July 2010 Archives

It’s always good to hear of successful projects for under 21s, many of whom have had little exposure to theatre through their home and school life - both in and out of school time. The Young Friends of the Almeida (YFA) scheme is one such.

Set up in 2008, it allows any young person in London interested in taking part in producing theatre (not just acting in it) to work and engage with the Almeida Theatre’s building and staff. “Two years in and they’ve really begun to contribute to our organisation’s culture and wider audience development, having spoken at board meetings and getting involved in programming the activity they want to participate in,” Charlie Payne, Almeida’s Projects Administrator, tells me.

Next week there’s a production to mark the end of Almeida’s second year-long project for a group of fifteen 15-21 year-olds. The Red Helicopter brings together a broad group of young people, mostly from Almeida’s partner state secondary schools in Islington, and I’m really sorry that I can’t get there on Friday 6th or Saturday 7th August to see their production.

So how does it all work? The group has come together regularly to explore each of the Almeida Theatre’s season of plays in practical workshop sessions - from Judgment Day through Mrs Klein, Rope, Measure for Measure and Ruined. Working with them has been a team of emerging professionals, including director Tessa Walker (who’s recently left her post as Literary Director of Paines Plough), designer Cecilia Carey, choreographer Kitty Winter and musical director Eilidh Debonnaire. Writer Robin French attended all these sessions and participated in discussions about the plays, wherein the participants drew out the themes and ideas that most affected them, growing up in London.

In February French went away to write the play and since April the group has been rehearsing The Red Helicopter. The play is set in London in 2072, a post-apocalyptic world where the only people remaining are society’s outcasts - including this group of unwanted children. Under the brutal leadership of the self-titled ‘Daddy’, they struggle for survival and constantly hope for rescue. The play tells the story of the rebellion that topples Daddy’s ruthless dictatorship.

Director Tessa Walker says of the project: “The chance for a young cast to work so closely with a professional team on a play specifically written for them is unique and exciting. It is an excellent opportunity for an audience to see a new generation of actors and emerging professionals in a production of a brand new play for young people.”

So who are these young people? In alphabetical order the YFA Company is: Diego Alejandro, Kim Brewin, Nina Chograshi, Omar Choudhury, Jessica DeFreitas, Jake Head, Aisha Josiah, Mollie Keane, Nickcolia King, Misha Patel, Hauk Pattison, Robert Ristic, Zakiyah Rawat, Josie Roughneen, Emma Tye, Cataline Zuliani.

I wish them every success with their show next week.

I enjoyed Danton’s Death at the National last week - with reservations and a few teacherly worries.

Buchner’s rather wordy episodic piece does its best to spring to life in Howard Brenton’s pared down version under Michael Grandage’s slick direction, accompanied by Adam Cork’s clever music which helps hook all those short scenes together. Toby Stephens gives us yet another swaggering, charismatic performance — and no-one who sees it will forget that already much commented on, ingenious guillotine scene. Not in my top-ten-of-all-time great shows but, in general, a decent enough evening out.

What really bothered me - education hat firmly on - was the age profile of the audience. Notwithstanding NT’s excellent Travelex £10 tickets scheme (now in its eighth season) most heads were grey, greyish or very soon will be. Teenagers and 20-somethings were almost entirely absent. OK, so it was press night and we all know that, according to Nicholas Hytner, most critics are ageing white males. But not every seat on press night goes to the press and you would expect to see some sort of age range across the auditorium.

If you’re looking for something ‘cool’ to entertain your six year old, you might try The GO!GO!GO! Show at Leicester Square Theatre. It opened this week and runs until the end of August.

How much learning and education is implicit in it is anyone’s guess, since this is an attempt to produce a musical which ‘fills a gap’ in the market by providing active pop music for very young children. Dragging myself away from the reactionary, old fashioned thought that at this age I’d rather children were learning and singing what my grandmother would have called ‘nice’ songs (folk, Teddy bears’ picnic, All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth and Rolf Harris) I notice that this is a debut production from The Show 4 Kids, a company set up by Mike Stock.

