The Blog

You may perhaps have  heard of the ancient River Thames ritual of “swan-upping”, when in the summer time gents dressed in archaic liveries conduct a sort of census of the Thames swan population, on behalf of the Queen?  (If not, there’s a helpful video link below.) Meanwhile, a hundred yards or so along the river from where I live, a less-publicised Thames Wildlife Survey has quietly been taking place, involving checking the health of – and presumably assessing the effect of pollution on – our local swans.

I joined a small crowd admiring the procedure – at the top of the picture is the vet, assessing the swans one-by-one, handed to him by the young assistant in the foreground, whose job is to lift the bird from the water, and calm it down so that it’s ready for examination. Have you ever tried to lift a large aquatic bird out of the water against its will? Not a task I would relish, but this young woman was a joy to watch – deftly lifting the protesting animal onto the shore, then sitting astride its back and murmuring words of comfort into its ear until it settled down – which each swan did within a few minutes, and then allowed itself to be handed over to the vet, as docile as you please. What and where next for the Swan Whisperer? In this fraught world, there is so much need for the still, small, calming voice…

This summer, as the UK may – or may not – slip out of the clutches of Covid, is truly a time out of joint, where normalities have evaporated, when extremities and oddities no longer surprise. As we in the UK prepare to “staycate” (how the virus has expanded our vocabulary!) we pack very small bottles of sun-lotion along with rain-hats, mackintoshes and welly boots, while downloading lists of “Stories for Wet Afternoons.” But hey, we mustn’t complain – those of you out there in the west of America, or on the Greek mainland with your scary temperatures and billowing forest fires – would, I know happily embrace just one of our fitful downpours. I can’t begin to imagine what living with fifty degrees Centigrade could be like – especially when you quantify it in “old money” and realise we are talking over one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit!

As with so many, the pandemic has changed my work pattern, inevitably leading one further into Zoomland. A welcome band of new on-line coaching clients has appeared, and a surge of “self-tape” auditions sent by my lovely agents has set the long-dormant acting career sputtering back into life – through modest, “supporting” roles, but supplying happy, much-missed fun along the way.

Following the excursion mentioned in the last episode – into darkest Somerset to be harassed by dogs and cannibals courtesy of a new “Blair Witch Project”style scary movie due for release in the autumn – I was cast as the elderly dad of the main character in a four-part “real-life” drama to be screened by ITV early next year. My “screen wife” Carrie Cohen and I had a terrific time in a range of locations, including Holloway Prison and Clerkenwell Crown Court, finishing in our own, “ordinary” northern living room – except it wasn’t, it was a cunningly adapted interior in a once-stately home – Stoke Court, Buckinghamshire!

For some of the shoot, we were on one of the George Lucas sound stages at Elstree Film Studios, where “Star Wars” was created, and where “The Crown” happens. After several uncertain decades, the UK film studios are all expanding like crazy, to meet the huge international upswing in TV “box-set” viewing figures during the pandemic. Investment is pouring in – on the way home one day my driver took me to see the Hertfordshire building site that will become the new “Sunset” studios (announced in last week’s news) and it’s MASSIVE, hundred of acres devoted to the creation of new drama. Despite Covid, despite the Brexit backwash, parts of our trade are in a healthy, optimistic state – long may it last and may it augur a soon and rapid recovery for our “live” stage, not just movie sound stages.

All at once, reader, things turned very Welsh. I am an illustration of the old Jesuit insistence that the crucial years in a man’s life are the first seven. Although in my eighth year I was transported from Cardiff to northern climes and had, to survive my new schoolmates’ taunts, to acquire a Hull accent, I still slip in a trice to a south Welsh persona, complete with accent. Which is handy from the acting point of view, and once we’d done the filming for ITV I nipped off down to the Valleys, to play a tiny part in Steve Spiers’s English-language sitcom for BBC Wales, “The Tuckers”. This show isn’t yet fully networked across the UK, but you can catch the whole of Series One on the iPlayer, and it’s great fun – tales of a disreputable family’s usually disgraceful adventures in Welsh village, by a cast led by Steve himself with Lynn Hunter as his fearsome mum, and Robert Pugh as her especially disreputable brother. It’s hugely popular in Wales – they’re now recording Season Three, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to gain a place on the BBC national schedules before long. Steve Spiers is a quite ubiquitous actor and writer – I’m especially a fan of his work as Shakespeare’s leading player Burbage in Ben Elton’s “Upstart Crow”.

