Saturday, 17 May 2008
JULY PRODUCTION
After the postponement of "Lettice and Lovage" it is now hoped to do two one-act plays instead. The first of these is "A Night Out" by Frank Vickery and to be directed by Peg . The second, "Fumed Oak" is by Noel Coward and to be directed by Peter Sain ley Berry. These plays go well together and should provide a good evenings entertainment. Various members of stage crew required. Volunteers?
Sunday, 11 May 2008
TOWN TWINNING
Under orders from Upstager I post the piece following below. This I wrote wearing another hat, in another place and for another purpose. It has little enough to do with theatre, though as it has been suggested that we might put on a play for the French visitors at some point in the future we ought perhaps to familiarise ourselves with what happens on such occasions. Nevertheless, it is words.
For the moment I can tell you that (subject to the imprimatur of the Committee) we have had to postpone Lettice and Lovage until the autumn and so will be looking to full the summer slot with some other diversion. Suggestions on a postcard, please
*************
One of the few compensations of having a large printing order to discharge, as we had this week, is that you get to listen to Radio 4 a lot. And want a wonderfully eclectic mix of programmes you find there! If you are an intellectual butterfly like me, vaguely interested in pretty much anything, you can find yourself listening to it more or less continuously while the thermal printer chomps away in the background.
In the last few days I have learned about midwives, prostitutes, Stanley Baldwin, a Chinook helicopter called Bravo November and how intensively reared chicken is altogether a Good Thing if the limit of your perspective is global warming. I have listened to the Archers, learned about the Burmese tragedy and and bristled at Susan Sarandon berating Hillary Clinton.
Not that the radio has had things entirely its own way. For between these printing sessions and other, more regular work, I have been assisting, as the French would say, in the biennial visit of families from Clisson, our twin town near Nantes.
They arrived on Thursday bringing with them both sunshine and their own portable loudspeaker apparatus and set up camp in our newly renovated Physic Garden, where the Committee had laid on the South Walian equivalent of a vin d’honneur. All very agreeable, you might say, but at the same time curiously transportng. For what with the bunting, the convivialité, the amplified French voices it seemed I was no longer in Wales at all but back somewhere in La France Profonde
Nor does this transporting stop with the bunting and ‘le micro.’ For the arrival of the French precipitates a rush of Gallic behaviour, even among us locals. Acquaintances that you barely nod to in the street suddenly greet you with a kiss on both cheeks. Apart from the absence of brioche and the unlikely substitution - caused I suppose by the relative strengths of the dollar and euro - of Blossom Hill Californian, for the ubiquitous Muscadet, the little reception could have been French.
It was the same with the Hog Roast last night. Trestle tables had been set out in the rugby club in three long rows. Some species of unfortunate pig roasted outside on a supersize barbecue. Pencil thin girls wafted up and down, depositing even more of the Blossom Hill on the tables. This embarrassed me as I am not a fan of wine grown in any English speaking country but our French guests affected not to notice, or if they did notice they remained unusually reticent on the subject.
The pig however refused to succumb without a struggle. I don’t mean that it started the evening oinking around on the hallowed turf of the rugby field. The butcher had done his job, but evidently the beast had proved more well-padded than expected and a great deal of the Blossom Hill disappeared while we waiting for the porcine epiphany.
This provided excuse for yet another round of cheek kissing and general amity before a local choir arrived in best Welsh tradition. After the choir a harp made its appearance, played by a woman in stovepipe hat - these were billed, after all as cultural exchanges - and the gentle rippling sounds mesmerized the audience.
After we had eaten, with the Blossom Hill, still not exhausted the choir returned and sang Myfanwy. For those who do not know it, Myfanwy is the saddest and most poignant of all love songs and the music alone evokes the longings of a young heart so beautifully that listeners are often reduced to tears.
Poor Benadicte, one of our visitors, found herself caught up with the conductor during this performance for reasons that need not detain us now. Never mind that the song was in Welsh and the music not exactly in the French idyll, she returned to her seat tears streaming from her eyes.
And so it went on. Not to be outdone the French visitors huddled to the front and sang and we banged the tables during that old happy drinking song ‘Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.’ Finally to shouts of ‘more,’ the choir returned and we all belted out together the national anthems - ‘Mae Hen Gwlad fy Nadau’ and the Marseillaise.
And so after a final round of cheek kissing and benedictions of ‘Nos dda (Goodnight) or even more endearingly: ‘Nos dda, Cariad’ (Goodnight, little darling) we meandered home happy.
