Ruddigore continues at Wilton’s Music Hall, London until 25 March 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

For decades I’ve struggled to understand why Gilbert and Sullivan’s magnificent gothic send-up isn’t better known. The score, which I’ve known and loved since my teens, includes some of Sullivan’s loveliest gems.

The good news is that in this bijoux version (cast of 13) it sits very happily in the gothic shabby chic of Wilton’s Music Hall. Peter Benedict, who also appears as Sir Despard, has retrieved some of Gilbert’s cut dialogue and reordered some of the songs in order to make this complicated plot about ancestors, three men with the same surname, ghosts and the rest as clear as possible.

The talented cast is a mixture of opera-trained singers and those who’ve come via the musical theatre route and the difference is clear. Benedict himself, for example, is a terrific actor – all Hitchcock-ian menace and eyes – and very good indeed at diction but his singing style is more Noel Coward than Bryn Terfel.

Madeline Robinson, on the other hand ….. (read the rest of this review at Musical Theatre Review https://musicaltheatrereview.com/ruddigore-wiltons-music-hall/

I’m an eclectic reader. I read most sorts and deliberately choose different levels of intensity. I used to tell my students that this is what they should aim for too. No one can or should read, say, Walter Scott or James Joyce to the exclusion of everything else. How are you ever going to learn to read critically if you don’t read widely so that you can make comparisons? In this I differed completely from one colleague who told our students so often that they should be reading the essays of George Orwell instead of what she called “trash” that I secretly wondered if she’d ever read anything else … until she “confessed” that during school holidays she read nothing but John Grisham. Fine, but I wish she’d discussed that with the students too.

Anyway the romantic novels of Katie Fforde are what I turn to when I want a change from, say, Charlotte Bronte, Rudyard Kipling and Leo Tolstoy all of whose books I have featured here in the last month. Moreover, of course, I read plenty of books – a lot of detective fiction, biographies, young adult titles and more which don’t necessarily get into these blogs.

Fforde has been publishing her feel-good stories since 1995 and she’s admirably prolific. They’ve been coming at the average rate of one every nine or ten months for 28 years. They are undemanding but witty with lots of likeable characters: the literary equivalent of a really well made cup of tea. She’s particularly good at warm, supportive, female friendship. And Fforde’s books are full of food, gardens, pretty décor, lovely scenery, flowers and beautiful houses. Another characteristic is talented, competent women succeeding – as chefs, gardeners, wedding arrangers and so forth – and I like that especially as they are often initially diffident people discovering their own potential.

She likes a traditional plot – and we all know there are only seven stories in the world. Fforde’s favourite is a version of rags-to-riches in which a woman is just establishing herself at something or somewhere when a rude/difficult/patronising/wealthy Mr Darcy type turns up and annoys her. Eventually he usually does something kind and unsolicited behind her back and she realises that she’s in love with him. This is so typical of Fforde that I now wait for him and smile. In her latest, One Enchanted Evening, his name is Justin – all motor cycle, leathers and aggression – and he doesn’t believe women should work in professional kitchens but eventually …

One Enchanted Evening is not set in the present although Fforde never dates it precisely. Meg, the protagonist is helping to run a hotel in rural Dorset where black forest gateau and coronation chicken are the thing, the dessert trolley (remember those?) is an innovation, en suite bathrooms are unusual and the war seems to be only one generation back so we are, presumably in the 1960s. Although even then I can’t believe that the stage crew would have installed an actual curtain for an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Meg has a group of friends (already familiar from other books because there is sometimes a tangential overlap) all of whom turn up to help in their different ways bringing their own joys and problems. In the hotel Meg meets Ambrosine an elderly lady who turns out to have quite a back story and they become close friends. She is beautifully done, as is Meg’s pretty, young (ish) mother, Louise and Susan, the ultra competent village woman who knows everyone and can get any sort of job done without fuss.

In short I loved it. I make absolutely no apology for enjoying light fiction along with everything else in my busy mix and I hope some of my former students are reading this, nodding and enjoying their own wide range reading.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Rice Without Rain by Minfong Ho

Macbeth

Flabbergast Theatre

Southwark Playhouse

Star rating: 4

As you’d expect, I’ve been round the block many times with this play. I’ve probably seen 50 productions and because it featured so often on the O level, GCSE or, later, the Key Stage 3 syllabus I’ve taught it to more classes than you can shake branch of Birnam Wood at too. It means I know the text almost as well as the actors do. Never, however, have I seen a Macbeth as visceral and muscular as this one. Flabbergast Theatre’s take on physical theatre takes in puppetry, dance, song, drumming and comedy all wrapped up in some riveting movement. The term “physical theatre” doesn’t actually do it justice. It’s an understatement.