Although this visit to the Land of My Fathers was very short, it was rich in scenery and interest. I was staying in Caerphilly, I had a couple of hours to spare before being needed on set, so – on the first scorching day of the recent heat-wave –  I went to wander in the local medieval castle, the largest in the UK outside of Windsor. I must have been taken there as a child, but I had no recollection of just how impressive Caerphilly Castle is – a sprawling, looming fortress originally built by warlike English aristocrats to intimidate the Welsh, and restored in romantic Victorian times by the Scottish coal billionaire John Crighton-Stuart, Marquis of Bute, who also restored Cardiff Castle and commissioned William Burgess’s gothic fantasy, Castell Coch.

Going on to join the crew and cast of ” The Tuckers”, I found myself again brushing against Welsh history, of a more recent and distressing kind, for the show is currently being filmed at Senghenydd, the site of one of the worst mining disasters of all time. In 1913, 439 men died as a result of an underground explosion. There is a “green room” for the actors in the local museum, so while waiting to be called on set I could browse the photos and memorabilia of this horrific event – and reflect on how many of its survivors then went off to perish in trenches in Flanders. Not, you might think, the best frame of mind in which to perform comedy…but life goes on, and “The Tuckers” has all the wry, dark humour that echoes in Welsh culture, after centuries of pain and oppression – alongside so much beauty, poetry and music.

Elements of course distilled in Dylan Thomas’s great 1954 “play for voices”, “Under Milk Wood” – which shortly after getting back to London I went to see at the National Theatre as part of a socially-distanced audience in the Olivier auditorium, the production directed by Lindsey Turner. In this version the piece is extended by the Welsh poet Siân Lloyd, and the play emerges from scenes in a Welsh care home. As in the 2014 BBC TV version, narration is by the great Michael Sheen, full of honest passion, with delicious character work by the likes of Alan David as Mr Pugh and Anthony O’Donnell as Captain Cat. I’m told the piece has been recorded for broadcast, so if you missed it presumably it will be available in the autumn or winter TV schedules – and if it is, let us know what you think.

                                                           Image: nationaltheatre.org

So the theatre is starting to emerge in the UK – isn’t it? Is it? Some shows are already under way, many more being bravely advertised to open in October and November. Others have been squashed out of existence by so many actors being “pinged” to isolate at home – for instance Kenneth Branagh’s “The Browning Version”, slated to raise funds for RADA at the Riverside Studios.

All we can do is keep our fingers crossed, and reach once more for the TV remote.  The papers are full of columnists’ lists of the “best pandemic/lockdown shows” and I’ve banged on quite enough about my passion for the great French products “Call My Agent” and “Spiral”. So just two series to mention this time – I can’t avoid “The Kominsky Method” on Netflix, which is about – well, it’s about a once well-known actor who survives as an acting coach, has had several attempts at marriage, and has a grown-up daughter who worries about him….Crackling, witty scripts, super acting – with Michael Douglas, and for the first two seasons, veteran comic genius Alan Arkin. Glorious, brilliant – however for this particular viewer, perhaps just a little too much resonance…

The other series I rejoice in is Channel Four’s “We Are Lady Parts”. Amidst all the noisy “woke” debates, amidst all the tiresome misconceptions and blustery accusations, here’s a show about an all Muslim female punk-rock band, with no preaching – just honestly-drawn characters and a clever storyline, delivered by a group of wondrously talented actor-musicians.

 

                                                                  Image: IMDB

I laughed loud and frequently through the first 5 episodes, and in episode 6 wept joyfully at the (spoiler alert) happy, merry ending. This is work created (as writer and director) by Nida Manzoor, a brilliant graduate of UCL – who found herself obliged to close all her social media accounts because of abuse following the series being broadcast. What a sad, mad world….

