincing Laura Kimpton) is worried about her missing husband Roy, back two years from Vietnam and unsettled. Hattie, played with terrific sensitivity by Lucie Nash, is brash and uneasy. She’s unhappy in her life, has married the wrong man and bravely covers it with humour. Emma Thomas’s Amy Lee is brittle and hiding something.

The second – parallel – play Lone Star gives us two brothers, one of whom is Elizabeth’s errant husband, Roy (Tim Hinchliffe) outside a bar along with Amy Lee’s husband Cletis (Dan Coles) in the evening of the same day. The rapport between Tim Hinchliffe as Roy and Christy Hinchliffe as Ray is very powerful. Roy is angry, unhappy and drinking hard. Ray is a very funny younger foil with a strong line in dead-pan humour. Then comes a serious confession and the mood changes. Coles, meanwhile, presents a flawed, nervous inadequate character with sexual problems which, reveal why Amy Lee is as she is. And both plays are haunted by a man they all knew, now in prison for car theft, named Wayne Wilder. The writing, like the acting, is very deft.

McClure called the two plays together Pink Thunderbird after Roy’s beloved 1959 Pink Thunderbird Convertible – a symbol of innocence and youth lost during the course of the play.

I think the Lindley Players go from strength to strength. They tackle a wide range of interesting material (the next show is Stephen Sondheim’s Company 25-19 October) and consistently achieve a near-professional standard.

First published by Sardines: http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Lindley%20Players%20Limited,%20The-Pink%20Thunderbird&reviewsID=2561

Backeyed Theatre Ltd

Wilde Theatre, South Hill Park, Bracknell and touring

The stage is smoky, dark and brooding occasionally lightening up for a contrasting conventional indoor scene. Characters – especially Ben Warwick who gives a glittering performance as anguished Victor Frankenstein – are spotlighted so that they emerge from the gothic gloom. The atmosphere, highlighted by side stage music including a set of timpani and skilful actor musos, is disconcertingly haunting and mysterious.

I’ve seen many adaptations of Mary Shelley’s post Enlightenment 1818 gothic horror story over the years, including a musical one and another which recast the characters of Mary, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron within the action. John Ginman’s two hour version for Blackeyed Theatre eschews such flights of fancy and tells the story in a pretty uncompromising way including the flashback framing device which comes with a whiff of Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner, published twenty years earlier.

An accomplished ensemble cast of five, imaginatively directed by Elio Giuralarocca, work on, round and though a set consisting of an angular heap of planks – ships masts, windows, laboratory table and so on. Sometimes the lighting shadows these, cage-like high above the action.

Lara Cowin’s Elizabeth is suitably fragrant in contrast to everything else which is going on. Max Gallagher delights as the very decent Henry (and does a lovely cameo of an elderly blind musician). Ashley Sean-Cook is strong as Robert Walton, the ship’s captain through whose eyes the story unfolds.

The ensemble work is seamless and all actors are continuously busy. The real star of the show, however, is Yvonne Stone’s monster puppet. Slightly larger than life, it is formed of grey ropes to represent its massive muscular strength. The moving head is sinister but vulnerable enough to evoke pity. Three actors operate it and Louis Labovitch gives it a penetrating, slightly other-worldly voice. And it because there are three people behind it they form a chorus which enable it to breathe, pant and sigh. Life is indeed created on stage – and not just by Victor Frankenstein.

All in all, then it’s a fine show. It has a huge nationwide tour booked well into 2017 so lots of people will be able to see it. And I especially recommend it to A level students of the novel. It’s a tale resonant with topical issues too. The monster is hated and feared mostly because of his appearance. He turns to evil actions only as a form of what we might now call “attention seeking” in his lonely despair and rejection. Sound familiar? Frankenstein is, among many other things, a plea for inclusivity and diversity and this version really brings that out.

First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Blackeyed%20Theatre%20Ltd.%20(professional)-Frankenstein&reviewsID=2562

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Blackeyed Theatre’s Frankenstein. Credit: Alex Harvey-Brown

It’s gone ubiquitously mainstream. And don’t anyone say it’s “the Warhorse effect”. The passion for puppetry across the industry has been growing rapidly for at least twenty years. It is now almost everywhere. And, given what an interesting theatrical phenomenon it is, I think that’s a really welcome development.

I’ve just seen Blackeyed Theatre’s new production of Frankenstein and what a show it turns out to be. So just how do you depict a monster convincingly? Yvonne Stone, puppeteer and puppet maker who used to work for National Theatre on Warhorse, has come up with a solution. Her monster is a (slightly) larger-than-life creation of ropes which suggest muscular strength. It’s operated by three actors in a five-hander piece. They make it breathe, speak, sigh, pant and much more. See this and you’ll be spoiled for any other stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel because it works a treat. It opened at South Hill Park’s Wilde Theatre where Blackeyed is based but there’s a big national tour stretching well into 2017 so there are plenty of chances to catch it.

