We sang Paul Spier’s 1953 setting of Pied Beauty when I was in the senior choir at Sydenham High School in around 1964. We did it from memory for Speech Day and I can still hear the alto line in my head. It was my first encounter with Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89). What a poet!

The English department at college later introduced me to The Wreck of the Deutschland, The Windhover, Felix Randal, Binsey Poplars and more and, as a teacher of secondary English I later shared some of these with classes but I must admit I hadn’t read any of it in a long time. Then, at the beginning of this month. I heard an arresting reading of The May Magnificat on Radio 3 and it sent me scurrying to the poetry section of my bookcases ( three shelves on my upstairs landing – not sure whether I’ve ever mentioned that?).

I pulled out my old volume of Hopkins, published by Penguin in 1953 and 1985 edited by WH Gardner. It is still available but there are plenty of other editions of Hopkins’s poems. Gardner’s laboured introduction by the way, made this irreverent 2023 reader laugh aloud. It includes the most convoluted account of Hopkins’s use of metre you could possibly devise: a sort of literary Sir Humphrey. After a few sentences you want to interject “I hope you’re keeping up.”

Hopkins was an Oxford man who was attracted by the Tractarian movement and eventually converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. Most of his poetry was unpublished in his lifetime and owes its survival to the poet Robert Bridges who was a close friend.

He was fascinated by nature and his observations are sensually accurate. In his sonnet Spring he writes “weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush”. His titular windhover is “daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon/in his riding”. Everything that he sees, thinks or feels is rooted in his religious passion, wonder, reverence and awe. God’s Grandeur is an unforgettable sonnet which opens: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil”.

His impressionistic, mould-breaking use of interwoven alliteration, assonance, consonance and rhyme anticipates Dylan Thomas (a very different sort of man) by half a century. Take for example the opening of this little poem which appears in my edition simply as number 57: “The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down/ His cheeks the forth-and-flaunting sun / Had swarthed about with lion-brown/ Before Spring was done.” Or what about the first two lines of Duns Scotus’s Oxford?: “Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell swarmèd, lark charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded”.

Apparently the two religious poets Hopkins most admired were George Herbert and Christina Rossetti and I can see the influence of both clearly in his work. Indeed, the 17^th century metaphysicality is definitely there but so is the contemporary Victorian awe that Rossetti does with such elegant simplicity.

Yes, “all things counter, orginal, spare, strange” are to be found in this man’s writing. I don’t share his religious belief but by golly, I admire his conviction. I also love his facility with words and his innovative depiction of the natural world.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Simon by Rosemary Sutcliff

Show: Princess Ida

Society: Ferrier Operatic Society

Venue: Bob Hope Theatre, Wythfield Road, Eltham, London SE9 5TG

Credits: By Gilbert & Sullivan

Princess Ida

3 stars

Photos: Robert Piwko

This production is a good example of an endangered type: traditional, amateur, all ability G&S. It’s pleasing, inclusive community theatre. There was a lot of it about when I was growing up. I wish we saw more of it now.

Princess Ida opened in 1884 and was Gilbert and Sullivan’s eighth collaboration. With its three acts and coyly medieval dialogue, it has never been one of their most popular shows. I think this was the fifth time I’ve seen it over a lifetime of G&S as opposed to, say, The Mikado which I’ve seen more than fifty times. Inspired my Tennyson’s long 1847 poem, The Princess, it pokes fun at women’s education which was, at last, getting off the ground by the 1880s and as such, irritates me slightly. It’s perfectly possible for a woman to be highly educated and to be a wife and mother – thanks very much. So, in some ways it’s very dated. On the other hand, the whole idea of men donning women’s clothes and trying to get into female spaces has never been more topical. Despite this creakiness, there are some good numbers and I left the theatre humming the finale waltz.

Andy Noakes is excellent as King Gama. He gets the two best songs and really runs with them – all malevolence and perfect diction. Janette Cattell, as Ida, commands the stage when she’s on it, brings all the appropriate gravitas to her role as leader of an impregnable (not) Castle Adamant, loosely based on Girton College which was founded in 1869. She sings to a professional standard too. So do Nathan Killen as Cyril and Andy Lee as Florian. And Killen’s drunk song is a very funny showstopper. Both Killen and Lee are prominent in some of the chorus singing which helps to keep it on track.

The Bob Hope Theatre, which I like very much, has a strange orchestra pit which is literally under the stage. Musicians have almost to crawl in and MD David Stevens has to reach up with his left hand when he needs to keep the singing together. It’s a twelve-piece band and they cope with the space well. And one or two weak entries nothwithstanding, there’s some lovely playing in the this show although some of the tempi feel very slow.

