December 2011 Archives

At this time of year I usually find myself thinking back over the Christmas shows I’ve seen during the last month or so and marvelling at the wealth of training - in the widest sense of the word - opportunities they bring.

Of course you don’t stop training/learning when you leave college. In fact, arguably that’s when the real performing arts education starts. So it was interesting to see Bex Roberts, a recent graduate from Royal Academy of Music’s post-grad music theatre course, doing so well in Snow White at Dartford alongside Craig Revel Horwood.

Another one, who stood out for me, was Tramaine Wright, a 2009 graduate from Midlands Academy of Dance and Drama, who shone brightly as a dancer in Peter Pan at Chatham.

Such young professionals - wish I’d been able to see the talented Samantha Hull, recent Musical Theatre Academy graduate as the Bad Fairy in Wakefield too - are getting real opportunities to develop their skills in these shows. And that is one of the reasons panto is important.

One of the many joys of my lovely job is that I get to visit lots of drama schools which gives me plenty of opportunity to talk to drama students and their tutors. And I don’t even have to wait to be asked. I have only to ring a college or school and ask if I can come and - almost always - I am immediately invited and made warmly welcome. It’s a splendid position to be in and I feel very privileged.

Looking back through this year’s diary I see that 2011 has taken me to LAMDA, Herbert Justice Academy, East 15, Guildhall, BSA(http://www.bcu.ac.uk/pme/school-of-acting), RWCMD(http://www.rwcmd.ac.uk/), Drama Centre London(http://www.csm.arts.ac.uk/dramacentrelondon/) and Musical Theatre Academy (MTA) among others. In January I have visits arranged to both ALRAand RADA and there will more during 2012. And that’s in addition of course to numerous showcases and one or two ‘proper’ Drama School shows, although sadly I don’t have time to get to as many of the latter as I’d like to.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing and reviewing a dramatised version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis - in a girls’ grammar school in Chelmsford. The company, which was adeptly and entertainingly demonstrating physical theatre influenced by Berkoff, Brecht and Artaud to A level students, was Scene Productions.

Since then I’ve had a chat with Katharine Hurst, 31. She co-founded Scene Productions - a Wokingham-based company which specialises in taking physical theatre performance into schools - with her business partner, Kelly Taylor-Smith, in 2004.

Hurst went to Goldsmiths College, University of London for a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts. Because the latter proved to be “brilliant for the theory but insufficiently vocational for me” (I’ve lost count, by the way, of the number of times I’ve heard that about university drama courses) she then did a post-graduate year at GSA.

After a year working in the industry as an actress, Hurst conceived the idea for starting her own company over a drink in a pub with her former drama teacher from secondary school, Ron Price. He pointed out that there was a gap in the market for performance of Brechtian plays which schools need for A level students. Price also offered to help with directing.

“It had simply never occurred to me that I could create my own work rather than sit at home waiting for the phone to ring’ says Hurst, pointing out that no one had ever mentioned such a thing at university or drama school.

So Scene Productions was born.

A good play is all about character and relationships. Two playwrights, Annie McCourt and Colin Hume, have won this year’s top prizes in Trinity College London’s International Playwriting Competition aimed at encouraging more plays to be written for young people. And they certainly know a thing or two about character and relationships.

In McCourt’s dark teenage drama Moth to the Flame, her two characters are removed from the comfort zone of modern technology. “I wanted to take them away from mobile phones and the internet and see how they would react,” said McCourt, 47, from County Durham. She is a drama practitioner specialising in applied drama in community and education.

In contrast, Colin Hume’s winning play for younger children, Quest of the Four Princesses, is complete with kings, queens and giants who are quite adept at dialling up for a pizza on their mobile phones, despite the play’s appearing to step out of the pages of a traditional style fairy tale. “Children don’t want just to play children. They like to be fantastic characters,” said Mr Hume, a computer programmer from Hertfordshire. “Most young children love fairy stories. They know the conventions - the wicked giant, castles, princes and princesses. I wanted to create a fairy story with a modern twist, mobile phones included.”

And here, as promised earlier this week, is a bit about the other two books which might make Christmas gifts for performing arts and/or education folk.

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Just Adrian is a collection of the late Adrian Mitchell’s writing, some of it previously unpublished. His wife Celia has edited it, with Daniel Cohen, as a cross between a tribute, an autobiography and a quirky portrait in his own words of a polymath and individualist. Mitchell who died in 2008, wrote many plays over four decades of course. And he worked with RSC, National Theatre and Unicorn. He was also a poet and an activist. As a young man he’d been a journalist.