All eight cast members – five male and three female – wear grubby beige skirts over trousers and each role emerges from the ensemble. The seating is on three sides in the Large at Southwark Playhouse’s Borough building. As the audience files in it has to walk round a disturbingly weird (I use the word in Shakespeare’s sense) scene in which the cast pants, whimpers, moans, intones and leaps about interacting with each other. It must have been great fun to devise. It’s pretty menacing scene setting and one tearful little girl, aged about 9, had to be taken out by her parents before the play even began at the performance I saw.

The action is devised but the text and the verse speaking are respectful. I liked the idea of chorusing the account of Macbeth’s valour at the beginning rather than leaving it with the Bloody Sargeant and it meant we could have graphic mime to convey the brutality of “unseaming” someone from “the nave to the chops”. And remember in small talk about extreme weather Macbeth says “Twas a rough night”? Well he’s just committed regicide so obviously it’s a double edged comment. I have never heard an audience chuckle at it before which shows how engaging and intelligent the story telling is.

It’s a production full of original ideas. Duncan is calculating, unlikeable and probably senile with a hideous cackle. The porter scene is almost wordless and certainly doesn’t use Shakespeare’s words but it’s funny and does the job it’s meant to – building up the anticipation before the finding of Duncan’s body. There is always a hint of sexual chemistry between the Macbeths but I’ve never seen it as overtly played as this and there is a strong suggestion, as they plot, that they find violence sexually arousing. The banquet scene is simply but effectively done with a large board from which Banquo’s ghost emerges.

The witches meanwhile, since they’re on stage all the time and play other roles, convey the impression that they’re part of everyone. And I really liked the whole cast creation of the apparition which the witches show him when he visits them for advice after the murder of Banquo. The whole cast creates a many headed monster when Macbeth is commissioning the assassin too.

This Macbeth is a taut production running just over two hours including an interval which is probably needed as much by the exhausted cast as by the emotionally battered audience. I found it a refreshing approach but if you want “traditional” Shakespeare with long uncut speeches and each role cast and costumed then this is not for you. The fact that at least 10 people didn’t return after the interval at the performance I attended is a sad but clear indicator that this way of working isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

This review will be published by Sardines in due course.

So the censors – sorry “sensitivity advisers” – have decreed that Roald Dahl’s Matilda can no longer read Rudyard Kipling. She has to read Jane Austen instead. Why on earth she can’t read both is beyond me but that’s not my point here. I doubt that Matilda was reading Kim or Stalky and Co anyway. I expect she was lapping up Kipling’s wonderful short stories or possibly Puck of Pook’s Hill.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in India which became the backdrop for much of his fiction. A highly successful writer, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and eventually buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Decades later cakes and handbags were named after him. In 1995 a poll found that “If” was the most popular poem in England.

Of course he was a patriotic supporter of the British Empire and all it stood for. Most people were – including, obviously, Queen Victoria, nineteenth century prime ministers and, in the early decades of the twentieth century millions of ordinary folk like my grandparents. Kipling was a man of his time – widely respected for his writing – and attempts to cancel him retrospectively make no sense at all. Good art in all genres can stand proud on its own irrespective of what any picky inhabitant of the 21^st century may think about the creator.

The whole debacle sent me scuttling back to the delights of The Jungle Book (1895) and the Just So Stories (1912) The former, let’s not forget, is a book of short stories not a novel about Mowgli as Disney and many stage adaptations like to hint. The first three are about Mowgli. Thereafter we get the delights of “The White Seal”, “Toomai of the Elephants” and best of all, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a mongoose who takes charge of the bungalow garden during the Raj period. He despatches three snakes and saves the white human family. It’s a bit anthropomorphic. Animals don’t talk and cobras don’t plot revenge but it’s powerful and very exciting – especially when Rikki finally confronts Nagaina, the female cobra, in an outhouse bathroom. And along the way, as a child, I learned quite a lot about wildlife in an Indian garden. All fiction enhances general knowledge, as I frequently observe.

I would often read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” aloud to classes. It lasts just 40 minutes which is perfect for a single secondary school teaching period. Almost always I could sense attentive tension in the room as we neared the end. On one occasion in the 1990s when I was teaching in a girls’ boarding school I read it to a Year 9 group. The next day a parallel group came in for their lesson and said: “That story you read the others yesterday – will you read it to us please?” They had actually been talking about it amongst themselves and away from the classroom! Music to a teacher’s ears. How can anyone want to “cancel” a writer who can do that?