The point about puppetry, of course, is that it takes the audience on an imaginative journey which has little to do with realism. When you see Avenue Q or take your kids to see Pepper Pig you can all see the actors who manage and voice the puppets. It’s a magical, inclusive journey of make believe. At opening of The Lion King we all know that actors are holding items up and walking with them. But it doesn’t matter. It’s an elephant and that’s the end of it. The elephant in this summer’s Running Wild at Open Air Theatre Regents Park had as much “elephantness” as a whole herd of real ones too.

And anything can be anything. A rolled up cloth becomes a baby. A paper bag can be a face. I once saw a wacky production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Puck was a few tools and an oil can puppeted by actors. And I loved a fringe show in which several women played violins and then turned them into babies with puppetry skill and fine acting. Puppets can do things which actors can’t – such as fly or explode too.

So why aren’t the drama schools teaching puppetry more proactively? At its most refined puppetry is a complex, highly skilled and takes years to learn. Yes, there’s a fine course at Central and The London School of Puppetry offers training. Little Angel Theatre, especially since acquiring its nearby satellite studios, offers a lot of actor CPD as well as starter courses. Of course there are other options too. On the whole though, if drama schools are teaching puppetry at all it’s in the form of short modules or optional courses as if it were a tiny, marginal specialist area. Surely they’re missing a trick and failing to address current industry needs? Puppetry is now so mainstream that every actor needs to be able to do it and to do it well. And the industry needs specialists who have studied puppetry in depth through discrete full-time two or three year courses too.

Last week I was at the opening night of Il barbiere di Sivigli at Royal Opera House which I really quite liked although a number of other critics damned it with faint praise. I was invited, not as an opera critic (which would probably be stretching things a bit although I do cover it when I can) but as an education journalist. And I attended a small reception before the show at which Jillian Barker, Director of Learning, told us about the Royal Opera House’s impressively wide range of excellent outreach work.

Yes we all know the ROH gets around £25m per year (in the 2015/2018) allocation) from Arts Council England and that’s a lot more than most other organisations get – although the subsidy has been reduced by over £12m since 2010 and now represents 22% of ROH’s income, according to chief executive Alex Beard. Opera, given top notch production values, cannot be done successfully on the cheap.

As I sat in what would have been a very expensive seat, pondering all this last week, I couldn’t help wondering why so many people are so self-righteously sniffy about ROH. A very well established musical theatre critic recently told me that he finds the place “daunting” and another senior industry person independently described it to me as “an irrelevant monstrosity in the corner of Covent Garden”

Well I don’t think ROH, where 40% of the tickets are priced below £40, is any more elitist than anywhere else. Yes, it’s an architecturally stunning – literally awesome –  building but so are Theatre Royal Drury Lane and Hackney Empire. Yes you see the occasional traditionalist who chooses to put on a suit or frock for his or her special night out but I’ve often seen that in the West End too. Perhaps it’s those very expensive red velvet curtains which will have to be replaced when the Queen dies and Charles III begins his reign? Maybe people object to opera sung in original language with surtitles, forgetting that the music fits the (usually Italian) vowel sounds in a way which simply doesn’t work in English. The word sounds are part of the musical texture.

ROH is a Bridge as well as a National Portfolio Organisation. Bridge is a nationwide Arts Council programme that connects schools, young people and communities with artists, arts organisations, museums and libraries. ROH delivers the programme in Essex (where its production park at Thurrock celebrates 10 years this year) Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and North Kent. In 2013, for example, ROH Bridge worked with more than 343 schools and other educational organisations plus 143 cultural organisations, enabling over 14,000 young people to take part in projects and a further 10,000 to attend an event or performance. Jillian Barker and her team are working hard to build on these figures by connecting digitally with schools elsewhere. Among many other projects and fields of outreach work Chance to Dance has inspired over 30,000 children since 1991. Participants are aged 6-11 and come from Lambeth, Southwark and Thurrock. “A large proportion” (according to a ROH printed summary) are from ethnic minority backgrounds.

I was inspired by all this and shall make the effort to find out more in due course. Meanwhile can we all please stop castigating a “world class” (yes, it really is) organisation which consistently raises the bar for thousands of people of all ages simply because we don’t like opera or think we don’t? Or even worse because we don’t approve of the opera-lover stereotype we create in our own minds – inverted snobbery at its most repugnant.

(A few years ago I was commissioned to write a series of light hearted articles about British icons for an American publication. It then went bust and most of the work was never published. I am therefore dropping them in here on an occasional basis  as “Daft Essays” in the hope they might amuse for a few minutes. This one was intended for the publication’s Australian edition)

An early look at Cook

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It’s a bitterly biting, icy winter’s night in October 1728.  And we’re in a
one-up, one-down, earth floored cottage at Marton. Then it was in Cleveland.
Now it’s  in North Yorkshire, flexible geography being a British
speciality.