Photos: Robert Piwko
First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/princess-ida-2/

Show: Shrek the Musical

Society: WWOS (West Wickham Operatic Society)

Venue: Churchill Theatre Bromley. High Street, Bromley BR1 1HA

Credits: Based on the Dreamworks Animation Motion Picture and the book by William Steig. Book and Lyrics by David Lindsaay-Abaire. Music by Jeanine Tesori

Shrek the Musical

3 stars

Shrek the Musical has a number of things going for it. First, it’s a celebration of otherness, diversity and, ultimately inclusion so it’s very “now”. Second, it has a big cast with lots of ensemble roles and scope for talent so it’s ideal for a company such as West Wickam Operatic Society which has members of all ages. Third, it’s witty: “This plastic horse is reversing” and “When you are grotesque, Life is Kafkaesque.” Fourth, because, like so many musicals these days, it’s based on a film it’s very familiar and that brings audiences in. Fifth, it’s family friendly which also helps with audience potential.

And this particular production succeeds partly because almost every principal has drama school training and/or professional experience and it shows. Kemal Ibrahim’s Donkey, for example, is fluid, funny and convincing. He really inhabits the role and oozes stage presence because he really knows what he’s doing. Joanne Frazer excels as Princess Fiona who has to be rescued from her tower. Her singing is perfectly controlled and she’s a fine actor, Andy More is a show stealer as Lord Farquaad. Many of the audience had clearly never before seen the kneeling with false tiny legs trick to create a half-size man and More, who is very nifty at it, gets lots of laughs. He too sings well and his diction is impeccable.

Jamie Fillery finds the right level of decency, irritation, sadness and eventually pangs of love in the titular ogre and his work with others is delightful. Yes, there’s a lot of talent in this show, well directed by Kevin Gauntlett and choreographed by Danielle Dowsett. The tap-dancing rats are a high spot as is Lord Farquaad’s entourage.

Jane Werry’s 11-piece band is tucked away out of sight stage right. It took them a little while to settle at the performance I saw but by the second half they were doing a grand job.

There is, however, a problem with diction and clarity in this production. Because this is an American show and the big cast of story characters mostly derive from Disney & Dreamworks rather than the brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen et al it is perceived as necessary to voice everyone apart from Shrek with American accents. In too many cases this results in shrill inaudibility and very few can sing in their accents, although some, such as Kemal Ibrahim are totally on top of it. I see no reason why they couldn’t use British accents as Hallam Tondeur does for the Pied Piper. It’s a difficult issue for a non-pro company which doesn’t usually have the luxury of voice coaches but in this case there was an obvious, simple solution.

Nonetheless this didn’t dent my pleasure much and it certainly wasn’t bothering the people around me who, by the time we got to I’m a Believer at the curtain call were well psyched up to party mood.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/shrek-the-musical-8/

This is a book which almost passed me by despite its lasting fame and popularity as an English curriculum text in secondary schools. I read it at Bishop Otter College where the Education department kept flinging out vague ideas for helpful wider reading. Cider with Rosie was top of their list because it tells the story of a childhood more or less from the point of view of a child – but of course it’s filtered though a long distance lens by the adult Laurie Lee looking back. He was 45 when Cider with Rosie was published in 1959. Another book they were keen on, for the same reasons, was The House of Elrig by Gavin Maxwell which I intend to reread soon.

64 years after it was published Cider with Rosie still feels startlingly fresh. Lee came from a large family growing up in the Cotswolds. The war and its aftermath are everywhere in Lee’s life because he was born in 1914. And it’s a time of great change. “The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village. I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ life” he writes going on to recall “a world of hard work and necessary patience, of backs bent to the ground, hands massaging their crops, of waiting on weather and growth; of villages like ships in the empty landscape and the long walking distances between them.” He remembers roads “innocent of oil or petrol” and observes that “the horse was king.” But it all changed in the 1920s.

He presents characters so evocatively that you could reach out and touch them: his otherworldly mother, for instance, who muddles through single-handedly raising her husband’s four children as well as her own three. He has long since deserted her although poignantly, while he’s alive, she never loses hope that he’ll return. The warmth and camaraderie is beautiful: the sisters who, effectively, bring Laurie up, the brothers he rubs along with, the school and the rural pursuits children amuse themselves with when there’s no TV or “entertainment” of any sort. Yet the young Laurie somehow learns violin and, of course, he reads.

