Ellis Jones

Dom is clearly well on his way to embodying Yorkshire prosperity, cunningly making available from his York city base his considerable range of acting and directing skills to the world-wide business community as a communications trainer. If you’re in business, and your team’s presentation skills need a tweak, there’s a link below. Well, two links, just to be generous.

And so back to London’s theatre-land, and a flurry of contrasting shows, from Greek tragedy through Shakespearian history to a whacky piece about the Internet. I’d already seen the always-impressive Helen McCrory give “Medea” at the National, and a chance to catch another significant actor, Kristin Scott-Thomas playing “Electra” at the Old Vic had to be grasped, and grasp it I did, along with a troupe of bright students from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

The Old Vic is still in “in-the-round” configuration, which works really well, and there’s a fine treatment of the Sophocles script by Frank McGuinness. Ian Rickson gives it a spare, uncluttered production, better for my money than the Euripides piece at the National. That’s well worth seeing for McCrory’s performance, but it’s yet another show in which the director seems to demand attention to clever production ideas rather than simply letting her powerful star actor tell her story. Nothing in the Vic production impedes our getting the full impact of Ms Scott Thomas’s astounding, quirky, penetrating, unsettling talent.

(Next up for tragic heroine addicts, come the spring: Juliette Binoche as “Antigone” at the Barbican.)

Very promising direction was on display at an exciting new “fringe” venue, the Proud Archivist, by the side of the Regent’s Canal in Haggerston. Where? Well it’s sort of Hackney, on the welcome new Overground Line, two stops down from Highbury and Islington. 

It’s a restaurant/bar/gallery/theatre, and hosted a sharp, scaled-down “Henry V” by the up-and-coming “Cyphers” company. It’s a classic “poor theatre” show with almost no set and minimal costumes, justified by skilled acting (especially a cracking Henry from Chris Anderton) and an exuberant, highly intelligent delivery of the text, totally free from 
pretension. 

I may as well state here and now that I have family connections with them, but this assessment isn’t just mine – there’s a link to a completely independent review at the end of this post.  Look out for this lot – they’re trying to find funding to mount a tour of this show – I suspect we will be hearing quite a lot more of them.

The Internet is something which has come to some of us rather late in life, and “Teh Internet is Serious Business” (first word deliberately mis-spelled) at the Royal Court had my friend Lois so bewildered by the interval she had a head-ache and went home.

There’s lots of inspired clowning by actors in funny costumes playing something called “memes”, and some rather good dancing, all meant to indicate the anarchy of cyberspace, but I found it self-defeating. Call me old-fashioned – and you do, I know you do – but if you’re going to do a play, please  start by giving us some characters and some sort of a story we can follow. It doesn’t have to be literal – “Ballyturk” at the National is poetic rather than linear – but once again we were expected to applaud directorial verve and invention above and beyond anything else, and I don’t think that’s what good directing is about. End of this week’s soap-box feature.

The eleventh of the eleventh is almost upon us. I passed by the Tower of London on a bus, and saw the thousands of ceramic poppies on the grass where the moat once was. I was disappointed when the children across the aisle (in the picture) clearly had no idea what they were all about, and the parent with them made no effort to explain. Perhaps he didn’t know either…sad, sad thought. My mother was nine years old in 1914 and could remember the teenage boys going off proudly to be slaughtered. I took her to see Richard Attenborough’s film of “Oh What A Lovely War” when I was student, and the final relentless montage of the thousands upon thousands of white crosses marking the soldiers’ graves left her weeping uncontrollably for two entire days.

A few weeks after that war was declared, the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea. Despite his parents being Welsh-speakers, he wrote in English. In those days in south Wales if your family had middle-class aspirations you just didn’t speak Welsh, as that immediately identified you as working class. My gran, I’m told, wouldn’t allow it to be spoken in her house at all. But I guess there are reasons to be grateful, as otherwise “Under Milk Wood” might only have happened on the BBC Welsh service, and thousands of English-speakers across the world might have been denied the thrill of poems like “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”. He wrote that last masterpiece, by the way, when he was still a teenager. Dylan’s one hundredth birthday would have been on Monday next, and there’s a festival in Fitzrovia, very suitably since his enthusiastic drinking did a lot for the local economy back in the 40s and 50s, at least in the Bloomsbury pubs!

