Ellis Jones

Now, for once the East in the title doesn’t refer to Walthamstow,  the endlessly appealing east London paradise wherein I dwell. Rather does it refer to the very Far and Distant East, the great oriental cities of Shanghai and Beijing, to which I am to return in two weeks’ time, and have lots of preparation to do, so this post will have to be somewhat abridged. I’ve seen a lot of London Theatre stuff these last weeks some of which I daresay some of you might already have seen, so I’ll be a bit selective.

For instance, I caught one of the last performances of “My Night With Reg”, which somehow I’d managed never to have seen, in neither its original production at the Royal Court, nor in this much-applauded revival from the Donmar Warehouse, which transferred to the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was directed by one of the grads from my RADA days, Rob Hastie, featuring another in one of the leading roles, Geoffrey Streatfeild, and is a brilliant production, with gloriously skilful work by Geoffrey and the rest of the cast. I’m not sure at the time of going to press if it’s going to tour. Look out for it if it does and comes your way, because if like me you haven’t seen it so far, you’re in for a treat. It’s one of the plays from the days of the AIDS crisis, most of which were from America – this one is indelibly British, beautifully crafted, deeply touching and very, very funny.

An even more established West End favourite I caught up with this month on Shaftesbury Avenue was “Les Miserables”. Believe it or not in all its thirty years of garnering huge audiences and correspondingly huge box-office receipts, I’d never seen it. Which is a bit of a confession for a theatre blogger – akin to a movie buff admitting never to have seen “Star Wars” – but anyway we went as a family treat for my daughter and me, using some tokens given by lovely friends as a birthday present.

 Like all West End musicals tickets are far from cheap. Without the tokens our two seats would have set us back £130 – which, incidentally is what you pay for just one seat at “The Book of Mormon”. Was it worth it? Well yes, it’s a sight to see – after all these years it’s a superbly engineered machine, with highly-charged, powerful performances in a terrific and spectacular John Piper setting, the Trevor Nunn/John Caird production as polished and gleaming as a vintage Bentley. My one quibble was with the printed programme – or rather the absence of such a thing. I paid five pounds for what I thought was programme, and it turned out to be a glossy brochure full of pictures, with a cast list from the original 1985 production – but none for the current show! And there were no cast lists available in the building. On behalf of my fellow Equity members onstage I felt incensed – OK, I’m sure they are adequately paid, but surely the combined Cameron MacIntosh/RSC managements, having accrued literally millions of pounds over the years from this show could at least run to a typed-out list of credits? A note has been sent to our union’s West End office: Margaret Thatcher may have removed our collective teeth, but surely we can still at least growl…?

The show’s on at the Queen’s Theatre, a venue loaded with memories for me. Long ago – so long ago it could have been on a distant planet in a galaxy far, far away – I was a callow stage-hand at that theatre, on the crew for a legendary season of plays which transferred from the National Theatre in its Old Vic days. Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith played in “Othello”, with Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun”, in a repertoire season including Geraldine McEwan and Robert Lang in “A Flea in Her Ear” – oh, and Derek Jacobi in “Black Comedy”. I have lots of memories, lots of stories – remind me to tell you all about it some time.

Meanwhile, to the current National Theatre in its newly refurbished and somewhat re-shaped South Bank home, to catch a rarity – a full-on, complete presentation of George Bernard Shaw’s epic “Man and Superman”, starring Ralph Fiennes. It’s a corker – Fiennes is on top form, and the piece crackles along, Shavian dialogue as fresh as paint, the three hours’ plus traffic of the stage passing merrily by. There’s one daft directorial imposition, in the form of a mocked-up audio recording right at the start, of Kirsty Young interviewing Ralph Fiennes in character as Jack Tanner on “Desert Island Discs” – thus indicating a totally unnecessary contemporary time-frame. This is then contradicted by a superbly designed series of Edwardian-style stage sets, and, when the action moves to France, by the appearance of a bunch of brigands in nineteenth century costume. But none of this matters as otherwise it’s beautifully directed, and at least the vaguely twentieth century costumes worn by the central characters permit the appearance of a fantastic motor car – a shiny white 1950s Jaguar XK150 convertible, which Ralph gets to drive! He drives it only for a very short journey, off into the Lyttelton Theatre’s wings – but taking great care, as it’s apparently insured for £150,000….I believe the run at the National is pretty well sold out, but despair not – it’s going to be in cinemas throughout the world by live digital broadcast on Thursday May 14th so check your local cinema – I promise you a terrific evening. All the cast are great, with Tim McMullen doing a brilliant double as Mendoza the Chief Brigand and the Prince of Darkness. Also look out for a very neat cameo by Clare Clifford as Miss Ramsden.