I am at Blackheath Halls where the main performing space is a lofty, unraked, school hall style, rectangular proscenium. Today it’s configured in the round with a 53-piece orchestra along one side and audience on the other three. In the middle is a huge but intimate playing space. And it needs to be big to accommodate the 65 adult and 63 child ‘community’ chorus.

The show is Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love (in Amanda Holden’s witty translation) and it is Blackheath Halls’s now annual community opera. It’s a partnership with Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, of which Blackheath Halls is a wholly owned subsidiary, and there’s support from Lewisham and Greenwich boroughs, ACE and charitable trusts.

The professional solo work, especially from Elena Xanthoudakis as Adina, Nicholas Sharratt as Nemorino and Robert Poulton as Dulcamara is magnificent. Like everyone else in the audience I love Sharratt’s famous Act 2 aria and Poulton’s deft diction and acting as the very funny quack doctor. And it is all immaculately controlled by Nicholas Jenkins whose supportive conducting technique includes mouthing every word.

But what impresses me most about this ambitious large-scale production is the education and training which lies at the heart of it.

Mulberry Theatre Company is the in-house theatre company of Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets and that’s pretty unusual in itself. Most mainstream secondary schools do not have in-house theatre companies.

And there’s more. Last year MTC made a bit of theatrical history at Edinburgh when, with its play The Unravelling by Fin Kennedy (pictured above), it became the first school ever to be awarded a Scotsman Fringe First.

This week The Unravelling is being revived at Southwark Playhouse so that London audiences can see the performances by seven teenagers which went down so well in Edinburgh.

How much of an actor’s professional training should be specific to camera work given that, according to a survey by Arts Educational Schools London, 60% of all professional work now comes from screen acting of one sort or another?

Convinced that traditional stage-focused drama school courses are selling potential actors short, Arts Ed London has now expanded the amount of work that its students do in front of the camera in film and television training to 50% in a new course, a BA Hons Acting for Film and Television — although it insists that it still includes a thorough foundation in classical theatre acting.

Arts Ed, which claims to be “the first drama school to redesign its course to fit the demands made on actors in the twenty-first century,” has worked with industry experts to create this course.

“The industry has changed,” my Arts Ed source told me. “Given the demise of the traditional repertory theatre season, where graduates used to start their careers, it is now much more likely that a young actor’s first job will be in the multi-channelled world of television, on-line, or even appearing in the latest soap on a mobile phone, not to mention the UK and Hollywood film industries.”

Arts Ed’s thinking is that the industry has turned itself inside out. Today, success on television and film can lead to acting opportunities in theatre. Only a few years ago it was the other way round. Actors made their names in theatre and then got TV and film offers. Interesting analysis. Are they right? Answers on a postcard please - or at least in a posted comment on this blog.

Meanwhile there is, of course, more information about the curriculum and audition process for the new course on Arts Ed’s website.

• The Stage has a pile of training books sent in by publishers for review and now surplus to requirements. We are prepared to give these to an educational organisation (but NOT, please note, to an individual) in exchange for a donation to a performing arts charity. Please email gen_enquiries@thestage.co.uk and title your message “Stage books.” First come, first served.

It’s always good to hear of an established training ‘brand’ being made more widely available. Everyone has heard of the Liverpoool Institute of Performing Arts, not least because Paul McCartney co-founded it — certainly a USP to distinguish it from the other 21 Conference of Drama School organisations.

Now there’s LIPA 4:19, at present the only stage school franchise linked to an established performing arts institute — another USP.

Classes in singing, dancing and acting for children and teenagers have been running at LIPA headquarters on Saturday mornings for six years. On the strength of that LIPA has launched into franchising in order to replicate that opportunity elsewhere.

At the moment there are just four LIPA 4:19 franchises across the UK (Rainhill, Widnes, Wanstead and Menston). Unsurprisingly, it is hungry to expand. So if you’re considering teaching and/or want to run your own part time school, in the UK or overseas, take a look at this option. The contact number for information 0151 330 3000.

The latest LIPA 4:19 franchise to open is at Menston, Leeds. And, interestingly, a mother and daughter duo are behind it so it’s a family business and a first for LIPA.

