The Blog

June 1st Sad news

1 June 2017 by Ellis Jones Leave a Comment

Such sad, sad news that Roy Barraclough has left us. We’d lost touch in recent years, but Roy became a dear friend back in the days of “Pardon My Genie”, the children’s comedy series we were in together in the 70’s. He was my boss Mr Cobbledick and I was Hal Adden, the sales assistant in Mr Cobbledick’s hardware shop who in episode one had found an old watering can in the store-room, with the original Genie of the Lamp living in it, now reduced to being the Genie of the Watering Can.

Hal became the Genie’ s new master (he was played in series one by the late Hugh Paddick, series two by Arthur White) but because he’d been asleep for several centuries, some of his magic was a bit rusty. Mr Cobbledick didn’t know about the Genie – cue opportunities for Mr Cobbledick to be caught in a range of totally bewildering circumstances, seized upon with glorious
gusto by Roy.

I’ll write a more detailed tribute very soon – this written in a state of shock while I’m in a hotel bedroom on the other side of the world. He wasn’t just a unique, special comedy talent – a superb panto dame in the theatre, always brilliant in TV comedy shows with Les Dawson and others, bringing a wry sparkle to “Coronation St” – but a distinguished serious actor as well: for example I was lucky enough to see him give a powerful, moving account of Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”.

A unique talent and a dear, kind person – shrewd, sharp, warm, gifted with a rich, gleeful wit. A special light has gone out.

April, with May not far behind…

12 May 2017 by Ellis Jones Leave a Comment

The sun sets over north-east London, May 2017

As the last post closed, my local football team was sinking. Now it’s sunk: it seems Leyton Orient was both the victim of old-fashioned asset-stripping and of eccentric, unpredictable behaviour by its owner. Ironically, having passed the point when demotion from the Football League was unavoidable, they promptly went out and won a game. And meanwhile, struggling amongst the lower rungs of the Premiership, Hull City – the team I have supported since I were a lad on Humberside – were gifted a home tie against no-hope, already relegated Sunderland – and promptly lost, so now themselves cower beneath the shadow of the guillotine.

Clearly Hull is not currently a place to seek sporting glory – but look, it’s the City of Culture, and my old school pal Townsend and I set off on a Quest, a latter day Quixote and Panza, cruising north in my elderly-but-still-elegant Cherry-Red Motor, which could, come to think of it, rather suit the name of Rosinante….

Our journey took us first to Stratford on Avon, to catch a performance of Richard Bean’s play”The Hypocrite”. This was a collaboration between the Hull Truck Theatre Company and the RSC, a production which had played to sell-out audiences in Hull prior to transferring down to the Stratford Swan.

The play treats on the life and times of Sir John Hotham, a seventeenth-century Sheriff of Hull, whose decision to close the city’s gates against King Charles 1 triggered the English Civil war. Now Mr Bean is a skilled farceur – “One Man, two Guv’nors” has been a huge success all over the world – and his script finds a lot of fun in the vagaries of Hotham’s life. But ultimately – although many in the packed audience at the Swan clearly loved every minute, I came away feeling a tad uncomfortable. After all civil war is a horrible thing, with neighbours slaughtering neighbours – there must have been parallels in our times for instance not long ago in Bosnia, where events didn’t produce too much in the way of comic material.

However, as always it was good to be in Stratford – and my tale returns there imminently. But the day after the play we took farewell of our pal Charlie Twigger, our ever-cheerful and generous Warwickshire host, and made our way north and east, through the fenland shires to one of the great legacies of 1960’s Labour Party politics – the Humber Bridge.

Townsend (who is a life-long politics addict) tells me that this startling, majestic construction – still one of the longest single-span bridges in the world – was given the green light in 1966 by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in an attempt to generate pro-Labour sentiments on Humberside during the run-up to a crucial by-election. The message to his current successor as party leader is clear – “Go Corbyn, go build bridges….”

Before crossing the bridge, we stopped for a cuppa in Barton on Humber, the small township at the southern approach . Have you heard of the Ropewalk Museum? We hadn’t. A firm called Hall’s started making ropes there in 1787, and continued supplying British navies, both royal and merchant through wartime and peace right through until 1989. Now the long narrow factory building combines art gallery and fascinating museum. When we were teenagers – oh so many years before the bridge (which wasn’t completed until 1981) – we would often take the paddle-steamer ferry from Hull to New Holland, sometimes to play football against Wintringham School in Grimsby. But we weren’t aware of the Barton rope-makers, who at that time would have been supplying the now long-defunct Hull trawler fleet – in those days our town, as our Headmaster constantly reminded us, was the Biggest Fishing Port in the World.

The ferryboat trip cost two bob, as I recall (ten P to you) and lives in my memory as indelibly romantic. You could buy a tea or a Bovril and sit on deck as you sailed the mile-wide water to Lincolnshire, or go below and watch the great brass-and-copper pistons driving the paddles as they churned the dark brown, mud-filled estuary swell. After the bridge made the ferries redundant, one of them – the Tattershall Castle – chugged south to become a floating pub on the Thames next to Waterloo Bridge. A couple of years ago it returned to Hull for refurbishment, and will shortly be again in place beside the Albert Embankment – so check it out when you’re in town (link below).

