November 2011 Archives

It’s TheatreCraft time again and I’m at The London Coliseum to meet students, sit in on workshops and talk to industry stand holders at this annual “buzzy” careers fair devoted to backstage jobs - in all their diversity.

The Stage Events — our new venture for 2012 which will launch a series of training seminars, some led by me, others by colleagues John Byrne, Barbara Eifler, Jo Hawes and others — has a stand and is attracting masses of interest.

Nearby are stands manned by Methuen Drama, East 15, Theatres Trust, Creative and Cultural Skills and London College of Fashion. The RSC, ENO, RWCMD, Equity and IdeasTap are here too, along with many others. This year’s event is sponsored by White Light Ltd.

Students aged 17 to 25 are flocking with enthusiastic interest. Some are alone. Others are with parents or school groups and their needs and interests range from how a school leaver might put a tentative foot on the performing arts careers ladder to 20-something graduates wanting some specialised training and wondering how on earth to fund it.

I’m at Comber Grove Primary School in Camberwell watching a class of lively but impeccably behaved Year 5 children enjoying a drama lesson with a difference. I’m intrigued to be in this Southwark school, actually, because in education circles it is legendary - although I doubt these Year 5 pupils are aware of that.

Comber Grove’s Head teacher, Mike Kent, has been a regular contributor to the TES, the paper which does for teachers what The Stage does for actors, for decades and is the author of several books. He is famous for inclusive, rigorous, creative education especially in the arts and you can sense that ethos as soon as you walk through the door.

The lesson I’m sitting in on is no ‘ordinary’ drama lesson though - if indeed there is any such thing? This is a 45 minute workshop set up by Blue Elephant Theatre which is just round the corner. Stuart Cox, BET’s full-time Education and Development Director, works in the school regularly and is clearly well known to the children.

Earlier this week I saw Matilda, the RSC hit musical based on Roald Dahl’s book, now open in London at Cambridge Theatre. Quite a treat. So many members of the press wanted to see it that we were slotted into various performances during this week with all reviews and press comments embargoed until today. The exuberant, sparklingly good show got a standing ovation on Tuesday and I gather the same has happened at every performance all week.

But I wasn’t there to review, which left me free to reflect a little on this show’s enormous education potential.

Until I agreed to attend StoneCrabs’s show at the New Diorama last week I had never heard of Queen Pokou. Perhaps I should have done but I hadn’t.

And in case you’re as ignorant as I was, I’d better fill you in on the outline. According to oral history/legend Pokou and her followers are forced, in the eighteenth century, to leave what is now Ghana and travel west into Ivory Coast because there’s a war of succession with Pokou’s own uncle as the scheming usurper.

So we’re immediately in Genesis/Exodus territory with Hamlet thrown in. The legend tells of a large Red Sea-type river which has to be crossed and Pokou can lead her people to safety only if she sacrifices her only child by casting him into the waters - shades of Iphigenia as well as Abraham not to mention Lorca’s Yerma. This is resonant stuff.

Can anyone support education work in a new theatre?

Of course it isn’t unique for the new theatre to be built in London - The Rose at Kingston and Unicorn Theatre in Tooley Street spring to mind - but it’s sufficiently unusual to be interesting. And the Park Theatre project near Finsbury Park Station is also intended to have a major education thrust which, from my point of view, makes it especially compelling.

So last week I took myself there to meet director Jez Bond and to find out what’s going on. And once I’d donned workman’s safety boots, a fluorescent vest and a hard hat I was able to see all over the site where builders are working hard to get the premises ready for use in about a year’s time.

We hear a great deal about creativity in children’s education these days with most commentators bewailing its lack because so much of the work done in so many schools is uninspiringly pegged on the National Curriculum.

The truth is, of course, that it’s perfectly possible to teach children everything that the National Curriculum requires - in a creative way. The trick is to be creative and imaginative in everything you do rather than treating creativity as one more thing that you have to do - maybe for 20 minutes on a Thursday afternoon. Creativity, to coin an old education cliche, needs to be grafted in, not bolted on.

Enter an organisation called Artis which works with primary schools and whose stated aim is to “spark creativity in education with a unique blend of music, drama and movement.”

On Monday I had the pleasure of visiting Musical Theatre Academy’s delightfully homely, but immaculately professional, new base in Holloway Road.

The narrow single-shop entrance on the street belies the spaciousness behind. There is one very large studio which can be subdivided into two roomy teaching areas or used open to rehearse shows. Second years were working in half of it when I visited. Upstairs is another good sized teaching space where I saw first years in a voice class.

An attractive long, thin social area with sofas, a kitchen area and MTA’s library leads down to the main studio. Inserted near the street entrance is a small office and a soundproofed pod for individual singing lessons. It is all well thought out. Not an inch is wasted but there’s nothing cramped about it - just sensible, economic use of space.

Annemarie Lewis Thomas founded MTA in 2009 and based it, amongst everything else which goes on there, at The Drill Hall. Such was her success - she now has over 30 students as she builds towards her eventual maximum of 44 - that she soon had to find premises which the college could call its own.

There are two things I want to tell you about today. And since there is no connection whatever between them I shan’t even attempt one of those spurious and creaky journalistic links.

First, I went last Thursday to Chelmsford High School for Girls to see - at last - Scene Productions’s theatrically riveting version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. My review should be on The Stage website today.

