Lou Stein is a man with vision. Only a few weeks into his new job at Chickenshed, based in Southgate, north London, he is already determined that it will be “a confident, highly skilled professional company, staging unmissable plays”. And for that, he declares, he has the support of 70….
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This article was by Susan Elkin for TheStage – See original article here
Learn to play, read and enjoy music in childhood and, however much you neglect it in adult life, it’s always there, hardwired in, to go back to.
I was seven when they asked us at primary school if anyone would like to start the violin and went home excitedly to ask for a note to take in the next day. Put in a little class of eight with Mrs Clements for the next three years, I picked up the reading of music effortlessly along the way. I wasn’t, to be honest, the best in the class but I liked it and wanted to continue at secondary school where my father (himself a fine amateur folk fiddler) cheerfully paid for individual lessons for seven more years – happy memories of ensembles, passing exams and sometimes playing folk with my father. It all went on after I left school and into my twenties too. Then came a full-time job, marriage and children. I got busy and somehow it all ebbed away.
Fast forward 35 years or so. Two years ago, bent on a bit of down-sizing, I unearthed my violin. Decision time. Sell it? Something snapped in my head like strong pizzicato note. No, I thought, I shall play it.
I had the instrument restored by a violin maker who also rehaired my weevil-nibbled bow. Then, out of earshot of anyone else, I cautiously tried a few notes. It sounded utterly dreadful but I persevered and after a week or two I could manage a simple folk tune slowly but more or less in tune. And I was back on the bike.
Since then I have found a local teacher with whom I do an hour a month. He and I reckon I’ve worked back to about Grade 6 standard. I’ve also joined a modest community group where no one minds if you can play only one note per bar and it isn’t always the right one. I was both humbled and moved to get right through the second violin part of Beethoven’s first piano concerto and get some of it right only a few weeks after joining, I never dreamed I’d ever do anything like that again. I’ve been on several residential course at Benslow Music at Hitchin in Hertfordshire where many of the others are ‘returners’ like me. I play string quartets regularly in a group and have attended numerous single day workshops
Such fun, so satisfying and, as my children never tire of reminding me, music helps keep dementia at bay.
Photo: Tim Hinchliffe
Listening is the key to good acting. The best actors listen to each other and respond with convincing spontaneity and truth. It is very rare to see non-professionals who understand this fully and practise it effectively. All four actors in this outstanding show are high-quality listeners and the result is a very fine piece of drama with acting that bears comparison with the best professional work.
It’s also an excellent play. Martin McDonagh’s 1996 piece takes us to Connemara in Galway where brittle, angry 40-year-old Maureen (Cheryl Mumford) is caring – sort of – for her unpleasant, manipulative elderly mother (Tracey Parvin). Two local brothers played by Christy Hinchliffe and Larry Dobin are neighbours. McDonagh builds the tension until Maureen finally snaps with devastating consequences – there were two moments so powerful that I actually had to look away and that rarely happens to me in non professional shows.
Tracey Parvin shuffles about malevolently or sits issuing orders from her rocking chair. She variously looks and sounds sly, pitiful, anxious, scheming, frightened and isn’t quite as infirm as she pretends. At one point she screams and cries in real terror. Her character is awful but she isn’t a villain and there are moments when Parvin makes sure we pity her as well as loathe her. It’s a very intelligently sustained performance.
Cheryl Mumford is terrific as desperate Maureen. She is trapped with a very unpleasant old woman and it soon becomes clear that her mental health is questionable. When Larry Dobin’s character shows a real interest in her she wants to grab the chance with both hands but is frustrated in every sense of the word. Mumford conveys every possible emotion during the course of the play from anger to resignation, from cynicism to passion and from ruthlessness to despair. She is very impressive indeed.
Both the men are good too although their roles are smaller. Parvin is moving when he writes a letter which acts as a monologue from his London digs at the beginning of Act 2 and powerfully troubled when he sees at first hand the situation in Maureen’s home and gets breakfast for her mother. Parvin ensures that you can see his character’s thoughts. Christy Hinchliffe is especially strong in the final scene as he reacts strongly to what Maureen is saying – and not saying. There’s a lot of screw turning in this scene and both actors contol it well.