I didn’t realise that the famous touring theatre company Cheek by Jowl now has a second base in Moscow. If you’re in London, don’t miss their superb all-Russian “Measure for Measure” at the Barbican – vibrant staging, tremendous acting – and a script which for my money is tellingly edited. I say this even though my character of Elbow (a collector’s piece still available folks, on BBC DVD) was cut entirely! It’s a wondrously intense and gripping night out, from its beginning to the very end – nobody takes a curtain-call like a bunch of Russian performers!

With an assortment of workshops and lectures to prepare for my excursion to the Orient, I just don’t have time to report fully on the other theatrical goodies I’ve sampled of late – Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire” being given a fine re-working as a dance piece by Scottish Ballet at Sadler’s Wells, the digital broadcast from Wyndham’s theatre of the much-garlanded “A View from the Bridge”, fine work from Marty Cruikshank in April di Angelis’s thought-provoking “After Electra” at the Tricycle Theatre, similarly from Ferdy Roberts (whose Macbeth featured on this blog a couple of entries back) and Louise Mai Newberry in “Lampedusa” at the Soho Theatre.

This last prompted discussion with my accompanying friend  – the writer Jo Hodgkin  – as to whether parallel monologues delivered by two separate characters who never make contact with each other and whose stories never coincide actually constitutes a play. Not that this matters, as the Guardian gave it a four-star review and it’s well worth seeing for the performances, and its timely exposure of the continuing stark horrors of the Mediterranean boat-refugee trade. Other topical horrors – those of the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks in 1915 – are highlighted by Neil McPherson’s “I Wish to Die Singing” at the Finborough – stressing that the Gallipoli commemorations on our TV screens this week mustn’t eclipse the other dark centenary from that benighted year. Anyway, links to this and other events are available below.

By the way, you’ll find a second link to the Finborough Theatre, as on June 10th and 11th that venue is hosting two staged readings of a play I’ve co-written with Martin Wimbush, “Miss Wilson’s Waterloo”. This marks yet another military anniversary, the bi-centenary of the culmination in Belgian fields of the Napoleonic wars. We’ve done a play about this before – as well as being a fine actor, fate has delivered Martin an uncanny physical resemblance to Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington – but this time we’re focussing on his rock-star love-life, with the colourful courtesan Harriette Wilson sharing the story, just one of our hero’s many, many amorous conquests. If you’re in London in early June, please come along to witness the fun.

                              Never mind Mick Jagger….

As I write the London Marathon is under way, the great national annual event which for me marks the proper start of Springtime, notwithstanding this morning’s grey clouds. There are thirty-seven thousand souls out there at this moment, pounding the streets of London town! And while we’re on sporting matters, hoarse and bibulous cheering will have swelled in the snug at the Prescott Arms yesterday as Hull City scored two splendid goals and gained three potentially vital Premier division survival points down here at Crystal Palace. All Brucie and the boys have got to do now is survive encounters over the next few weeks with Liverpool, Arsenal, Burnley, Spurs and Manchester United…

As they say in the glorious “W1A” – now mercifully back on our screens on BBC2 of a Thursday “Well – er, brilliant, yes – good luck with that…”

LINKS:

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE – http://www.scottishballet.co.uk/what-s-on/a-streetcar-named-desire-tour.html

MAN AND SUPERMAN LIVE BROADCAST: http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/49348-man-and-superman

MEASURE FOR MEASURE BARBICAN TRAILER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59-k2y-IUsQ

SOHO THEATRE LAMPEDUSA:
http://sohotheatre.com/whats-on/lampedusa/

AFTER ELCTRA:
http://www.tricycle.co.uk/current-programme-pages/theatre/theatre-programme-main/after-electra/

FINBOROUGH ARMENIA PLAY:
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2015/i-w
ish-to-die-singing.php

FINBOROUGH MISS WILSON’S WATERLOO:
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2015/miss-wilsons-waterloo.php

If you’d like to respond,  if you disagree with any of the above, or would like to add a comment or two, I’d love to hear from you – you can do so anonymously, if you like – and I’ll happily publish your views. Just click on the word “comments” in the little panel below, and follow the instructions.  

