April 2012 Archives

On Friday I mentioned next month’s TakeOver Festival at York Theatre Royal in which a group of under 26 year olds do just that — take over the theatre for three weeks.

Here’s another example of a similar learning experience in London.

From May 31 to June 3 — which means it could be something to do over the part of the long Jubilee weekend if you’re looking for shows to see — students of Central School of Speech & Drama and their mentors are to mount the Accidental Festival at the Round House. This is the Festival’s 7th year.

The Accidental Festival, which is commendably international, is devised by the 21 students on Central’s BA Theatre Practice: Performance Arts course acting as producers.

Earlier this week I blogged about Evan Placey’s play Holloway Jones, produced by Synergy Theatre Project, with which he has won Theatre Centre’s 2012 Brian Way award.

Now I understand from Forward Theatre Project, an associate company of Paines Plough, that Placey has another play, Scarberia, coming up next month (May 24-June 2) at York Theatre Royal. It is part of the rather inspired TakeOver Festival, now in its third year.

TakeOver is a scheme in which every role at York Theatre Royal is taken over by young people under 26 years old who are then mentored by their equivalent staff member. The outcome is a three week youth-run arts festival.

This year Forward Theatre Project has collaborated with TakeOver to run a residency through which they have created a new piece of theatre specifically for an under 26 audience in York - Placey’s Scarberia.

A few weeks ago I was grumpily alleging — mostly via Twitter — that, under its new director, Purni Morell, Unicorn Theatre was about to sell seriously short the young audiences for which it was created.

Well, I was wrong. And I apologise both to Morell and to her colleagues at Unicorn for saying otherwise.

I was, for example, pretty taken, a couple of weeks ago with The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth — Unicorn at its scary, heart-warming, thoughtful, empathetic best for primary school age children.

Since then, Hull Truck’s touring production of DNA by Dennis Kelly for ages 12+, which I have not seen, runs at Unicorn until this Saturday and seems to have gone very well. My colleague Aleks Sierz, who reviewed it for [The Stage] http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/35158/dna) at The Rose, Kingston in February certainly found it enjoyable.

And now, opening next week, there’s a Greeks season. Quite an original idea for a children’s theatre.

On Thursday I attended Theatre Centre’s Brian Way Award presentation. Last year I was one of the judges, so I feel a real affinity with this splendid prize, which is awarded to the best play for children and young people professionally produced or commissioned and performed in 2011-2012.

I was thrilled about the winning entry too — although, of course all five shortlisted plays were worthy contenders.

Evan Placey (above right) won the 2012 Brian Way Award for his play Holloway Jones commissioned by Synergy Theatre Project. Last year’s winner Keith Saha (above left, with Theatre Centre’s artistic director Natalie Wilson) presented him with a cheque for £6,000 at the Shoreditch Town Hall, London where the ceremony took place.

I sat in on a rehearsal for Holloway Jones last year at Riverside Studios where Synergy is based. In a feature for The Stage I looked at the company’s marvellous, ground breaking work in prisons and with recently released prisoners - some of whom were involved with the Holloway Jones production which then played at Unicorn Theatre. I met Evan Placey and the cast too, and interviewed Synergy’s director Esther Baker, who also directed Holloway Jones, in depth for Teaching Drama magazine.

It’s been a bit of a week for classical music education.

First, not quite my usual thing, on Monday I went to London’s best known gay nightclub, Heaven, for a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by RC Theatre Productions. And it was certainly an education for me.

The marvellous thing about this gay revamp of Don Giovanni is that at the heart of the 1980s story and promenade, unseated (I played the dignity card and got allocated one on a balcony) audience is a 10 piece live classical band under Colin Pettet and Mozart’s sublime music. What an inspired way of bringing opera to new audiences. People present seemed to be a healthy, if incongruous mix, if I may stereotype for a moment, of earnest opera buffs and night clubbers.

I am often asked — face to face, by email or letter, via Twitter — how innocents new to the world of performing arts training can tell the difference between a good vocational training provider and a rip-off. It is a matter which alarms most perspective students and, of course, their supportive but anxious parents.

So, if you want to be “industry ready” at the end of your training here is a checklist of six questions to ask and points to bear in mind which might help and save you some expensive mistakes.

