February 2009 Archives

Although it has been around for some years I have only just discovered that hilarious training manual: The Art of Coarse Acting or How to Wreck an Amateur Dramatic Society by Michael Green. The 1994 reprint is published by Samuel French. You can get it from Amazon for £8.25.

Coarse actors, of course, are bad actors and those, sadly, are not exclusive to amateur theatre. ‘A skilled actor can make a piece of wood seem like a sword. A coarse actor can make a sword seem like a piece of wood’ asserts Green. And we’ve all seen it just as we all know the small-role actor who is hammily determined to be noticed at all costs, the one who never knows his words, the prompt who falls asleep, the actor who insists that the audience never noticed a thing and all the rest of them.

Alleyn’s School in south London is expecting a gathering of theatrical great and good this weekend when Trevor Nunn officially opens its new Michael Croft Theatre and Performing Arts Centre on Sunday.

This new theatre means professional standard performance facilities for Alleyn’s and will enable the National Youth Theatre to return to its roots - in the school founded by actor Edward Alleyn in Shakespeare’s time. It was Michael Croft, a former English teacher at Alleyn’s, who with the encouragement of a group of Old Boys, established the NYT in 1956. The Michael Croft Theatre includes a dedicated NYT space for rehearsals and workshops during the holidays.

Over the years this (now) fee paying co-educational school has nurtured more than its fair share of theatrical talent including Sam West, Nancy Carroll, Julian Glover, Simon Ward, Chris and Tom Godwin (father and son), Nicholas Day, Richard Hampton and David Weston - all of whom will appear in Sunday’s jolly junket along with performances by current students, and current NYT members.

It isn’t often that I get excited about training manuals especially when they deal with subjects of which I have absolutely no hands-on experience. But Period Hairstyles for Studio Stage and Screen and its companion volume Period Make-up, both by Kit Spencer and both new from Methuen Drama, are lovely, heavy ring-bound books with lots of outstandingly helpful pictures.

If you are a student wanting to know how to get that Tudor look right (the illustration is Keith Michell as Henry VIII) or the Winslet Edwardian look for the Titanic period then these are the books you want. The Make-up book starts with Dorling Kindersley style, well illustrated pages of necessary equipment. Then after some basic how-to information about applying make-up, the styles it covers range from prehistoric and Mayan to gothic and Geisha and from Italian Renaissance and 18th century France to the US Civil War and 1990s grunge.

The hairstyles book is just as eclectic. It gives a lot of detailed but accessible advice about styling before sailing into the ‘Gallery’ where you learn how to do hair to look like Brad Pitt’s in Troy, Clive Owen’s in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Audrey Hepburn’s in War and Peace and, of course, Johnny Depp’s in Pirates of the Caribbean - among many others.

In every case the process is laid out with great clarity step by step with models photographed at each stage as the style is built up - like a child’s recipe book.

Expressions is a funny name for a school of performing arts but it seems to be putting itself on the map at a time when it isn’t easy to break into the performing arts training business.

Started at Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in 1989 by Maxine Glasby as Discoworld School of Dance, initially it taught only part-time dance: ballet, tap, Latin American, jazz, freestyle disco and rock and roll.

20 years on it is now heavily into music theatre and was reborn as Expressions School of Performing Arts in 2003. Children’s classes are CDET approved and the school has, among other achievements, recently provided boys for Oliver! at Drury Lane.

One of its newish wings (started 6 years ago) is Expressions Academy of Performing Arts, a privately funded 3 year Musical Theatre Course for over-16s. The third business under the banner is Expressions Casting Agency.

So, if you are 16 and looking for training how good is that three year Musical Theatre Course which, remember, you have to pay for in full yourself? Well at the moment the course is not fully accredited by CDET but it has ‘applied membership status’ so accreditation is in hand, as it were.

I’m in a large, rather unlovely school hall at Simon Langton Girls’ Grammar School in Canterbury on a Saturday morning and never let it be said that these blogs don’t wander widely across the full gamut of performing arts education.