This blog comes to you courtesy of www.teachyourselfacting.com. If you need help with voice-training, presentation preparation, getting ready for an audition or access to classes and advice from some of the best trainers in the UK, just click on the link.

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If you’d like to respond,  if you disagree with any of the above, or would like to add a comment or two, I’d love to hear from you – you can do so anonymously, if you like – and I’ll happily publish your views. Just click on the word “comments” in the little panel below, and follow the instructions.  

This blog comes to you courtesy of www.teachyourselfacting.com. If you need help with voice-training, presentation preparation, getting ready for an audition or access to classes and advice from some of the best trainers in the UK, just click on the link.

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

My Chinese friends tell me I’m a sheep, but nonetheless I offer fraternal greetings to all goats at this, our very own New Year, as the written symbols for sheep, goats and rams are all the same.  More of that in moment – but may I just ask, did you know about the Troxy in Limehouse?










Built in 1933 this magnificent art deco hall served as a cinema, as a rehearsal space for Covent Garden Opera, and then, along with so many relics of the golden era of movies, it dwindled into a bingo hall before closing in 2005, and dereliction loomed. But then bingo! – to coin  a phrase – along came a firm called Ashburn, who turned it into a modern “events” venue, and restored its glorious mirrors, lights, stairways, and soon it will provide a home for one of the grandest of the Mighty Wurtlitzer cinema organs, rescued from the site of the now-demolished Elephant and Castle Trocadero – watch this space.

Long before its centre moved to Soho,  London’s old Chinese quarter – in the days of opium and laundries – was of course Limehouse.

A Big Event this week pulling the crowds to the Commercial Road was a special Gala Concert for the Chinese New Year of the Sheep, 2015. My friend Lin Yi from Peking University took me along to see her amazingly talented daughter Milly perform on the guzheng – often described as a form of zither, but it’s actually more like a sort of horizontal Welsh harp. It sounds terrific, and Milly played up a storm, accompanied on the piano by my former RADA colleague, the estimable Andrew Charity. Here they are doing their stuff onstage at the Troxy:

                            

There may be those who feel this blog makes rather too much of the east London suburban town of Walthamstow, which I count myself fortunate to inhabit, and to celebrate its curious ways and byways, and the creative urges of the locals, past and present. Here were the great Matchbox toymakers, here the first British-made motorcar appeared, here the first British powered aeroplane disturbed the peace of the marshlands, and here young William Morris’s arts and crafty instincts first stirred.

A famous local artist of today, Grayson Perry, has announced a move away from the borough because it’s getting too “gentrified”  – but with all due respect sir, if by “gentrified” you mean streets blocked with Porsche cars, shop-doors jammed by yummy mummies with buggies, wine bars echoing to the braying of city traders – then there’s still, thank God a very, very long way to go. I speak as one who moved here from Crouch End…The streets are being tidied up, the place generally feels cleaner, there’s more light, there are new shops and a new cinema, a lively pub theatre, a micro-brewery, a gin parlour, a neon workshop, two immaculate museums, but the “longest street market in Europe” still throngs with cheery merchants, many of whom would have felt at home in the world of the Burning Pestle.

The what? Those of you not currently in touch with events on the south bank of the River Thames may not be aware that the magical, candle-lit Jacobean Wanamaker Playhouse in Southwark has these last weeks hosted a revival of their celebrated production of Francis Beaumont’s comedy from 1607, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”, and oh, I so regret not having been to see it until its final week, as it’s now closed and thus it would be pointless to urge you to see it!  Part of its whacky storyline involves a journey through Waltham Forest and an adventure at the Bell Inn (pictured here in 1909, the same building standing today on the site, I’ll be bound, of the inn known to the good Frank Beaumont, protege and drinking pal of Mermaid tavern regular Ben Johnson.)

