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Susan’s Bookshelves: George Grossmith by Tony Joseph

I’ve been keen on the operas of WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan for most of my life. It began with The Mikado at the school my father was teaching when I was five after which I sang “Tit Willow” as a party piece to anyone who would listen. My sister got the same bug because she grew up in the same household surrounded by G&S LPs. Delightfully my elder son, Lucas, who’s a very competent semi-pro musician on top of the day job, has got it too.

He and I were chatting at his home recently late one evening over a glass of wine after he’d conducted a performance of The Sorcerer in a Cambridgeshire village barn. Somehow we got on to George Grossmith who sang most of the bass baritone roles in the original G&S  productions. Martin Savage played him rather well in Mike Leigh’s 1999 film, Topsy Turvey.  Lucas has sung most of those parts – often known as the Grossmith roles –  too. I’ve seen him as Koko, The Lord Chancellor and all the rest. Well, we agreed that neither of us knew anything  about Grossmith beyond his having sung the roles and written a timeless and famous comic novel called The  Diary of a Nobody with his brother Weedon. “Surely” I said, reaching for my phone, “Someone must have written a biography?” Indeed someone  had: Tony Joseph in 1982. Of course nearly 40 years later it’s out of print but there are plenty of second hand copies available via Amazon. I bought one on the spot.

Born in 1847, Grossmith came from a theatrically inclined family. His father performed as did his grandfather. Young George was clever, funny and well educated. He worked as a journalist (court reporter) before being gradually sucked in to the theatre. He met Gilbert in 1877 who offered him the role of John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer. He was slight, had impeccable diction, a gift for comedy and an unremarkable singing voice. He found first nights so nerve-wracking that it affected his performance.

He stayed with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company for seven years, became very famous, made many friends in high places including royalty before branching out on his own. He wrote hundreds of songs the most famous of which is “See Me Dance the Polka” and would do a one man performance from the piano including sketches and songs – he toured Britain and America with these shows and was commercially successful. Meanwhile he had married, was happy and the father of four children, most of whom eventually followed him into the business. Their descendants have many letters and papers which provided much of the source material for Tony Joseph’s book. Although the style is a bit stilted in places it’s very well researched and detailed.

No one really knows how much imput Weedon had in The Diary of a Nobody. He certainly illustrated it. He was a trained artist who could never quite make ends meet commercially so he too, went into stage work. Joseph thinks that even if Weedon didn’t do much of the writing he certainly provided a number of the ideas for the hilariously dead pan doings of Charles Pooter.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

 

 

Show: Much Ado About Nothing

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Leicester Square Theatre. 6 Leicester Place, London WC2H 7BX

Credits: by William Shakespeare. Presented by Sh!t-faced Shakespeare®

Much Ado About Nothing

4 stars

Photo: AB Photography

The fourth version of Much Ado About Nothing I’ve seen this year, and the third in the last twelve days, is an antidote to all the others.

It’s an irreverent send-up predicated on the idea that the actress playing Beatrice (Flora Sowerby at the performance I saw – the cast rotates) is drunk or “sh!t-faced”. She therefore messes up the show with a lot of asides, falling about and disinhibition. Think – if this company’s modus operandi is new to you – Horrible Histories spliced with The Play That Goes Wrong and blended with an energetic adult pantomime.

Sowerby is a gifted comic actor and uses her height – nearly six foot of it – to great effect. She also exudes charisma along with the daftness and has the audience eating out of her hand. And the other five actors work seamlessly with her. It must be fun to develop a show like this. I wonder who came up with the line “Refrain from mounting my codpiece”?

But it’s a bit of an irritant that every time Beatrice swears – and there’s a lot of that –  the audience falls about laughing. Yes, it sounds modern and therefore incongruous but actually these words are centuries old and Shakespeare knew them as well as anyone. Witness the “country matters” joke in Hamlet. It’s funny at first but for me it quite quickly wears thin. It’s a show about drink, in a sense. Perhaps I should have drunk more while I watched it because I thought the chlamydia joke was over-egged too. Trouble is that at heart I don’t find the British obsession with drink and drunkenness funny but that’s a personal reaction. It doesn’t mean that this isn’t a fine show of its type. After all they do – sort of – wind their way through Much Ado and even speak some Shakespeare occasionally.