Part of the celebrations involves a Welsh shepherd’s hut (complete with sheep) in the garden of Fitzroy Square, at which a succession of actors deliver golden extracts from his amazing oeuvre. Modesty forbids self-advertising, but if you’re in the area on Saturday afternoon, please come and say Hello…

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.  

And so to Heyford, on the Oxford canal, a return to my pal Robin’s boat for a gentle cruise in the fine autumn sunshine, with tea amongst the drift of just-turning leaves, a respite from a hectic couple of weeks. September is when wheels start turning again, and work demands attention.

These last few weeks have seen the arrival of new students from America, the start of a new season of theatre visits, a fresh spate of note-taking and seminars. It’s been a time of explaining just what the British royal family is, what they’re for, and why we still write plays about them, four centuries and more after Will Shakespeare chronicled the blood-soaked politics of the Plantagenets. And then explaining why most of us felt a huge wave of relief to discover that Elizabeth Windsor was not, as of last Friday morning, about to become Elizabeth the First of Scotland.

At Wyndham’s Theatre we saw a cracking cast led by Tim Pigott-Smith in Rupert Goold’s expert production of “King Charles the Third”, a witty exploration of a fantasy scenario in which Charles, on becoming king, promptly refuses to sign off an act of parliament with which he disagrees. It’s a neat idea, cleverly written in quasi-Shakespearian blank verse by Mike Bartlett. Originally staged at the Almeida, with wickedly funny echoes of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”, the supernatural element is introduced via a wispy ghost of Princess Diana.
                                     

The cast, while none of them looks especially like the familiar characters they portray, all grasp the essential elements and attitudes, and are utterly convincing – for instance a marvellously pragmatic and elegant performance by Lydia Wilson as Kate Middleton, bringing middle-class common sense to a family condemned by its own creaky history to a world of luxurious, confusing impotence.

A set of fine supporting performances comes from Nyasha Hatendi, one of which  – as Chief of the Armed Forces – echoed for me memories of his commanding officer in “Journey’s End” at RADA, one of the shows I directed and one full of happy memories, which were stirred again this week at the Trafalgar Studios, where another former member of the cast, Philip Cumbus, pitches a strong, thoughtful Tudor Earl of Richmond against Martin Freeman’s “Richard the Third”.

Following the dramatic mayhem of this tale of the Last of the Plantagenets, yet more explanations of the ways of British royalty have been required, but also of the ways of British theatre directors.The joy of “King Charles the First” was that the show told its story seemingly effortlessly, an example, for my money, of excellent directing – in other words, the sort of directing you don’t really notice. The worrying thing about the Trafalgar Studios show is that it has “Director with a Concept” written all over it. The programme has several articles giving detailed explanations as to why Jamie Lloyd chose to re-set the play’s late medieval time-frame to the 1970s. Could a need for lengthy written explanations indicate how secure the “concept” is – or perhaps isn’t?

Back in the 1980s, the English Shakespeare Company toured an entire “Wars of the Roses” cycle directed by Mike Bogdanov, which threw up a set of problems akin to those I experienced with this show i.e., if you’re going to stage a Shakespearian civil war in modern Britain, what do you do about the references in the script to medieval weaponry, and indeed transport? You can of course cut them, but when you’ve got a line as famous as “My kingdom for a horse!” what are you going to do with it in a battlefield bristling with automatic weapons a few miles off the M1 in Leicestershire? When the crippled, wicked king responded to Richmond pointing a gun at him by yelling for a horse, it seemed to me it would have made equal sense if he’d called out “Taxi!”

That said, the production rattles along with lots of energy, pace and excitement, and most of the young people in the audience who’d come to see Mr Freeman – and incidentally caught a great play by a great writer – seemed to enjoy the experience no end, and you can’t argue with that.