And so to the Just So Stories. I first heard “How the First Letter Was Written” and “How The Alphabet Was Made” in primary school when an inspired student teacher read them to us. And soon found the others for myself. I’m particularly fond of “How the Leopard got his Spots” and “The Cat that Walked by Himself” but “The Elephant’s Child” is the real pearl.

Of course Kipling was a fine poet (“The Way through the Woods” and “Danny Deever” are, for example, splendid) and it shines through his prose. “The Elephant’s Child” is almost more poetic than a poem with its oft repeated “great grey-green Limpopo river all set about with fever trees”. The crocodile has a “musky, tusky mouth” and the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake has a “scalesome, flailsome tail”. It’s engagingly musical which is why any child you read it to will soon start chanting it with you.

Adults must have read it to me a lot when I was little because I can do an abridged amateur version of it from memory. Once, in a restaurant in central France when we’d travelled all day, our small children were very tired and the service was slow, I launched into “The Elephant’s Child” to distract them. After a few minutes I sensed that everything had gone quiet and my husband was grinning incredulously. I then realised that every single person in that busy restaurant was listening. Well, given that most of them were not English I doubt that is was my story telling ability which had caught their attention. It was the compulsive musicality of Kipling’s words which are catchy even if the language isn’t your own. How many other writers can you think of who could do that?

So please don’t let’s belittle Rudyard Kipling, Yes he’s a bit dated and quaint in places and he took colonialism for granted but my goodness, he was a wordsmith who could tell a fine story.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: One Enchanted Evening by Katie Fforde

Coming back to Charlotte Bronte’s life changing, life-affirming 1847 masterpiece for at least the twelfth time is like listening to a Beethoven symphony or gazing at van Gogh’s sunflowers. Every word, note or brushstroke is warmly familiar and yet there are always things to marvel at that you’ve never noticed before.

At one level it’s a rags-to-riches story. Jane, orphaned and unloved is sent away to boarding school and then goes to work as a governess in a rich man’s house. She falls in love with her boss and he with her but there are many complications before they finally find their happy ending. And I think that’s about the baldest, tritest summary I have ever written!

The narrating, eponymous Jane is a prototype feminist. She has no family (or believes she doesn’t) so knows she must take full responsibility for her own life and welfare. Advertising herself for a governess post is, for instance, a pretty radical action for a young woman who has hitherto led a very sheltered life. She comments:

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings, knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.”

Yes, that really was written 176 years ago. And it’s extraordinary to think that in some circles and some parts of the world, not much has changed. Moreover, this is the certainly the sort of thing my grammar school headmistress would have said (and did) in the 1950s and 60s. Look, incidentally, at all those semi-colons – how punctuation habits have changed.

So what sort of people are Jane and Mr Rochester? Well, for a start, neither of them is physically attractive. Jane is plain and very small at a time when statuesque women like Blanche Ingram or even Bertha Mason were admired. Her horrible cousin John Reed describes her as a toad. No one ever calls her pretty and she knows she isn’t. Mr Rochester has a huge head and a jutting brow, as Jane repeatedly tells us. It is their personalities and the chemistry between them, along with mutual respect which drives their burgeoning love – along with their being able to have long, adult intelligent conversations on a completely equal level.

Of course there have been dozens (and dozens) of screen and stage adaptations. For me, the first was the 1956 serialisation on BBC TV (with Stanley Baker and Daphne Slater) when I was still at primary school and it was that which first led me to read an abridged version. But I’ve never seen a dramatisation which does the novel justice. Susannah Yorke and Edward C Scott in the 1970 film were both far too attractive, for example, and the 1983 BBC version with Timothy Dalton as Mr Rochester was a travesty. I’ve never, to be honest, been overly impressed by Dalton as an actor, good looking as he is, and he was certainly miscast for this role.

For me the power (and I still find Jane Eyre a page-turner) is in the words. Volume 2, chapter 8 is pivotal. It’s a hot summer night at dusk. There is tension in the air because of a forthcoming storm. Jane and Mr Rochester are in the garden pretending not to see each other and the way Charlotte Bronte ratchets up the eroticism is masterly.

