It was my pleasure a couple of weeks ago to attend a performance of 'Ruddigore' at Buxton Opera House during the G&S festival there. This proved to be an enlightening experience. Firstly 'our' ladies facilities are palatial by comparison. There was only one ladies comfort station to serve the entire stalls. This is about on a par with Verona where there are several more facilities, but they tend to be holes in the ground in the bowels of the amphitheatre, great when you have dressed for the occasion. Secondly my daughter in law and I accidentally chose to eat in the pub frequented by all the operatic luvvies attending the season. The bitchiness was a pleasure to witness.
The group performing that evening were from Southampton and staged a modern dress performance with a cricketing theme, sort of 'Outside Edge' with violins. We did not stay for the adjudication, the G&S purists sitting behind us were not impressed, but then listening in to their conversation in the interval, they had been less than enthusiastic with the Bride of Chukkie in Verona's 'La Traviata' last year. I had another surprise when the contralto arrived, I had to restrain myself from calling out, she was our Lattedrinker's lovely wife's double!
It got me thinking about the Spring, lots of ideas but definitely no 'communal box', the running gag of the whole show. On with my deliberations!
Saturday 30 August 2008
Tuesday 26 August 2008
Theatre Club Evening - 5th September
From 7pm on Friday 5th September, and at the same time every Friday in September, we shall be having a Theatre Club Evening at the Cowbridge Market Theatre.
Admission is free, and open to all. The bar will open at 7pm, and the evening's activities will start at 7.30pm.
Audience participation is encouraged but not enforced, and the theme of the first evening is communication. There will be some warm-up games and exercises, some short comedy sketches to enact or enjoy, and a little bit of improvisation.
The idea is to share our skills, thoughts, knowledge of all things theatrical, and get to know each other a bit more, in a relaxed environment.
Please come along - bring a friend or two - and have some fun.
Admission is free, and open to all. The bar will open at 7pm, and the evening's activities will start at 7.30pm.
Audience participation is encouraged but not enforced, and the theme of the first evening is communication. There will be some warm-up games and exercises, some short comedy sketches to enact or enjoy, and a little bit of improvisation.
The idea is to share our skills, thoughts, knowledge of all things theatrical, and get to know each other a bit more, in a relaxed environment.
Please come along - bring a friend or two - and have some fun.
Wednesday 20 August 2008
Roaring Meg Brings The House Down
Of course it should have been a balmy summer evening, the sun sinking slowly into a furnace of copper, chilled Pinot Grigio on the castle terrace and a light zephyr breathing the warm balm of Sicilia over the assembled company. But that was asking too much.
We went in the Company of Upstager and Zebskid to Goodrich Castle last Saturday evening for the specific purpose of getting a good soaking and incidentally to watch the Rain and Shine Theatre Company perform the Winter’s Tale. As they say on the quiz shows: the clue is in the title.
Rain and Shine are an excellent troupe who perform Shakespeare and other classical plays in a rumbustious, burlesque, street theatre-ish style. Lots of noise, lots of clever and comic ‘business,’ minimal staging, deliberately hammy acting and audience involvement: the actors (well, two of them) fancying a drop of wine during the performance and helping themselves to the remains of someone’s picnic, for instance. Well worth seeing; more: well worth going an hour’s drive to see. Even in the rain. Even when the rain itself was over-acting.
I had never seen the Winter's Tale, so that was a first for me, and, given the generally humid ambiance, not one I am likely to forget. I actually enjoyed it, though I did, I confess, as the rain started to descend in stair rods during the last half hour, wish that the final scene would quickly draw to a close so that we could all go home. "Yes, we know the statue is real!" I wanted to say, "so you can skip the gradual warming up bit." Only when I started drying out did I discover how wet I was.
We sat, on seats brought especially for the occasion, next to a seventeenth century mortar called Roaring Meg. A squat, tubby black thing that looked almost benign and resembled an iron toad. It had been cast locally when the Parliamentary commander besieging the Royalists of Goodrich began to lose patience. So with Meg’s helped he lobbed a few 200lb gunpowder filled shells into the castle and the walls, in true Biblical style, came tumbling down.
I couldn't help thinking, watching the droplets of rain swirling on the wind like snowflakes in the luminescence of the spotlights, that the play might have been performed before, in this same castle courtyard or in the adjacent hall, in happier times, before Roaring Meg (why are cannons always female?) brought the great castle towers tumbling down.
I couldn't, either, help falling into my Lettice role and picturing the hall tables piles high with hedgehogs, puffins and coneys, or the Virgin Queen descending the grand castle staircase during one of her progressions around the Kingdom and slipping on the same wet stones stones as us.