 

Links:

Swan-Upping explained (British Pathé News, 1953)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQyVxyhRH4Q&list=RDCMUCGp4u0WHLsK8OAxnvwiTyhA&start_radio=1&t=23s

The Tuckers:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000d4w2/the-tuckers-series-1-episode-1

We Are Lady Parts:

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/we-are-lady-parts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(If you’re reading this on a phone, I find the pictures look better if you read it in “landscape” rather than “portrait.”)

As I write we’re about to re-set the clocks for British Summer Time – are we all ready to spring forward? As the world’s axis tilts us towards the sun, will we soon be sinking pints in the pubs, bustling on the beaches, swelling the stadia – and, of special interest to this blog – will we be thronging the theatres?

Top of my headline list comes news fresh from the South Bank, to gladden Welsh hearts – that the astounding Michael Sheen and the fabulous Sian Phillips are, in June, to lead a company in a new stage version of “Under Milk Wood”, towing with them an illustrious ensemble, including two of my pals, Anthony O’Donnell and fellow former “Squirrel”* Alan David . The last time Michael Sheen tackled this iconic Play for Voices was on TV, in a terrific version Pip Broughton put together for the BBC in 2014 – a gorgeous chocolate-box of talent, with Matthew Rhys as Second Voice and countless other stars from the Principality, perhaps most famously Sir Tom Jones as Captain Cat. It’s no longer on the iPlayer, but I just discovered you can get DVDs of it on Amazon – it’s a joy, and I’m sure the new stage version will be just the tonic our four virus-jaded local nations need.

And meanwhile other wheels are starting to turn – from June Michelle Terry and the Shakespeare’s Globe team will offer, despite Covid-ravaged resources, a season including “Romeo and Juliet”, “King Lear” with Kathryn Hunter, also “Antony and Cleopatra”. To cope with the continuing Covid threat, I understand the “groundlings” – who normally stand to see the show for five quid – will be offered socially-distanced seating. And Michelle has decided to do away with intervals, since audiences back in Will’s day never had nor expected pauses in the entertainment. They bought an orange or a beer or a pie from a seller in the crowd whenever peckish, and wandered off to pee against or beside the nearest wall as the need arose. It all sounds like my teenage Saturday afternoons as a Hull City supporter.  

The great Sir Ian McKellen is due to journey upstream from Limehouse to Windsor and re-visit playing Hamlet in July – on the not unreasonable grounds that he felt he didn’t get it quite right when he played it in 1971 and now he’s 82 it’s about time he had another go. The box-office for the Windsor Theatre Royal opened for this remarkable event last week and I can tell you now, don’t bother – I tried and failed – it had sold out within hours. Most theatre box offices aren’t yet open – the National, for instance, opens on April 30th.

Further afield in the regions, the buildings who were lucky enough to receive “survival” grants from the Chancellor seem at present to be keeping their powder dry, marking time and not offering hostages to fortune – but expect announcements before long. Summer visitors are the lifeblood of venues in places like Keswick, Scarborough, Pitlochry – and above all, Edinburgh whose legendary festival just didn’t happen in 2020, any more than those at Glyndebourne, Glastonbury or for that matter, Bayreuth.

 The north has theatre powerhouses, from the Glasgow Citizens to the Royal Exchange – some of which are small but tough, not ones to be knocked over by a few germs. For example, Tyneside’s dynamic Live Theatre is about to announce a new directorate – and I hear that in the old South Yorkshire coalfields exciting work is brewing in Doncaster – look out for a project called “The Last Motel” at a resolute regional resource called CAST.

As you know, much of my time nowadays is spent in coaching, and I have been busy during the Lockdown helping aspiring actors prepare for drama school auditions – even though I tell them all that this is the worst year EVER for performance training. The schools have slashed their intake quotas, while at the same time application totals have soared. At RADA this year they awarded fourteen places after auditioning several thousand people. The training in the schools has kept going, but often in weird ways – musical theatre students, for example, have for months been taking singing and dance classes on their own in their living rooms, via laptops and smartphones.

However, once Covid retreats, the creative industries will regenerate, and demand for talent will surge. Yes theatres will re-open – but also the watching and re-watching of box-sets that has kept us all sane during the pandemic has stimulated a massive demand for home escapism which I reckon won’t go away. Film and television companies are going to need performers of all kinds, fresh faces with new energies, released after months and months of stifling lockdown!