And so we crossed the bridge, paid a £1.50 toll and drove into God’s Own County. We’d checked on-line, and found that, notwithstanding Hull’s Year of Culture there were no professional theatre shows at all that weekend – the local producing company Hull Truck being between productions, and the big touring house, the New Theatre, was closed for refurbishment – the timing of which seemed a bit odd, to say the least. (However, it’s due to re-open in September, so there will be time for three months’ worth of Culture before the year’s end.) Nothing daunted, at the City Hall we found the real Humberside culture we knew in the fifties – a programme of professional wrestling!

Image result for wrestling hull city hall

New Generation Wrestling at Hull City Hall – see link below.

Wrestling isn’t quite what it was in the old days – it’s now much more family-friendly (lots of kids in the audience) and there’s an awful lot of sparkling Spandex, but the shameless posturing, the wonderfully fake suffering is on full display, and surely provides we theatre buffs with a link to ancient traditions, when for example a professional would be hired by the guilds at York and Beverly to rampage as the Devil in the mystery plays! The modern wrestlers are clearly all highly-trained gymnasts, governed by strict health & safety régimes. I found this poster from yesteryear for wrestling at the Madeley St Baths, which gives just a hint of what it was like in our day – the sweat and the swearing, the beer-fumes and fag-smoke, the men howling and grunting, the ringside women baying for blood.

After the wrestling we retired to the Old English Gentleman in Worship St, which despite the current closure of the theatre still functions as a classic stage-door pub. It was at the Hull New that my life in the theatre began, as a student assistant stage manager being paid a princely one pound per week. I’ve been back to the New a few times over the years, and was I must confess a tiny bit gratified to find on the pub wall a framed relic from my days as something of a “TV name”, meriting a billing on a tour poster (just) above the title…..

But there’s a lot more to Hull culture than sweating, Spandex and acting – there’s poetry! Two great poets are forever linked to Hull and its history – one by being born at nearby Winestead, the other by serving as the University’s librarian for several decades. Your starter for ten – who “by the tide of Humber would complain” and worry about “Time’s winged chariot”? Supplementary question: which great modern poem has its opening line engraved on the floor of Hull’s Paragon Station, and its closing lines on a wall-plaque at London’s King’s Cross? These pictures provide clues

We had a great time in amazing weather. As the summer and autumn unfold, if you get the chance – hie you to Humberside! There are lots of cultural goodies in the pipeline – Barry Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company doing “Richard the Third”, a sea of Hull citizens’ naked blue bodies in Spencer Tunick’s pictures at the Ferens Art Gallery, a new work for voices by Opera North, inspired by and performed at Winestead Church – and lots, lots more. The old city at the junction of the River Hull and the Humber Estuary is rich in history of ancient maritime trades, of protest against the Crown, against the Roman church and above all against slavery. There are ships’ chandler stores turned art galleries, there is a spectacular deep-sea aquarium called The Deep, there are waterside restaurants, ancient pubs – and still the best fish and chips this side of Whitby…

The nearby countryside of the East Riding is glorious, its crown jewel the exquisite town of Beverley, technically a market town but essentially a miniature cathedral city, the Minster at its heart one of the gothic glories of western Europe. And Beverley now has its own repertory company, the East Riding Theatre – watch this space.

This post has turned into a travelogue In Praise of Hull – there’s a lot more to come – what’s going on in London, how we celebrated Shakespeare’s Birthday in Stratford, and – unavoidably – the Great Chinese Shakespearian Take-away….Don’t go away. Part Two will be along shortly.

Wrestling link: http://www.ngwuk.com/events.php

Tattershall Castle floating pub on the Thames: http://www.thetattershallcastle.co.uk/

East Riding Theatre: http://www.eastridingtheatre.co.uk/about-east-riding-theatre/

APRIL 1st TO THE ORIENT, BUT WHICH ONE?

1 April 2017 by Ellis Jones

This blog is in association with www.teachyourselfacting.com providing access to an amazing range of presentation and performance skills training.

The last time I blogged I was about to set off for the Orient.
Here’s someone who never left the Orient:

Long ago in a distant galaxy my friend Townsend and I would spend our Saturday afternoons on a windswept slope called Bunkers Hill, supporting through thick and thin – often VERY thick, often indescribably thin – a wayward and often feckless Hull City Football Club as it roamed the Third Division.

Last week Townsend came to visit Walthamstow Waterside, all the way from Wellington New Zealand. Across the marshes we heard the strangled cries of a failing football club – Leyton Orient! We hailed a cab – ten minutes later we were pushing through real old-fashioned turn-styles, forking out fifteen pounds apiece. We paid threepence to see City, but hey, that was in a different universe where balls were made of leather, super-stars like Stanley Matthews were paid twenty pounds a week, and your half-time cracked mug of Bovril set you back tuppence.

And the O’s God bless ’em, need the money. Not only are they now facing major competition in the shape of Premier side West Ham having moved into the Olympic stadium a bare mile from their ground, but they seem to have lost the knack of winning any games. They’ve sunk to the very bottom rung of what is cruelly called League Two, a misleading modern euphemism for the Fourth Division, and now face relegation clean out of the Football League.

The day we went they lost 4-1 to Doncaster Rovers, whose supporters were in full voice, robust full-throated northern vowels rattling the rafters of the East Stand, bringing echoes of those far-off Humberside days. Sympathetically we chewed on hot meat-pies at half time, and marvelled at the resolute cheeriness of the several thousand locals who turn out in regular support.

