May 2011 Archives

Although I see and review a fair number of drama school showcases, it isn’t often I can get to a complete student show. And that’s not because I’m not invited — invitations arrive thick and fast, for which I am grateful to the senders — but simply because there are an awful lot of calls on my time and only so many hours in the day.

It was therefore a real pleasure, and something of a novelty, to find myself in Italia Conti’s Avondale Theatre last week for Sing Yer Heart out for the Lads. Although I have been to Italia Conti’s Goswell Road HQ and its full time 11-16 school more than once, this was my first visit to the Landor Road, Clapham site where most of the higher education students are based — so that added to the interest.

I’m at High House Production Park at Purfleet in Thurrock, a stone’s throw from the Dartford Crossing. And if you think that sounds like an industrial estate full of car mechanics and small factories you can think again because this is “the UK’s first ever national centre of excellence for the performing arts” and it’s beautiful.

Not only does the 14-acre site house the vast and impressive new Bob and Tamar Manoukian Production Workshop where Royal Opera House sets are now made, and where National Skills Academy Creative and Cultural Skills will be based in a large new building next year, but it is also the base of ROH’s Thurrock 11-person Education Team.

The education team has been in Thurrock since 2007 where it has been running the Creative Partnership scheme in 100 Essex Schools with 20,000 pupils since 2008. For example, opera Director Tom Guthrie, librettist Stephen Plaice and composer Richard Taylor led a weekly series of drama workshops for 8-10 year olds at Purfleet Primary School. They developed a story based on a local incident of heroism in the 1914-18 war which was eventually performed to an audience of family and friends.

Any performing arts project which operates across 150 schools in 18 London boroughs gets my vote. This year 3,658 young people are taking part in Step Into Dance - the open access dance initiative. That is over 1,500 more than last year.

And it gets better. 24% of the participants are boys and 11% of the children involved have special educational needs. There are now 27 SEN schools taking part, including Pupil Referral Units - 5 more than in 2010.

The scheme takes free dance training, in the form of extra-curricular classes, into schools. The young people get the chance to explore dance disciplines “from ballroom to Bollywood, from jazz to jive and everything in between including contemporary, hip-hop, street dance, African and Latin.”

2011 seems to be a special birthday year for a surprising number of drama schools. Italia Conti is celebrating its centenary, while East 15 is happily marking 50 years. And the institutions which eventually formed LAMDA date from 1861, which makes this its 150th year.

Of course the pressure is on to find imaginative and appropriate ways of marking these landmarks and Rose Bruford has, I think, come up with a nice one.

60 years old this year, Rose Bruford College is presenting a season of new writing from emerging young playwrights as part of its Diamond Jubilee celebrations. They are Alice Birch, Ben Ockrent, Ella Hickson, and Nick Payne. Award-winning dramatist Simon Stephens has mentored them.

These playwrights have been commissioned to write seven short plays on the themes of Performance Dreams, and Entertaining Intimacies - part of the Director’s New Writing Season.

I’ve been interested in the work of Y Touring, the theatre arm of Central YMCA, almost since it started 22 years ago. The company’s very unusual USP is that it takes contentious scientific issues — such as families dealing with genetic disease, or animal experimentation — and commissions experienced playwrights to create gripping drama based around them. The resulting plays, which include Pig in the Middle by Judy Upton (1997) and Every Breath by Judith Johnson (2006), are then toured to schools where they become catalysts for informed debate.

Of course Y Touring has developed and expanded its activities over the years, which is why I found myself earlier this week sitting in a rather splendid lecture hall at The Wellcome Trust (a long term Y Touring sponsor) in Euston Road to see the company’s first film.

Although ‘exciting’ is, in my view, a much overused and abused word in this industry, I really was quite excited by the production-in-preparation I saw at the weekend.

Two narrators prowl the mysteriously dark stage at the New Diorama, their faces lit by torches. Their delivery crisp and impeccable, the vocabulary they use is imaginative and designed to extend the creative and linguistic horizons of 7-11 year olds. This show uses physical theatre, light, micro projection and parasols for an original take on an age-old story about a parent plotting to kill a child of whom she is jealous. I loved the way Snow White, the third actor, is part of her parasol, from shadow puppetry behind it to its representing her breathing when she’s meant to be dead but isn’t.

Filskit Theatre Company was founded by three Rose Bruford graduates, Katy Costigan, Victoria Dyson and Sarah Gee. They’ve been working together since 2008 when they left college, where they still often go to rehearse.

Snow White - devised and written entirely by the three-person cast - has been developing for some time. They had a week’s placement to work on it at Unicorn Theatre earlier in the year, for example. “When we started we had an adult audience in mind, but it has now turned into a children’s piece,” Victoria Dyson told me after the run through.

Strange isn’t it. Keen as I am to write about performing arts training in Ireland, I don’t hear much about it. And then, hey presto, like those proverbial buses, two stories come along in a week — although this one is from the Republic of Ireland as opposed to Northern Ireland where Replay Theatre Company, which I mentioned last week, is based.

