February 2012 Archives

The New Diorama Theatre may be a fringe venue but it is only just north of Euston Road so it’s pretty central and accessible. And, since the departure of resident company Quicksilver last year after the axeing of that group’s ACE funding, director David Byrne has worked indefatigably to put the venue on the map without the specificity of a single resident company.

For a start he’s managing to raise £18,000 from donors and sponsors to support companies. He has, for example, Santander, whose head office is next door, on board for the 2012 season along with British Land and Regent’s Place.

And there’s an impressive range of work in the pipeline coming from NDT’s four associate companies: Idle Motion, Spare Tyre, Third Party and Faction Theatre Co. Shows include Idle Motion’s The Seagull Effect next month and Pell Mell’s Death Song in May but do look at NDT’s website because it’s a full programme and I’ve picked only a couple of examples at random.

Here’s a double-sided education story - as all the best ones are. Not only will the English National Ballet School’s new project provide real training performance for its third-year students, it will also give children, including some very young ones, their first taste of classical ballet.

My First Sleeping Beauty is the first in a series of My first …. ballets performed by ENB2, a new touring company featuring graduating dancers from English National Ballet School. It opens on April 3 at Peacock Theatre with a nationwide tour to follow.

This series follows the success of English National Ballet’s Angelina Ballerina ballets, which reached audiences of over 300,000 across the UK and the world between 2007 and 2009.

“I am firmly convinced that everyone should take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe at least once in their lives…Performing at the Edinburgh makes you a better neighbour, better teacher, better friend, better parent. For a few it even makes them better performers.”

That’s playwright, Mark Ravenhill making a joyfully upbeat case for the transformative power of Edinburgh as a learning experience in the foreword to Mark Fisher’s useful and engaging new book The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide.

This summer thousands of companies, collectively involving at least 21,000 people, will be in Edinburgh to present upwards of 40,000 performances. Youth Theatres, community groups and drama schools will be among them. And there will be a few secondary school teachers leading enthusiastic school and college groups too. Shrewsbury School, for instance, has taken several very successful musicals to the Edinburgh Fringe in recent years. And Milford Haven School wowed Edinburgh Fringe audiences last year with Macbeth which they’d worked on through the Shakespeare Schools Festival. So lots of development and learning for lots of people.

But if you are an Edinburgh virgin you need advice because there are plenty of challenges (such as how to get your audience into double figures or how to get in and out of your venue really slickly) and Mark Fisher’s excellent book takes you right through the whole process.

Fisher, Scottish arts critic and veteran Fringe man, explains how the festival works, who does what and what you have to do to get your show there. He gives down to earth advice about different sorts of show, funding, marketing, transport, accommodation and more with lots of inspiring quotes from people who have done it.

One very sensible recommendation in this ‘can-do’ book is that anyone who is considering the ‘madness’ of Edinburgh should plan well over a year ahead and attend the Fringe as a dummy run or research trip the year before. Otherwise, he contends, you will have little or no idea of the festival’s size and scope. It is, he says ‘the most exhilarating place on earth’ but ‘surprisingly manageable’ if you ‘stay focused and take it one step at a time.’

• The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide by Mark Fisher, Methuen Drama, ISBN 97814081132524

Tech Music School is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Started by French-born drummer Francis Seriau who initially gave lessons in his Acton front room, TMS is now a large, integrated school of rock which teaches drums, vocals, singing, guitar, bass guitar, music business and song writing through a range of degrees and diplomas.

Three new BA (Hons) degrees are due to start this October - a sure sign that TMS is marking its three decades with confidence for the future. They are in Music Production, Music Business and Songwriting.

“Today’s music industry is vastly different place from the pre-Internet landscape and yet the core values of quality songwriting, production skills and sound business acumen remain as intrinsic and valuable as ever,” said principal, Andrew Bates. “I’m very excited about these new degrees, which I believe reflect our continued determination and commitment to remain at the forefront of music education in the UK.”