I’m new to boxset watching, and these months found me entranced by two series, one dramatic and one comic, and both French. I have bored my friends for hours on phone and zoom about “Engrenages” (“Spiral”) and “Dix pour Cent” (“Call My Agent”). I won’t button-hole you now, but I may offer a few thoughts in a future blog about the French approach to acting and actor-training – and I will strive to include a dab of Gallic zest to make them digestible, perhaps, who knows even entertaining..

Now, there are out there a few people who from time to time remember I still proudly hold an Equity card – including some of whom, very occasionally, invite me to act. And so it was one morning last month, when I was driven to a remote part of rural Somerset to portray a terrified pensioner harassed by cannibals. I had a great day, and wanted to blog about it – but the film company has asked me not to pre-empt their publicity agenda, so I will say no more, other than to mention there’s a link to another event already mentioned in this blog – but hold, enough! Watch this space.

In the meantime, here’s a pic I took of the location – a green but damaged England, a place of unsettling silence, a post nuclear-holocaust society left troubled and adrift, changed for ever by unforeseen, unexpected events…

Links:

 

• BBC “Under Milk Wood”: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Milk-Wood-DVD-Jones/dp/B01H1JWG9U

 

• * “The Squirrels”: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Squirrels-DVD-Bernard-Hepton/dp/B00B5SDFLM

 

 

…..I was prostrate, out cold. I had expected a jab in the back, I had expected to be semi-conscious for the full 90 minutes. But I was fast asleep throughout. Coming to – several hours later – I felt dreamy, bouyant. I was in bed. At the end of the bed two feet were sticking up from the blankets, pink and very clean. Clearly worth a photograph – I reached for my phone, conveniently on the bedside table.

So if you’re one of several friends who recently received bewildering WhatsApp images of a pair of pink feet, my apologies. I was high as a kite.

Those anaesthetic drugs are mightily potent, thank goodness. During the ninety minutes a distinguished orthopaedic surgeon, Mr Gilbert Railton and his team had been busy with handsaw and chisel, removing a well-worn left hip joint and replacing it with a shiny, cunningly fashioned new one. Amazing stuff. Two days later I was on my way home in my own personal ambulance, having been looked after magnificently by the NHS nurses, physios and staff at Epsom Hospital. I had, if you will pardon the expression, fallen on my feet – for this is reckoned to be one of the very best orthopaedic units anywhere. Having been driven there by two kind neighbours, I found myself in a small very modern ward, with just two other patients – one of whom was a wealthy businessman who had cancelled a booking for private surgery. He’d realised he would be in the same hospital with the same surgeon, with the same degree of support from the same medical team – albeit in a solo room with presumably a wider choice of food – and for which his bill would have been around thirteen thousand pounds!

I realise from today’s news of the advancing Covid Second Wave that I’ve been incredibly lucky to hit a window when the beleaguered NHS still has space for some “non-essential” operations. I’ve been limping about the world for a decade now, an uncertain gait aggravated somewhat by a collision with a bus in New Oxford St a few years back. All I have to do is work through a six-week programme of physiotherapy exercises – then stand back! Is there a dance teacher out there who’d care this autumn to swap some top-level audition prep for a beginner’s course in Salsa?

And meanwhile what of the other, non-operating theatres? Literally non-operating at present, alas, with some brave exceptions. A glance into the media shows a world teeming with actors and production teams desperate to get out there and strut their stuff – and incidentally there has been a noticeable increase in requests for acting coaching on this TYA website – but what of the venues, where crusts may be earned? For sure the film and TV production wheels are turning, albeit fitfully, but the percentage of drama school grads lucky enough to be handed a film or TV contract on completing their course is more neglible now than ever before.

HOWEVER, theatre folk are persistent and dogged, and to a person Micawberists, so ways to re-open are being found. From the tiniest art centres to the biggest West End theatres, things are stirring. For instance, Jeremy Drakes reported performing in September at the admirable if diminutive Old Sorting Office in Barnes, as part of the #briefencounters initiative, to enthusiastic 50-strong audiences seated at tables in groups of no more than 6, where the customers could buy food and drink.

