November 19 WINTER LIGHTS, WORDS OF WAR

Now we northern Europeans shake out our winter coats and rummage in the drawer for the thermal socks, now we switch on the heaters and prepare to be ripped off yet again by the shameless cartel of crooks who run our energy companies. November arrives, the clocks go back, we buy our poppies, and with a sinking feeling we watch some benighted celebrity switch on the Christmas lights in Oxford Street a full SIX weeks early. And yet, and yet – it’s a great time of the year – there are fireworks, decent drama comes back on the TV, Hull City cling on muddily in the premiership, and in an upper room of a pub in north-east London, a group of actors-in-training learn to apply their craft…

Here are Rebecca and Chris running voice and movement sessions in the first TYA London Acting Essentials workshop course, at the Rose and Crown Theatre. 



We deliberately restricted the number of participants to eight – and they all seemed to agree with the message Victoria Hamblen put out on Twitter on the way home from the final class.

For my money a better value scream is to be had at the Fortune rather than the Arts. “The Woman in Black” is a literate, beautifully crafted piece first produced at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre (see this blog’s last entry) in 1987. It’s been running in London since 1989, and has now toured eleven times. I’ve seen it  twice, in London with Frank Barrie as Arthur and more recently on tour at Guildford, with Scarborough veteran Graeme Eton in the same part, and boy does it work! The soft, swift and sudden arrival of the silent ghost is wonderfully chilling – but then if you haven’t seen it, don’t let me spoil it for you…

Excellent, literate work was also to be found at the Jermyn Street Theatre in a very early Terence Rattigan play “First Episode”. Co-written with a friend when Rattigan was still an undergrad, there’s enough skill, enough obvious emerging talent in this piece fully to justify artistic director Anthony Biggs’s policy of unearthing lost and/or neglected significant plays. The Jermyn St venue is a cracking little theatre, producing unusual, well-crafted work funded by its box-office and by fund-raising amongst supporters. 

We talk a lot about publicly-subsidised theatre in our country, but several significant London producing houses are funded, like the Jermyn St, on a model prevalent in the U.S., by ticket-sale revenue boosted by self-generated donor support – look no further than the Old Vic, or indeed Shakespeare’s Globe.

Another brave venue surviving under its own steam is the St James’s Theatre, one of my favourite places –  notwithstanding the difficulty in finding it, picking your way through the massive construction sites which currently plague the whole Victoria district. I expected to hate Anya Reis’s version of Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya”, re-located to the UK in modern times, with references to the Internet etc – but it was bright, refreshing and totally engaging. Especially fine was Amanda Hale’s Sonya – I have fond memories of directing Amanda as one half of a delightful elderly couple in an Ayckbourn comedy at RADA, alongside a certain T. Hiddleston…

Here she is with the brilliant John Hanna. But I can’t leave this without a gentle hint to the director – if you’re going to set a show in rural Britain, please make sure members of the same household have a consistent accent…                                                                                                  

Photo: Simon Annand 

One hundred years on from the Great War, and last Monday I was asked to create a presentation for and with New York University students in London, drawing on British poems and texts from 1914 to 18 researched by Philip Drummond. We included some of the famous songs, none of which the students knew at all – but they learned them from Youtube clips over a weekend, and turned up at rehearsal on Monday morning with every note learned, complete with harmonies! Without wishing to suggest that English actors are in any way lazy – perish the thought – but American student actors really get stuck into the work. At least the Tisch students did, and produced fine, sensitive work. We rehearsed a scene from “Journey’s End”, at first in American accents but it sounded just too weird – imagine “Streetcar”  in Etonian English – so on the night the boys delivered the lines in good, carefully-clipped English tones, and Sherriff’s lines made the powerful impact common to all the work by that astonishing generation of writers.

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