What I will argue with is the current rash of Shakespearian shows involving naff dancing! Mercifully there wasn’t any in the “Richard the Third’ but almost every show nowadays at the Globe, and indeed at the RSC, includes episodes of actors jigging. Usually it happens at the end, but sometimes at the beginning and even sometimes at the interval as well. Now, if you’re doing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the play requires the mechanicals to perform something called a “bergomask” and it’s up to the director or choreographer to produce something appropriate and funny. But what on earth is the spectacle of British actors hopping about supposed to add, for instance, to “Anthony and Cleopatra”? And if you’ve given the audience a lot of fun with the mad plot-complexities of “A Comedy of Errors” why risk spoiling it by prancing about at the curtain-call, demanding everyone clap along in rhythm to your unconvincing capers?
                                         

I was at a lovely party last night where three smashing singers in a sparkling Malcolm McKee cabaret featured a number called “Don’t You Hate It When They Make You Sing Along?” Exactly. Listen, directors: most British “classical” actors aren’t very good at, and hate, dancing, and getting the audience to clap along doesn’t make them any better at it. These guys speak poetry superbly, can create stunning characters, they’ve mostly attended period dance classes at RADA or elsewhere, but please, spare us. 


If I pay to watch dance, I expect the performers to be doing things I couldn’t possibly do, stuff I can marvel at and be excited by. When did you last see a prima ballerina recite a sonnet at a curtain-call?

Mind you, the Shakespeare’s Globe “Anthony and Cleopatra”, which I caught in a rare “outside in” performance at the candle-lit Wanamaker Playhouse, was wonderful, with our Eve Best being – as usual – brilliant as Cleopatra, Clive Wood an ideally rugged Anthony, Phil Daniels a sharp and sinewy Enobarbus, with lovely work from the stunning Sirine Saba as Charmian. 

The Wanamaker may not be the most comfortable theatre to sit in, but boy is it atmospheric. And it brings a sharp focus to plays – like this one – written in the Jacobean period, probably performed in just such a wooden playhouse, lit like this by a multitude of candles.

Outside on the Globe’s main stage “The Comedy of Errors” has been very cunningly cast, with the two masters and two servants looking uncannily alike, feeding the comic confusion wonderfully. The play resonates down the ages – it was after all, based on a piece by Plautus written about 200 BC – and is given a suitably rousing production by Blanche MacIntyre. Except, except…would not actors in Roman and indeed Elizabethan productions have had really accomplished circus skills, and when they danced their jig at the end – assuming they did dance a jig – would they not have been really skilled dancers…? I rest my case.

On Thursday to Marylebone station, en route to Stratford on Avon and the bookshop at the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, for a book-launch at which I am expecting to meet up with two ex-students.   Waiting for the electronic board to tell me my train’s platform I glance up and find myself beneath a poster of both of them – that is to say Ed Bennett and Michelle Terry – in glamorous Edwardian mode for the RSC double of “Love’s Labours Lost and “Love’s Labours Won” (aka “Much Ado About Nothing”). The first opens this week – good luck chaps. 

The book being launched, by the way, is “Stratford upon Avon The Biography” by the amazing Nicholas Fogg, and is a snip at around 15 quid for lots of fascinating, illustrated history and insight.  Click on the link below to reserve yourself a copy.

Meanwhile back in ever-astounding Walthamstow my friend Robinson and I found ourselves this afternoon wandering into an extraordinary emporium called “God’s Own Junkyard”. You wanna buy neon?

Look no further. There are neon signs and devices of every description, many from movie sets, and many surely destined to be hired or bought by movie designers in the future. It’s a glowing, shimmering Aladdin’s Cave in an unlikely, unglamorous corner of E17. Come visit.



                                      

Links:
STRATFORD upon AVON THE BIOGRAPHY 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stratford-Upon-Biography-Eyewitness-Accounts/dp/1445637871

GOD’S OWN JUNKYARD:

http://godsownjunkyard.co.uk

FOOT-NOTE (literally) In discussion with fellow sufferers, a new movement to call a halt to directors imposing excruciating jig-dancing on British actors and audiences has been instigated, with the witty acronym of SAND – Shakespearians Against Naff Dancing. (The title inspired by those great sand-dancers Wilson Keppel and Betty, who had they still been alive, could have made an entirely appropriate contribution to “Anthony and Cleopatra”. You can see what we mean by clicking on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkhJpr2zR8s) 

If you would like to express support for SAND, please write in.  

p.s.  TYA has just announced a new set of “live” acting classes in London for October/November. Click on: www.teachyourselfacting.com 


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.  

“I passionately believe in heroes….” One of Richard Attenborough’s sayings, which has often been quoted these last few days as the worlds of film, television and theatre take in the news that he has now left us.