It’s that time of year again. Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park is in full swing in the sunshine and its now annual Shakespeare “re-imagined for anyone aged 6 and above” opens this week. This time it’s Macbeth and Steve Marmion is the director.

“If your brief is to make this play about power, sex and murder work for 6 years olds (and above) then the witches — usually such a problem — are the least of your worries,” he told me between tech rehearsals last week. “Children in Year 5 know all about witches and magic so you can give it to them straight.”

Death isn’t difficult either, apparently. “Children are usually better than adults at dealing with death and anyway our short prologue, which includes a big opening fight, makes it clear that these are actors pretending,” he says.

Shades of Bottom and co. in Pyramus and Thisbe, I wonder irreverently? But I don’t think so. Marmion, a fine CV at his back including both directorial assisting for the RSC and pantomime at Lyric Hammersmith among many other credits, is a passionate advocate of taking children seriously and giving them the work of the world’s best story teller.

But what about the language? “First we pared the play down to its barest storytelling essentials. You could actually tell the story that way in ten minutes,” he says. “Then we added back in all those shards of poetry which illuminate the play and make it resonate.”

He points out that children love to make up words — as Shakespeare did, with the perfect neologism “bubble” — and have no difficulty, for example, with “hurly-burly”. That’s something the late, great Rex Gibson, who did so much to promote Shakespeare education, used to say too.

This is the third ‘re-imagined’ Shakespeare in the Park. When Timothy Sheader took over as Open Air Theatre’s Artistic Director in 2008 he decided to put a Regents Park-ish Shakespearian spin on the well established annual children’s show. The result was Dominic Leclerc’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2008 and Liam Steel’s The Tempest last year, both highly imaginative and acclaimed cut down versions for children using small-ish casts.

Many of the schools bringing groups to Macbeth will have introduced the children to the play last month by buying in a production-linked Young Shakespeare Company (YSC) workshop, devised by Sarah Gordon and taught in their own schools.

I’m looking forward to seeing Marmion’s Macbeth, no doubt in the excellent company of a few hundred eager children, on Friday and reviewing it for The Stage.

Enticing new MA courses continue to launch, not just in single spies but in battalions. The latest one I’ve noticed is starting in January at Cardiff-based Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Royal Welsh College has, of course, been successfully involved in Musical Theatre for some time. Recent years have seen productions of Quadrophenia, staring Kimberley Nixon (Cranford, Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging) and West Side Story, featuring Aneurin Barnard who went on to win an Olivier for Best Actor in a Musical for his West End debut in Spring Awakening.

Its production of Thoroughly Modern Millie launched the career of Clare Dunne, recently seen in Three Sisters at the Lyric. Young RWCMD graduate Ryan O’Donnell was nominated for a TMA (Theatrical Management Association) Award for Best Performance in a Musical for his part in the recent professional production of Quadrophenia.

So, given this track record, the MA “specifically designed to meet industry demands for musical theatre practitioners who are strong in the interdependent disciplines of acting, singing and dancing” is RWCMD’s next logical step.

Newly appointed course leader Vivien Care says: “As one of only three conservatoires that provide both music and drama training, the College provides a unique environment to study musical theatre with opportunities to perform in both intimate and large- scale musical performances.”

Head of Acting, Dave Bond, agrees: “At Royal Welsh College we have always aimed to produce a fully rounded, grounded actor who makes the most of their skills. While staying true to these core values, the Musical Theatre course will also offer specialised training.”

Care’s experience as a performer and teacher, her work as a vocal consultant and coach, together with her extensive industry links, inform an approach to the training of musical theatre practitioners which augurs well for the new course. A former Royal Welsh College student, she is currently playing Sister Margaretta in The Sound of Music now touring after its successful West End run.

“As a performer myself, I’m so looking forward to leading this highly focussed course here at my old College. I’m thrilled to be able to help generate this dynamic and long awaited new venture that promises to meet industry needs for greatly specialised and thoroughly integrated performers.”

Olivier award winning Aneurin Bernard adds, “I am so glad to hear that the College is now launching an MA in Musical Theatre, giving a wider choice of range for applicants to be more specific in what they choose to train in.”

See the website for more information on the MA in Musical Theatre.