For many years, potential Irish actors and other performers have bemoaned the lack of training opportunities in their own country which is why you find so many Irish students in UK drama schools.

Not any more, perhaps. In September Trinity College Dublin’s new National Academy of Dramatic Arts - The Lir - opens with 14 students.

I’ve been talking to actor/producer Andrew Taylor (pictured), 35, in connection with next month’s part-time training supplement which, as usual, I am editing (for publication in The Stage’s June 16).

Taylor’s revival of Jez Butterworth’s 2006 play The Winterling opens at The White Bear in Kennington on May 24, and runs until June 12. He thinks this will be the first central London revival since the piece first played at The Royal Court and my researches have borne that out, but I’m sure there’s someone out there to correct us if Taylor is unwittingly making, and I am supporting, a false claim.

Anyway he’s an interesting chap because his entire training took place at Caravanserai Studio, run by Giles Foreman, in north London and it was all part-time.

I very much like the sound of Replay Theatre Company’s The School Underneath — a thriller for 6-9 year olds — which begins a six week tour of primary schools in Northern Ireland tomorrow before a week long public run on the stage of the brand new Lyric Theatre in Belfast next month (June 22-26).

Young audiences are promised plenty of the subversion-in-a-safe-environment which characterises all good children’s theatre. In this case that includes, according to the press release: “pyrotechnics, illusions, giant pencil cases, madcap and mayhem” which are “all part of the school routine in the exciting parallel universe of The School Underneath, where everyday objects become filled with wonder and magic and absolutely anything can happen.”

It is good news in these cash-strapped times, when training is so difficult to fund, that the Leverhulme Trust has awarded Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance £91,500. The grant will allow fifteen nominated students to pursue their studies in Musical Theatre at conservatoire level.

Each nominated student will become a Leverhulme Musical Theatre Scholar, awarded a bursary to help fund his or her studies.

The idea is to reward students who show real potential to excel in musical theatre and to ease the transition to higher education. Trinity Laban plans to distribute the award over three years so that the maximum number of students can benefit.

We seem to be going through a little spate of drama schools moving into sparkly new premises or dramatically (the right adverb perhaps) improving their existing fabric, or extending into new refurbished annexes.

Last year GSA moved into a brand new building at Stag Hill when it became part of the University of Surrey, and its nearby on-campus new performance space is about to open. East 15 is now as active in Southend as it is at Loughton with its beautiful Clifftown Studios church conversion and (separate) teaching block on the main shopping street - not to mention a big building project back at Loughton.

Drama Studio London, part of Central St Martins College of Art and Design, is due to move into a magnificent mew building behind St Pancras and King’s Cross Station next term. LAMDA, too, is planning a major rebuild to include an on-site theatre adjacent to its existing Barons Court premises, once St Paul’s School and for many years the home of the Royal Ballet School. And the new Milton Court building will soon (2013) be part of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Now there’s good news for Mountview too. Haringey Council has backed plans for it to move into the Hornsey Town Hall in 2014. It would have a 125-year lease and pay a peppercorn rent.

Why are funding organisations — student loans, DaDA and so on — so fixated on courses meeting a fifth birthday criterion before participating students qualify for financial support?

Yes, of course, we need safeguards and cannot go pouring what is effectively public money into the pockets of doubtful, fly-by-night exploitative, soi-disant training providers who don’t deliver the goods. But that does not, in my view, mean that only students in a handful (22 to be precise) of CDS schools and dance trainers accredited by CDET should get funding.

‘Accreditation’ is a very blunt instrument. I could take you to half a dozen impressive ‘unaccredited’ schools - usually dedicated to music theatre - which have started in the last couple of years or are launching this year. A school such as Music Theatre Academy, for example, is doing an outstanding job. I have seen its students in action several times. The standard is astonishing and 25% of its first intake is already signed up by agents four months before they graduate. Few accredited schools can match that. Yet MTA’s students get almost nothing in funding support because the college falls short of the five-year rule.

Why cannot each school be independently assessed for funding eligibility by people who really understand the requirements of training which is fit for purpose? The number of years the course has been running, or whether it ‘belongs’ to a CDS school, should have nothing to do with it.

As it is, the only hope for schools such as MTA is private sponsorship, altruism or scholarships provided by the schools themselves. Some - Herbert Justice Academy, whose full-time vocational course starts in September, for example - have the resources to help students in this way. Most do not.

Enter the new 2011 arrangement for the BBC Performing Arts Fund which has helped over 160 students with grants totalling more than £630,000 since the fund’s inception in 2003.

I’ve kept an eye on the doings of Nice Swan Theatre Company for a couple of years now since it was started by two very young men. Artistic Director Ben Hunt, 22, was still an English and drama student at University of Sunderland at the time. Jamie Gray, 21, manages the company.

Describing itself as ‘service to students and young people all over Tyne and Wear’ the company has staged acclaimed amateur/training productions of Rent, Spring Awakening and, last month, As You Like It with casts aged 16-25. It is now embarking on West Side Story. So there’s nothing samey or unambitious about the material they use.