There’s a crowd-fund been started to raise the quarter of a million reported necessary to save the club from bankruptcy – the link is below. This is grass-roots stuff, it’s one of London’s oldest football clubs, an oasis of fun and colour it would be so sad to lose, so I’m going to chip in. When I last looked they’d raised £154, so there’s a bit of a way to go…

And meanwhile, what of the other Orient, of Far Cathay? Back in November I retreated from the worrying West as Trump triumphed and Brexit began to bite, and went off to work at one of China’s most venerable seats of learning, Peking University. This has a beautiful campus in Beijing, in the palatial grounds of a former home of an Imperial minister in pre-revolution days:

It’s a university steeped in history, regarded by many as parallel with Oxford or Cambridge, and in the last century was a focus for both Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. Nowadays there is much talk of cultural links with other countries – the gent on the plinth is Miguel de Cervantes, no doubt dreaming the impossible dream…

So what was I doing there? Well I thought I was going to teach a course in communication skills, but I found myself knee-deep in preparations for a Festival of Chinese Comedy, due to be presented in London during the Chinese New Year, February 2017. When in the East one has to adopt a somewhat Zen attitude to changes in life’s pathways, so I went with the flow. But whatever one does in Beijing, or any major Chinese city these days, there is one big challenge, and that is in simply breathing. In the brightest of sunshine the air has a slightly unreal sparkle, and when the smog comes down it’s nothing short of alarming, the air pollution forty or more times the World Health safety level. Storm-trooper masks are what everyone who’s anyone is wearing…

Here’s the view from my room at dawn…

…here’s the same view 3 hours later…

..and here’s me on my way to work.

So: it’s a long, long story. Suffice to say that the “Happy Chinese Comedy Festival”, produced by Peking University’s Professor Lin Yi came to London in early 2017, and there were three performances at three separate venues – the RADA Studio Theatre, the Corbett Theatre at E15 Acting School, and the Soho Theatre Downstairs.

There were many twists and turns of fate as the project unfolded in Beijing – including a late disappearance of a large chunk of the expected funding. The idea had been to assemble a mix of Chinese actors with traditional opera skills and Chinese actors with a good command of English, who could perform modern comedy in translation.

But as the end of January approached I found myself back in London with no English-speaking actors at all – and the first performance scheduled for January 29!

The response to a request for help from Leon Rubin, Principal of the E15 Acting School and his team was nothing short of miraculous. Leon swiftly produced a group of talented, lively South-east Asian acting students who immediately got stuck into evening rehearsals, despite being involved in full-time training and college performances during the days.

If anyone’s reading this in the Vatican, I fully support any move towards canonising Leon Rubin! Other generous, unstinting help came from my wonderful stage manager Diana Fraser, and much-loved former colleagues at RADA.

There was enough budget to fly out three professionals from the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing, to perform comic scenes from traditional Chinese opera. The modern comedy scenes translated into English were (eventually) delivered by the group from the E15 school, supplemented by an M.A. student from RADA and one remarkable London-based professional actor/director.

Oh, and me. I can now say “Very big, China” in Mandarin. Stop me and ask me to do it if you catch me in the street.

The other performers were all terrific. Somehow the three performances happened, despite one of the three Beijing professionals having his visa refused as he was about to set off! The London-based and the (two) Beijing-based actors met each other for the first time in a conference room in a hotel in Waterloo on the morning of Sunday January 29th – and the first performance took place that evening. The audience (largely invited by the Chinese embassy) seemed to enjoy it.

I have to note that the project survived and came together largely because of another hero – Hao Wu, currently assistant director on “Chinglish” at the Park Theatre: this bi-lingual naturalised Brit, originally from Beijing, contacted me out of the blue in my darkest hour, and with a combination of wizadry and sheer hard graft made it all come to pass, in the space of six days.

East 15 images: Hao and the students warm up for rehearsal.

Stanley Seah (from Singapore) and Hsin-Hue Huang (from Taiwan) run a scene in the garden.

Chinese Opera scenes in performance:

Hanchi Hu in “The Miser” with Peizhi Zen (RADA M.A. student)

Linghui Tu, Yuyang Liu (E15 student) & Hanchi Hu in “Love in a Box”

So that is why, dear readers, this blog has been off-line since before Christmas. I have to say the whole caper left me knackered….I ended up as director, co-producer, dramaturg, script-writer and adapter, production manager, PR/venue co-ordinator and performer.

However, as Mrs May and her raffish team of negotiators start to slice our ties to Europe I guess cultural links with the world’s second-biggest economy may stand us in good stead, so I await thanks from Downing St. God knows, now our cousins across the Atlantic are led by a seriously scary simpleton, maybe better deals await in the inscrutable Orient….

Next time, I will return to reports from the UK theatre scene, including cheering news for ageing actors in London, and observations from the front line at the European City of Culture. In the meantime, if like me you feel an indispensable part of British culture is the survival of the cheerful underdog, please support our own, local Orient! I’ve just checked, and alas the crowd-funding site seems to have shut down – but according to the local news website there is a glimmer of hope in the shape of an “unknown American investor”, which you can read about on the link below. Hang on a minute….”unknown American investor”…surely it couldn’t be..could it? But then a quiet, dusty corner of east London would make a restful change from dealing with pesky liberals in Washington….

http://www.guardian-series.co.uk/sport/leytonorient/15195471.Tailored_offer_to_be_put_forward_to_Orient_despite_high_debt/

Watch this space – back soon!

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November 13: the Autumn of a bitter year

13 November 2016 by Ellis Jones

This blog is in association with www.teachyourselfacting.com providing access to an amazing range of presentation and performance skills training.