The set (designed by Tim Hinchliffe) which consists of a very basic, rural kitchen with curtains instead of cupboard doors works well because there’a lot of food-related stage business. And the triangular playing space sits neatly on the Whitstable Playhouse stage leaving a corner to act as the London digs for the only scene which takes place elsewhere. The other thing which deserves a plaudit is the way all four actors manage the broad Irish accents required by McDonagh’s script with its Irish syntax. It takes a lot of practice and this quartet are convincing and clear.
If I were awarding stars this excellent show would get the maximum number. The Lindley players always achieve a high standard but this production is in a different league.
It’s an opera, as George Ikediashi reminds us at the beginning and the end in his spectacularly deep speaking and singing voice. It is, therefore an interesting idea to make the band central to the action. Ingenious use of the revolve stage means that MD David Shrubsole is sometimes whizzed onto the stage playing his electric keyboard which is carefully “costumed” as a scruffy wooden early twentieth century pub-style piano. At times he is closer to the actors than they are to each other and the rest of the band moves downstage at times too.
Simon Stephens’s script, a very free adaptation of the original Brecht, is casually witty and pulls no punches in a piece about sex, violence, drugs and corruption. He rhymes “wanker” with “banker” for example and “sucker” with “fucker”. A family show this definitely is not. And we’re in 1930s London rather than Berlin with a lot of emphasis on the King’s forthcoming Coronation tour of the East End which suggests 1937 when George VI was crowned.
So far so good but the band makes a distinctly ragged start before settling into that strange, characteristic Kurt Weill sound with its metallic syncopation and quirky harmonies. Much of the singing, moreover, is focused on hammering out every word – and you can’t fault this show for clarity of diction – rather than on melodious music making. There are exceptions, of course. Rory Kinnear as the central, Macheath – lustful, criminal, exploitative but very charismatic – sings shakily at the beginning (first night nerves?) but by the time he reaches the second half he is in his stride and of course he’s one of the best actors of his generation. He more than captures the essence of the character: a mixture of bravado and self-interested fear, enhanced by real dignity at the end.
Rosalie Craig sings well as the feisty Polly Peachum, a fully fledged independent woman in this version, and she’s engaging as an actor, Haydn Gwynne as Mrs Peachum uses her long slender, red clad body to humorous effect as she develops her drunken, sex-crazed character and she sings almost better than anyone in the cast. Nick Holder, as Peachum, reworked by Stephens as a man of ambiguous sexuality, is very funny with his mood shifts between coyness and ruthlessness.
It’s a show with strengths, certainly, but there is something quite flat about it and the first half drags. The set is complex with lots of moving staircases, paper barriers to break though, wooden struts and masses of flags but it’s over fussy and you soon begin to wish there were more focus on the characters and less on gimmicks.
It is Helen McCrory’s evening. Hardly off stage in two and a half hours, she is whey-faced and brittle as Hester Collyer, failing to resist despair. She drives her character from anguish and fear to bravado-driven hope to loss and, ultimately to resignation and a glimmer of positive determination. It is a very finely nuanced, bravura performance.
Rattigan’s 1952 play opens with an apparently dead body on the floor in front of a gas fire – a decision the playwright is said to have made as a response to the suicide of his estranged gay lover. How important that is to understanding the play is debateable but anyone new to it certainly need some knowledge of the contextual background. The play was written, and is set, at a time when homosexuality and suicide were illegal and when adulterous relationships or even extra-marital sex were strongly disapproved of. And in the background there are tens of thousands of men like Hester’s lover Freddie Page (Tom Burke – good) finding it difficult to settle and find a purpose in civilian life after six years of war.
The third person in the play’s central adulterous triangle is Hester’s husband, William played by Peter Sullivan who finds gravitas, decency, dignity and reasonableness in the character – along with lack of sexual charisma which is what Hester craves and seems once to have thought she’d found it in her lover. McCrory convincingly conveys the sexual longing – a brave thing to attempt in 1952 – with warmth and passion.
Among the support roles there’s nice work from Nick Fletcher as the doctor who’s been struck off and from Marion Bailey as the well-meaning nosey landlady.