Well, for we who worked at, and for the many actors, writers, technicians and directors who trained at, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art during the last three decades of the 20th century, there is only one modern candidate for the tile of “hero”.

RADA was set up by another great actor-director, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, in the early years of the last century. Dick Attenborough won a Leverhulme scholarship for a place there as a student as the Second World War spread around the globe.

In 1941 the Luftwaffe dropped a land-mine in Malet St, destroying the academy’s Vanbrugh Theatre, and damaging the smaller second auditorium in the basement, the Little Theatre. Dick was one of a bunch of student volunteers who worked for several days and nights trying at least to restore the smaller theatre. They slept in sleeping bags on the Gower St foyer floor, and one morning Dick awoke as a pair of lanky legs in plus-four trousers passed by his head. 

The legs went up the foyer stairs, and a white beard appeared over the mezzanine balustrade above. “It’s all right, children” said a voice with a slight Irish lilt “The theatre is going to open”. The legs, beard and voice all belonged to the great George Bernard Shaw, a member of the RADA Council, who had come to ensure sufficient funds were available for students to continue with their training and performing. 

Shaw was the greatest single financial supporter of the academy in its early days, and when he died he left RADA a third share in the royalties from his work. Once his play “Pygmalion” became the basis for the enormously successful musical “My Fair Lady” the academy was able to breathe, in financial terms, somewhat more easily than other less fortunate schools. When Richard Attenborough became Chair of the Council in 1972,  he suggested re-naming the basement auditorium, and thus it became (and remains to this day) the GBS Theatre.

By the time I joined RADA as head of the acting course in 1993, the cash-flow from the Shaw royalties had slowed down considerably. The academy was still technically a private school, struggling to cope with creeping financial problems in a set of crumbling, dusty buildings.  For some years precious little spare cash had been available, and often in times of financial crisis Richard would, being the magician he was, suddenly produce a rabbit out of the hat – in other words a donation from one of his contacts, or simply from his own pocket.  

Then suddenly in 1994 a large potential rabbit appeared in the shape of the new National Lottery, intended to support the UK’s sporting and artistic activities. Richard (by now Lord) Attenborough quickly made sure RADA was very near the front of the queue, and the rest of the Council, the Principal Nick Barter, and we the management team were marshalled into creating a detailed bid for money to refurbish and re-equip the academy’s premises. 

After some nail-biting delays, the bid succeeded, and an Arts Council grant was awarded amounting to £22.7 million. However the total cost of the project was going to be some £32 million, the balance to be achieved by “Partnership Funding”, a challenge which Richard faced without blinking. The steel and tenacity he showed in raising backing for unlikely-sounding movie blockbusters like “Ghandi” and “Cry Freedom” came into play at Gower St.

While many others have worked hard and selflessly over the years to support and sustain RADA as a world-class school, without doubt the existence of the fine buildings the academy inhabits today (and indeed the financial structure supporting the work they house) is almost entirely due to Lord A’s single-minded, fiercely focussed energy. And also, of course his ability to put to good use an unsurpassed address-book. When Her Majesty the Queen eventually came to open the new buildings one of my tasks as Vice-Principal (I’d been promoted to help Nick Barter with the multiple challenges of teaching, fund-raising and rebuilding) was to help look after the members of our Chairman’s fund-raising committee at the opening ceremony. This group consisted of some of the wealthiest, most influential people in Europe. A colleague turned to me and murmured “If a bomb goes off in this room, the insurance industry will collapse!”

There are many tales of those extraordinary years, perhaps one day to be told in another forum. Reams could be written of his sheer management skills – nobody could work a room, or run a meeting, like Lord A. Whether you were a student or a member of staff, when you found yourself in conversation with him you found yourself being really listened to. A great gift, but a skill that sprang from a deep determination to help everyone to do their best, to fulfil their potential to make the world a better place. 

There’s lots more to be said – if you missed the BBC1 television tribute to him last night, seek it out on iPlayer for a fuller picture of just how big his impact has been across the world.  But today this is just to record how grateful those of us who were involved in his work for RADA are, and will forever be, for Richard’s huge generosity, his astounding energy, and his great, kind heart.

God bless, Dick.  If ever anyone defined the phrase “The Great and the Good” it was you.  