‘On writing for performance’ is a long interview by Peter Hulton and Alan Read, first published in 1982 as part of the Theatre Papers series. In it, the man who adapted, among other things, The Jungle Book and Robinson Crusoe says - and as a greedy and eclectic guzzler of fiction I find this interesting - that he doesn’t think there is a novel which cannot be adapted as drama provided the novel is good enough.

Tucked in amongst the longer pieces are some tasty fragments: ‘There’s one thing worse than your average rock musical and that’s your average religious rock musical.’ Or ‘I love my wife, who is a fine actress. And I love my children. Freud is up a Gum-Tree with Jehovah.’

Published in the Oberon Masters series, Just Adrian is a slim and elegant book with all the tactile pleasure you don’t get from reading on an e-book reader.

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Second comes a completely different sort of book, but it could work well for any school teacher wanting to develop drama writing in pupils. As a former English teacher I know that teachers are pretty good at encouraging prose fiction writing and poetry is often popular with classes and their teachers as a writing form. But in most schools plays are a Cinderella genre. Perhaps it’s because we write best what we read and few people read plays - they see them performed (if they’re lucky). The only opportunity most school students get to write plays is if they take part in a project run by a theatre company which brings workshop leaders into school.

So Playwriting across the Curriculum by Caroline Jester and Claire Stoneman, published by Routledge, is a useful book. It offers six schemes of work. These include details of how, beyond the English classroom, teachers can use playwriting to further other learning such as health education. It is meant for use with students aged 11-14.

The book refers to schemes such as National Theatre’s New Connections project and the work playwright Fin Kennedy has done at Mulberry School in Tower Hamlets. It uses extracts from plays for young audiences as a stimulus to get students to write their own - helped by devices such as character sheets and graphic organisers. The work is diverse enough to include students with special needs, learning difficulties, or those who are still learning English as a second language - and these are all flagged up. It is also strong on different learning styles and uses the Teacher Effectiveness Enhancement Programme.

Jester is Dramaturg at Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Stoneman is Assistant Headteacher at the Dame Elizabeth Cadbury Technology College, Bournville, Birmingham.

Five more performing arts books with training/learning/development potential have reached me in the last month or so. Just in case you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping and need gifts for young performers, or those who work with them, here is a bit of information about these titles: three today and two on Friday. These three are all play texts.

Thirteen Monologues by Jean Cocteau and Georges Feydeau, translated by Peter Meyer and published by Oberon Books, is the first paperback edition of delicious pieces such as ‘Duet for One Voice’, written by Cocteau for Edith Piaf and first performed by her in 1940. A second Cocteau monologue written for Piaf is included along with five others written as radio pieces for Jean Marais.

Six monologues, all written between 1892 and 1898, by Feydeau include ‘The Schoolboy’ and ‘A Man who Hates Monologues.’ The translations were commissioned for BBC Radio and broadcast in the late 1970s. Richard Briers, for instance, performed ‘A Man who Hates Monologues.’ ‘The Antipodes’ was the work of Eileen Atkins and Timothy West did ‘A Member of the Jury.’ Some fine audition material here.

Second up, from Trentham Books, is Six Plays for Theatre in Education and Youth Theatre by Geoff Gillham. Gillham, who died in 2001, was a well-known figure in theatre in education — at the Cockpit Theatre, for example, and internationally — and a playwright for over thirty years. This is the first publication of his work.

‘Lessons’ - which needs a large cast and runs for two hours - was first performed in 1982 and meant for what we would now call Years 10 and 11. The play asks questions about the nature and purpose of education and needs to be considered against the early 80s background of the Brixton and Toxteth riots and the Falklands War. There’s certainly plenty here to think about.

There is a detailed and enlightening Introduction by David Davis, Professor of Drama in Education at Birmingham University after an upbeat foreword by Edward Bond. Each play is introduced by Chris Cooper, Artistic Director of Big Brum Theatre in Education Company, who has always championed Gillham’s work.

My third choice is another from Oberon Books. Tim Crouch: Plays One gives us four plays: My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND and The Author with an introduction by Professor Stephen Bottoms, Wole Soyinka Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at University of Leeds. It’s innovative stuff and you can only get a whiff from reading the text because Crouch has always performed his own work with a small group of other actors the play requires it.