I can't think of another country, other than Britain, where there would be shown the same spirit - not only of 'The Show Must Go On' but also of 'The Show Must Be Watched.' And as it ended and we packed up and waded back the long quarter mile in the darkness to the car park, cold and soaked, I knew I was glad to have gone. There is more to theatre than ice cream in the warm trappings of the grand circle.
Friday 8 August 2008
LETTICE AND LOVAGE
Last week we received the news that Claire Gribben would be starting a new job in the autumn and, in consequence of the travelling that this would be likely to entai, would not be able to take up the part of Lettice in ‘Lettice and Lovage’ under my direction in November.
It was necessary therefore quickly to find a replacement. To cut a long story short, I volunteered myself to play the part, on the basis that I could change the gender of Lettice from female to male. The Committee agreed.
I know this decision will not find universal favour. I want therefore to use this post to explain what lay behind my proposal and the Committee’s acceptance, apart from the need to have a lead actor in place virtually immediately.
Having been the putative director of ‘Lettice’ since the Spring (originally the production was scheduled for July) I had got to know something of the part. It contains some marvellous lines, lines which any actor would enjoy speaking simply for the fun they contain. So I began to learn a few.
But as you speak the lines you quickly realise that it is very hard to discern what gender the character is. Take away the obvious titles like ‘Miss Douffet’ and you are left with sentiments that are more likely to be uttered by men than by women. “Language alone frees one,” says Lettice, “and History gives one place.” Women are not usually given to such pretension, noble though it may be. Men, on the other hand........
Where had I heard such sentiments before I asked myself? Of course, spoken by Jeffrey Bernard. Not those words, no, but similar words. In fact, I concluded, that both ‘Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell’ (which I had performed with CADS in 2003) and ‘Lettice and Lovage’ are, at bottom, very similar plays.
Both are essentially about loss and compensating for loss. For Jeffrey Bernard the compensations for his crumbling life and the decay of Soho’s spirit - “sitting by the bedside of a dying Soho, holding her hand, but wondering whether it would not be kinder to switch off the light,” are racing, alcohol and fanciful reminiscence.
For Lettice, the loss is similar. She mourns the colourful past. “We live in a country now that wants only the mere - mere guides, mere people, mere events,” she exclaims. Her compensation is to escape the present into the fantasy of another age. But like Jeffrey Bernard, her life in late middle-age has crumbled too: she lives alone with her cat bemoaning the modern age that ever more deeply envelopes her. There are no children to call: “my tourists.......are my children....” she observes poignantly.
I should I suppose get away from writing of Lettice as ‘she.’ From now on it will be a man called Lettice. For that is the point: the character, as written, is gender neutral. Lettice is not a mother, she is not a wife or girlfriend, she does not involve herself with the WI, or the hairdresser, she does not buy tights or wear wigs, or keep home or do any of those things that otherwise identify a stage character as female.
And not only that - in his excursions into the past Lettice plays historical figures that are male: Sir John and Sir Nicholas Fustian, Richard III, Charles I, Charles II, Walter Raleigh, Charles I’s executioner, the public prosecutor of the French revolution. The only female character Lettice actually plays is Mary, Queen of Scots (in which role he says nothing anyway). Now it is easier to play male figures, as a man, of course, just as it is to adopt the boldness of style that is part of the Lettice image.
The play was supposed to have been written for Maggie Smith. Whether Maggie Smith arrived while the play was still a blank sheet of paper or whether Peter Shaffer adapted some already formed ideas for a male tourist guide for Maggie Smith, I do not know, but I suspect the latter from the text.
Certainly I find Lettice’s lines very easy to deliver as a man. The lines appear correct, authentic, the sort of thing a man would say in that circumstance, whereas, if I imagine a female Lettice - even when played by Maggie Smith - some of the lines seem a trifle forced, just as the idea of an all female company enacting only the History Plays of Shakespeare in French, in the Dordogne, is forced. Lettice, the woman, playing the part of the male executioner, complete with ‘foinal trappings’ (beard) is forced; her performing the Walter Raleigh cape gesture, as a woman, is forced.
These things can be just as funny, and slightly more realistic, when played by a man. But of course one cannot escape entirely the business of ‘forced.’ There is the Queen of Scots scene, though I cannot accept that a man playing (only briefly of course) the Queen of Scots is anymore of a travesty than a woman playing Charles I or his executioner. Playing Lettice as a man also gives the opportunity to introduce a subfusc element of sexual chemistry into the relationship with Lotte. Even with actresses as talented as Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack there is some subtle thing (to my mind) in their long arguments together that is missing.