The village lies on the edge of what today’s movers and shakers neatly
parcel up as the ‘North York Moors National Park.’  It’s about ten miles
south of the pretty port of Whitby and it’s one of the coldest spots in
England.  If you go there at any time of year, pack plenty of pullies.

Hundreds of miles to the south in London, white-wigged, britches-clad George
II has just become King and is strutting about elegantly enjoying the music
of Mr Handel whose stuff is the Georgian equivalent of top of the pops.  But
back in that rush-lit farm worker’s cottage, Grace Cook, formerly Grace Pace
doesn’t, at this moment, care much who’s king.   She’s struggling painfully
and laboriously to produce her second son.

Then – a little miracle – against all the odds of poor hygiene, inadequate
diet, cramped conditions and no obstetric care whatsoever, she pops out a
healthy son. He’s named James after his proud Dad and this little lad is
going a long way – in every sense.

Little Jim was one of eight children born to Grace and James, but five of
them died while they were still children. Sad – but not unusual.  Then Mr
Cook got an offer of a better job as foreman of Aireyholme Farm at Great
Ayton a few miles to the north. It was a bit of a career break. So the
family decamped.

A bit more money in the coffers meant that James was sent to the village
school (not compulsory in Britain until 1870) so he learned to read and
write – useful skill for a chap who will soon be turning his back on his
chilly origins and navigating his way across the uncharted globe.

But all that’s in the future. For the time being he earned his pocket money
by being a live scarecrow on the farm. That meant spending hours in the
fields frightening peckish birds away from the crops – a common enough
activity for farm children, but educationally developmental it wasn’t.

Young James Cook got his first proper job when he was 17. He went to work ina grocer’s shop at Stathes, a fishing village on the coast, north of Whitby.
Maybe it was seeing the grey North Sea every day, hearing the slap of the
waves on the beach and dreamily watching the ships sail in and out, but
after only a few months James Cook was smitten. ‘I’m determined to go to sea
and seek my fortune,’ he said.

He asked a local family of trading bigwigs, the Walkers, for help. They were
Quakers who took a shine to James Cook’s sober enthusiasm. So they gave him a chance.  Thus he learned the craft of sea-faring by sailing in creaky
timber cargo ships up  and down the east coast of Britain – mostly  carrying
coal from the mine-full North East to London.  Imagine George II and his
wife Caroline hosting a ‘do’ in their drafty old Windsor Castle.  Perhaps
James Cook has helped to transport the fuel in their fireplaces.

He’d found his metier too. He was rapidly promoted, passed some exams
(see – that schooling was bound to come in useful) and sailed farther field
in Walker ships. ‘I’d like to offer you the command of one of my ships,’ Mr
Walker told the 27-year old James in 1755.

But that wasn’t what this ambitious young man wanted. He had set his sights
on even wider horizons so he volunteered for the Royal Navy. He shone there
too – charting coastal waters, making scientific observations, serving in
North America and taking part in action against the French during the Seven
Years War.

The big break came in 1768 when the Admiralty offered him the command of the Endeavour (built at Whitby) with a mission to sail Tahiti to make
observation of Venus.  It was the first of his three great voyages. So,
watch out Australia, the farm boy from Yorkshire is on his way to ‘discover’
you.

He was killed, of course, by frenzied warriors as the result of a bit of
ill-judged, high-handed colonialism against the king of Hawaii in 1779 – not
quite the end his tearful, but joyful, mom might have envisaged  for her son
back in that  humble cottage in 1728.

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Il barbiere de Siviglia, Royal Opera House

This version of Rossini’s 200 year old comedy is (originally directed by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, now revived by Thomas Guthrie) is fresh and crisp. There’s a lot of bright colour both in costume and lighting with much of the action set in a candy striped inner stage box to represent Rosina’s “prison” in Dr Bartolo’s house. Of course windows and doors open within it as characters enter often clandestinely – this is comic opera after all. There are also some imaginative ideas such as raising the inner box of the set several feet above stage level and rocking it with the entire cast on board to suggest confusion although I couldn’t help wondering what such a gimmick/coup de theatre (depending on your point of view) added to production costs.

The chorus of guards (reminiscent of the policemen in The Pirates of Penzance) exposed upstage is fun too, especially when they dance with their truncheons. And the translation of the Italian libretto for the surtitles by Kenneth Chalmers is good value. “The cheese has landed on the macaroni” declares Figaro gleefully at one point.

Il barbiere di Siviglia dates from 1816 when Rossini was only 24 and weaving charismatic musical magic around intrigue, trickery and witty dialogue. Sung here in Italian, as usual at the Royal Opera House, it employs a full range of appropriate musical vowel sounds – a strand in the sound texture which disappears as soon as you start translating the words.

