Easter come and gone, and still the weather flirts and teases. Last Friday I had a tooth taken out. On Sunday and I walked in the marshes, and suddenly a weird, unfamiliar sensation came over me. Delayed reaction from the anaesthetic, thought I…then, no wait, it was warm sunshine…
But then within 24 hours, the bitter winds returned, the garden gained a thin covering of greyish snow, and here we are again under leaden skies, fighting off gloom, feeling the onset of Seasonally Affected Disorder.
This week saw the passing of a significant female politician, and inevitably a tide of comment is surging through the Internet. I just picked up on a remark made by the late Norman St John Stevas in the wake of being sacked as Thatcher’s arts minister. Norman, always one for an apt turn of phrase, thought she saw all issues as black and white whereas he, like E.L.James, saw the universe as being “made up of many shades of grey…”
Mrs/Baroness T certainly provided good material for female members of the acting trade: Meryl Streep caught the pathos of her physical and mental decline in “The Iron Lady” and our lovely RADAgrad Andrea Riseborough was brilliant as the young Maggie in the BBC’s “The Long Walk to Finchley”. There’s a link to the trailer for that here, and a further link to an interview with Andrea at our website:
And talking of female talent, there’s a lot on show in London at present.
Carrie Cracknell’s zingy production of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is packing them in at the Young Vic. There’s high-octane work from Hattie Morahan as Nora, and indeed from the rest of the cast (she’s seen here with Susannah Wise). It’s a restless, finely detailed presentation of the piece, which I admired greatly and enjoyed watching… and yet, and yet… I couldn’t somehow accept the world the show sought to take me too. I wasn’t sure what time we were in. So much of the production – from its brilliantly designed setting to the style of the always expertly delivered acting – seemed to me to be a reflection of a much more recent time-frame than the play’s 1879 origin. Nothing wrong with that, there’s no need ever to be slavishly, pedantically chained to a playwright’s epoch, but in this case I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief long enough to go with the flow and thus be moved. In discussion afterwards, I was expecting the fiercely feminist American students in my party to seize on and rubbish my misgivings, but found that for the most part they shared them. But it’s arresting, award-winning work, and most of the audience clearly thought it was amazing, so if you can get a ticket, go and let me know what you think.The Young Vic is a great London venue – full of youthful buzz, and home to one of the few theatre bars in London where you can buy a glass of wine without first taking out a mortgage. There are three auditoria, the middle-sized one being the Maria Studio, named after the remarkable designer Maria Bjornson, who died, far too early, back in 2002. Her work on The Phantom of the Opera rightly brought her huge fame, but she had already gained wide admiration within the trade for a series of extraordinary designs, going back to the early seventies at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where I briefly worked with her. So it felt very appropriate to go along there and see “Above Me the Wide Blue Sky,” a production incorporating an “art installation”. This show is by the company Fevered Sleep, who have quite a reputation for combining fine art work with theatrical expression, and are based at Battersea Arts Centre.
Well, oh dear, I’m afraid this one for me was a great disappointment. The “installation” wasn’t very interesting. It looked a bit like a British Home Stores Lighting Department display with dated, “new-age” music accompanying the lights fading up and down, and projections of clouds on the four walls of the studio. The performer had a dog with her, who curled up and went to sleep. The performer, Laura Cubitt, then recited a description of a sea-side landscape, a list of items each pre-fixed with “There is…” Half way through the lights dimmed, and then she started again – the same list, pre-fixed with “There used to be..”
There was a note in the programme explaining that one of the inspirations had been Astrov’s great speech about the destruction of the countryside in Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya”. Well, alas, I could only think of Konstantin’s sad, failing little play during the first act of “The Seagull”. Like the dog, I dozed.
Cheerier times at the tiny Jermyn St Theatre, where there is a welcome revival of a play that at one time made regular appearances in regional repertory theatres, Frederick Lonsdale’s “On Approval”. There’s lots of deft, crackling wit, not unlike Noel Coward but with a different flavour, and four very enjoyable performances, especially from the brilliant Sarah Crowe, who brings depth and feeling to some scorching one-liners.Here’s an actor who became famous for a nice line in scatty, somewhat vacuous young women, and it’s grand to witness material that could be so easily caricatured being delivered with mature elegance, style and humanity.
In reading up about Frederick Lonsdale, I discovered he was grandfather to Edward and James Fox, and thus great-grandfather to Emilia, Freddie and Laurence, a dynasty of great and increasing distinction. Not many people know that. Well I didn’t anyway – one for the pub quiz. And talking of quizzes, we have a winner. The first correct answer to the question posed in the last entry came from final-year Central School student Lexi Sekuless. The first British theatre writer to be knighted was W.S. Gilbert, he who came up with the witty words to go with Arthur Sullivan’s music for all those famous G & S operettas down at the Savoy. It’s been a good week for Central. My spies tell me that Lexi and Declan Perring gave the outstanding presentation at the Globe Theatre’s student verse-speaking event, the Wanamaker Festival, last Sunday. Delivering classical dramatic verse in that unforgiving space is a real challenge, and it’s the chips-down test for actor training. I was told that some actors from quite famous schools couldn’t actually be heard beyond the first few rows. Don’t get me started…
Before we leave the matter of female impact in the theatre world, the word from across the Pond is that Miss Trunchbull’s debut on Broadway in “Matilda” has not entirely gone unnoticed. Audibility is never a problem for her or her creator, so hurray for Bertie! Read all about it:
www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/apr/12/matilda-musical-rsc-hit-broadway
Now listen, it’s early morning at Waterside, and once again there’s something odd, something unfamiliar in the air, something almost Hitchockian. Sunlight again, streaming across the reservoir, and the birds are gathering….
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