I had originally conceived that I might play the part as an effeminate, gay, Quentin Crispish sort of man. Indeed, I even considered that I might have done it entirely in drag. While the latter, of course, might have been great fun I am not sure I have the talent for it and certainly, in a female voice, it would become impossible to give the lines in the play the enunciation they deserve. Besides it would turn the show into a pantomime, which would be most sad.
But there is no need. The part works very well as pretty much the character I played in Jeffrey Bernard - philosophical, regretful, by turns sentimental and self-pitying, by turns flamboyant and outrageous. As I said the plays are most similar; let the characters be so too. It will be a great show; of that I have no doubt. We have a great team, the play offers wonderful ‘coups de theatre;’ it will be a credit to CADS.
It was necessary therefore quickly to find a replacement. To cut a long story short, I volunteered myself to play the part, on the basis that I could change the gender of Lettice from female to male. The Committee agreed.
I know this decision will not find universal favour. I want therefore to use this post to explain what lay behind my proposal and the Committee’s acceptance, apart from the need to have a lead actor in place virtually immediately.
Having been the putative director of ‘Lettice’ since the Spring (originally the production was scheduled for July) I had got to know something of the part. It contains some marvellous lines, lines which any actor would enjoy speaking simply for the fun they contain. So I began to learn a few.
But as you speak the lines you quickly realise that it is very hard to discern what gender the character is. Take away the obvious titles like ‘Miss Douffet’ and you are left with sentiments that are more likely to be uttered by men than by women. “Language alone frees one,” says Lettice, “and History gives one place.” Women are not usually given to such pretension, noble though it may be. Men, on the other hand........
Where had I heard such sentiments before I asked myself? Of course, spoken by Jeffrey Bernard. Not those words, no, but similar words. In fact, I concluded, that both ‘Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell’ (which I had performed with CADS in 2003) and ‘Lettice and Lovage’ are, at bottom, very similar plays.
Both are essentially about loss and compensating for loss. For Jeffrey Bernard the compensations for his crumbling life and the decay of Soho’s spirit - “sitting by the bedside of a dying Soho, holding her hand, but wondering whether it would not be kinder to switch off the light,” are racing, alcohol and fanciful reminiscence.
For Lettice, the loss is similar. She mourns the colourful past. “We live in a country now that wants only the mere - mere guides, mere people, mere events,” she exclaims. Her compensation is to escape the present into the fantasy of another age. But like Jeffrey Bernard, her life in late middle-age has crumbled too: she lives alone with her cat bemoaning the modern age that ever more deeply envelopes her. There are no children to call: “my tourists.......are my children....” she observes poignantly.
I should I suppose get away from writing of Lettice as ‘she.’ From now on it will be a man called Lettice. For that is the point: the character, as written, is gender neutral. Lettice is not a mother, she is not a wife or girlfriend, she does not involve herself with the WI, or the hairdresser, she does not buy tights or wear wigs, or keep home or do any of those things that otherwise identify a stage character as female.
And not only that - in his excursions into the past Lettice plays historical figures that are male: Sir John and Sir Nicholas Fustian, Richard III, Charles I, Charles II, Walter Raleigh, Charles I’s executioner, the public prosecutor of the French revolution. The only female character Lettice actually plays is Mary, Queen of Scots (in which role he says nothing anyway). Now it is easier to play male figures, as a man, of course, just as it is to adopt the boldness of style that is part of the Lettice image.
The play was supposed to have been written for Maggie Smith. Whether Maggie Smith arrived while the play was still a blank sheet of paper or whether Peter Shaffer adapted some already formed ideas for a male tourist guide for Maggie Smith, I do not know, but I suspect the latter from the text.
Certainly I find Lettice’s lines very easy to deliver as a man. The lines appear correct, authentic, the sort of thing a man would say in that circumstance, whereas, if I imagine a female Lettice - even when played by Maggie Smith - some of the lines seem a trifle forced, just as the idea of an all female company enacting only the History Plays of Shakespeare in French, in the Dordogne, is forced. Lettice, the woman, playing the part of the male executioner, complete with ‘foinal trappings’ (beard) is forced; her performing the Walter Raleigh cape gesture, as a woman, is forced.