Last week I saw two shows on consecutive nights. Both packed an educational punch but otherwise they could not have been more different.

First there was Saturday Night, Sondheim’s “lost” and very early “reassembled” musical in RADA’s Vanburgh Jerwood Theatre, performed by its third year acting students. I have to say that, although the piece itself is quite fun, it’s patchy and it’s slow to get going. You can see why it’s never achieved the popularity of, say, Into the Woods or Sweeney Todd. Nonetheless there were some very promising student performances among a strong ensemble.

Molly Gromadski as the initially flighty, but later committed, Helen - with her wonderfully expressive face and comic timing - is one of the most watchable student actors I’ve seen for some time. Taron Egerton - who looks like a young Leonardo di Caprio - matches her well as Gene and Tom Canton’s mastery of comedy and physical theatre multi-roling is terrific.

How much more satisfying it is to see what these young actors can do in a show, after three years of training, rather than being confined to a formulaic showcase. And it was a very pleasant experience to see the spacious Vanburgh Jerwood Theatre, configured in the round for this show, in action.

There’s an all day folk festival, Somerfest, at Halsway Manor, near Crowcombe in Somerset on Saturday April 7.

What catches my eye about this in particular is that it is preceded by a residential week, “Hot House” for young gifted and talented musicians, dancers and artists from the South West. As the daughter of a gifted, semi-professional barn dance musician (my late father, Ken Hillyer, led The Southerners in the 1960s and 70s) I’m all for anything which gets young people interested, and involved, in folk music.

Now here’s some good news.

Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank provides 20,000 free tickets each year to a specially commissioned production at Shakespeare’s Globe and provides in-school workshops, training sessions for teachers at the Globe, and a lively interactive website.

This year’s production is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From February 27, there’s a two-week run on The Globe stage. Directed by Bill Buckhurst, it’s abridged and intended to be a fresh and edgy interpretation to appeal directly to 11 - 16 year olds.

Students from 119 schools from every London Borough will see the production free. Over 70 per cent of London schools have participated in the project since it began in 2007. In five years that has provided over 50,000 school students with tickets worth over £1m.

In addition to the schools’ shows, there will be two public performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at 7pm on Friday, March 2 and at 2pm on Saturday, March 3. Tickets for these performances are free too, but must be booked in advance by contacting the Shakespeare’s Globe box office on 020 7401 9919 when booking opens on Monday, February 20.

This year’s list of patrons includes industry names along with politicians such as Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, Ed Vaizey Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries and Baroness Morris, the former Education Secretary.

Today, I’d like to highlight two shows by talented, aspiring actors — one in a drama school last week and the other the work of a youth theatre later this week.

On Friday I saw that fine Alan Bennett play, The History Boys third year play by half the group, mainly male. The other half of the group, mainly female, present The House of Bernada Alba this week.

As I tweeted in the interval, there was some very impressive work under the direction of Lawrence Evans. I was especially taken with Tom Couch as the exquisitely sensitive Posner, Emma Hook, 22, as the feisty, dry 50-something Mrs Lintott, David Bates as the cheerful and very accomplished piano-playing Lockwood and James Nelson-Joyce as the insolent, pragmatic, charismatic Dakin.

But what struck me most forcibly, just as it did in 2004, is the sheer power of the play itself.

Yes, we have to stop valuing things only if they can be quantified before the statistics-driven education system completely unravels. Bennett makes Hector remark that in any school the biggest enemy of culture is the headmaster. Well, I’ve been in schools where that is not the case, but in far too many cases Bennett is depressingly right.

Thank you to the students of Italia Conti to making me reflect on all this again. The play should be compulsory viewing/reading for all Education Secretaries, ministers and the civil servants who work with them.

