January 25th WHO GAVE YOU THIS JOLLY RED NOSE?

                            

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.  

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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