Larger-scale, profit-dependent “commercial” theatres operate on slim profit margins, so to close down hundreds of seats due to Covid social separation is a major challenge. Back in July Andrew Lloyd Webber ran a “test” performance at the London Palladium starring Beverley Knight to get a feel of the impact of the new restrictions. Here’s what the auditorium looked like, with unavailable seats marked with crosses.

Picture: The Stage

You can see the problem. And yet – as of yesterday, campaigning by Lloyd Weber and others has produced a result, as you will have seen in the news, at least with regard to some pantomimes – including the one at the Palladium – as the National Lottery gallops to the rescue.

There’s also a panto planned for the Garrick, but the lucky nine other productions to be awarded Lottery support have yet to be announced. Since producer Michael Harrison has welcomed the Lottery announcement so eagerly, it’s a fairly safe bet that some of the thirty-plus regional venues for which his Qdos company supplied Christmas shows last year – from Aberdeen to Bristol, from Newcastle to Richmond in Surrey – will benefit.

However also, as of next month, unless the Covid Second Wave suddenly triggers a government theatres closure – a horrible thought but hey, keep watching the news – if you want to see a West End Show other than a panto, tickets for some are already on sale. For example SIX, the hit musical about Henry V111’s wives, is selling out fast at the Lyric (opening November 7) and the touring version will set off to visit major theatres throughout the country – with venues booked through till February 2022!

Being a commercial theatre producer always involves taking huge risks – it’s estimated that only 1 in 10 West End shows achieves a profit – so all credit to the managements who are taking edgy decisions to rekindle a crucial part of our country’s creative life. See below for links.

Propping up commercial pantomime producers is one thing – BUT what of the “non-commercial” venues and companies? What of the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, what of the Brewhouse at Taunton? What of the Bush, the Kiln and the rest of the brilliant London “fringe”? Across the country local producing theatres, companies and touring venues are still nervously waiting to see how much or how little of the Chancellor’s July £1.57 billion “arts rescue package” may or may not come their way.

STOP PRESS NEWS

Since the above paragraph was written, the news has started to come in (October 12) of the new funding allocations. The full list will be issued later today, but as of 9am this morning Keswick Theatre by the Lake gets a “rescue” grant of £878,492, the Bristol Old Vic gets £610,466, the Young Vic £961,455, and London’s tiny Finborough Theatre £60,000. At all of those places you can almost hear the collective “Phew!!!” while many others will still be chewing their nails to the quick. Good luck if you’re one of those – we’ll be watching the news closely today.

Down on the South Bank, the National Theatre has re-configured the Olivier auditorium as a socially-distanced space.

It will open with the Roy Willams play Death of England: Delroy on October 21st, with Michael Balogun following Rafe Spall’s acclaimed pre-pandemic performance in Death of England in February.

Over at Stratford on Avon the RSC is planning productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Comedy of Errors, delayed until the Spring of 2021. This gives us pause to reflect that William Shakespeare would have found the closure of our theatres all too familiar, at a time of recurring waves not of coronavirus, rather then of the horrific bubonic plague. While in post-op isolation I found Maggie O’Farrell’s prize-winning novel “Hamnet” a revelation, a superbly written insight into the circumstances around the creation of his most famous play.

And by the Thames at Southwark, at Shakespeare’s Globe – where Michelle Terry and her team produce amazing work without any government funding at all, the brave sign outside the gate says it all

LINKS:

SIX – THE MUSICAL https://www.sixthemusical.com/london?gclid=Cj0KCQjwt4X8BRCPARIsABmcnOosdVdTmpxXVtBwy830Keo4O-TltP5HIGEKk87HMGMBdL1H4v9Hq1QaAobVEALw_wcB

Other musicals – PRETTY WOMAN, HOME FROM AWAY, THE LION KING etc https://www.atgtickets.com/

DEATH OF ENGLAND:DELROY https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/death-of-england-delroy

OLD SORTING OFFICE, BARNES https://www.osoarts.org.uk/whats-on

Meanwhile – many professional productions are still out there in Cyberspace, available at home via on-line streaming:

https://discover.ticketmaster.co.uk/theatre/our-guide-to-streaming-the-best-theatre-at-home-49832

Enjoy the season, keep the faith.