A new three-week arts festival opens today in the newly refurbished Old Vic Tunnels beneath Waterloo Station. And as my colleague Mark Shenton tweeted the other day, yes, they’ve even got proper loos:

Also good to see that@OldVicTunnels now have proper toilets! Theatre also warm! But damp & mould still cling to the walls….!

— Mark Shenton (@ShentonStage) February 4, 2012

VAULT, is presented by Heritage Arts and includes theatre, film and music so there’s plenty there to learn for people looking for ‘alternative’ takes, or for young people seeking ‘edgy’ ways into the arts. The programme includes the award-winning Silent Opera, Kindle Theatre’s The Furies, a film programme curated by Hammer and the flicker club.

A year or so ago I interviewed Jo Hawes for the Training page in The Stage about her very successful new (then) masterclasses for children wanting to audition for professional shows. Jo, whom I’ve known for some time, is probably the UK’s best known children’s casting director and administrator having been in this aspect of the business for 17 years on West End shows such as Oliver!, Shrek the Musical, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Sound of Music. Originally a LAMDA-trained stage manager she has worked with many hundreds of children and their parents and has a huge amount of expertise.

When Andrew Walby at Oberon Books read my piece about her masterclasses, in which she disseminates her very well informed advice to children wanting to get into some of these shows, he contacted Jo to see if she’d like to write a book to share her expertise even more widely. I feel, therefore, as if I had a tiny hand in the genesis of Children in Theatre and have been looking forward eagerly to its publication.

Subtitled ‘From the audition to working in professional theatre — a guide for children and their parents’, the book makes a splendid job of debunking many of the mysteries in what, for many parents and children, is a very strange, unknown world. She provides a nice down to earth glossary, for example, explaining very simply the meaning of terms such as “stage right” “read through” and “break a leg.” At the end of the book are examples of audition application forms, an explanation of licensing and some information about the law.

Here’s something different. Could this modus operandi possibly evolve into the way forward in these cash strapped times?

Fourth Monkey Theatre Company is an actor training company led by Steven Green. Based in Muswell Hill in north London’s Borough of Haringey, it claims to take a “wide variety and non-generic approach to learning the acting craft.”

Among Fourth Monkey’s several strands of work is its two-year Rep and Training Programme which costs £15,900 for the two years running from 2012 to 2014. The idea is to give the students a contemporary taste of repertory theatre - an experience lamented by so many as a fine apprenticeship for any actor - alongside classes in voice, singing, stage combat, puppetry, clown ensemble, multifarious ways of acting, lots of workshops and much more.

Redbridge is not a sexy borough. It has neither the deprived-so-we-must-help image of, say Tower Hamlets, nor the prosperous middle class ambience of, for example, Bromley. And my perception is that because of this it tends, rather unfairly, to get overlooked or overshadowed by more clamorous London boroughs.

So I was interested to hear about the good work which goes on at Redbridge Drama Centre - a receiving house, producing theatre and focus for education and community drama-related activities and projects. It also runs youth theatre and other opportunities for young people.

But I am concerned to learn that it’s under threat. Redbridge Council, based at Ilford Town Hall, is proposing to cut £186,000 from RDC’s budget in 2012 and £292,000 the following year. Few members of the Friends of Redbridge Drama Centre, which is campaigning hard, believe that RDC can survive such a loss.

I write all the time about learning in these online columns. That’s the whole point. Education and training is what this blog is about.

Usually, however, I write about other people’s learning. Today I have to tell you about my own. because I can’t remember when I learned so much from a single volume as I have from Michael Pennington’s engaging, absorbing, congenial, informative new book Sweet William, published by Nick Hern Books.

Pennington, who reckons he’s spent 20,000 hours with Shakespeare since first being blown away by Macbeth at the Old Vic when he was 11 years old, has been touring a fine one-man show about Shakespeare called Sweet William for several years. But the book is different. It has time and space to explore the plays and the author’s experience of, and views about, them in leisurely depth, although it never gets boring and always reads like an entertaining chat with a master practitioner.