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

I have a sinking feeling. Is summer slipping away? Last week there was heat in the air, now there’s a chill, and grey clouds scud across the white-flecked reservoir…..

Come on Jones, you’re in London!!! Be grateful for the warmth we’ve had – more this summer than in many another, and in any case Radio Four said yesterday that in a few years London’s climate will be comparable to Istanbul, so just be patient. Those Waterside apple and plum trees will give way to prickly pear and swaying date-palms, the marshes will become acres of scorching sand, camels will graze….

Meanwhile there’s been a Supermoon! 


On Sunday last for reasons optical and astronomical, the moon, as it climbed above the trees seemed HUGE. I’ve yet to replace the digital SLR camera nicked by the thieving swine who broke into my house last February, so I did the best I could with my little Fuji bridge camera, prowling the silvery marshlands between my house and the River Lea. It’s always a joy to give an outing to an under-used word, so all those affected by the wandering moon should note that on September 9th there is another perigee…

Any chill in the air was eased for me this week by a burst of Gallic passion over at the Park Theatre, where a talented and bold cast deliver Nona Shepphard’s intense, trim version of Zola’s Therese Raquin, with music by Craig Adams.

Vibrant performances from Radagrads Tara Hugo, Jeremy Legat and Gary Tushaw, with stirring work from Julie Atherton and Greg Barnett add up to an enlivening night of melody and lust, seconds away from Finsbury Park tube. Tickets are very reasonably priced, so hurry along you can’t go wrong – the run finishes on the 24th.

The perceived natural habitat for Gower St grads is the classical stage – but they can strut their musical stuff with the very best. For example both the 2006 and 2013 West End runs of Dirty Dancing respectively starred Georgina Rich and Jill Winternitz as “Baby” – both Radagrads –  and indeed Jill is currently starring in “Once” at the Phoenix. Like Tara Hugo, Jill is one of those discerning American talents who chose to train with us – I take a quiet pride in having “discovered” Jill at an audition in New York.

Gary Tushaw (a former Marius in Les Miserables) moves next month from Finsbury Park up the Archway Rd to sing and act in an intriguing piece at the Jackson’s Lane Theatre, called The Liberation of Colette Simple, based on an early Tennessee Williams drama, due to open on September 16th.

And of course, as already mentioned in an earlier post Gemma Arterton shifts Sally Hawkins’s film role onto the stage in the musical version of Made in Dagenham at the Adelphi, opening on October 9th with Rupert Goold directing. 

There’s lots of pre-publicity for this, so it’s clearly carrying quite a lot of cash investment. Gemma commented rather endearingly in an interview in the Independent that she didn’t see how the show could sell out as she’s “not that famous”. Well…when going public over a new boy-friend spawns a headline in the Daily Mail, when there’s an entire website (see below) devoted to gleaning every scrap of news remotely connected with you – and given that you’re bursting with talent – I suspect the punters investing in the Adelphi show could be seen as being onto a fairly safe bet.

I found myself musing about another, earlier show based on a real-life strike by women workers, its book written by Bill Owen before he found fame in The Last of the Summer Wine. Inspired by the 1888 strike at the Bryant and May match factory – which still exists, you pass it on the way south to the Blackwall Tunnel – the show was called The Match Girls. 
                                                   Gerard Healy and Vivienne Martin
                                                                         The Match Girls by Bill Owen and Tony Russell

I was on the stage crew for its West End run back in the 60s, which was directed by the  amazing Gillian Lynne, and I have rich memories,  not entirely unconnected with eventually marrying one of the cast.  The Match Girls has a great story, some strong characters and good songs – you can hear some of the music on the link below.

And while we’re on the West End – regular readers will recall my recent rant at the Ambassador Theatre Group’s insatiable, despicable greed. Now the distinguished theatre producer David Johnson has given ATG a public roasting for having the nerve to request free tickets for his Fascinating Aida show in Edinburgh. Here’s an extract from his response to their request:

If I had my way you would be invoiced for just breathing Edinburgh air and wandering around this fabulous city and its astonishing festival. A festival that is the absolute antithesis of ATG’s current easyjet/ryanair mentality. 

Quite so, sir. Good luck with Charm Offensive.