The time will come when why, we shall smile…

Are there words not yet exhausted? Unique unprecedented world-changing life-changing unheared-of unseen disturbing distressing unknowable scary weird tragic …

Cataclysmic events spark stories – wars, riots, earthquakes, tsunami, erupting volcanoes, plane crashes, train crashes, road pile-ups, revolutions, assassinations, terrorist attacks, fires, floods – and now Pestilence. The biggest Corona Story may well be a tale of Changed Perceptions, of how our lives can and should work – politically, economically, socially, morally.

Within weeks of a resounding election victory a British Conservative Government commits itself to spending far, far more public money than its derided socialist election opponents had ever proposed. A country supposedly a haven of decency and fair play witnesses ten per cent of its population ruthlessly grabbing and hoarding twenty per cent of available domestic commodities, while the needy are left staring at empty shelves.

Soon after gently and mercilessly shedding light on Morality as perceived by a so-called Senior Royal, Emily Maitlis has in a Newnight introduction asked of our post-Virus state “what level of social settlement will need to be put in place to stop inequality becoming even more stark?”

Woah there Jones! Is not this blog a light-hearted discourse on the Life Theatrical? For Matters Social Political or Moral we can turn to Peston, O’Brien and Buerk, not to mention Ms Maitlis herself! Quite so. I confess, the names of those 3 distinguished male commentators when put together suggest a 1930s tap-dance act…

So: for me all this really kicked in at the Young Vic Theatre on Tuesday March 10. I was with my NYU Tisch students, to see NORA: A DOLL’S HOUSE – Steff Smith’s refreshing, perceptive new take on Ibsen’s 1879 feminist masterpiece, given a striking production by Elizabeth Freestone, in a collaboration between the Young Vic and the Glasgow Citizens theatres.

The production has a strong, emotional climax, and as the auditiorum lights came up at the end I wasn’t entirely surprised to see my group staying in their seats, looking quite distressed. Then I noticed several were staring at their mobile phones, in tears…During the evening they had all received an urgent email message from New York University that all European study centres were closing immediately, and they should seek ways of returning to the States as quickly as possible. Given that they were only half way through their time in London, only half way through a range of creative projects including for most of them an opportunity to act in Shakespeare at RADA, this was traumatic.

I was upset too – they’re a lovely lot, I didn’t want to lose them half way through my course, which I assumed would now be cancelled. HOWEVER, this is the Age of ZOOM!! Two weeks later, there I am waving at my computer and there on the screen are 15 of my 18 students waving back! Ok as a group they’ve shrunk a bit – they’re only thumb-nail size, but as soon as one of them speaks she or he becomes the main picture. Just in time for Easter – a Miracle! I was only vaguely aware of Zoom – a sort of rather more advanced version of Skype – but after a few training sessions I’ve worked out how to use it – well, some of it – and it’s a joy to chat with these cheery souls, now scattered between New York, Chicago, Texas and California.

The substance of the course – visits to live theatre performances in London – has had, inevitably, to be adapted. But each day more recorded London theatre shows become available on the Web so we can retain links with London’s theatre world, albeit digitally – and the new technology often provides a pretty darned near facsmile of a “live” experience. A good example has been the Royal Court’s “streamed” production of David Ireland’s CYPRUS AVENUE. Terrific, sharp writing and remarkable acting, especially from Stephen Rea – taking us into the surreal world of violence born from conviction, I guess the greatest curse of mankind. Because I believe what I believe I am right, and to kill for my belief is the greatest virtue. Be prepared to laugh in the early scenes – but don’t watch the closing scenes late at night. You have been warned. Link below.

In a time when free-lancers are desperate for work, I feel a hint of guilt that – for now at least – a few of us can still earn a crust teaching online. Interestingly, training enquiries via this TYA website have steadily increased as the Virus takes hold. The UK drama schools have gone over to auditioning by Skype or Zoom, so forgive me if I briefly salute the TYA coaching team, and point out that we’re here constantly on-line, offering no-nonsense top quality actor and communications training – now more than ever with a view to how you look when you act for a camera. End of commercial break.