As this worrying year moves into its closing months, as voices from the dark side call triumph on both sides of the Atlantic, I thought a soothing image of sunset over calm waters might help us feel a bit better. It’s a shot I took a couple of weeks ago in the Arabian Sea – ironically in the most pirate-infested part of the world’s oceans. I was there to run some acting workshops for passengers on a ship, which mercifully slipped through unnoticed by Somalian boarding parties, and peace reigned. Oh that it would elsewhere, but with HMS UK casting off into choppy Channel waters steered by Mrs May with Boris holding the map, and with the rudder of the Free World about to be grasped by Donald Trump, we could dear friends be in for an interesting voyage…

Back here in the UK, as I write there is snow in the north and bitter winds driving sleet across the reservoir at the end of my garden. On either side of dodging seaborne kidnappers in the the tropics, there have been theatre visits and other events in London.

I had the great joy of meeting one the TYA overseas clients, Joann Valley, who has been taking Shakespeare by Skype classes with me for several years, and who was in transit between Ohio and Russia. We met at Shakespeare’s Globe, and saw a matinee of “Imogen”, a new take on “Cymbeline”. This had lots of noise, pulsing blasts of electronic music, lots of young energy, and finished with – oh welcome change from the lumpen hopping about which ruins the curtain-call of many an English Shakespeare production – a really gutsy street-dance, in which Joann joined with glee. She set off for the land of Chekov with warm thoughts of London and our immortal Bard

I was delighted that she had enjoyed her first experience of the Globe, and yet, and yet… I couldn’t help but note my own inner misgivings. There’s always a place for rock’n’roll Shakespeare (is anyone here like me, old enough to remember “Catch My Soul“?) but so much research, so much effort so many pounds and dollars went towards re-creating the Globe on Bankside, pennies raised in response to the magnificent vision of Sam Wanamaker. A vision allowing today’s directors and actors the chance to match their creativity against the genius of Shakespeare and his contemporaries using the same tools, in the same physical environment. This has been the exact opposite of a dry academic exercise – Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole produced glorious, vibrant productions – think only of the Rylance “Twelfth Night”, of Dromgoole’s rich and varied seasons, in which actors of the calibre of James Garnon, Eve Best, Michelle Terry and Jamie Parker took possession of that challenging wooden “O” and made us thrill to the words, to relish the energy and excitement of the stories, often with the most basic of lighting, and without a microphone or loudspeaker in sight.

But days after our visit came a bombshell. Following a series of “controversial” productions, and I imagine a series of quite lively meetings, the governing council of Shakespeare’s Globe announced that Emma Rice – appointed a few short months ago as the theatre’s Artistic Director – is to be asked to stand down at the end of her current two-year contract. Cue howls of outrage in the London arts community. An exciting, innovative talent had been turfed out by the forces of reaction, demonstrating that no worthwhile creative could ever create good work within the stifling limits set by such a theatre. Well sorry chaps, that’s simply not true – see above. A letter in The Guardian, for me, nailed it: “The Globe can embrace all the rampant creativity the plays were designed to cultivate and still to its own self be true as the “radical experiment to explore the conditions within which Shakespeare and his contemporaries work…” “

Quite so. Messing about with Shakespeare’s plays is now the norm, for God’s sake – there’s absolutely nothing radical or innovative left. Every drama group in every college throughout the English-speaking world does “concept” Shakespeare – on bicycles, on pogo-sticks, set in swimming pools, in media-company offices, etc etc. The Globe offers a wonderful opportunity for directors with courage and confidence not to impose, but to allow the magic waiting in those fabulous texts to emerge and do its work.

But, as with Brexit, until 2018 – until which Emma is still in charge – there is still time for doubters to be proved radically wrong. Her previous work with the Kneehigh company was indeed innovative and exciting: her production of “Brief Encounter” gave me one of the best evenings I’ve spent in a theatre anywhere. The timing of the Globe board’s announcement is at least questionable, as she’s hardly had time to hit her stride. She may yet confound them all, her 2017 Shakespeare shows could take the Globe to new and amazing levels, perhaps after all the board will beg her to stay and accept a new contract, whereupon like Coriolanus she may well turn her back on the common cry of curs and seek a world elsewhere.

Moving indoors, I saw a cracking play at the Royal Court – “Torn” by Nathaniel Martello-White – a sharp, clear-eyed breakdown of life in a mixed-race, urban family, rich in character, rich in use of language,

resonant and memorable. One of Nathaniel’s class-mates during his time training as an actor with us at RADA – James Hillier – was in the cast, giving a cracking, arresting and wonderfully layered performance. Look out for both these guys – undiluted, disciplined talent, bringing to our trade what the football commentators call “real quality”

Picture source: “The Stage”

Adelle Leonce and James Hillier in “Torn”Picture source: www.theartsdesk.com

And talking of quality, while the London theatre explores kingship through a gender-blind prism (see this blog’s September entry) television drama has been busy with the lives of two famous queens – Victoria and her current descendant, Elizabeth the Second. Cressida my daughter and I became totally engrossed in ITV’s “Victoria”, happily suspending disbelief as a brilliant cast led by Jenna Co

leman, Rufus Sewell and Tom Hughes took us through this – of course carefully tidied-up and disinfected – slice of history. Whatever your politics, the life and loves of people in extraordinary circumstances, well chronicled and performed, make great drama – and the British royals of almost any era live in undeniably extraordinary circumstances, begging to be dramatised. Ask Will Shakespeare.