There’s a compere (Beth-Louise Priestley on press night) who acts as a quasi stage manager and pantomime-style liaison with the audience, along with some rather contrived audience participation: It’s the sort of thing which grates on me but that’s to do with personal taste and not a criticism of the show.

It is, of course, much harder to do something like this than it is to do a Shakespeare play “straight” even with a heavily cut text. You have to convince the audience it’s all spontaneous while at the same time keeping it carefully under control – quite an art and this company do that extremely well which why I’m giving it four stars. This is a classic case of a reviewer having to separate her own likes and dislikes from assessment of quality.

 

  • Photos: AB Photography

 First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/much-ado-about-nothing-15/

I heard Kit de Waal talking to Michael Berkley on Radio 3’s Private Passions recently, having not come across her before, I was so taken with who she is and what’s she’s done that I immediately bought her debut novel, My Name is Leon, which was published in 2016.  Private Passions quite often has this effect on me.

I read it in 24 hours, totally hooked and devastated by the plausible inevitability of its tragedy. Leon is the mixed race son of a totally inadequate white mother: drugs, drink, promiscuity and mental health issues.  Now she has a new, white baby and Leon, aged eight, feels he has to care for them both. Of course, it goes horribly wrong. Social Services arrive and do their best. Appallingly, in time that “best” includes finding a white family to adopt  baby Jake but accepting that there is “no hope” for Leon. You feel his agony, guilt, anxiety and the yearning to be with his brother, on every single page.

The interesting thing is that everyone Leon encounters – his mother’s friend upstairs, the woman who fosters him and her sister, each social worker he meets, the friends he makes at the allotments –  are good people in their way although many have issues of their own. Even his mother loves him while eventually accepting that she doesn’t know why, but she can’t look after him.  No one wants Leon to be unhappy.  Yet from where he is standing (and eavesdropping)  everyone is lying, breaking promises and letting him down – so he lies too. And steals. And truants. And vandalises. And runs away. It’s a gut wrenching story which  every social worker and teacher will recognise. Eventually – no spoilers – he gets a bit of stability. It’s not perfect but it will do.

Mixed race herself, Kit de Waal’s origins are unequivocally working class. She grew up in the Irish community in Birmingham. She has served as a magistrate and on adoption panels. She knows, really knows, the world she’s writing about. That accounts for the extraordinary ring of truthfulness in this compelling novel. It’s fiction but every word of it is authentic.

The other thing which impressed me enormously is the way in which she gets into Leon’s mind. She knows what he’s thinking. She understands – and so, therefore does the reader  – everything that Leon does even when, on the face of it, he appears to be rude and difficult to the people who have to deal with, and look after, him.  It’s written in the third person but entirely presented from Leon’s point of view. This novel should be compulsory reading for everyone training as a social worker or wanting to. I’d insist every foster parent, teacher, magistrate, police officer and policy maker read it too.

Leon2 (1)

So determined is Kit de Waal, incidentally, that working class people and those from minority backgrounds should have a voice in fiction and the world of books that, as soon as she had secured a publishing deal for My Name is Leon she launched the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Scholarship. It provides a fully funded place for a student to do the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck.  Her own achievement – getting this impressive novel published in 2016 when she was in her mid fifties – makes her a pretty powerful role model.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: George Grossmith by Tony Joseph

Show: The Tempest

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Main Auditorium, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. The Regent’s Park, Inner Circle, London NW1 4NU

Credits: William Shakespeare (REIMAGINED FOR EVERYONE OVER THE AGE OF SIX). Directed by Jennifer Tang. Presentrd by Open Air Theatre Regents Park and Unicorn Theatre

The Tempest

3 stars

Photo: Marc Brenner

The latest in Open Air Theatre Regents Park’s series of re-imaginings for an all-age audience, is very freely reworked. And this time it is co-produced with Unicorn Theatre which makes a lot of sense. The show is effectively a tuneful mini opera (music and lyrics by Harry Blake) glued together with short passages extrapolated from Shakespeare and made as coherent as possible with skilled adaption and addition. It runs for just 75 minutes.

Chiara Stephenson’s set is a delight. The playing area is surrounded with the sort of rubbish which washes up on beaches so there’s a quietly understated environmental message especially as Ferdinand’s later task is to clear it up rather than to move logs.

The set uses a double revolve with a sort of makeshift hut in the centre which starts gauzy for the storm and then becomes Prospero’s cell. The roof of it provides a second playing space. The outer ring has stylish trees which can be climbed and which rotate at magical moments.