One of the many Big Questions posed at present for theatre folk is, after the Virus fades, how long will it take audiences to re-discover the theatre-going habit? Will Netflix and Digital Theatre and NT at Home have eroded any desire to get up and go out, to take the risk of sitting next to total strangers in a crowded room? And will anyone be able to afford tickets anyway? Today on the radio they’re talking of the worst economic slump since the 1920s… The economic crises of the 20s and 30s generated glamorous escapist movies in the cinema, and lavish escapist musicals onstage – somehow I suspect the modern response will be the Golden Age of Netflix – or has that already dawned?

But for now, there’s a wealth of recent and fairly recent theatre successes to be enjoyed digitally, either for free or for a modest payment, from Phoebe’s “Fleabag” to Michelle’s “Hamlet” at the Globe, from Howard Brenton on Indian politics at Hampstead to the heady mix of Ayckbourn/Lloyd Webber/Wodehouse in “By Jeeves!” – a truly rare event whose announcement I am poised to engrave in the diary. I missed this high-pedigree stage musical in its short West End life – it struggled at the box-office, yet Andrew LW claims it as one of his favourite-ever shows. Link below.

The New York students who were deprived of their Shakespeare opportunities in Gower St will nonetheless be given a chance to rehearse and perform a Shakespeare play online – RADA is to attempt one of the Roman plays on Zoom. I’ve come across lots of Zoom choral and orchestral events, and a few groups of actors are experimenting with small-cast short scripts, but as yet I know of no other Shakespeare play launching into Cyberspace, with remotely isolated actors, starting from scratch. Do you? I’m sure plans are afoot for many online wonders – especially as the Edinburgh Festival 2020 has already been cancelled. Let us know about new initiatives – use the Comments tag on this blog, and we’ll spread the news.

And in the midst of all the worries, spring sunshine abounds in the UK. On my one permitted exercise walk per day I just can’t stop clicking…

LINKS:

CYPRUS AVENUE https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/cyprus-avenue-film/

FLEABAG (In Support of Covid19 charities, including Acting for Others) http://ondemand.sohotheatre.com/

SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE STREAMING https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/watch/

HAMPSTEAD THEATRE STREAMING

https://www.theguardian.com/stagevideo/2020/apr/13/watch-drawing-the-line-a-drama-about-indias-partition-video

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER STREAMING https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLeErO8nXsc

Winter is upon us – or what passes for winter in leaf-strewn Surrey as the world warms. So far all we’ve had is gusty wind and prolonged dollops of rain – but nowhere near as much as further north. And how lucky we are – I witnessed the effects of flood on homes in Cockermouth a year or two back, and they are horrible – your house doesn’t just get wet, it gets ruined. Raw sewage soaks into the carpets and the furniture, and above all into the walls – and that’s the lasting, merciless effect, which takes months or years to deal with.

So to start this entry I thought I’d include a cheering image or two of country landscapes, as painted by Anna Teasdale – an old friend who passed away a few weeks ago, in my view one of the great unsung talents of British landscape painting. At the end of the blog there are links to where you can find originals and prints of her lovely work.

Given my vintage – from a time when footballers weren’t allowed to earn more than twenty quid a week, no, really – there’s no wonder this blog sometimes nods to the passing of friends and heroes, since over the decades I’ve gathered so many of both. But I rejoice in knowing younger folk read this, so let’s move swiftly to matters theatrical around London. I’ve linked up with a new troupe of creative students recently arrived from over the Pond, and have started exploring the current scene.

There’s just so much of it, all one can do is pick a few dumplings from the stew and hope they’re tasty. So far we’ve seen only three: “Cyrano” at the Playhouse, “The Welkin” at the National – both strong pieces of work, with striking lead performances by James McAvoy and Maxine Peake respectively – and then last week, “Pass Over” at the Kiln, Kilburn. And well, as a famous Greek thinker once announced from his bathtub, Eureka!

“Pass Over” isn’t a new play – its author Antoinette Nwandu first created it with the famous Chicago-based Steppenwolf company in 2018, and went on to do a film version with Spike Lee. The premise sounds bizarre – “Exodus” crossed with “Waiting for Godot” – but if you’re in London, make the effort – go and see it. I came away reckoning it could rank as historic an event as the arrival in London of “Godot” itself in 1955 at the Arts Theatre via a young director called Peter Hall. There’s undeniably outstanding work in Kilburn from the cast, director Indhu Rubasingham and her creative and tech teams.