It’s a familiar and pretty simple story. Count Almaviva (Javier Camarena) is in Seville to court a beautiful girl Rosina (Daniela Mack) who is due to be married to her guardian Doctor Bartolo (Jose Fardilha). Three hours of shenanigans and misunderstandings later, led by the local barber, Figaro (Vito Priante) we arrive at a happy ending of a sort. Those who know Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, based, a generation earlier, on the second play in Beaumarchais’s trilogy will be sceptical. And of course you have to take at face value this world in which  passionate – randy, even – women are imprisoned by buffoonish manipulative men until they are rescued by other rather sexier manipulative men. There’s a lot of it in classical opera.

Camarena is a show-stopper as Almaviva. His sapphire-sharp tenor voice sustains some astonishingly long notes and his dynamic control is top notch.  He’s also an accomplished actor and his music lesson scene with Mack is very funny. A wide register mezzo, some of Mack’s top notes threaten to break glasses while at other moments she plumbs rich claret depths. She too is warmly convincing in character, petulantly throwing darts at the set walls and flouncing about in pent-up frustration in her first real scene, for example. And Vito Priante provides an enjoyable mercurial Figaro for balance. He sings his act one entrance patter number – always tricky because it’s so well known – by coming in from the back and flirting with audience members on his way to the stage which works beautifully. And his comic timing is perfect.

All this is accompanied by the magnificent Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in the pit under youthful-looking Henrik Nanasi. He really brings out the colour and detail in the music. The fortepiano continuo from Christopher Willis is especially fine in its accuracy and responsive sensitivity.

The Royal Opera House claims to be “world class” and of course it is – working here with an outstanding cast of principals from all over the world.  It’s a very enjoyable production which I am happy to recommend enthusiastically although the fly in the ointment – as always at ROH – is that the stalls seat I sat in on press night would have cost over £150.

Originally published by Lark http://www.larkreviews.co.uk/?cat=3

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The Chronicles of Derek Dunstable by HG Sansostri, Tiger Publications Ltd, 2016 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chronicles-Derek-Dunstable-H-G-Sansostri-ebook/dp/B01J8UDEXM

How many young adult novels have you read in which you can feel the author groping for the right tone and register for his or her teenage characters and getting it woefully wrong? One of young author HG Sansostri’s greatest advantages is that he’s steeped in that age-specific verbal culture because he’s only fourteen himself, The dialogue in his The Chronicles of Derek Dunstable is absolutely spot on.

So is the plotting. We first meet Derek, seriously depressed and frightening his parents, three years after a devastating experience. Most of the novel then flashes back to unravel the horror he has experienced at school when something completely unforeseen and terrifying happened. The format is not especially original but the nature of the horror is – no spoilers here. I love his characters too. The teachers are beautifully observed, Derek’s friends such as Todd, Greg and Matthew, fizz with life and so do his bickering but stable and loving parents, Sarah and Danny. We’re all met kids like the manipulative, wannabe bully, Jerome, too.

All in all then, a remarkable achievement for a 14 year old – who already has The Little Dudes’ Skool Survival Guide under his belt. The earlier book is an advice book about dealing with bullying and HG (as I understand he likes to be known) has done many school visits to promote the book and share its message. Most people would be immensely – and justifiably –  proud to have written The Chronicles of Derek Dunstable at any age. At 14 it’s extraordinary.

Of course, given the youth of the author, there are minor flaws in the writing – and I used to be an English teacher so I can’t help spotting them.  First someone has told him to use as many adjectives as possible and it gets a bit irritating sometimes. A strong, unqualified noun is just fine, HG. Similarly the words “says” or “said” work perfectly well most of the time. Careful over use of  words such as “mutters”, “screams” “bellow” “shouts” grunts” and the rest soon begin to feel laboured. And please, please, please, HG: In British English “all right” is two words.

These are however, very small reservations about an exciting read which – I’m certain – will go down very well with readers in their early teens. Warmest congratulations to the author. We’re all eagerly looking forward to your next book

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Animus, performed by the Musical Theatre Academy’s first-year students, continues at the Bridewell Theatre, London until 10 September.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

We’re in 18th century London. In a quasi revenge tragedy, heiress Charlotte Donne (Jenna Innes) seeks vengeance, but her judgement is not sound and she makes several (literally) fatal mistakes. It’s a colourful, atmospheric show with hints of The Beggar’s Opera and, from a different century, Les Misérables and Oliver! There are brothel scenes as theatrically thrilling as anything in Measure For Measure and more murders and bodies than in Hamlet. The plot is pretty complicated, but it’s so full of unexpected twists that somehow you sail along with it.

And Michael Webborn and Daniel Finn’s score…

Read the rest of this review http://musicaltheatrereview.com/musical-theatre-academy-animus/