It takes plenty of vision – and some extraordinarily quick costume changes – to do The Tempest with a cast of six but Jennifer Tang makes it work smoothly enough. Ashley D Gayle, for instance, who gives us a fabulous angry, oppressed but funny Caliban, is also a delight as the unpleasant plotter, Antonio as well as singing a jolly song in a very glitzy get up (costumes by EM Parry – good) as one of the three masques summoned to formalise the big betrothal.

Juliet Agnes’s spectacular, larger-than-life Ariel in a sort of white space suit is arresting and she and Gayle lead the audience participation with verve.

Mark Theodore is the most impressive looking Prospero I’ve ever seen. He’s a big, statuesque man with a deep voice and he finds real gravitas and authority in the role – as well as some rueful humility and wisdom at the end.  It is, after all, ultimately a play about forgiveness and redemption.

I also enjoyed Finlay McGuigan’s  diffident, wet Ferdinand which contrasts well with his bumptious Trinculo. Daisy Prosper is a suitably bouncy, impressionable Miranda discovering the hormones she wasn’t previously aware of and Alice Keedwell is convincing as the bereaved mother, Alonsa. and funny as Stephano although I was puzzled by the drink she and Trinculo share and feed to Caliban. From my seat in row Q it looked like a bottle of Windowlene.

They are, in short, a talented bunch although some of them should not have been cast in singing roles. The best tune in the show is Ban, Ban Caliban.  I’m sure, though, I’ve heard it before or something very similar. It’s in a minor key, off the beat, uses a descending chromatic scale and becomes an instant  earworm. I heard several people, grown ups as well as children singing it as they left the theatre.

Maybe I’m literalist but I was a bit anxious about Prospero running a computer on electricity generated by Caliban on a bike. It seems implausible. And where, on this remote Island is getting his wifi from? Satellite? Never mind: magic innit. And  of course it’s fun to have his “books” represented by an iPad which he also uses to instigate his spells.

I think this re-imagining could have used just a little more Shakespeare (although all the famous speeches are in) and a little less innovation which can sometimes stray into gimmickry. I could see no sense, for example, in the pair of Deliveroo drivers bringing food, for example, although it’s good for a laugh.

In general though, it’s a decent and enjoyable show.

 

  • Miranda (Daisy Prosper). Photos: Marc Brenner

  • Stephano (Alice Keedwell) and Caliban (Ashley D. Gayle)

  • Caliban (Ashley D. Gayle)

  • Antonio (Ashley D. Gayle) and Alonsa (Alice Keedwell)

  • Miranda (Daisy Prosper), Prospero (Mark Theodore) and Ferdinand (Finlay McGuigan)

  • Alonsa (Alice Keedwell), Ariel (Juliet Agnes), Miranda (Daisy Prosper) and Prospero (Mark Theodore)

  • First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-tempest-14/
 Su

Show: Labour of Love

Society: Tower Theatre Company

Venue: Tower Theatre

Credits: James Graham

Labour of Love

4 stars

We’re in a Nottinghamshire constituency which has always been Labour. It’s 2017 and sitting MP David Lyons (Liam Stewart) is close to losing his seat. James Graham’s play then takes us back to the late 1980s in a detailed, compelling, often ruefully witty exploration of the tensions between the traditional Labour position and pragmatic New Labour.

Stewart gives us a man who is now shouty and probably burned out, struggling to come to terms with the imminent end of his career. Then we shift back in time and see him with his rather “posh”, distant, lawyer wife (Sophie Platts-Martin – good) who can’t envisage living in the constituency, trying to form a working relationship with the local council and making a laughable mess of a trade negotiation with a Chinese businessman (James Taverner – convincingly cold).

Most important of all is his relationship with his feisty, forthright, very bright agent, Jean (Helen McGill). McGill’s is a remarkable performance. She develops her character from a troubled young mother, whose husband has had to resign as MP because he’s dying of cancer, through several decades to a mature woman who knows the business she’s in and the man she’s working for very well indeed. And she does it in reverse. We get the mature version first and then with the aid of a wig, some younger clothes and some fine acting she sheds 30 years and carries us with her completely.

At the heart of this very political play is a love story. The relationship between David and Jean is stormy, argumentative, often angry but always passionate. As with Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing the more they hurl insults at each other the more we know that there’s chemistry there. It’s beautifully written and in this production exceptionally well acted and intelligently directed.