And before we close this week, a hint to all beer-lovers who live in, or who may stray to, north-east London. Christopher Lane, the TYA movement specialist, is also an innovative director who this week directed me to an exciting local enterprise, the Wild Card Brewery. It’s in a yard just minutes from the heart of picture-post-card-pretty Walthamstow Village, and opens its doors as a pub on Fridays Saturdays and Sundays. Click on the name for the link and directions.

Other links 

The Park Theatre: 
http://parktheatre.co.uk/whats-on/therese-raquin

Jacksons’s lane Theatre:
http://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/whats-on/event/2014/the-liberation-of-colette-simple/

Jill Winternitz:
http://www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/news/backstage-pass/article/item227110/q-a-jill-winternitz/

Gemma Arterton:
http://www.gemma-arterton.net

Fascinating Aida’s Charm Offensive:
http://www.fascinatingaida.co.uk/files/charm-offensive-programme.pdf

The Match Girls:
http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-match-girls-original-cast-recording-mw0000231981

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

As I watched the First Word War ceremony on television last Monday night, gradually an image formed of twenty million ghosts watching with me (for that was roughly the number whose lives were stopped in the 1914 war) and of those same ghosts staring dumbly at the carnage in Gaza, in Syria and Iraq, and in the Ukraine.

The answer of course is make of it what you will – the horrors of war never go away, and never will. We who are so very fortunate at present not to dwell in a firing-line can only strive to make our politicians employ care and sense on our behalf, and contribute in whatever way we can to easing the lot of the victims.

Pondering these sober thoughts as London’s theatres pack with thousands of tourists, and my fellow creatives swarm to the great arts festivals (while my daughter and pals invade the soggy music festivals) I’ve chosen to spend these warm damp weeks quietly enjoying southern England. The sun and rain are swelling the fruits on the trees at Waterside  – so never mind creating great works for the theatre, never mind teaching and nurturing the next generation of thespian talent, a priority this autumn will clearly be the steaming jam-pan…

A joyous present from my sister at my last birthday was membership of the National Trust, so I was delighted by the news today that the Trust has just bought one of those great, haunting sites from the unwritten past, the ancient fortified hill of Hambledon in Dorset, first settled (probably) by our forbears back in the New Stone Age, some five thousand years ago.

A trip westward beckons, but meanwhile the Trust offers plums to be picked nearer home. I’ve only ticked off a few of the London venues so far, so watch this space. Over at Hampstead there’s a fine eighteenth-century villa, reached via a handsome tree-lined driveway, giving a hint of the days when Hampstead, Highgate and Muswell were countryside hills overlooking the smokey spread of distant London.

Fenton House is a few minutes’ (albeit quite steep) walk from the tube station, and is well worth the trip. The house gives a great sense of eighteenth century living, is rich with cabinets of amazing porcelain, and walls decked with a stunning collection of pictures, many willed to the house by the late actor Peter Barkworth, who lived in Flask Walk, just over the way. I knew Peter quite well in his later years – over several decades he divided his time between acting in plays films and television dramas, and teaching at RADA. (He starred for many years in the record-breaking West End run of “Roar Like a Dove”, and would spend non-matinee days giving classes at Gower St.) 

By the time I joined the Academy as Head of Acting Peter had long since retired, and was a revered member of the RADA Council. At tea-break in my first Council meeting Peter cornered me to share his opinion that the course involved “too much Alexander technique, and nobody knows how to stand!” Well, we listened, we kept the Alexander technique, but we tweaked, we shifted emphasis here and there  – I think you’ll find the likes of Maxine Peak,  Eve Best, Matthew MacFadyen, Tom Hiddleston and the rest of the amazing actors who came through the school in the next few years – all, at the very least, stand rather splendidly… 

Hilary Mantel’s wondrous Elizabethan chronicles of “Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies” have featured before in this blog, and in recent weeks I’ve been happily re-reading them. A cheering surprise came when I went to visit another NT London property, Sutton House in Hackney.

This Elizabethan town-house – still recognisably basically Tudor, despite later alterations – is mis-named. For years it was thought to have been the home of the founder of Charterhouse School, Thomas Sutton, but research showed Sutton lived not there but nearby, and that this house was in fact built by Rafe (or Ralph) Sadler, protege of Thomas Cromwell, Ms Mantel’s complex central character, who features often in the second book. Here is the kitchen where Cromwell almost certainly tasted Rafe’s cooks’ baking, here is the courtyard where he took the air, and the great chamber where King Henry’s troubled and troublesome love-life would be discussed.