Laurie Lee was a fine poet and that’s really his great legacy although I expect it was Cider with Rosie and its sequels which paid his bills. I taught and loved lots of Laurie Lee poetry – with Sunken Evening and Cock Pheasant being two of my all time favourites. His poetry is vibrantly sensual and actually, I realise now, so is his prose. He describes two elderly neighbours as having “sickle-bent bodies, pale pink eyes and wild wisps of hedgerow hair”. When he recalls the low level sex games he played with a girl named Jo when he was 11 or 12 his erotic scene setting includes “The old red trees through arches above us, making tunnels of rusty darkness”. Playing with the village boys on a glitteringly cold day he remembers the “stream in the valley, black and halted, a tared path threading through the willows”. It really is intensely vivid writing, astonishingly full of youthful joie de vivre and awe.

It also feels very honest and truthful as Lee tells us, for example, about his gossipy trio of elder sisters who eventually got jobs and married and his uncles, all damaged World War One survivors.

Yes, I suppose those college people were right. Cider with Rosie does reveal something of how children feel, what they experience and how they are affected by what happens around them. It is also a masterclass in how to write colourfully compelling autobiography.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Introduction and notes by WH Gardner)

Show: Richard lll

Society: Tower Theatre Company

Venue: Tower Theare. 16 Northwold Road, Stoke Newington, London

Credits: by William Shakespeare. Directed by Kornelia Adelajda.

Richard lll

3 stars

This is a pared down Richard III for our times: the two-hour journey / traffic of 2023 and post-pandemic Britain, blighted by timeless power struggles.

Thus we get Boris Johnson as Richard III and Chris Frawley is excellent. An exuberant blonde wig, rotund slouchiness with hands in pockets make him totally believable. Frawley also speaks the verse beautifully and gets mood changes from plausible to menacing well. He lies, cajoles, gives orders and is every inch a hideous monster who never has audience sympathy. It’s an impressively nuanced performance.

There are problems though. There are inevitable textual anomalies including Richard’s disability which is mentioned a lot but seems to be a case of “not all disabilities are obvious”. And as always with re-located Shakespeare it’s never going to fit completely. Of course there are parallels. Richard III and Boris Johnson were both usurped but the reasons were very different. And the stories are, obviously not the same. Whatever you or I think of Johnson he is not a murderer. So you cannot “translate” every character in Shakespeare’s play into someone in 2022 frontline British politics. This bothered two ladies sitting near me who were very puzzled about who characters were “supposed to be”. All you can do is to draw attention to the way in which power struggles work, then and now and point up the similarities.

Having said that, it is a brilliant idea to recast Buckingham as bespectacled Dominic Cummings in a woolly hat, body warmer and scarf, constantly looking at his watch and phone. At first he’s Richard’s right hand man and then falls foul. Yes, there have always been people like that. Matthew Tyliankis is very good in this role. He both moves and sounds like Cummings but, like Frawley, speaks the Shakespeare well. Frawley, incidentally has a Belfast accent and every time he said “Buckingham” I misheard the first consonant but couldn’t make up my mind whether it was a deliberate subtlety or whether I was simply hearing what I wanted to hear.

Other good performances in this show include Landé Belo as an impassioned, angry, distressed Queen Elizabeth and Rachel Verhoef who multi-roles but is particularly strong as the sassy, insolent assassin.

In this context, staging the Battle of Bosworth, in which Richard dies, is a directorial challenge but Kornelia Adelajda finds some neat solutions. She has Richard asleep, haunted by the ghosts of those he has killed, dreaming restlessly calling for a horse, as any Richard III must. Richmond (Lucy Moss) is very confident female politician who “kills” her opponent with rhetoric as they stand at desks and we hear the familiar sound of House of Commons rumbling before a vote which she wins.

It’s a fresh, imaginative, topical take on Richard III with clear story telling and that’s welcome but some aspects of it work better than others.

Photos: Jason Harris

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/richard-lll/

Unseen Unheard: The untold breast cancer stories of Black women in the UK – Review

Theatre Peckham, London

****

Written by Naomi Denny

Directed by Simon Frederick & Suzann McLean

Six women attend a support group meeting for black women with breast cancer. It doesn’t sound like a promising premise for a lively play. It could easily have become a static, earnestly worthy documentary. In the accomplished hands of playwright Naomi Denny however, it’s anything but, with Denny delivering a pacey, dynamic, entertaining drama. Yes, of course, there’s anger, sadness and fear but there’s also a lot of wisdom and humour in this warm celebration of female friendship.