I want to take a moment here to praise the work of the director Adele Thomas – but 27 years old, and a director with the talent, vision and sheer gumption to realise that Beaumont, Shakespeare, Marston and all those guys wrote cracking scripts that can in 2015 send you out of the theatre enlightened, moved, and thoroughly entertained by actors in accurate period costume, with no self-conscious, silly references at all to today! You need skill in casting, a great sense of pace, a strong design and tech team, a good choreographer, MD etc, but above all the ability to let your actors show what they can do with the text as it appears on the page – not how you think it should be re-interpreted through your own half-cocked, condescending “concept”. I once heard the director Edward Hall say he could see no point in performing Shakespeare in anything other than modern dress, because the scripts being works of genius for all time they should always be performed in the idiom of each succeeding epoch. Poppycock, say I, and I call upon established and emerging theatre directors to take heed of Adele Thomas’s work, because she knows how to do it, if you don’t!

That said, I sat with a largely teenage audience at the Hammersmith Lyric this week, and witnessed an “Othello” set in a modern north-country pub complete with pool table,  and the audience stayed rapt and attentive throughout, cheering noisily and enthusiastically at the end of the show. The piece was mounted by the Frantic Assembly team, whose brilliance in creating movement-based theatre has been an exciting and refreshing element in London’s theatre these last few years. Abi Morgan’s “Lovesong” was one of my all-time favourite theatre experiences, and their work on the National’s “Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-time” makes a significant contribution to that production’s enormous and continuing commercial success. The opening ballet-like sequence of this “Othello” is theatrical magic, taking us into a world of edgy, dangerous emotions, shot through with elegant, lyrical beauty – entirely appropriate, of course,  for Shakespeare’s great tragedy. And the cast went on to deliver Shakespeare’s story in Shakespeare’s words, albeit heavily edited to fit the modern context. This I didn’t mind at all – I’d much prefer inconvenient lines to be cut than left in to beg irritating  questions. This pub-set version ran much more credibly, for instance, than the recent National Theatre production, which retained whole chunks of text utterly at odds with its apparent setting in a twentieth century British army base. 

But I have to record I left this Hammersmith show feeling just a bit sad – sad, because I knew that the young audience, notwithstanding their obvious enjoyment of the energy and verve with which the story had been told, had nonetheless been short-changed. 

Short-changed, because alas, several of the actors playing leading parts simply didn’t have the vocal equipment to give the all-important language its full value. The story was indeed delivered efficiently, elegantly and neatly, but without any of the texture, nuance and depth of poetry Shakespeare’s writing makes available for the human voice. Imagine a Bach key-board sonata played by someone who can pick out the notes, but lacks the training and skills to deliver the feelings behind them, to give us not just the notes but the music. If we’re to offer young audiences the joys of our classic theatre heritage, then please let’s make sure our young actors are equipped to match the demands the plays make on them! 

The frustrating thing about the Hammersmith “Othello” is that several cast members are indeed up to it – notably Steven Miller as Iago and Barry Aird as Brabantio/Ludovico, whose work shows there are still theatre schools at Clifton in Bristol and Gower St in London whose graduates can do the job. But their expertise underlined just how much richer an experience the young audience could have taken home, had the whole ensemble been of a comparable vocal standard. 

However, having had my moan, I still recommend this show – Scott Graham’s Frantic Assembly may have given us an incomplete tragedy, but it’s still a rare and dynamic, exciting event.

Those of you who read my pre-Christmas post may have noted the query as to the Hugh Whitemore/Derek Jacobi version of the Alan Turing story, an earlier alternative to “The Imitation Game”. I am indebted to the lads at the Prescott Arms who have used our “comment” facility (see below) to point out that there was indeed a film made of it, and now I find you can watch on Youtube – see the link at the end of this entry.