‘The Author’, for example, makes each audience member an object of scrutiny as four actors work between and amongst two rows of banked seats facing each other. It tells the story of another, very disturbing, fictional play which three characters were involved in and the fourth saw as audience. Shades of Noises Off - except that it’s quite different.

The book is an ideal gift for Tim Crouch fans, for students looking for meaty modern texts to work on or for newcomers to Crouch wanting to explore his interesting work. I bet it won’t be long before I see and hear some of it in drama school student showcases.

Yesterday I saw the new Spotlites show for Christmas and beyond at Kings Theatre in Chatham. Merlin’s Dragon must be at least the 10th Christmas show I’ve seen in this tiny, beamed 1826 building which was probably once part of Chatham Workhouse.

Rachel King, who founded the company about 20 years ago, writes professional shows which are performed by three versatile young professional actors who double and change costumes so fast it’s dazzling. Some, like Merlin’s Dragon are for age 5-12. Others such as The Magic Porridge Pot which opens on December 19 and The Enormous Turnip from December 29 are for age 2-5.

And all these shows are interactive - and that doesn’t just mean a bit of banter with the front row, hurling a few sweets and having an audience singalong. King is now so adept at finding ways of bringing groups of children onto the stage to help drive the story along that she has almost invented a sub-genre of her own.

I have on my desk Stage Lighting: the technicians’ guide by Skip Mort published by Methuen Drama at £19.99.

I can see two main uses for this impressive, on-the-job reference tool, which comes with high quality DVD video resources. First, it gives teachers — who may not know much about lighting — a starting point for school or even college productions. Second, its user-friendly, well-illustrated, tabulated format gives it the potential to be a strong source of practical information for performing arts students at all levels — especially post-16 FE students who might use it as pre-course foundation reading before a specialist HE lighting course.

It covers all aspects of stage lighting, equipment, special effects, lighting a performance space and lighting design. The information, instructions and advice are carefully differentiated at three levels, First there’s ‘A quick start’ which provides basic information. ‘More info’ adds further depth and ‘Extras!’ takes the technical information and data to a more advanced level.

I was recently shown round the splendid education facilities at the Roundhouse at Chalk Farm.

It works with around 3,000 11-25 year olds a year as well as offering several fine performance spaces from the main auditorium to the studio theatre (where I enjoyed and reviewed Tall Stories, Twinkle Twonkle last week) and the cellar-style ‘hub’ at the centre of the building. It’s all a far cry from those decades in which this wonderful former tram shed stood desolate and a bit derelict because no-one quite knew what to do with it.

Huddersfield isn’t a place I visit very often, either actually or virtually. Shame on me, because it is home to an international touring theatre company which devises and delivers visual theatre productions exclusively for primary children and younger years in schools, theatres and festivals.

Tell Tale Hearts is based at Huddersfield’s Lawrence Batley Theatre and this month’s Christmas show is a new version - a participatory adaptation - of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. It runs at Barnsley Civicwhich is also producing it, for the rest of this week until Friday December 9. Then, from next week, there’s a further run at the Lawrence Batley until December 24.

So what makes this production different from other versions of the Snow Queen? The company spent time at Silkstone Primary School in Barnsley running explorative workshops and short “work in progress” theatrical presentations.

It must be the most humbling and inspirational afternoon of my year - and I certainly need plenty of tissues, as earlier this week I attended Stagecoach Theatre Arts Children’s Achievement Awards.

Launched at the House of Commons in 2009, the awards were held this year at Theatre Royal Drury Lane and Dreamworks gave all the winners and their families free tickets for Shrek the Musical in the evening.

Every single winner and runner up was in some sense an unsung hero (or heroine) and a role model for others. Take Megan Bhari, 16 (pictured above, with her mother Jean) who has been ill since she was 13 with fluid on the brain and its many side effects. She will not get better.

Meg, as she likes to be known, has endured 23 operations and, having been unable to attend school for three years, is an enthusiastic Open University student. Among her many achievements is the charity Believe in Magic which she founded five months ago to help seriously ill children from birth to 18. Articulate and persuasive, she is proving to be a very successful fundraiser.

Meg won the StageCoach Theatre Arts Young Citizen Award, presented to her by Shrek the Musical star, Nigel Lindsay.