I see that the performance is to be repeated tonight, and no doubt will be another attempt to drink California dry. Dancing is to be substituted for singing this time, which will be fun as the Clissonais confess to a variety of interesting folk dances. But why in our reserved little Britain do we not do this sort of thing more often?
For the moment I can tell you that (subject to the imprimatur of the Committee) we have had to postpone Lettice and Lovage until the autumn and so will be looking to full the summer slot with some other diversion. Suggestions on a postcard, please
*************
One of the few compensations of having a large printing order to discharge, as we had this week, is that you get to listen to Radio 4 a lot. And want a wonderfully eclectic mix of programmes you find there! If you are an intellectual butterfly like me, vaguely interested in pretty much anything, you can find yourself listening to it more or less continuously while the thermal printer chomps away in the background.
In the last few days I have learned about midwives, prostitutes, Stanley Baldwin, a Chinook helicopter called Bravo November and how intensively reared chicken is altogether a Good Thing if the limit of your perspective is global warming. I have listened to the Archers, learned about the Burmese tragedy and and bristled at Susan Sarandon berating Hillary Clinton.
Not that the radio has had things entirely its own way. For between these printing sessions and other, more regular work, I have been assisting, as the French would say, in the biennial visit of families from Clisson, our twin town near Nantes.
They arrived on Thursday bringing with them both sunshine and their own portable loudspeaker apparatus and set up camp in our newly renovated Physic Garden, where the Committee had laid on the South Walian equivalent of a vin d’honneur. All very agreeable, you might say, but at the same time curiously transportng. For what with the bunting, the convivialité, the amplified French voices it seemed I was no longer in Wales at all but back somewhere in La France Profonde
Nor does this transporting stop with the bunting and ‘le micro.’ For the arrival of the French precipitates a rush of Gallic behaviour, even among us locals. Acquaintances that you barely nod to in the street suddenly greet you with a kiss on both cheeks. Apart from the absence of brioche and the unlikely substitution - caused I suppose by the relative strengths of the dollar and euro - of Blossom Hill Californian, for the ubiquitous Muscadet, the little reception could have been French.
It was the same with the Hog Roast last night. Trestle tables had been set out in the rugby club in three long rows. Some species of unfortunate pig roasted outside on a supersize barbecue. Pencil thin girls wafted up and down, depositing even more of the Blossom Hill on the tables. This embarrassed me as I am not a fan of wine grown in any English speaking country but our French guests affected not to notice, or if they did notice they remained unusually reticent on the subject.
The pig however refused to succumb without a struggle. I don’t mean that it started the evening oinking around on the hallowed turf of the rugby field. The butcher had done his job, but evidently the beast had proved more well-padded than expected and a great deal of the Blossom Hill disappeared while we waiting for the porcine epiphany.
This provided excuse for yet another round of cheek kissing and general amity before a local choir arrived in best Welsh tradition. After the choir a harp made its appearance, played by a woman in stovepipe hat - these were billed, after all as cultural exchanges - and the gentle rippling sounds mesmerized the audience.
After we had eaten, with the Blossom Hill, still not exhausted the choir returned and sang Myfanwy. For those who do not know it, Myfanwy is the saddest and most poignant of all love songs and the music alone evokes the longings of a young heart so beautifully that listeners are often reduced to tears.
Poor Benadicte, one of our visitors, found herself caught up with the conductor during this performance for reasons that need not detain us now. Never mind that the song was in Welsh and the music not exactly in the French idyll, she returned to her seat tears streaming from her eyes.
And so it went on. Not to be outdone the French visitors huddled to the front and sang and we banged the tables during that old happy drinking song ‘Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.’ Finally to shouts of ‘more,’ the choir returned and we all belted out together the national anthems - ‘Mae Hen Gwlad fy Nadau’ and the Marseillaise.
And so after a final round of cheek kissing and benedictions of ‘Nos dda (Goodnight) or even more endearingly: ‘Nos dda, Cariad’ (Goodnight, little darling) we meandered home happy.
I see that the performance is to be repeated tonight, and no doubt will be another attempt to drink California dry. Dancing is to be substituted for singing this time, which will be fun as the Clissonais confess to a variety of interesting folk dances. But why in our reserved little Britain do we not do this sort of thing more often?
Monday, 5 May 2008
What no news?