Now, before Christmas 2014 dwindles forever into the mist, a couple of panto reflections. I went to the two professional pantomimes nearest my home – “Mother Goose” at the Hackney Empire, and “Jack and the Beanstalk” at the Park Theatre, Finsbury Park. The Empire show was jolly,  robust fare, observing lots of the traditions, including bits of script in merry, clunky verse and a wondrously bold and brassy dame from Clive Rowe. My moan here is about the SOUND. This is a superb Frank Matcham-designed Victorian music hall, equipped to resonate to the sound of live music made by un-amplified instruments and voices. In a modern show with electric keyboards, guitars and the like I guess the sound has to be balanced by microphones, but in Clive Rowe and Sharon D. Clarke, Susie McKenna’s production boasted two of the most powerful voices in London.The microphones at their throats – and all the other microphones on the band and the chorus – were set at a ridiculous, unnecessary, wildy high level. The Empire had spent a chunk of their substantial budget on hiring Autograph, one of the world’s leading theatre sound companies, but for my money (i.e, twenty-five quid including an ancient person’s discount) the evening was spoiled by aching ears, numb from being relentlessly thumped throughout the entire show. It was sound-design geared to Wembley Stadium, not a playhouse.

No such problems were found at London’s neatest new playhouse, the Park Theatre. This sits almost on top of Finsbury Park station, and is a smashing venue, with two auditoria, and a couple of welcoming bars. But make sure you buy your ticket online and print it out – they use a cost-cutting system, now also emerging in cinemas – whereby the bar doubles as box-office, creating inevitable queues of irritated patrons. 

                                             

I said there were no sound problems at the Park, but alas, it pains me greatly to report that the “Jack and the Beanstalk” show was, however, dire. I saw it second house on the Saturday after Christmas, which should have been packed at a theatre this accessible, and sat in a pretty-well deserted balcony. I went because I’d read a couple of good reviews, one praising the director for “shaking off the shackles of traditional pantomime”. Presumably these are the same shackles that tied down Adele Thomas when she created an entirely traditional show and packed a theatre for weeks down in by the river?

“Jack and the Beanstalk” is one of the great universal stories, and it does children – many of whom presumably making their first live theatre visit – no favours at all to show how clever you can be by losing the storyline in an over-elaborate, badly written, rambling piece of undergraduate whimsy, and wasting a talented cast in half-baked, ineptly directed routines. Any experienced theatre director will tell you that providing local patrons with a lively, dependable panto each year can be your banker for taking a few risks with adventurous new productions in subsequent months – look no further than Hackney. Those empty seats at Finsbury Park told a sad, worrying tale of missed opportunity.

Oh dear I do so hate being a grump – of course we have to innovate and break new ground – all art, all culture must, I grew up with the theatre of Peter Brook, Max Stafford Clark, Sarah Kane and the like – but as we move on let’s make sure we take our treasures with us. Things like thorough training, like writing and directing that celebrates and respects the good stuff that’s gone before. Adele T put it splendidly in a tweet: “The olden days were pleasingly rich with invention and playfulness” As the quote at the top of this post implies – we can never have too much of either!

If you’d like to respond,  if you disagree with any of the above, or would like to add a comment or two, I’d love to hear from you – you can do so anonymously, if you like – and I’ll happily publish your views. Just click on the word “comments” in the little panel below, and follow the instructions.  

This blog comes to you courtesy of www.teachyourselfacting.com. If you need help with voice-training, presentation preparation, getting ready for an audition or access to classes and advice from some of the best trainers in the UK, just click on the link.

Sources 

Cartoon: http://londonliving.at/east-village-focus-on-walthamstow/

Production photo source: http://flickrhivemind.net/Tags/fulham,west/Recent

Park theatre photo: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/10033603/Jez-Bond-Does-London-need-another-theatre.html

Breaking the Code (Alan Turing film): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23yie-779k
       

As regular readers know, I love Americans, I work with American colleagues and lovely American students, it seems this blog has lots of American readers – but please, guys, may we have our language back?! Only this morning I heard an English person, a Londoner, call in to a radio phone-in show and wish the presenter “Happy Holidays” – hello, is it summer time, time for buckets and spades and off to the seaside? It’s Christmas, and we on our side of the Pond wish each other a “Happy Christmas” for Christ’s sake! (This last not an expression I use a lot, but one should never miss a chance to be appropriate.) This week’s fit of linguistic xenophobia has been brought on by going to see the film “The Imitation Game”, starring the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch.