Phillip Ley’s set supports all this with basic office furniture, an “outside” door to the constituency office and a tiny kitchen off it. He has done some very accurate research and prop finding to get exactly the right sort of technology – phones, TV, fax and so on – for the year in question.

The above-set, video projection (designed by Harry Tomlin) is good too. He gives us archive footage of various prime ministers and leaders of the opposition over the last thirty years (how young everyone looks!) interspersed with film of Stewart and McGill canvassing and making constituency visits. It’s intended to cover the scene changes while cast and crew carry things on and off and it works pretty well although some of the cueing was iffy at the performance I saw.

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/labour-of-love/

 

 

Show: Much Ado About Nothing

Venue: The Roman Theatre of Verulamium. Bluehouse Hill, St Albans, Herts AL3 6AE

Credits: By William Shakespeare. Directed by Helen Tennison. Produced by Creation Theatre and OVO

Much Ado About Nothing

3 stars

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at the Roman Theatre 2023 . Photo: Richard Budd

Yet another sparky, innovative take on Much Ado About Nothing of which there’s a lot about this summer although I sometimes wonder whether it’s a competition to see who can come up with the quirkiest re-imagining. The National Youth Theatre, for example, set theirs on Love Island earlier this year.

Creation Theatre has teamed up with OVO for this 1980s version of a play which sits neatly in the leafy, hilly space of the Roman Theatre on a summer evening especially when we’re graced with kind weather.  And they’ve certainly recruited a talented cast, all of whom have to work pretty hard, because there are only six of them.

Good ideas include the rebirth of Leanto’s brother as his sister Antonia, good fun with a long 1980s coiled phone cord and lots of Keystone Cops-style comedy with Verges and Dogberry with sirens and loud hailers around the audience.  I was less happy about the Friar as Elvis although it’s very funny. Presley died in 1977 but perhaps we’re supposed to assume that this Friar is a self-styled, enthusiastic Elvis imitator/fan.

Anna Tolputt – a charismatically diminutive woman and a fine actor – plays Benedick as a man. She is very watchable but as we see Beatrice (Emily Woodward – excellent) gradually realise that she loves him, it feels as if we’re somewhere between a “trouser role” like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and a school play in a girl’s school. Tolputt has, however, an excellent knack of communicating her feelings with her face and hiding her character’s gentle vulnerability and innate decency behind gruffness as every good Benedick does. She has a gift for comedy too. Few people could get a laugh out of simply dropping an alka-seltzer into a glass of water.

Lewis Chandler is outstanding as Don Pedro – all independent school RP – along with a delightfully camp Margaret, the hilarious Elvis character and the self-important Dogberry. He is clearly a highly accomplished actor having a lot of fun. Brianna Douglas, meanwhile competently  gives us a prettily virginal Hero, an excitable Verges and a bent, tiresome, bossy old lady when she’s playing Antonia.

I also enjoyed Nicholas Osmond’s performance as the plummy- vowelled, malevolent Don John and as Leonato, a laid back father until we get that profoundly disturbing patriarchal anger with Hero after she’s jilted at the altar. He handles the change with so much conviction that it’s painful. Herb Cuanalo, who also plays Claudio, is at this best as the track-suited, East End Borachio earning pocket money by making mischief at Don John’s behest.

The problem with all that doubling, however is that there often has to be contrived stage business to allow other actors to change costumes and at one point there’s a gap where nothing happens at all and that feels clumsily amateurish as does using recorded music to cover scene changes.  But the occasional use of a recorded or telephone conversation as a way of not having a character on stage at a given moment is both ingenious and effective.

I liked the slight hint at the play on the word “die” by the way. It was Elizabethan slang for orgasm but I may have been the only person in the audience who got the joke.

 

  • ‘MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING’ at the Roman Theatre 2023. Photos: Richard Budd

  • First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/much-ado-about-nothing-14/
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I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t graze in bookshops much these days. Most of my browsing is now online or I buy books I’ve seen reviewed or which someone has recommended. The other day, however, I found myself with half and an hour to kill and wandered into Waterstones. Inevitably I came out with two (yes, only two) books one of which was this one. I remember reading Sheila Hancock’s The Two of Us (2004) and Just Me (2009) after the death of her husband, John Thaw. And I enjoyed and admired her performance in This is my Family at Chichester in 2019. She is now 90.

