May 3rd DARLING BUDS AND BANKSIDE BLOOD

Mayday Bank Holiday, comrades! As we fortunate inhabitants of the E17 wetlands watch not-so-rough winds shake the darling buds of our abundant blossoms, down by the Thames in SE1 blood and gore abound, and according to the Press audience-members are being carried from the theatre, swooning at the gruesome brutality onstage.

At the Shakespeare’s Globe’s “Titus Andronicus”, as little as five pounds for a standing ticket buys you a tingle of anticipation of falling in a dead faint, unless of course you slip some smelling salts into your pocket before you set off.

“Brutality of the Highest Order” is the publicity tag-line, and yes we witness evidence of rape and mutilation, severed heads dripping with Kensington gore, and a nursemaid slaughtered by penetration from the rear with a sword wielded by Aaron, the Bard’s most gleeful villain. There’s some spirited acting on show – not least by the always exciting Indira Varma as Tamora, tucking with gusto into a pie containing the remains of her two sons.  While at RADA Indira played a gutsy Mrs Peachum in my production of “The Beggar’s Opera” alongside Matthew MacFadyen’s Macheath, and she’s had a terrific television career playing strong, sexy women, often in togas – and occasionally minus a toga – from “Rome” to “Game of Thrones”.

The groundlings – at least from my seat at the back of the first gallery – seemed to me to be far more at risk of being run over than of passing out. The director has deployed two tall steel towers on wheels into the standing area of the auditorium, from the top of which actors harangue the audience as though they were the Roman mob.  A supporting crew push and steer these towers while clattering them with iron bars and bellowing football-yob chants, and the fiver-a-head punters just have to get out of the way. It’s good old-fashioned theatre economics – if you can’t afford extras, charge members of the public for the privilege!

It’s been a blood-stained week. I mean you wait for ever for a production of Shakespeare’s most gory family entertainment to come along and suddenly you see two different productions in as many days…Regular readers will know I run a “Theatre in London” course for students from New York University, and most of the students on it also take part in a semester at RADA of “Acting in Shakespeare”, a course I designed during my time as the Academy’s Vice Principal. The culmination of this term – to use the quaint British term for “term”- is an edited studio production of a play by the Bard, under professional direction. So on Tuesday I watched Melonie Jessop’s succinct 90-minute version of “Titus” at the GBS Theatre in Gower St, and on Wednesday went with its cast to witness the carnage on the South Bank – a brace of “Titae Andronicae” in forty-eight hours…

I have to say, at the risk of being branded a heretic, Will’s story-lines often benefit from, and come sharply into focus through, being shrewdly edited. I’ve directed lots of productions with graduate actors for the RADA classical theatre programme on the Cunard liners, and audiences always seem very happy to sit through tales of star-crossed lovers, warlike English kings, tragic Danes and Moors, etc concentrated into an hour or so of well-paced action, and applaud enthusiastically at the end. The demands of a cruise agenda will never allow for an entertainment item to be any longer than an hour. On a Queen Victoria world cruise we despatched the central storyline of Macbeth in 48 minutes, in a four-actor version called “The Weird Sisters”. This 90 minute RADA studio “Andronicus” covered most points of the mayhem, and most of the good speeches, and my attention was held throughout. At the Globe, pace some expert performances from a highly-professional cast, there were areas of the script – notably the bits where Titus is either going barmy or pretending to go barmy – when my attention wandered to the visiting pigeons swooping amongst the galleries.

It’s also been a very sad week. We lost Bob Hoskins, one of London’s finest. His was a strong talent devoid of any pretension, with an open, honest and kind personality. I worked with him just once, in a television adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story in the 80s, and whenever we met in the years since he was always cheery, warm and welcoming, with no hint of the huge international status he had earned in his movie career . 

We also – in the last few days – have lost an actor I worked with closely back in the golden days of repertory, Chris Harris. Those of you who live in the West Country will know Chris as the perennial star of Bristol pantomimes, and many more across the world will have seen his amazing one-man show celebrating Shakespeare’s famous clown, “Kemp’s Jig”. 

Here are two pictures, one of Chris in panto mode, the other a contrasting still of him in the title role of “Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs”, venting his fury against the irritating Dennis Charles Nipple (played by me) in Chris Denys’s production at Worthing Connaught Theatre back in the late 60s.
Chris was an authority on the fast-disappearing world of real, old-fashioned English pantomime, the tradition of Jo Grimaldi and Dan Leno, an authority rendered all the more genuine through his glorious gift for performance. He was magnetic, funny and a sheer delight. Kids loved him.