Will someone please slow this year down? June already, with a half-hearted summer arriving breathless because spring never came, winter having stayed till May – a nagging tiresome guest long, long outstaying welcome. Now all at once we have wind-tossed roses and long sunsets, and yesterday I was in sun-splashed Cambridge, with rowers hastening to the river, muscle-bound knees gleaming in the sunshine…
It’s the season for end-of-course drama school shows, hence Cambridge, where I’m external monitor for the Foundation Drama course at CSVPA, which I helped design back in the RADA days. Two of my brilliant colleagues at www.teachyourselfacting.com, Rebecca Cuthbertson and Christopher Lane are core tutors there, and had directed a show apiece. The course at Cambridge doesn’t take hostages, and after just three terms of intense training, this year’s group were coached by Rebecca into giving a clear, confident and imaginative version of Shakespeare’s “Pericles”. Somehow I’ve lived a long and otherwise richly-detailed life without ever once having seen this play! While cooking up this piece Shakespeare had a co-writer, a shadowy figure called Wilkins, and for this version he had a second in Ms Cuthbertson, who inserted subtle and crafty clarifications of the sprawling plot-line, so that we in the audience really enjoyed following the Prince of Tyre‘s eventful and often somewhat alarming Mediterranean tour…
Also on offer this week is another piece which until yesterday I’d never seen. As well as being a movement-training expert, Chris is a seriously good director of musical theatre. He’d picked a nugget from the North American repertoire, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and turned it into a perfect showcase for his gifted students.
If like me you’ve never come across it, you can get a sense of the fun embedded in this show via its American website: www.spellingbeethemusical.com
Last week I called in at the Central School – sorry, the Royal Central School. The group I directed in “Absolute Hell” at the end of last year signed off their 3-year course with a revival of one of the landmark shows from the school’s history, Caryl Churchill’s “Mad Forest”. This is the play which the playwright, the director Mark Wing-Davey and 10 CSSD students assembled out of a visit to Bucharest in 1990, in the turbulent wake of the collapse of Ceausescu regime. It still stands up, and creates a powerful pastiche of a fractured, disintegrating society. There are eerie echoes of what life must be like today in restless parts of the Near and Middle East – Egypt for instance, where by all accounts any sense of stability or security still feels very far off, despite last year’s “Arab Spring” revolution.
A cheery anniversary here in the UK has been 25 years of Robin Herford’s production of “The Woman in Black”. Starting in Scarborough and transferring eventually to the Fortune Theatre in the West End, this adaptation by Stephen Mallatrat of Susan Hill’s short, scary novel has so far spawned one television film in 1989, one feature film in 2012 and no less than eleven professional theatre tours. The latest – the 25th Anniversary Tour – was in Guildford at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre two weeks ago and on June 5th I went with a bunch of pals to watch another mentor from the www.teachyourselfacting team, Graeme Eton, in one of the two starring roles. 
A veteran of many Scarborough seasons directed by Alan Ayckbourn, and of several at Keswick directed by me, Eton is a master performer, and it was grand to see him teasing all the tension, and the nervous laughs, out of this well-crafted thriller. The book is now an A-level set text, and at Guildford there were several parties of female sixth-formers, who responded to the show’s shock moments with loud and sustained screaming – which must be satisfying for the performers, but play havoc with timing key lines! If you’ve only seen the Daniel Radcliffe movie, do try and see the stage version. The presence of a real ghost cannot be digitally reproduced!
I don’t spend enough time in Cornwall, so an invitation from my friend Shirley Dixon to the BAFTA showing of “Summer in February” was welcome – a low-budget, British movie co-produced by and starring Dan Stevens – all shot on location in Lamorna, home of a famous colony of artists around the time of the First World War. It’s fabulous to look at, there’s good acting from Stevens, Dominic Cooper and the stunning Australian Emily Browning, but as some of this week’s newspapers have pointed out it’s a bit light on plot development. However I enjoyed it a lot, and it will be a perfect choice as a DVD for an evening at home next winter, preferably in romantic company with a glass of something warm and encouraging…
And so back to home and television, and to the closing episodes of this year’s “Springwatch”. Inspired by Michaela Strachan and her pals, one morning last week I fixed my trusty Canon compact to its tripod, and trained it on the birdhouse at the bottom of the garden. I e-mailed the results to various friends, several of whom felt I should share them with you…
Er, Dad……?
It’s OK – no-one’s looking
Look, just do as your Dad says….
Go on – I won’t look!
Right, come on Dotty, you’re next….
And finally this week, congratulations to Tony Robinson on being dubbed a knight of the realm. I hope this makes up for all the years of being penalised for giving a great performance in “Blackadder” as a twerp, and by being perceived as such ever since by the untold millions of people who simply can’t get the fact that an actor and his performance are two different things! I used to suffer from the same syndrome, having played several simple souls back in my TV acting days – one casting director even told my agent he doubted if “Ellis is bright enough” to cope with a particular role, and was astonished to be told that I was a university graduate. Tony’s done superb work as an actor, as an archeological mentor to the nation, and as a campaigner against social inequality, so the gong is richly deserved.
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