So we sat down to watch the new Netflix series “The Crown” with eager anticipation – after all, it’s the same story as “Victoria”, fast-forwarded a century or so. But alas try as I might, for me suspending disbelief was a struggle. Now “The Crown” has good actors – Claire Foy and Matt Smith as HM and HRH respectively – and reportedly a MASSIVE budget, and it must be said has been well reviewed.

It’s not because I’m old enough to remember much of the story in real life, and indeed many of the characters are still with us. After all, I enjoyed “The Iron Lady”, despite being completely aware of Meryl Streep acting an all too familiar British politician, and I know Jenna Coleman is far prettier than even the most flattering portrait of Victoria. But both those performances are so well-rounded and complete that I gladly went along with their stories. In “The Crown” there is diligent attention to period detail, the research has clearly been extensive: plausible moments like Princess Elizabeth rushing to visit her seriously ill father, and on arrival instantly dropping curtseys to both her grandmother Queen Mary and her mother Queen Elizabeth, protocol observed scrupulously no matter how distressing the family crisis.

However, I have to say I nonetheless struggled to engage in it as drama, and it’s tantalising to try to work out why. My guess is that it’s not the actors, it’s the directing of the actors, and it’s some of the script. I used to run a workshop at the Actors’ Centre on “British Class”. How do you get inside a character from another era and from a sector of society utterly different from your own background? The era bit is often just plain technical – the etiquette of how to cut a cigar, how to curtsey etc But it’s the core behaviour that’s difficult. Without actually having endured the rigours of Gordonstoun School, without having served as a wartime naval officer, without having lived a life surrounded by folk hanging on every word you utter, how do you arrive at that ducal way of walking, that unique way of talking? It’s tricky stuff: you really need lots of support – and of course dialogue that rings true. At one point Prince Philip said to the infant Princess Anne – “Now run along and play and I’ll be right over…” Right over?

Before the memories of the Summer of 2016 fade, here’s one that will last my remaining years on the planet. Recent generations of RADA-trained actors will tell you without hesitation that they owe much of their confidence, much of their success in life to the support they had as students at Gower Street from the Academy’s Registrar. This summer we celebrated twenty-five years of extraordinary service by Patricia Myers OBE, at a lovely event organised by the tireless Chairman, Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, at the Garrick Club. Pat’s amazing energy, devotion and humour saw off not just many a student crisis, but many a crisis afflicting her colleagues, including me. I was so glad my office opened directly opposite hers: at difficult times Pat could be relied upon to reach into the desk drawer and produce her famous silver wand. One swift wave, and shadows receded.

The Garrick event was actually quite overwhelming – literally hundreds of graduates attended, and more took part in the tributes by video-links from all over the world, including Hollywood. Not many people can be said really to have Made a Difference to others’ lives, and it’s a rare thing for good works to be celebrated on quite such a scale. So huge thanks to Sir Stephen for thinking of it, and with the RADA Council making it happen.

So, OK, what lies in store over the Pond? Leaving aside the uncomfortable truth that Mrs Clinton actually polled overall two million more votes than Trump, has his campaign been nothing more than a pantomime performance?

Trump’s suddenly soothing and conciliatory victory speech had the air of an actor who’s spent months rehearsing Abanazar the Wicked Wizard suddenly deciding he’d rather play Henry the Fifth. Then talking of class…his body language during the “hand-over” meeting with Barack Obama was that of a chauffeur called into the dignified Presidential presence to explain why a puncture hadn’t been fixed.

But this is no time for jokes. Now more than ever we need hope, we need optimism. On the morning the news of Tump’s triumph broke, I opened my curtains to a vista of ominous, grey autumnal drizzle.

But within hours, lo, the heavens cleared and God sent a rainbow….

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SEPTEMBER 10 – Heat, drizzle, and what sex would you like your king…?

11 November 2016 by Ellis Jones

This blog is in association with http://www.teachyourselfacting.com providing access to an amazing range of presentation and performance skills training

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It’s been an unusual summer. The hottest English August on record, with comparatively low-key Games in distant Rio, give or take the odd stamped foot in Moscow. We’ve had the weirdly reminiscent sights of Downing Street staff welcoming a new Tory lady boss, of the Labour Party again throwing its lot behind a shambling north London no-hoper, and of Hull City FC clambering, wide-eyed and unsteady, once more onto football’s top shelf.

Me, I went to France. Old friends invited me to stay in Cap D’Antibes, on the Côte d’Azure.They have a lovely quiet house, a few steps away from the beach where in times gone by Picasso sketched, Scott and Zelda drank, and Ernest Hemingway preened, all guests of a rich, hedonistic American couple called Gerald and Sara Murphy. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about it all in “Tender is the Night”. Another member of the group was the painter and ceramic artist Fernand Léger, now celebrated by an exuberant museum a few kilometres inland.

Léger’s work is joyous: I love his wacky ceramic stuff – like the “Walking Sun”, and “The Wrestlers” – the latter perhaps hinting at party games down at the Murphies….

Soon after the end of the Second World War the town of Antibes presented Pablo Picasso (in self-exile from his native Spain, then still ruled by fascism) with a studio in a fine medieval tower overlooking the bay. Now the Picasso museum, it has a stunning terrace hosting work by contemporary sculptors – and it’s not hard to see why they call it the Blue Coast….

On my last evening with my friends Doug and Kate, we sipped wine in their garden while the Bastille Day fireworks crackled and whizzed across the bay in Nice. At one point the noises became very clear loud bangs, and I made a facetious remark about war breaking out. Shortly afterwards we turned on the TV news and discovered the dreadful truth about the horrible terrorist attack.