Published in 2022, Old Rage is written episodically as a sort of occasional diary starting with the letter from the Palace offering her a DBE in 2020. It then pops back to 2016 and runs to June 2021 with a bit of an update for the 2023 paperback edition which takes us through to December 2022 and tells us about the day she went to Windsor Castle with her grandson, Jamie,  both “looking the business,” to be invested by Prince William. Touchingly, that day, she wore the neck chain bearing the wedding rings of both her spouses (her first husband, Alex Ross also died of cancer) and her parents because she wanted to take them all with her.

It’s ruminative and often recalls incidents from long ago as well as commenting on what’s happening today. She ranges across Brexit – deeply detested because it undermines the peace, harmony and collaboration across Europe which she sees as the finest thing to come out of two world wars – ageing, Quakerism, her daughter’s cancer, life without her beloved John and, of course, Covid, the pandemic and lockdown, among many other topics.

Sheila Hancock is extraordinarily good company. She chuckles and chats as well as getting very cross about the likes of Trump and Johnson. On the other hand she has a delightful knack – perhaps it stems from her Quakerism – of quite liking people she disagrees with. She is kind, for example, about Theresa May and has a fond regard for the Royal Family despite knowing that logically she should be a republican. Classical music is her great comfort.  She’s caring (work with Ukrainian families)  and self-deprecating too, never really acknowledging just how good she is at what she does.

She’s ruefully funny too. She has a good anecdote, for example, about breaking up a fight in the street. She then tells us that her success wasn’t down to the Quaker anger management skills she was busily applying. The fight stopped because the perpeptrator recognised her from Celebrity Gogglebox.

Now in her tenth decade she has no illusions about her future and she’s realistic about her rheumatoid arthritis and immune system. On the other hand she’s still working and her brain is clearly in excellent nick. This is one of the most entertaining first person books I’ve read in ages. Thank you, Dame Sheila.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal

 

 

Forget Visconti, Dirk Bogarde and Mahler. It’s very interesting to read what Thomas Mann actually wrote in his 1911 long short story/novella.

For me this was a return to something I read – only once, I think – long ago. Mr E was keen on Thomas Mann because he’d done German A level and become absorbed in things Germanic. Death in Venice arrived in our household with him when we married so of course I picked it up. And, rather sweetly, it’s his old Penguin (price 2/6) copy that I have revisited now, although the cellophane with which he’d covered it (no, I don’t know why either) has gone crispy and all flaked off as I handled it.

Gustave von Aschenbach is a complex character. Writer and aestheticist, he has, it seems, been suppressing urges all his life. Although it’s written in the third person the narrative is presented entirely from Aschenbach’s point of view until the final three- sentence paragraph. When years ago I described Death in Venice as being about the death of a sad, repressed homosexual (the word “gay” meant something else then) who falls in love with a boy and then dies, I was told off for crude oversimplification. Actually, that’s exactly what it is.

At one point he is described as “utterly lovesick” and the physical descriptions of Tadziu’s skin, hair, clothes and voice almost quiver with intensity. In fact the writing is often warmly sensuous: “foreign birth raised his speech to music”, “a waft of carbolic acid” “the sea, dazzling white in its morning slumber.” Aschenbach is a sick man and has been ill since the age of 35.  Mann makes no secret of where this story is going. The title is unequivocal.  All the protagonist’s senses are heightened by his illness which means that at last he can give rein to forbidden inner thoughts.

He and Tadziu never speak to each other although the boy eventually becomes aware of being followed – I’m afraid the word “stalked” came to this 1923 reader – and flashes the odd smile at the old man.

It is true, though, that this is more than a daring (for 1911) story about a dying man transfixed by a pretty boy and that’s what the famous 1971 film loses. It’s also a reflection on the nature of true – great, even – art. Aschenbach is famous for an epic novel on Frederick the Great at which he worked with “almost religious fervour”. There’s hint of Mr Casaubon about him. Mann gives us a lot of detail about his upbringing and career and shows us that Aschenbach’s ideas about art,  have mellowed. It is the purity of Tadziu’s beauty which first assails him – like a homecoming.

I know you probably can’t help seeing Dirk Bogarde’s face every time you hear Mahler’s famous adagietto from the 5th Symphony. I certainly can’t. It is, however, well worth going back to the source material and marvelling at the power of Mann’s prose, even in translation.

Thomas Mann

 

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Old Rage by Sheila Hancock