However having now discussed it with a group of thoughtful American students, several of whom had never seen or read “Waiting for Godot” – I realised that my reactions were those of a white European theatre addict – very different, for instance from those of a young black American woman experiencing a live theatre play production for only the third time in her life (and the other two were the London shows mentioned above).

It’s writing which stays with you, and like Beckett’s original – OK, leaves you pondering Big Questions about Life, but in fact its setting is very precise, and poses queries for here and now – specifically in the context of the on-going arbitrary killing of black people on the streets of American cities. The Black Lives Matter movement is still raw and urgent, as the hopes and aspirations of Obama’s presidency fade into history. Since these are very real, very immediate issues for those living in Trump’s America, how useful is a play in a theatre?

If you can, please go and see it – it provokes much talk and many thoughts. For instance one of our group found out that in the Steppenwolf version the Valdimir and Estragon equivalent characters are teenagers – whereas in London the two brilliant actors (Paapa Essiedu and Gershwyn Eustace Jnr) play at their own 30-something age. Is this a significant choice?

It may be set firmly in America, but you leave the theatre reflecting on its resonance for our country, not least the steady surge of knife crime on London streets. Meanwhile a man in a beanie hat skulks Downing St, trying to sneak racist weirdos through the back door. It’s an image as strange and disturbing as any dreamed up by Sam Beckett.

And talking of weird images, here’s one that almost made me fall off my sofa whilst watching television last Friday night.

Why so? Well it’s a clip shown in a BBC4 documentary fronted by Billy Bragg about the way Lonnie Donegan’s hit record of a song called “Rock Island Line” hugely influenced the flowering of British rock’n’roll – the emergence of groups like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles – in the early sixties. Those of you who weren’t around then may recognise the name, as Lonnie Donegan is featured in the recent Oscar-winning Renee Zellweger movie “Judy”. The guitarist with his back to the camera in this picture is Lonnie, and the cove with the double-bass is me.

The clip was filmed in Manchester, at the Granada TV studios. In the BBC documentary there are two tiny excerpts, just a few seconds long.

The story behind this is that during the 1964 General Election Johnny Hamp – a famous Granada producer, who gave the Beatles their first TV break – had decided to feature on his nightly “Scene at Six Thirty” show acts who had been top of what was then called The Hit Parade during other recent elections. “Rock Island Line’ had been top two elections previously, and Lonnie happened to be on tour in Manchester that week in ’64. He didn’t have a band at that time so Hamp requested the casting department to supply a couple of “comedy actors” to mime to the record on washboard and tea-chest double bass, two homely instruments much used in “skiffle” music – Lonnie was known as the King of Skiffle.

As a student at the Manchester University drama department with an Equity card, I was that week doing some extra-work on “Coronation St” – so Carolyn Bartlett in the casting office sent me along. The fee bought my first car – a blue Ford Popular, bought off my schoolmate Dave Welpton for £40 – pretty dashing, eh? Did wonders for my image. It had a sign on the back saying “Disabled Driver No Hand Signals”.

If you’re in the UK you can catch Billy Bragg’s doc on iPlayer until March 21st, the link is below. Apart from my two fleeting appearances, it’s well worth checking out if you’re interested in the Golden Age of British Rock’n’Roll. For example, apparently early skiffle sessions with Donegan and the Chris Barber Band took place in the upper room of the Round House pub on Wardour St, where a teenage Mick Jagger used to go and watch, and in the doc Billy chats with survivors from John Lennon’s pre-Beatles skifflers, the Quarrymen.

Anyway, I had no idea that my microscopic contribution to rock history still existed, and there it was lingering in a dusty archive. Like Tutankhamun.

We’re just off to see Conor McPherson’s new version of “Uncle Vanya” at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Stay tuned.

• LINKS

Anna Teasdale obituary:https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2020/01/anna-teasdale.html

Original paintings available at: http://www.gallerylefortfineart.com/artist.php?i=37

Prints: https://www.myartprints.co.uk/a/teasdale.html?sfl=1&INCLUDE=LIST

ROCK ISLAND LINE: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000433l

KILN THEATRE: https://kilntheatre.com/whats-on/pass-over/