As a neighbour of the UK’s Museum Of the year 2013, i.e. the William Morris Gallery, I am now committed to exploring the known haunts of the great Victorian artist/designer/socialist/businessman, and so with three chums went off last week to the Red House at Bexleyheath.


Morris was blessed with family money, and had the resources at the age of 25 to create – with his contemporary architect pal Philip Webb – a bespoke home for himself and his lovely new wife Jane, which would double as a base for his other creative buddies as they developed their arts and crafts, pre-Raphaelite projects. The day we went the sun shone fiercely, butterflies fluttered, we supped on cream teas amongst the hollyhocks in the garden, and reflected on what mix of heady ideals and earthy passions those privileged  young Victorians brought to this quiet corner of Kent all those years ago. It’s a smashing place to visit – there are at least two more WM sites to be ticked off, in Hammersmith and Oxfordshire. Reports will be filed.

  

William Morris I’m sure would have had a soft spot for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Confined to my bed this week by a temporary minor disorder, I’ve caught up on quite a lot of TV history, including Melvyn Bragg’s documentary on John Ball, the preacher-poet and intellectual driver of the revolution whose Kentish supporters would quite likely have passed by the site of the Red House on their way to challenging King Richard’s nobles in London. How concepts of status change, I remarked to my pal Robinson – a RADA graduate and former TV star who at the time was sprawled on my bathroom floor, having obligingly volunteered to replace the loo-seat – what would Messrs Ball and Tyler have made of their story being expounded for an audience of millions by a wealthy, socialist Peer of the Realm…..? 

Theatre Festival Corner: for those of you who are feeling starved of theatre and have headed off to the festivals, in the links section below please check out the shows we’d love you to go and see, and to send us your comments.

EDINBURGH, both at the Pleasance Theatre:

“Connected – the Musical” by Craig Christie
https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/connected-musical#overview 

“Civil Rogues” by Tim Norton
https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/civil-rogues#overview

AVIGNON

The Avignon Festival has just ended, but we heard great things about “The Diary of a Madman” and we understand there is now talk of it transferring to Paris – so readers by the Seine please note. You can catch a taster of it at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95IRyvckbOE

Other links:

Hambledon Hill: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-28674113

Fenton House: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/fenton-house/

Sutton House: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sutton-house/

The Red House: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/red-house/

William Morris gallery: http://www.wmgallery.org.uk

Essential cast members:

RAFE SADLER: http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/sutton-house-home-of-ralph-sadler-late-of-wolf-hall/

JOHN BALL:
http://www.radiotimes.com/episode/czr8zm/melvyn-braggs-radical-lives–series-1—1-now-is-the-time—john-ball

  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.  

    

At a time when each day the world seems to hold ever more horror, I tend to close my eyes during the BBC news, and open them just for the weather forecast. Thomas Shafernaker and his merry band have been so determined this week that thousands of Apocalyptic Storms would be shaking our sceptered isle to its roots, that it’s a bit disappointing to report that, at least so far in E17  – while we did have one night of flashes and bangs – most of the time we’ve had warm, humid unspectacular sunshine. Mind you, for this amateur lensman the brooding evening skies over the marshes have triggered several fits of feverish clicking…



This blog doesn’t usually get involved in World Events, well not serious ones, but the dreadful happenings in Gaza, and the wicked, wicked shelling of an airliner over the Ukraine can’t just drift by unremarked. I may be utterly naive, but I am genuinely puzzled by an aspect of the Gaza crisis, and since I can’t find an answer on the BBC or on the Web, I put out a question this week on Twitter and repeat it here. Hamas is the Palestinian group who are firing rockets at Israel. Rockets are very expensive, and are hard to obtain unless you have wealthy backers and willing suppliers. Yet the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza are notoriously amongst the most miserably poverty-stricken people on the planet, so where do they get their expensive rockets? It seems that the Americans, and thus presumably the Israeli government, are totally convinced that the principal supplier is Iran. So why is Israel not making much more of a public fuss about Iran? Why is she not aiming reprisals at Tehran, instead of slaughtering Palestinian families?