Where are all you bloggers? I have been away a month and no one has anything to say. I am posting some more pictures from "Arms and The Man"
Tuesday, 1 April 2008
Monday, 31 March 2008
Arms and the Man
Another success! Well done to all concerned; it is, as always, invidious to single anyone out but The Director/Set Designer/Costume Maker consortium deserve praise and as far as the cast is concerned it is so encouraging to see more new faces on the stage. We look forward to seeing more of them and a special word of praise for Mike Chapman who stepped so nobly into the breeches when an original cast member left in a hissy fit.
Audience feedback was very positive ( a Full House on Saturday) and several first timers expressed firm intentions of coming again.
So here's to Lettice and Lovage !
Incidentally, Mistress Henslowe and I attended a performance of "A Small Family Business" at the RWCMaD last week; very enjoyable with good ensemble acting and a very interesting skeleton set but certainly no better than what was on offer at the Market Theatre.
Audience feedback was very positive ( a Full House on Saturday) and several first timers expressed firm intentions of coming again.
So here's to Lettice and Lovage !
Incidentally, Mistress Henslowe and I attended a performance of "A Small Family Business" at the RWCMaD last week; very enjoyable with good ensemble acting and a very interesting skeleton set but certainly no better than what was on offer at the Market Theatre.
Saturday, 15 March 2008
AN EVENING OF DELIGHT
Brave man that he is Lloyd Lee asked me to write a review of his show 'Educating Charlie,' so I have.
AN EVENING OF DELIGHT
It is impossible to use too many superlatives in describing Lloyd’s Lee’s one-man show based on the entertainments that Charles Dickens himself used to give. But ‘Educating Charlie’ is much more than a series of readings - it is a full-hearted theatrical event, both excellently written and magnificently performed.
In the show we trace the story of Dickens' life from his humble Portsmouth beginnings, through his happy youth in Chatham and then to the great London wen, following in the footsteps of his father’s distress. We feel for him as he is put to work, aged 12, as a humble toiler in a boot blacking factory by the Thames. As he tells this tale of the ups and downs of a young life, he describes the real adults who peopled it and shows us how he used them as models for the characters in his novels whom we know and have come to love - Pickwick, Mr Jingle, Wackford Squeers, The Micawbers, Sam Weller, Fagin and so on.
Lloyd manages to bring real Victorian authenticity to this eclectic family. He commands a range of accents and voices that is at once as at home in portraying the squeaking high Cockney treble of an agonised Mrs Micawber as it is the low Yiddish bass of Fagin. And as with the voice, Lloyd’s action and gestures convince us that we are in the actual presence of these souls so that we, the audience, experience the same astonishment and bewilderment that Dickens himself must have done as a boy in his encounters with the poets and schoolteachers, cabmen and boot boys he found in his new London world.
Truly, this is a mighty show and as good an evening’s transport of delight as ever one might hope to encounter on the London, or any other stage.
Peter Sain ley Berry
EuropaWorld
15/3/08
AN EVENING OF DELIGHT
It is impossible to use too many superlatives in describing Lloyd’s Lee’s one-man show based on the entertainments that Charles Dickens himself used to give. But ‘Educating Charlie’ is much more than a series of readings - it is a full-hearted theatrical event, both excellently written and magnificently performed.
In the show we trace the story of Dickens' life from his humble Portsmouth beginnings, through his happy youth in Chatham and then to the great London wen, following in the footsteps of his father’s distress. We feel for him as he is put to work, aged 12, as a humble toiler in a boot blacking factory by the Thames. As he tells this tale of the ups and downs of a young life, he describes the real adults who peopled it and shows us how he used them as models for the characters in his novels whom we know and have come to love - Pickwick, Mr Jingle, Wackford Squeers, The Micawbers, Sam Weller, Fagin and so on.
Lloyd manages to bring real Victorian authenticity to this eclectic family. He commands a range of accents and voices that is at once as at home in portraying the squeaking high Cockney treble of an agonised Mrs Micawber as it is the low Yiddish bass of Fagin. And as with the voice, Lloyd’s action and gestures convince us that we are in the actual presence of these souls so that we, the audience, experience the same astonishment and bewilderment that Dickens himself must have done as a boy in his encounters with the poets and schoolteachers, cabmen and boot boys he found in his new London world.
Truly, this is a mighty show and as good an evening’s transport of delight as ever one might hope to encounter on the London, or any other stage.
Peter Sain ley Berry
EuropaWorld
15/3/08
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