I’m sitting in on one of Stagecoach’s ‘Early Stages’ dance classes. No one in the room (apart from teacher Clare Beddows, her assistant, Holli Datlen and me) is over the age of 6. One tiny boy is three years and eight months. His Mum persuaded Canterbury Stagecoach principal Alan Goodwin to take him a few months early because the child envied the fun his sister was having.

And you can’t blame him. First these tots stand in a ring jogging, swaying, jumping and so on, and led by the charismatic Beddows who plays upbeat accompanying music on her CD player. Then the children line up at one end of the hall and take turns to skip, run or sashay to the opposite corner. Next comes a sort of mini cowboy ballet in which they don ‘hats’, mount ‘horses’ and whirl ‘lasoos’ It’s as much as I can do to stop myself joining in.

What strikes me most forcibly however is the extraordinary - almost disconcerting - confidence and self assurance of these tiny children. One comes bounding up to me, a complete stranger, to tell me she has lost two teeth and show me the gap. Another tells Goodwin and me that her sister hasn’t come because ‘she’s got a virus.’ When parents and children sit in front of Goodwin for the register before the session he calls each one up for a public chat. Shyness simply doesn’t exist here.

Do you work with video and projection in live theatre and if you do have you had any training in it? Ben Sumner, Deputy Director of Technical Theatre at Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD) believes that it could be a major growth area largely ignored by drama schools some of which, dare I say it, might just be the teeniest bit ‘traditionalist’ at the expense of taking new trends seriously.

Sumner wants answers to lots of question about how video and projection is - or should be - made part of the technical theatre curriculum. Should it be bedded in with lighting? Does it belong to sound? Should it be a discipline in its own right? And he wants experts to network.

You have to hand it to Julian Chenery. He cheerfully rewrites Shakespeare and jollies it up with music and has been entrancing school and family audiences with his creations for some years now via his successful company Shakespeare 4 Kidz.

Unlike many conventional theatre-in-education companies S4K is even weathering the axing of the National Curriculum English tests at 13+ because, Chenery says, helping children prepare for Shakespeare tests has never been the be all and end all (spot the quote) of what the company does.

Now he’s planning to be on the road again later this year with the Scottish Play aka Macbeth following a spring tour of Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest.

The show has been pretty well received each of the five times it has toured since its premiere in 2000 and the ebullient Chenery is confident that the play will be a winner once again.

He weaves Shakespeare’s most famous lines into modern language with some songs and dances. The result, he insists, is a two hour entertainment which everyone - even the youngest primary kids - can understand.

And he is undaunted by, though wary of, the superstitions which haunt the Bard’s tragedy. ‘The famous curse is something we’ve had our share of in the past,’ he reveals.

On Monday late afternoon I drove 40 miles into London from my home in Kent to review Alan Bennett’s Enjoy for The Stage. Like many others who have commented this week I was astonished to find London virtually closed and the Gielgud theatre where Enjoy is staged one of the very few West End theatres to be open. Actually, although the wet slush underfoot was a nuisance, the main roads through Kent and the suburbs were remarkably clear and I got home at the end of the evening in record time wondering, quite frankly, what all the fuss was about.

Goodness knows how much money the almost total failure of the metropolis’s transport system will have cost the theatre industry and or its insurers. But something else is bothering me more.

Monday night is probably the most popular performance for school parties because it traditionally gets the smallest houses of the week so theatre managements can offer good deals for groups. I wonder just how many groups of school children lost their evening at the theatre this week?

Should we call drama schools something else?

I heard Paul Rummer, principal of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (BOVTS) speaking at a conference the other day.

He told the audience - which ranged right across the creative industries and included politicians and civil servants - that ‘theatre school’ or ‘drama school’ are really rather misleading names now for institutions like his which also teach skills for TV, film, radio and a diverse range of other work opportunities including post casting and making voice overs.

He also observed - and of course he could have been speaking for LAMDA, RADA, Mountview and most other accredited course providers - that large numbers of BOVTS students are learning production, not acting skills. In the case of BOVST it is 50%. So the notion of a drama school being solely and exclusively a training ground for actors is very outdated. How can we communicate this to the wider public? Should we call drama schools something else? Is so what? Ideas please.