Tom Scutt’s set design is interesting. Although all the action takes place in Hester’s flat with kitchen stage left, Scutt has created a whole house converted into flats around it complete with stairways and thin walls so that you can see and hear the other occupants of the house moving about. It reinforces the fairly humble nature of Hester’s living arrangement given that the husband she has left is a judge living in Eaton Square. Much less successful is Peter Rice’s tiresome, low level rumbling sound which is almost continuous. Presumably it’s meant to connote danger, menace, anxiety – or something. In fact it’s just irritating and adds nothing.
Adapted by Helen Edmundson from Jamila Gavin’s young adult novel for the National Theatre in 2005, this large-scale ensemble piece is a good showcase for graduating student talent because there’s plenty for everyone to do.
On the other hand, even when it’s cleverly configured to create a playing space which is more or less in the round, Central’s Embassy Theatre is not the Olivier and the small playing area necessitates a great deal of entering and exiting which makes the piece feel clumsy at times.
Gavin’s moving, often horrifying, story presents Alexander Ashbrook and Thomas Ledbury getting to know each other in the choir school at Gloucester Cathedral. At the same time Otis Gardiner is ruthlessly exploiting wealthy young women with “inconvenient” babies by pretending to deliver them to the famous Foundling Hospital in London. Eventually as the years pass and Alexander is denied access to his beloved music the strands of the story are knitted together.
The set for this production is simple but lovely. Dominated by two large latticed shapes it clearly evokes the gothic fan vaulting of Gloucester cathedral and the music – which plays a large part in this show – is accompanied on upstage organ the rear of which provides a backdrop for the rest of the action.
Frances Knox is delightful as the charming but slightly uncouth, Somerset-voiced young Thomas – whether her character is singing a bawdy song, being kind, blunt or funny or trying to work out how to behave in society. Sandro Kalandadze is chilling as the utterly evil (not a single redeeming feature) and almost indestructible Otis Gardiner, a disturbingly convincing conman. And Lucas Button does very well indeed as his pitiful, abused, epileptic son. Yes, there’s some strong, well directed acting in this show.
There is a problem though, which the willing suspension of disbelief doesn’t quite cover. Alexander and Thomas are supposed to be musically outstandingly gifted. And although, Antti Laine and Frances Knox have obviously worked hard at their roles they sound like amateurs who’ve practised rather than highly talented singers. I recall the National had exactly the same problem with these two roles back in 2005.
And I’m afraid this review is based on the first half of the show only although that was sufficient to get the flavour of where it was going. Very unfortunately for the students and their director, Catherine Alexander, there were serious technical problems which caused the show to be lengthily stopped twice in the first half on the opening night when most of the audience were invited guests. Then an early interval was called. Given that this show is billed as lasting 2 hrs 45 minutes anyway these hitches meant that it couldn’t finish before 11pm even if there were no further hitches. So I made a reluctant decision to leave at the interval because it takes me two hours to travel home to Kent from Swiss Cottage and trains do not run all night.
English literature courses have become exercises in box-ticking that leave no room to appreciate the “real meat” of a text, says former English teacher Susan Elkin
English literature is about reading. And thinking. Then you reflect, discuss, re-read and perhaps consider some views about the text from elsewhere. You can’t do it by numbers and there’s no formula. Jane Austen, JB Priestley, Shakespeare and Wilfred Owen all died in happy ignorance of assessment objectives.
Once upon a time, English literature examiners and schools preparing candidates for exams understood all this. Questions were quite open-ended, with scope for intelligent, well-informed responses even at GCSE level. We showed our candidates that there was no single “correct” answer and encouraged them to read the text thoroughly and thoughtfully – as well as seeing it as part of a lifelong reading journey of exploration which should and would lead to other reading, both directly related and tangential. I used to spend at least one lesson a week discussing wider reading with as much enthusiasm and passion as I could muster. A good teacher is a fearless and open-minded advocate for his or her subject.