These things can be just as funny, and slightly more realistic, when played by a man. But of course one cannot escape entirely the business of ‘forced.’ There is the Queen of Scots scene, though I cannot accept that a man playing (only briefly of course) the Queen of Scots is anymore of a travesty than a woman playing Charles I or his executioner. Playing Lettice as a man also gives the opportunity to introduce a subfusc element of sexual chemistry into the relationship with Lotte. Even with actresses as talented as Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack there is some subtle thing (to my mind) in their long arguments together that is missing.
I had originally conceived that I might play the part as an effeminate, gay, Quentin Crispish sort of man. Indeed, I even considered that I might have done it entirely in drag. While the latter, of course, might have been great fun I am not sure I have the talent for it and certainly, in a female voice, it would become impossible to give the lines in the play the enunciation they deserve. Besides it would turn the show into a pantomime, which would be most sad.
But there is no need. The part works very well as pretty much the character I played in Jeffrey Bernard - philosophical, regretful, by turns sentimental and self-pitying, by turns flamboyant and outrageous. As I said the plays are most similar; let the characters be so too. It will be a great show; of that I have no doubt. We have a great team, the play offers wonderful ‘coups de theatre;’ it will be a credit to CADS.
Monday 4 August 2008
Towards Zero
Why are robust and curmudgeonly older women called 'trouts?' This strikes me as very strange, the trout being as near to a sexless beast as it is possible to come this side of the molluscs. Such women may look variously like a great many members of the animal kingdom, but even so fishes are surely not among them - fish, even in old age, usually being sleek, well-groomed and wrinkle free, qualities not immediately associated with a 'trout' of the elderly female variety. I wonder what the male equivalent is?
Perhaps the word is falling into desuetude; certainly it has a Blandings Castle feel to it, which is probably why it was the critic's word of choice to describe the character played by the redoubtable Eileen Atkins - the stalwart but decrepit Lady Tressilian - in Kevin Elyot's adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (she would today be Ms Marple, no doubt) stories on the television last evening.
A quite wonderful cameo performance of an old dying lady (who nevertheless contrives to get herself murdered) who lies abed all day, chain-smoking cheroots, as she issues directions and listens to the beguiling conversations among her guests that chance conveniently to drift through her open window. Eileen Atkins manages to combine simultaneously the force of the moneyed matriach with the bathos of the dying as when she exclaims, in a cross but resigned sort of a way, 'Oh what does it matter? We shall all be dead come September?'
Perhaps the word is falling into desuetude; certainly it has a Blandings Castle feel to it, which is probably why it was the critic's word of choice to describe the character played by the redoubtable Eileen Atkins - the stalwart but decrepit Lady Tressilian - in Kevin Elyot's adaptation of one of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (she would today be Ms Marple, no doubt) stories on the television last evening.
A quite wonderful cameo performance of an old dying lady (who nevertheless contrives to get herself murdered) who lies abed all day, chain-smoking cheroots, as she issues directions and listens to the beguiling conversations among her guests that chance conveniently to drift through her open window. Eileen Atkins manages to combine simultaneously the force of the moneyed matriach with the bathos of the dying as when she exclaims, in a cross but resigned sort of a way, 'Oh what does it matter? We shall all be dead come September?'
Saturday 2 August 2008
champagne or salmonella?
I quite agree with Lattedrinker about the Chairman and his braces and cannot think of anything to better it. I do feel ,however, that awards for sheer heroism should also be awarded. From the audience perspective the ham and tomatoes were quite fresh as Doris in 'Fumed Oak' claimed. By Saturday they looked a very sorry sight, despite all the best resuscitation techniques from the S.M. The loaf of bread needed turning to hide the growth of mould showing to the audience in the front rows. This had been very apparent from Dress Rehearsal, probably a penicillin culture in the making. The cast need medals for carrying on with the script in the face of such odds. To be able to deliver such lines as 'What's wrong with it?' and the response, 'I don't know yet' about the ham, without turning a hair should go down in CADS legend.
Although Doreen never had to look at her nemesis, I would award her top prize for behaviour above and beyond. By Friday the remains of the three takeaway meals into which she had to stick her hand had developed blue furry mould.On Saturday the SM and Props peeled the lids off at armslength. Warned about it, Doreen, 'without showing a morsel of fear', declared that she would shove her hand into 'the brown sauce one' being the least lethal of the three and did so. Wow!
Although Doreen never had to look at her nemesis, I would award her top prize for behaviour above and beyond. By Friday the remains of the three takeaway meals into which she had to stick her hand had developed blue furry mould.On Saturday the SM and Props peeled the lids off at armslength. Warned about it, Doreen, 'without showing a morsel of fear', declared that she would shove her hand into 'the brown sauce one' being the least lethal of the three and did so. Wow!
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