Mass murder, untold grief caused by religious bigotry – does our new PM really think it’s helpful to exhort religious parents to send their children to exclusive single-faith schools?

After a much-delayed flight back, I set about preparing to work on a drama project in Hampshire, and was rewarded by several glorious sun-filled weeks in one of England’s most idyllic counties. I stayed with my sister in the interesting market-town of Alton, full of Jane Austen associations (as indeed is my sister, a long-serving volunteer at the nearby Jane Austen museum) and on my free days we explored the country and the coast, along the way sampling cream teas, fish suppers and local ales.

The Hampshire seaside options are rich and varied – for example, you can watch cars drown at Bosham, fly kites on Hayling island, or re-paint the Spinnaker Tower at Portsmouth….

For those like me saddened by the closure (or trendy, ruinous modernisation) of so many urban pubs, it’s a joy to report that here flourish still many traditional hostelries, some hidden deep amongst inland forest hills, where it would be no surprise to find Frodo Baggins hobnobbing with Tom Bombadil over a foaming pint, or at least a poet jotting a few bucolic lines by the fireside…

Here’s the Three Horseshoes at Elsted with its garden views of roses and wheat-fields, a secret revealed by Jane Hayward, friend and comrade from repertory days at Farnham.

The harvest evening that seemed endless then

And after, the inn where all were kind.

All strangers.

(Edward Thomas, reflecting on English country life, not by the fireside but from the trenches in Flanders in 1915.)

Many of these inns have stood since Tudor times, and this summer has brought echoes of those far-off days. We took time in Portsmouth to re-visit the Historic Dockyard, and the remarkable Mary Rose, whose timbers have now, after a nigh-on thirty year process, been wax-treated to survive for several hundreds more. Do go – if like me you have an interest in Shakespeare and his days, here’s a window into that world – or rather lots of windows – literally thousands of salvaged objects sit there as if they’d been used yesterday – clothes, gadgets, jewels, tools, weapons, all saved from a ship sunk at the Battle of the Solent on July 19, 1545. There are curiously carved cannon, ornate swords and halberds, and many long-bows as used at Agincourt, all restored with guidance from our country’s greatest long-bow expert, the gloriously nonogenerian actor Robert Hardy.

Returning to another historic county, one nearer to my east London home, my pal Robin and I went into Essex, to see the Tudor Hunting Lodge. Queen Bess’s dad Henry V111 relaxed – between bedding and beheading ladies – by hunting down stags in Epping Forest. Doubtless venison pasties featured on his table, and you can see a rather good display of prop-food at the lodge.

I include a picture of the stairwell, because it seems the original 16th century stairs here were used as the pattern for the staircases at the re-created Shakespeare’s Globe in 1997.

And prop-food and Elizabethan stairs take us, dear reader, back to the world of The Theatre – which is what this blog is supposed to be about. Once again it’s the time of year when I conduct New York University undergrads to London shows – and as I write this the current troupe is braving steady drizzle as Globe groundlings, watching “Macbeth”. I saw it last week – it has Ray Fearon as the Thane, with Tara Fitzgerald as the Lady, and a supporting cast including puppets. There’s a new régime at the Globe, with Emma Rice now artistic director, following several lively years running the Kneehigh company in the the West Country, promising lots of exciting new directions at Bankside. She’s already given a reportedly very funny take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, featuring Helena as a chap. Quite where the current rash of onstage gender-bending has come from is difficult to nail. I reported earlier on our Michelle Terry’s impressive “Henry V” – see below for the latest manifestations.

Meanwhile, two other excursions to report. To the National Theatre, to see the Chichester Festival production of “The Seagull” – part of the Young Chekov season – with some fine acting, notably from Geoffrey Streatfeild as Trigorin, Adrian Lukis as Dorn and Jade Williams as Masha. And last week back once more into Essex, to the Queens Theatre Hornchurch. This place is worth watching – one of the very few remaining near-London regional producing houses, with high production values and a strong artistic track record.

They’ve collaborated with the New Wolsey Theatre at Ipswich to produce the first post West-End mus

ical version of “Made in Dagenham”. To be honest, this was a tighter show than the West End one I reported on last year with our Gemma Arterton in the main role, by the Queens artistic director, Douglas Rintoul. There’s neat choreography, gutsy performances by a cast of actor-musicians, and the opening night was given extra resonance by the presence of some of the original Ford strikers (Hornchurch being next-door to Dagenham). It’s a show to watch, at a theatre to watch – on the London Underground (District Line) with sensible ticket prices once you get there.

Now, a heads-up for no less than THREE “King Lears”! Already in performance at Stratford is the RSC one. This is the most eccentric, as it has a man playing the King. Anthony Sher is by all accounts splendid, but I want you to go and enjoy the Unpleasant Sisters, played by two terrific Welsh actresses from my time in charge of the training at RADA, Nia Gwynne as Goneril and Kelly Williams as Reagan.

Meanwhile it won’t have escaped your notice that the great twice-Oscared Glenda Jackson has left politics to return to the boards in the title role of the same play at the Old Vic, due to open next month.

But don’t let that obscure the fact that another distinguished actress, Ursula Mohan, is re-creating the “Queen Lear” we reported on last year, and is performing with an all-new cast at the Tristram Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, starting on September 20th.