Although Scene Productions creates work which is theatre-friendly and the company is beginning to get bookings in venues patronised by the general public, its core business is theatre in education. Katharine Hurst, who runs the company (with Kelly Taylor-Smith - currently on maternity leave) David Sayers and Stuart Walker had run a two-hour workshop with 17 sixth formers before my arrival. The performance that I saw was, therefore, graced with a very informed and engaged audience.

I’ve looked at signing and ways of making theatre accessible to deaf and blind people in a new light ever since I attended a marvellous LAMDA session on it a couple of years ago. Head of Technical Theatre, Rob Young, is passionate about educating his students in these techniques and the day was a real eye (and ear!) opener in every sense.

Fascinating too, to me at least, is watching signers at work in theatres. Their fluency and theatricality is very compelling and I love the elegance of their body language.

Rumour has it, although I hope desperately that it isn’t true, that some actors and directors dislike the presence of signers, or the activities of visual describers and the like, because they distract from the “real” work on stage. If there’s any truth at all in this then Rob Young is absolutely right: education is the way forward because attitudes have to be changed.

With all this in mind I’m delighted to report that Unicorn Theatre is to present Autism Friendly, Integrated Sign Interpreted, Captioned and Audio Described performances of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen this Christmas. It’s a new version of the story set in India, and runs from Wednesday November 23 to Sunday January 8.

It isn’t often I find myself devoting this blog to The Bible but here I am doing so twice in a fortnight. 2011, the 400th anniversary of the translation of the Bible into English by a group of clerics and scholars commissioned by James I, is just that sort of year.

On Monday I attended press night of Written on the Heart by David Edgar at The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. I wasn’t there to review so I was free to mull on education matters. The intelligent play, under Gregory Doran’s direction, depicts the political and religious tussles amongst the translators torn between Puritanism on one side and ‘Papery’ on the other. The violent Tudor swings between Catholicism and Protestantism are within living memory and the horror of the mid-17th century Civil War is yet to come.

Actually I think the play is rather too wordy to make really outstanding drama and there’s too much informative filling in of the history by characters telling each other things as Edgar — clumsily in places — strives to make sure the historically uninformed members of his audience know what’s going on. The Bush’s 66 Books and The Globe’s readings each make better KJB-related drama.

On the other hand there is much to admire and enjoy.

My copy of Contacts 2012 has just arrived. Amazingly this is the 101st edition and it’s been published by Spotlight since 1947 - that’s 64 years for anyone who’s mathematically challenged. So this is a hardy annual which has clearly stood the test of time to be with us in such strong and useful form today.

Basically, of course, it’s a book, edited by Kate Poynton, of annually updated listings - over 5,000 this time - of companies, services and individuals across all branches of television, stage, film and radio. Thus you can easily turn up contact details for, say costume hire companies, good digs, opera companies, casting directors, rehearsal rooms, theatres, unions and much more. Invaluable, obviously, although as with any directory you need to be aware that things change all the time and this book must have gone to print some weeks or months ago so don’t take all those names, phone numbers and email addresses as gospel. But they’re a handy starting point.

I’ve long regarded theatre itself as a crucial facet in education and it doesn’t always have to be pigeon-holed as “theatre for young audiences”. Learning is, after all, a lifelong process, and children and young people can often get a lot out of work which was not specifically created for them.

Take the marvellous Nutcracker, which I saw, courtesy of Northern Ballet, at the splendid new Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury earlier this week. Yes, it’s such a confection that of course it works well for children and there were quite a few youngsters in the audience including, I was pleased to note, some enthusiastic boys.

On the other hand, it’s timeless and ageless. I know every note of that music and have been familiar with most of the Act 2 set pieces since childhood because Derek McCulloch, aka Uncle Mac, used to play them on Children’s Favourites on the radio on Saturday mornings. And yet I never listen to the full ballet score (as opposed to the suite) or see a production without noticing something new and delicious and learning from it.

I thought David Nixon’s choreography and direction for this production was fresh and original with some really spectacular work in, for example, the Arabian Dance. The whole show was a joy.

I was also pleased to discover from the programme that Northern Ballet is now established in its own new building in Leeds and that its training arm, Northern Ballet Academy, is developing children (some of the mice in the Nutcracker for instance) with talent and ambition as well as offering dance classes for all - from tiny tots to over 55s.

Last week I learned that Drama Centre London, part of Central St Martins and a well established CDS school, had 2,800 applications for the 15 places on its BA Acting course this year. I haven’t researched the other 21 CDS schools for comparable specific stats but I know they are all heavily oversubscribed.

Perhaps applications will drop off slightly next year, as other higher education courses are expecting, when the reality of the £9,000 a year funding dawns. But even if there were a 20% fall - and that’s unlikely - it would still mean 150 applicants chasing each of Drama School London’s 15 places.

I also heard on the grapevine last week that BRIT school in Croydon, which is among other things a comprehensive secondary school for 14-19 year olds, gets 27,000 applications a year.

There is evidently a huge hunger for training out there amongst young people wanting to train as performers.

I therefore find it utterly baffling that Herbert Justice Academy at Elmers End, on the Bromley/Croydon border, has had such difficulty filling its places on its new 3-year full-time Professional Performing Arts Course.