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I’m sorry this blog has been silent a month or more, but I’ve been upside down at the other end of the Earth, and upside-down blogging is tricky stuff to achieve. Now Professor Cox will assure us that in the cosmic infinite there is no such thing as upside down, and being in the antipodes is no excuse for sloth at the keyboard….
Well, OK dammit, the fun and the adventures have totally filled the days, and at the end of each day I’ve been too exhausted or woozy or both to contemplate lifting the Macbook’s heavy lid, and have slipped quietly into dreams of hot springs and Tui birds, of hot pies and Marlborough wines, of glaciers and streams where Gollum wanders, of crashing surf and amber nectar, under dark skies teeming with bright stars ruled by the Southern Cross….Here’s me on January the 2nd, fantasising about creating an open-air production of “Waiting for Godot” on the deserted beach of Rabbit Island, off the South Island of New Zealand:
“Oh for Goodness sake!” I hear the cry – what of the theatre, what displays of the lyric arts have you witnessed in these travels, what startling productions, what rich performances? Um…well dear friends…until last Tuesday, none.
None? Four weeks in the land of Peter Jackson and Jane Campion, and a fifth in the City of Cate Blanchett? What on Earth was the point of your going? You who report endlessly on thespian doings on and around the banks of the Thames – did you lose all sense of your calling as you crossed below the 38th parallel?
I guess so. In fact, I was there to visit old and close friends, to share a Fezziwiggian Christmas with the family Townsend, to meet up with other dear friends Savile and Eton – London based, but also escaping UK floods and frost in southern climes – and thus priorities adjusted. Fezziwiggian? Do try to keep up – Dickens, dear, “A Christmas Carol” – yes all right, of course you knew. Just checking.
In between visiting hot springs and glaciers, tracing Lord of the Rings locations and swimming off often deserted beaches (even on Christmas Day) there was some contact with kiwi theatre. For a capital city – especially one billing itself as the “Coolest Little Capital in the World” professional theatre in Wellington is generally thin on the ground, and the only professional house operating at the time was the Circa Theatre, offering a Christmas show. I swapped notes over a glass or two with the wonderfully talented Pinky Agnew, whose work as an actor and writer often takes her to Circa, when not adding richness to New Zealand society as a celebrant of weddings, funerals and the like. We explored possibilities for taking Martin Wimbush’s award-winning “Wellington” to the eponymous city in 2015 – watch this space… The other professional Wellington theatre set-up, Downstage, has recently closed through lack of funding. I had a lovely lunch with one of the latter’s former directors, another distinguished actor and playwright Catherine Downes, and we mused on how lucky we Londoners are, where notwithstanding government cuts the city still teems with plays and players. However as I left, the New Zealand Arts Festival was getting under way with lots of exciting stuff from all over the world, and I believe as I write the Wellington theatre scene is abuzz with mid-summer activity.
Incidentally I had the most extraordinary journey getting there. I won’t bore you with the whole saga, but I’ll mention that it involved a) a four-hour pre-take-off delay on the tarmac at Heathrow because of a faulty smoke alarm b) once in the air two passengers having heart-attacks within 30 minutes of each other while we flew over the Caspian Sea, leading to our being diverted to the Ukraine and c) because the plane’s crew had run out of flying hours, our then spending 19 hours on the ground in Kiev, most of them in a soviet-style hotel, while edgy political demonstrations raged a mile or so up the road…
My biggest cause of irritation was that the delay knocked out a planned overnight stop-over in Singapore and a much-anticipated lunch with my eminent pal Aubrey Mellor, Senior Fellow at Singapore’s La Salle College of the Arts.
Anyway, five weeks on the journey home was painless, and en route I stopped for five nights in Sydney, a city for which I have to say I fell, big-time. Parts of Australia are sweltering in temperatures of 45C and above, and forest fires are raging, but in Sydney it was a lovely 27/28, and each morning I slipped into the roof-top pool of my (very reasonably-priced) apartment hotel, to plan the day’s exploring of parks and harbours, of bars, ferries and beaches.