I don’t doubt that all three versions of this great work will be wonderfully revealing in different ways. But it may be worth pointing out that the London “fringe” is often the place to find pure gold, at a fraction of the prices you would would pay at the bigger houses. Connoisseurs of intriguing theatre, but especially those on a limited budget, please take note…

And finally, two cheering pictures taken at the end of two streets- one I have called Waltham Forest Flowers, of the blooming displays generated by the borough council on the High Street railings at the end of Coppermill Lane where I live, the other a distant view of the Alpes Maritimes taken at the end of my friends’ street at Cap d’Antibes.

Both for now, heartening local images from within the European Union.

At least for the next two years…

Enjoy.

May 3rd What goes on tour…digs, awards and castles

11 November 2016 by Ellis Jones

May 3rd What goes on tour…digs, awards and castles

MAY 2, 2016 ~ TEACHYOURSELFACTING ~ EDIT

This blog is in association with http://www.teachyourselfacting.comproviding access to an amazing range of presentation and performance skills training.

We’re on the road. The second WestEnd run of “The Father” – a pre-booked five weeks spell at the Duke of Yorks – seemed to last about five minutes. It was hugely enjoyable, and intriguing to note how a shift of a few hundred yards – the distance from the Wyndham’s Theatre (where we played before Christmas) to the Duke of York’s Theatre – brings a new focus, a new set of perspectives. The former is anchored at the corner of Leicester Square and the Charing Cross Road, the latter flanks the lower reaches of St Martin’s Lane, close by a fine view of Trafalgar Square across the steps of St Martin’s church. And St Martin’s in the Fields is the big player in this corner of London, providing succour and support to London’s ever-increasing homeless while offering the rest of us, as well as services and prayers, an almost daily serving of fine music.

Just around the corner from Maggie Hambling’s sculpture of Oscar Wilde staring at the stars from the gutter, you can descend beneath the street to St Martin’s crypt, where you find a great gift shop, meeting rooms, chapel, an art gallery – and a large self-service, licensed restaurant serving good food at reasonable prices, an increasingly rare phenomenon in theatre-land.

If you would seek Oscar’s monument…..look under the cardboard coffee cups.

But a few weeks on, and St Martin’s Court seems another country, a distant time. We started our tour at Guildf

ord, where the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre sits beside a tumbling mill-race. I first visited a theatre in the riverside car-park in this town in the early 60s, on a visit to the famous Century Theatre, which was a touring theatre building. Yes, building. This extraordinary phenomenon toured the towns and cities of post-war England, in Guildford keeping the creative flame alight while funds were raised to replace the burned out repertory theatre in North St. The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre was completed in 1965.

(The Century Theatre toured Britain between 1952 and 72, when it settled in Keswick, Cumbria.)

We had a great week as spring began cautiously (and mistily) to arrive. Back in 1066 William the Conqueror spotted the potential of Guildford as a regional centre, and built a tidy castle up on the top of a hill overlooking the town, which he clearly meant to last. And last it did, and it’s now surrounded by lovely gardens and great views across Surrey.

We held our breath as the Guildford week finished – for that was the weekend of the UK’s most prestigious theatre event, the Olivier Awards, and our show had been nominated in two categories. The event was televised on the Sunday

The play itself lost out to “Hangmen” in the Best New Play list, but then came the keenly awaited presentation of the Best Male Actor award. There had been feverish speculation in the media about a head-to-head confrontation between Benedict Cumberbatch for “Hamlet” and Mark Rylance for “Farinelli and the King”.

Well, the award went to….Kenneth Cranham for “The Father”! Our jubilation knew no bounds.

Then the press reports came out the next morning. In both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express reports of the Olivier Awards much was made (quite rightly) of Dame Judi Dench’s record-breaking eighth prize, and then of the fact that both Mark Rylance and Benedict Cumberbatch had been “disappointed” in their hopes of the Best Actor Award – but NO MENTION AT ALL was made of the actor who had actually won it! I tell you, it takes a lot for me to tweet, but tweet I did. I still don’t really understand tweeting, but I felt a bit better for it as my train snaked south and west. The spirit of the players, my lord, never fades, be it recognised by the scurvy press or not, and we took our play to Cornwall.

The castles of England have perhaps proved a more enduring network than our country’s theatres – William and his northmen built theirs after they’d succeeded in conquering England over 900 years ago. Some years later an English king descended from a long line of Welshmen – Henry V111 – wanted to fend off anyone with similar ideas, and so built some impressive coastland fortresses. One of which still dominates the headland at Falmouth, just down the road from our next touring venue, the Hall for Cornwall at Truro. The British army only stopped using this castle as an operational military base in 1956, so even though Henry found picking wives a bit of a challenge, he was good at castles.

Pendennis Castle, Falmouth

Truro’s a neat little city, dominated by a fine Victorian cathedral. I had lovely quiet digs (link below) and – no thanks to the Mail or Express – the news of Ken’s award clearly
had an affect on the ticket-sales, as the wide hall (a converted market-building) filled up nicely.

On my one full day off, I took the local train to St Ives. I’d always wanted to go there for a range of reasons, some personal,so it was a kind of a pilgrimage. It’s easy to see why, in the early and middle years of t

he last century, the Cornish coast was a magnet for artists. Whether the sun shines or not, the light has a special quality, the air salty and sharp. And when it’s bright the sea and sky are boldly blue, with sub-tropical trees deeply green beside the flinty grey and white of the buildings. Although the town was enjoying a healthy crop of tourists, I found the (still operational) Bernard Leach pottery almost deserted, and wandered in the quiet of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture garden.