Denny has based her play on the testimony of five women, credited and named in the programme. From that she has moulded six characters, all very different but each a meaty role. And casting director Ali Anselmo has assembled an outstanding cast to bring these people convincingly and realistically to life.

Denise Pitter is very plausible as Pauline who chairs the meeting. She’s empathetic, respectful and carefully inclusive. Laya Lewis plays her passionate and funny friend Ruth. Both women are currently NED (no evidence of disease). Carol Moses’s Dorah, on the other hand, has Stage 4 cancer and is by turns forthright, bitter, outrageous, hilarious, kind and terrified. The nuancing is impressive.

As Sonia, Yvonne Gidden is tense, taciturn and apprehensive but gradually unbends and Genesis Lynea delights as her elegant, articulate doctor daughter although lack of age gap between them doesn’t work. Meanwhile Aliyah (Adaora Anwa) is the youngest attendee. Only 25 and still living at home she is struggling to come to terms with having been assailed by this disease so early in life.

The group dynamics are perceptively observed as they compare notes, concur, infuriate each other, argue, drink tea and share the food they’ve brought. Occasional freeze flashbacks (good lighting by Pablo Fernandez) provide insights into the experience of diagnosis or dealing with the horror of learning you have cancer as a single parent of two children. It’s cracking drama as well as being informative. How many people know that a black woman with breast cancer is forty per cent more likely to die than a white one? This is a play with a powerful message.

First published by jonathanbaz.com http://www.jonathanbaz.com/2023/04/unseen-unheard-untold-breast-cancer.html

Musicals By Candlelight continues at St Paul’s Church, London until 10 June 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

This 60-minute concert was a happy meeting of several of my worlds. I review theatre and musical theatre. I have been attending classical music concerts all my life and these days review a fair number of them. I play amateur violin and am part of a quartet. So to hear an outstanding quartet playing theatrical music ticked a lot of boxes. It was definitely a concert with my name on it so thank you Musical Theatre Review for inviting to cover it.

Icon Strings consists of six highly accomplished professional musicians of whom four played in this concert: Martyn Jackson first violin, Charis Jenson violin two, Sophie Lockett viola and Kirsten Jenson cello ….

Read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review https://musicaltheatrereview.com/musicals-by-candlelight-icon-strings-st-pauls-church/

Show: The Vortex

Society: Chichester Festival Theatre (professional)

Venue: Noël Coward

Credits: By Noël Coward.

The Vortex 4 stars

Photo: Helen Murray

The relationship between troubled sons and brittle, sexually active mothers is a rich source for drama. Shakespeare exploited it in Hamlet. So did Chekhov in The Seagull. And anyone who thinks Noel Coward was all about witty froth would do well to remember that his take on the mother/son theme, The Vortex (1924) was his first major success. It’s serious, quite dark stuff too, just spiced with the occasional whiff of Cowardian irony.

Moreover, if you can cast a talented real-life mother and son (Lia Williams and Joshua James) then there’s bound to be some pretty potent chemistry. Yes, we’re in plush, stereotypical Coward drawing room (design by Joanna Scotcher) with tea tables, comfy sofas and a piano on which James’s character Nicky plays extracts from George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue which dates from the same year as the play. Or at least that’s where we are until, along with some dramatic work with the revolve, it all disappears as we enter a bare-staged quasi nightmare with Lia Williams’s Florence.

It opens like a traditional drawing room drama with the cast of ten gradually assembling. Nicky, to everyone’s surprise, brings his new fiancée (Isabella Laughland) home to meet his mother. There’s tension immediately and it later transpires that she and Florence’s lover know each other well. Also in the mix is an outrageously camp friend (Richard Cant having fun), a jazz singer, a family friend and Nicky’s very marginalised father.

It’s “a vortex of beastliness” in which jealousy is the norm and hardly anyone is reasonable with anyone else. There’s a lot of meaty subtext which would repay detailed study. The “closet scene” in which Nicky and Florence finally confront each other in a rawly empty, smoky space is electric and we know that although promises are eventually extracted, the chances of their being kept are minimal. It’s a nuanced, ambiguous conclusion.

Williams, tall lithe and imposing glitters in this role and perfectly captures Florence’s shallow self-absorption along with her vulnerabilities. And James matches her beautifully. One isn’t surprised to read that he has, in the past, played both Konstantin and Hamlet. The support cast does a generally convincing job too.

The Vortex was originally a three act play. This production gives us a succinct version which runs for a continuous 90 minutes. Thus the pace never flags and it flows coherently towards its powerful final scene.

All photos: Helen Murray
First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-vortex/