It is easy to see Mr Rochester as a wicked man (and I think I probably did in youth) who tries to commit bigamy but actually he’s anything but. He could have put his wife, Bertha – who has, in modern terms, a hereditary form of intermittent psychosis which triggers pyromania, nymphomania and violence – into some appalling asylum. Instead he has her cared for at home as decently as he can. She’s locked in but not restrained as she would be in an asylum. Then when the building is on fire he seriously injures himself in trying to rescue her. That said, I always find the way he leads Blanche Ingram on pretty distasteful. She is not a likeable woman but she doesn’t deserve to be deliberately toyed with and used.

Later in the novel Jane is rescued from self-imposed destitution (I’m always irritated with her for leaving her bag on the coach) by the Rivers family. Eventually St John Rivers and his sisters turn out, through one of those glorious Victorian novel coincidences, to be Jane’s cousins: thus she exchanges the broken Reeds for the Rivers of life. Did Bronte actually mean that? Probably – she had to choose names for them after all.

St John Rivers, a clergyman, is in some ways far more of a “monster” than Mr Rochester. And unlike Mr R, he is classically good looking: tall, blonde and personable. He wants to marry Jane, for entirely practical reasons. He wants her to assist him in his overseas missionary work. He has no love for her (in fact he’s in love with someone else and refusing to follow his heart). He is cold and controlling with no respect whatever for Jane’s independence. It’s a fascinating contrast – like so many things in Jane Eyre.

Another thought on rereading this novel now. We’ve just come through a pandemic. I’m struck, as never before, by the casual, habitual bed sharing at Lowood School. Based on the author’s own experiences at Cowan Bridge School where two of her sisters died, the institution is decimated by an epidemic. No one knew about bacteriology until the big break through by Louis Pasteur in 1850. Jane Eyre is a novel of its time.

It’s also very much a novel for now. If you haven’t read it lately then I urge you to do so.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I often think about Laurie Lee’s Cock Pheasant “gilded with leaf-thick paint” swaggering across “the cidrous banks of autumn”. We used to see a lot of pheasants when I lived in Kent and I’ve never read a more apt description.

Yet, all the online information, including obituaries, asserts that Lee (1914-1997) struggled to achieve recognition as a poet. Yes of course I read his prose works especially Cider with Rosie which was heavily promoted at my teacher training college because it was, they said, a fine presentation of a child growing up. It was certainly evocative as were its sequels As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War. For a long time Cider With Rosie was standard fare on secondary school syllabuses too but I think it’s a bit too English, white and dated to tick the boxes in 2023.

We shouldn’t underestimate him as a poet, in my view. I first stared to explore his poems when an anthology called Poets of Our Time was set for the O Level classes I was teaching – yes, it was a while ago now. Poets of Our Time was edited by Chris Woodhead, fondly (or not) remembered by teachers as HM Inspector of Schools from 1994-2000. He was an English teacher long before he achieved fame – or notoriety, depending on your point of view.

I’ve recently started to dip into Lee’s poems again. “Sunken Evening”, for instance, is a stunning depiction of dusk in central London in the 1950s. It’s based on a sustained metaphor comparing the withdrawal of workers from town at the end of the day with the tide going out. Thus “crusted lobster-buses crawl/ Among the fountain’s silver weed” and “There, like a wreck, with mast and bell, /The torn church settles by the bow, / while phosphorescent starlings stow / Their mussel shells along the hull”.

What a wordsmith!

Lee’s poem “Christmas Landscape” is quite something too. Biting cold becomes “the wind gnaws with teeth of glass” – and yet there is warmth and life as “in a nest of ruins the blessed babe is laid” although there’s a “cry of anguish” as “the cold earth is suckled”.

Or what about “My Many-Coated Man” in which Lee gives us four contrasting animal pictures from the “padded spicy tiger” to the “rank red fox” and the “mottled moth”. I like the vulnerability of the “the turtle on the naked sand” who “peels to air his pewter snout” best. Then in the final stanza he compares these with the complexity of man “hooded by a smile”.

Lee is a good poet. And like all good poets he is master of form as well as message. He’s well worth reading and I’d like to see a revival of interest in his work. Have I started the ball rolling?

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Show: The Walworth Farce

Society: Southwark Playhouse

Venue: Southwark Playhouse. Dante Place, 80 Newington Butts, London SE11 4FL

Credits: By Enda Walsh. Presented by Southwark Playhouse

The Walworth Farce

3 stars

Photo: David Jensen

Enda Walsh’s plays are famously claustrophobic and in that sense The Walworth Farce (2006) is fairly typical. Three Irish ex-pat men, a father and two sons, confine themselves to their flat high above the Walworth Road where they act out a play repetitively, compulsively on a loop. They play a lot of parts – and the clue is in the name – there’s a lot of very funny, high speed shenanigans with wigs along with quasi Brechtian physical theatre nicely directed by Nicky Allpress. But that doesn’t make it a comedy and the ending is anything but. In many ways it’s a play about loss – these people have no family or friends and they miss their homeland. It’s relentless, challenging and at the end one was grateful for its succinct 115-minute length..