The clay room, Bernard Leach Pottery

And of course there are still artists and craftsmen at work, so as a memento I bought myself a present of a tiny piece of seaside artistry. I’m not sure what the process is that creates “forced glass”, but here it is. It’s by Claire Harris.

Then back home, and a week’s nice easy commute to Richmond Theatre – another small piece of fine craft-work, this time by the great Victorian architect, Frank Matcham. Size is of course relative, Richmond Theatre isn’tthat small – about 800 seats – but it’s modest alongside his famous blockbusters like The London Palladium or our next stunning venue, The Theatre Royal Newcastle. This glorious palace recently had a £4.75m refurbishment, and it feels like it – it’s terrific to work in or to watch shows in, and the locals are rightly very proud of it.

(Picture: Ents24.com)

The same can be said of Tyneside in general, well certainly last week, when we had a glorious mini heat-wave. Although I’d been to Newcastle before I’ve never taken time to explore. It was a happily packed week, camera-clicking on the Tyne and in the city, and by the beaches of the nearby coast

The sun on the Tyne is all mine….the lighthouse, Whitley Bay.and the Gate, Newcastle Castle

Local travel is swift and easy on the Metro train system, fittingly since this is where the great rail engineers, George and Robert Stephenson came from, and while the Metro engines and rolling-stock are sleek and efficient, some of the local stations reflect a more ornate age:

The railway station, Tynemouth

Mind you, the local trains need to be good – at rush hours the traffic is ghastly – there are amazing bridges, and the traffic planners in the 60s did their best to create through-ways – but you have two busy adjacent cities, Newcastle to the north of the river, Gateshead to the south, both with steep, narrow ancient streets. I hired a car for an overnight trip to visit loved ones in North Yorkshire – and if ever you need to hire a car on Tyneside, take my tip, don’t do as I did, hire in the city centre – make straight for the airport and hire there. It’s about 20 minutes each way by Metro, and you save a lot of time and money!

Back at the Theatre Royal we toasted two men of genius, firstly the great Matcham (our brilliant leading man here seen inspecting the bust proudly displayed front-of-house) and of course Will Shakespeare, the 400th anniversary of whose passing coincided with our visit. The Friends of the Theatre Royal invited Ken to read a sonnet at a celebratory event, and I read one as well along with my fellow understudy, Tom Michael Blyth. Because of the content of our play, the event raised funds for the Alzheimers’ Society, an organisation which Tom is also seeking to support via a new “all-the-sonnets” web-site – of which more news anon.

Newcastle is alive with culture – famous art galleries, an astonishing silver concert hall, and at least two other significant theatres apart from the Theatre Royal. There’s the wonderfully attractive and welcoming Live Theatre – a dynamic producing house, famous for new work – and another superb Victorian survival, the Tyne Theatre and Opera House, which is home to a fine set of vintage stage machinery, and amongst other projects, a training programme for young performers.

The Theatre Royal also has a training agenda, including a year-long foundation course for those seriously considering going on to professional training. As you can imagine, on finding out about this I reached for my TYA hat and made enquiries. More information can be found in the links section below.

From the top north-east corner of England we swooped south, to the gulls and cockles and candy-floss at Brighton. But the sun had stayed on the Tyne!

Yet another fine Victorian Theatre Royal, in a town famous for its mix of elegance and sleaze, the opulent and the tacky. You can find bargains in the Lanes, eat fish and chips sometimes almost as good as those in the north-east, or pick your way through hordes of French students to inspect the Pier, which is currently up for sale should you have millions spare to invest in something more adventurous than failing retail stores or dodgy banks…

It’s been a lovely week, and a sad one. On Friday I had the melancholy task of speaking at an old friend’s funeral. Graeme Eton was a fine actor, teacher, sportsman, sometime contributor to TYA, and a man of charm and wit. In yet another week of grim news, most especially of the wretched combined police and press wickedness over Hillsborough, it’s timely to be reminded there are sometimes people in the world

with a gift for bringing cheer, who when they turn up in your thoughts, make you smile.

And talking of which, as one whose chequered past career veered occasionally into the colourful world of old-fashioned Variety, I was over-joyed to find this statue in the garden betwixt the theatre and the great Royal Folly, the Brighton Pavilion.

Max, a son of Brighton, was famous for offering his audiences a choice of jokes taken from either of two books – the white book (clean) or the blue book (guess). Inevitably they would shout out for the blue book.

“You’ll get me locked up, you will….Now – ‘ere’s a funny thing… ”

Catch me in the pub sometime, and I’ll tell you the joke that got him banned by the BBC….

THE FATHER – an award-winning play with an Olivier-winning star performance at its heart – backed up by yours truly in case of accidents – has but two more weeks on the road.

Next at the Rep, Birmingham, the week after at the Everyman, Cheltenham – come and see it, it’s very special.

Links and contacts:

To book, or for further information, just click on the links

THE FATHER at Birmingham – The Repertory Theatre

THE FATHER at Cheltenham – The Everyman Theatre

Newcastle Theatre Royal Actor Training

Other amazing theatres: Live Theatre

Tyne Theatre and Opera House

Great places to stay in the West and the North:

TRURO –

Quiet, immaculate rooms, by the cathedral Mary Brooks, 3 Union Place 01872 263 778

NEWCASTLE

Perfect self-contained flat Bernard & John 0191 267 1745

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Picture source: “The Stage”

Adelle Leonce and James Hillier in “Torn”Picture source: www.theartsdesk.com

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