Last week I had the pleasure - and it really was - of seeing the New Diorama’s first in-house production. The Dark Room is a sinister, funny 21st century reworking of — really a response to — Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Aturo Ui.

Written and directed by David Byrne, artistic director at New Diorama, this satire on dictatorship and the rise of Hitler is set in a modern comprehensive school.

Last year the Royal Opera House launched its first Youth Opera Company. It made its debut in May last year in a specially commissioned new work called Beginners by composer Richard Taylor and librettist Jane Buckler. There was also a newly devised piece that included a number of opera choruses written for young voices. Drowning in Imagination was created by Karen Gillingham and Suzi Zumpe and arranged by Richard Taylor. The Company was led by co-artistic directors David Stevenson and Karen Gillingham and vocal director Suzi Zumpe and their performance was conducted by Steven Moore, a former member of the Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists Programme.

Now, the company is about to perform on the main stage as a children’s chorus in La Bohème which opens on April 30. My colleague, Nick Smurthwaite, wrote a detailed feature about this in last week’s The Stage (April 5, page 14), having dropped in on a rehearsal.

Many of the new series of Stage Events training sessions have been very successful. But, alas, How To Fund Your Training, which I was due to lead last week, could not go ahead.

However, some who had signed up for the half-day session contacted me direct to tell me how disappointed they were because they really need information about this tricky matter.

So - in order to help them and anyone else who is interested - here is the gist of what I had planned to say.

Whenever I prepare and edit a supplement for The Stage in which I refer to different training providers, I know that within a few days there will be aggrieved letters and emails from the ones which didn’t get a mention.

The Postgraduate Training Supplement which was published on March 22 was no exception. It brought me a letter from Peter Craze, principal of Drama Studio London who also sent me his prospectus. No, I’ve not been there. Yes, the work looks pretty good - especially the one year programme which has been running for over 25 years. But this is the first communication I have ever had from DSL so it has, I admit, tended to slip under my radar.

The truth, of course is that there are hundreds of training providers, some of them outstanding and others, arguably too many, very poor. Although many of them clamour very persistently for my attention, I would need to write a very large book even to list them all. There is no way every provider - even the good ones - can be mentioned in every short supplement. As editor I have to make editorial choices. That’s what editors do.

And so, as promised last week, to those other new performing arts books in my desk corner pile. Easter weekend could be a useful time to enjoy or learn from a few of them.

First up is the fourth edition of Writing Comedy by my colleague at The Stage John ‘Dear John’ Byrne. Published by Bloomsbury in the Writing Handbooks series the book is both practical and funny. First he discusses whether you can learn to write comedy from a book (yes, of course you can or he wouldn’t have bothered to write it), before taking the reader through basic joke writing, comedy routines, different sorts of comedy and then - because this is John Byrne and career management is one of his great strengths - how to organise and develop your career as a comedy writer. It’s full of excellent advice including, at the end, a resource kit to get you started by listing, for example, comedians to study and organisations to consult.

Theatretrain, which provides part-time performance education and experience for 3,500 children and young people, has a landmark anniversary coming up. In May/June it will be 20 years since the founding of Theatretrain by Kevin Dowsett, who still runs the company.

Today Theatretrain has over 70 franchised centres across England. It also has two in Wales, one in Ireland and one in Australia. More franchises are available and Theatretrain is always keen to hear from people interested in starting their own centres.

Both the shows I saw last week were ‘educational’ in different ways.

It’s always a pleasure to go to the sparkly new Marlowe Theatre at Canterbury and I was glad of the opportunity to see a full length Propeller production because although I have interviewed the company’s artistic director Edward Hall I had previously seen only his excellent ‘pocket’ productions which use reduced text for young audiences.

So last week I took myself to Propeller’s Henry V. It’s a play I taught to A Level English students for many years so I know it very well and love it dearly - although trite exam questions such as ‘Is Henry an ideal king?’ irritated me a lot. I would tell students tartly that the answer is ‘That depends on the directorial interpretation in the production,’ and that they should then go on to discuss the different versions they’d seen and studied. And I always made sure that they had at least three or four live performances and films under their belts. This is, of course, not the approach most English examiners expect but nearly all my lot got high grades, so I suppose it worked.