Dan Skinner as Dinny, the oldest character on stage is suitably volatile in his pitiful attempts to control everyone else. Killian Coyle is marvellous as Blake, the brother who plays all the female parts and Emmet Byrne finds powerful pathos is Sean, the younger brother who like his father and sibling is seriously damaged.

But the actor who really pulled me up short is Rachelle Diedericks as Hayley, the girl who works in Tesco and turns up just before the end of the first act with a bag of forgotten shopping. Her loquacious, nervous normality highlights the madness of what she has stumbled on. Diedericks does a fine job of gradually escalating Hayley’s disquiet and fear. Her face work, standing apart from the others, as Byrne delivers a long, telling speech is outstanding acting.

Anisha Fields’s set gives us the whole flat: kitchen, sitting room and bedroom in a lot of detail and opening into each other so that the action can thread through the entire space. A word of praise/sympathy for stage managers Molly Tackaberry and Olivia Wolfenden too: there are a lot of quite complex props in this play on a pretty busy set.

This is the first play at Southwark Playhouse’s new theatre – just off the Elephant and Castle gyratory. For the moment they are calling it Southwark Playhouse Elephant to distinguish it from its existing venue now re-named Southwark Playhouse Borough. SP Elephant is very pleasant with two big bars, excellent loos, comfortable seating and a huge playing space with seating on three sides on two levels. And of course, because The Walworth Farce is actually set at Elephant and Castle it is an ideal choice.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-walworth-farce/

Show: The Beekeeper of Aleppo

Society: Nottingham Playhouse (professional)

Venue: Nottingham Playhouse. Wellington Circus, Nottingham NG1 5AF

Credits: Adapted for the stage by Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler. From the acclaimed novel by Christy Lefteri. Presented by Nottingham Playhouse in association with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and UK Productions Ltd.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo

4 stars

The cast of The Beekeeper of Aleppo (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

It’s every inch a story for our times. I thought that when I read Christy Lefteri’s bestselling novel in 2019 and this play, which is pretty faithful to the book, hammers that home with gentle, heart-wrenching power.

Nuri (Alfred Clay) and his wife Afra (Roxy Faridany) have arrived, both acutely damaged mentally, in the south of England where they are lodged in a shared house on the coast while they await the outcome of their asylum application. Gradually – mostly through Nury’s dramatic memories – we learn about the tragic loss of their young son in a bombing raid in their native Aleppo and the horrors of the journey and obstacles they faced in their attempts to get to the UK.

Bees are a metaphor for community life. Nuri and his cousin Mustafa (Joseph Long),who has arrived in Yorkshire, have kept bees in Syria. They want to do the same in Britain.

Clay is a fine actor. He gives us a man who is so deeply traumatised that he’s delusional – worried, loving, in denial and, often sardonically witty. Faridany, whose character has lost her sight as part of post-traumatic stress disorder, brings plenty of anxiety, depression and, eventually warmth both in marriage and friendship.

The cast is gloriously diverse and bring plenty of experience of real life immigration stories to their roles. They are also all strong and work seamlessly together with a lot of multi role-ing. Long, for example, is powerful as the stalwart Mustafa and ruefully funny as a house mate in the south coast refugee house. And there’s lovely work from Nadia Williams as a Brummie official, a bossy nurse and a mystic African woman who befriends Afra in Athens, among other roles.

Ruby Pugh’s imaginative set gives us sand dunes with a bed, a chair and a trap door which connotes every possible place that Yuri and Afra find themselves in. But the real star of this show is Ravi Deprees’s film design which projects onto perforated gauzey screens at the back giving us bees in a hive. At other times he uses moving film to evoke very effectively a small boat in a storm, a ride in the back of a lorry with a cow and much more.

I watched this two hour play (plus 20-minute interval) for the first three quarters of it, deeming this §§ a perfectly decent 3-star show. Then the last fifteen minutes moved this hard-bitten critic to tears so she decided it had earned a fourth star.

Photos: Manuel Harlan

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-beekeeper-of-aleppo/

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The Walworth Farce

3 stars

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The Beekeeper of Aleppo

4 stars

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