Today, the subject seems to be focused entirely on a distracting box-ticking exercise: “Have I mentioned context? Oh good, that’s AO3 done”. Candidates are trained to think like literary circus lions listlessly hopping though utterly pointless hoops. We used to despair if a student said “Do we need this for the exam?” Now it’s common for a GCSE or A-level course to begin by issuing the students with a list of the assessment objectives relating to the written examination two years later. “Teaching to the test” is a polite expression for such hideously reductive teaching.
Examination boards often publish study guides to support this formulaic cramming. Commercial publishers are at it too – producing little books focused on which exam board assesses which objective and offering specimen essays with faux examiner’s comments. The relentless emphasis on ticking every miserable little box distracts from engaging with the real meat of Lord of the Flies or A Christmas Carol. I have actually written five of these study guides myself, having accepted the contracts before I realised just how shamefully anti-educational it all is. There will not be a sixth.
The main purpose of an English literature course should be the development of thoughtful readers. Death by assessment objective is not part of the deal. English teachers should be sharing love of novels, plays and poetry and introducing new ideas regularly alongside the in-depth studying of set texts. You know you’re succeeding when a student arrives at the lesson clutching a copy of something that isn’t on the examination specification, but which you discussed in class last week.
Of course we all want students to pass their exams. For the record, mine always did, usually with high grades. But examinations – especially in a marvellously eclectic, mind-expanding subject like English literature – are definitely not the totality of education. They should be simply the punctuation mark at the end of two years’ study and learning, not the driving force of every lesson.
Susan Elkin taught English for 36 years before becoming a journalist and author.
Learning to decipher the squiggles on the page well enough to pass the key stage 1 Sats does not make you a reader, says author Susan Elkin
Teaching reading in itself is pointless. All the phonics, decoding skills and whole-word recognition in the world are a waste of time unless you then develop children as real readers.
Think of it like swimming. Learning a few strokes and getting your 10-metre certificate does not make you a good swimmer. For that, you have to jump into the deep end and swim length after length with confidence and stamina. In short, you have to actually do it. Reading is the same. Learning to decipher the squiggles on the page well enough to pass the key stage 1 Sats does not make you a reader. You learn to read properly only by reading.
The trouble with learning the mechanics – of almost anything – is that if you don’t immediately and continuously apply what you’ve learned, you lose the skills. That is probably why The Centre for Economic Performance recently reported that by the age of 11, having been exposed to phonics at an earlier age makes no difference to a child’s reading. It also explains the alarming recent observation from the University of Sheffield that many undergraduates are unable to read whole books. We are failing to develop readers.
So how can we embed reading habits at an early age?
Children emulate adults. If they never see respected grown ups buried in books, then they get the “do-as-I-say-but-not-as-I-do” message that this is an activity prescribed in childhood only to be put aside as soon as you have “more important” things to do.
Sustained classroom periods of individual silent reading in which teachers and TAs sit silently reading with the children are essential. If I were a headteacher, I’d have a daily block of whole school time for this and, book in hand, would visit each class regularly to join in. You cannot underestimate the power of role-modelling. That’s why there’s important work to be done in this area with parents too, especially in finding ways of getting dads – or other significant male adults – to read with boys.
Ask them what they are reading. If they want to, pupils can write reviews or share their thoughts orally with the group. Tell them what you are reading and make sure that you read plenty of children’s and young adult fiction as it comes out. The teacher whose knowledge doesn’t extend beyond a handful of 1980s titles has a lot to answer for.
Reading fluency matters more. Enid Blyton made me a reader. I soon re-applied the book-gobbling habit to other authors as I grew up. Never criticise a child’s or young adult’s reading choices. How do you learn to make valid critical judgements if you don’t read indifferent stuff as well as Judith Kerr, Charlotte Bronte and Philip Pullman?
No one enjoys a book which takes three months to toil through. That’s why children need masses of practice as soon as they can decode to break the slow sub-vocalising habit. And incidentally, that’s why listening to pupils read is counter-productive. It tests reading but impedes its development.
Real reading is an essential life skill and entitlement. But it has little to do with the 21st-century, mechanical concept of “literacy”.
Former secondary English teacher Susan Elkin is the author of Encouraging Reading (Network Continuum Education, 2008) and Unlocking the Reader in Every Child (Ransom, 2010)