Now we northern Europeans shake out our winter coats and rummage in the drawer for the thermal socks, now we switch on the heaters and prepare to be ripped off yet again by the shameless cartel of crooks who run our energy companies. November arrives, the clocks go back, we buy our poppies, and with a sinking feeling we watch some benighted celebrity switch on the Christmas lights in Oxford Street a full SIX weeks early. And yet, and yet – it’s a great time of the year – there are fireworks, decent drama comes back on the TV, Hull City cling on muddily in the premiership, and in an upper room of a pub in north-east London, a group of actors-in-training learn to apply their craft…

Here are Rebecca and Chris running voice and movement sessions in the first TYA London Acting Essentials workshop course, at the Rose and Crown Theatre. 



We deliberately restricted the number of participants to eight – and they all seemed to agree with the message Victoria Hamblen put out on Twitter on the way home from the final class.

For my money a better value scream is to be had at the Fortune rather than the Arts. “The Woman in Black” is a literate, beautifully crafted piece first produced at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre (see this blog’s last entry) in 1987. It’s been running in London since 1989, and has now toured eleven times. I’ve seen it  twice, in London with Frank Barrie as Arthur and more recently on tour at Guildford, with Scarborough veteran Graeme Eton in the same part, and boy does it work! The soft, swift and sudden arrival of the silent ghost is wonderfully chilling – but then if you haven’t seen it, don’t let me spoil it for you…

Excellent, literate work was also to be found at the Jermyn Street Theatre in a very early Terence Rattigan play “First Episode”. Co-written with a friend when Rattigan was still an undergrad, there’s enough skill, enough obvious emerging talent in this piece fully to justify artistic director Anthony Biggs’s policy of unearthing lost and/or neglected significant plays. The Jermyn St venue is a cracking little theatre, producing unusual, well-crafted work funded by its box-office and by fund-raising amongst supporters. 

We talk a lot about publicly-subsidised theatre in our country, but several significant London producing houses are funded, like the Jermyn St, on a model prevalent in the U.S., by ticket-sale revenue boosted by self-generated donor support – look no further than the Old Vic, or indeed Shakespeare’s Globe.

Another brave venue surviving under its own steam is the St James’s Theatre, one of my favourite places –  notwithstanding the difficulty in finding it, picking your way through the massive construction sites which currently plague the whole Victoria district. I expected to hate Anya Reis’s version of Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya”, re-located to the UK in modern times, with references to the Internet etc – but it was bright, refreshing and totally engaging. Especially fine was Amanda Hale’s Sonya – I have fond memories of directing Amanda as one half of a delightful elderly couple in an Ayckbourn comedy at RADA, alongside a certain T. Hiddleston…

Here she is with the brilliant John Hanna. But I can’t leave this without a gentle hint to the director – if you’re going to set a show in rural Britain, please make sure members of the same household have a consistent accent…                                                                                                  

Photo: Simon Annand 

One hundred years on from the Great War, and last Monday I was asked to create a presentation for and with New York University students in London, drawing on British poems and texts from 1914 to 18 researched by Philip Drummond. We included some of the famous songs, none of which the students knew at all – but they learned them from Youtube clips over a weekend, and turned up at rehearsal on Monday morning with every note learned, complete with harmonies! Without wishing to suggest that English actors are in any way lazy – perish the thought – but American student actors really get stuck into the work. At least the Tisch students did, and produced fine, sensitive work. We rehearsed a scene from “Journey’s End”, at first in American accents but it sounded just too weird – imagine “Streetcar”  in Etonian English – so on the night the boys delivered the lines in good, carefully-clipped English tones, and Sherriff’s lines made the powerful impact common to all the work by that astonishing generation of writers.

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If you’d like to respond,  if you disagree with any of the above, or would like to add a comment or two, I’d love to hear from you – you can do so anonymously, if you like – and I’ll happily publish your views. Just click on the word “comments” in the little panel below, and follow the instructions.