Surfers at Bondi on Sunday afternoon
Lynne Williams gave me a terrific tour of Australia’s leading drama school, NIDA, of which she is the tireless Principal, with a vision to maximise the academy’s considerable assets for the benefit of not just Australian talent, but for gifted youngsters throughout the southern hemisphere. A former colleague from my time with the Enterprises wing of RADA, Caroline Spence, now runs the equivalent NIDA department for Lynne, and she and I spent an evening sampling various brews in a series of lively downtown joints, as the sun sank and the Opera House turned gently pink….
Which brings us to the only theatre performance I witnessed on the whole trip, which was a revival of Julie Taymor’s “Magic Flute” in the opera auditorium of that amazing building. The house has been open since 1973, and is now undergoing refurbishment over-seen by the architect son of Jom Utzen, who produced the original design but tragically died after falling out with the Sydney Council and removing himself from the project before it was finally completed. To be in an audience there truly is one of the great experiences – the production was great, but in a sense was almost incidental to the experience of sitting beneath those soaring arches, and to stepping out in the interval onto the open-air balcony among the harbour lights, and the evening I was there to watch a tall sailing-ship glide beneath the majestic Harbour Bridge…
And so, eventually, back to the Wettest English January on Record, to panic over the tax return, to starting work again…and to welcoming a brand-new London theatre, the Wanamaker Indoor Jacobean Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe.
If you get a chance to see “The Duchess of Malfi”, grab it. The productions in this theatre are lit by beeswax candles, on moveable chandeliers, and it’s like sitting in a Rowlandson water-colour, audience and actors bathed in pale pastel light.
Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole shows as much assurance in directing for this space as he does out on the outdoor wooden “O”, and this current show is a cracker. It so happens that all three of the leading actors – Gemma Arterton, David Dawson and James Garnon – trained at RADA during my Gower St days, and all of them, in the words of a distinguished director I chatted with after the play, are “quite exceptional”. It was a lovely fillip to my jet-lagged, post-holiday mood, and cheered me up no end.
Incidentally, I mentioned “starting work again” – in fact, thanks to the wonders of technology, I was able while travelling to keep in touch with www.teachyourselfacting.com, and deal with various training projects across the mystifying reaches of cyberspace. A related project is currently under way, for any London-based actors. Christopher Lane, the TYA movement expert, is offering a one-day workshop on Saturday February 15th at Ye Olde Rose and Crown in Walthamstow for a remarkable introductory one-off fee of £15.
This guy is a brilliant teacher and director, and frankly at that price a 10am till 6pm workshop is a steal, in a crunchy venue just five minutes’ walk from the Victoria Line station at Walthamstow Central . Book now to avoid bitter disappointment – just click on this link:
http://relativemotion.co.uk
And so, eventually, back to the Wettest English January on Record, to panic over the tax return, to starting work again…and to welcoming a brand-new London theatre, the Wanamaker Indoor Jacobean Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe.
If you get a chance to see “The Duchess of Malfi”, grab it. The productions in this theatre are lit by beeswax candles, on moveable chandeliers, and it’s like sitting in a Rowlandson water-colour, audience and actors bathed in pale pastel light.Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole shows as much assurance in directing for this space as he does out on the outdoor wooden “O”, and this current show is a cracker. It so happens that all three of the leading actors – Gemma Arterton, David Dawson and James Garnon – trained at RADA during my Gower St days, and all of them, in the words of a distinguished director I chatted with after the play, are “quite exceptional”. It was a lovely fillip to my jet-lagged, post-holiday mood, and cheered me up no end.Incidentally, I mentioned “starting work again” – in fact, thanks to the wonders of technology, I was able while travelling to keep in touch with www.teachyourselfacting.com, and deal with various training projects across the mystifying reaches of cyberspace. A related project is currently under way, for any London-based actors. Christopher Lane, the TYA movement expert, is offering a one-day workshop on Saturday February 15th at Ye Olde Rose and Crown in Walthamstow for a remarkable introductory one-off fee of £15.
This guy is a brilliant teacher and director, and frankly at that price a 10am till 6pm workshop is a steal, in a crunchy venue just five minutes’ walk from the Victoria Line station at Walthamstow Central . Book now to avoid bitter disappointment – just click on this link:
http://relativemotion.co.uk
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