May 2012 Archives

A project I’m involved in (of which you will hear more in due course) is necessitating my finding out about a wide range of theatre jobs — beyond performing — and how you train for them. And it’s fascinating.

I am, obviously given my own work area, pretty well steeped in training, what it involves and where you go to get it. A kind person even observed the other day that there aren’t many others, if any, linking and writing about education and performing arts in quite the way I do it. But even I hadn’t realised quite what a wide range of access points there are for some of these jobs. So it’s hardly surprising that teenagers, parents, teachers and careers advisers are at best a bit confused and at worst lost in a murky sea of ignorance.

For example, I’ve visited drama schools and talked to costume and wardrobe staff and students. I’ve seen them pattern cutting, chatted to them about their designs, hopes and aspirations. I’ve met apprentices in the workshops of big companies and strolled round almost as many costume repositories as I’ve had Sunday dinners.

But it had never occurred to me that the best basic training for all this, especially if you’re going to specialise, may not be drama school or college — but art school.

Now here’s a bit of good news and something to look forward to.

From 11 June you will be able to access all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets via Apple iPad beautifully performed by actors such as Patrick Stewart, Fiona Shaw and David Tennant. You can see a sample video above (and at the app website). and I must say I’m bowled over by the quality. What a teaching and learning resource.

I was really disappointed not to be able to attend the launch of John Abbot’s new book the other day, having been invited both by his publisher Nick Hern Books and by Arts Educational Schools London where Abbot was, until recently, Head of Acting.

The Acting Book started life, according to the author’s foreword, as a handbook for Arts Ed students. It has now developed into a potted acting course with plenty of practical exercises to help users to practise each technique — a useful resource for actors or trainee actors, obviously, but also for teachers and directors.

I have just discovered Huddersfield-based Dark Horse and it certainly lives up its name. Dark Horse trains disabled actors but it really doesn’t seem - yet - to be very well known nationally. And it deserves to be.

I taught The Merchant of Venice for years as an English literature text, first to O level students and later for GCSE. Few of my English teacher colleagues would touch it because they said that the play was antisemitic and they couldn’t possibly share it with students. They wouldn’t do Henry V either, another play I love and taught a lot because they said it promoted warmongering — which it doesn’t. Fortunately, for them, public examination syllabuses always offer a choice.

So with all this controversy in mind I was delighted to hear that Giles Foreman (of the Giles Foreman Centre for Acting, which I featured in The Stage recently) was directing The Merchant of Venice with his students and hurried off to Chelsea Theatre to see what they’d made of it.

Last week I spent a couple of hours in prison — a first for me. I learned a lot about how the security works, the bleakness of the infrastructure, how pleasant and affable most of the staff are, and — crucially — how much drama can do to help the troubled, low-ebb, edgy people who’ve landed themselves there.

Esther Baker, artistic director of Synergy Theatre Project which specialises in this sort of work, is directing David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross at HMP Brixton. She has a cast of prisoners working with professional actor, Rocky Marshall (Ed Keating in Holby City).

Ackie, her stage manager, is an ex-prisoner whom Baker first worked with when he was still in prison. She has employed him on several projects in the three years since his release and he has also freelanced with other companies.

Last week I saw, and enjoyed, Bridge Theatre Company’s production of Something for the Winter, by Deborah Gearing. It was my first visit to Southwark Playhouse too, so that was memorable as well.

The Bridge Theatre Company comprises a group of 18 and 19 year old actors who have trained at the BRIT school for Performing Arts and Technology, Croydon.

They work for a year with theatre professionals on a single production which tours to venues and festivals during the spring and summer.

On Friday I went to Dukes Hall at the Royal Academy of Music — surely one of the prettiest concert halls in London with its amber and cream decor, chandeliers and oil paintings, not to mention the splendid acoustic.

My purpose was to watch the internationally celebrated Semyon Bychkov rehearse the Academy Concert Orchestra and the work was Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I walked into the hall to the rich sounds of the fourth movement, the adagietto which has become so well known and popular since Visconti’s film Death in Venice and that unforgettable Dirk Bogarde moment.

But of course there are five movements in this marathon of a symphony which takes nearly an hour to play.

It’s pretty unusual to find an acclaimed company of young graduates who first worked together while they were at school and which is now directed by their drama teacher. But that’s how Idle Motion came about. Lyn Gardner of The Guardian described its 2010 show, The Vanishing Horizon, as ‘a little jewel of a show … propelled by real ingenuity.’ My Stage colleague, Lauren Paxman who saw in it Edinburgh deemed it ‘one of the Fringe’s most beautiful, accomplished and innovative physical theatre pieces.’

Paul Slater teaches drama at The Cherwell School in Oxford where the group he refers to as “the girls” were students. Five years ago he took Red Demon, a school student show, to Edinburgh, having raised the money separately so that none of the students had to pay and the experience was totally inclusive. He asked ex-student Kate Stanley, then just coming to the end of the first year of her drama degree at Exeter University, to go with the show as stage manager.

“Standing one day on Waverley Bridge in the rain Kate said that the whole thing had been such fun that we ought to form a company with a few more former students. That was the genesis of Idle Motion.” says Slater who is ten years older than the girls.

Last year I attended a work in progress performance by Filkskit Theatre at New Diorama Theatre where they were completing a research and development week.

I wrote a blog about it the time in which I opined “it’s very encouraging to see young actors founding their own company and creating some truly original, fine quality work.”

Earlier this week the finished version of Snow White played for three Brighton Fringe performances at The Warren - a delightful new venue in the middle of the city, complete with a magical secret garden frequented by greenfinches.

Last week I judged a school student theatre review competition.

It was run by a company which specialises in high quality issues-inspired plays performed mostly in secondary schools. The company had invited teenagers who’d seen a specific production to submit a review for the competition. I was asked to judge from a final shortlist of five.

It was an interesting task which left me reflecting on how reviews should be written — and how you learn to do them.

Everybody knows about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of the great show biz partnership of the 20th century. Far fewer people know, or remember, that Fred Astaire made his name by dancing with his sister Adele until she married Lord Charles Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire in 1932.

Kathleen Riley’s book The Astaires: Fred and Adele, which publishes later this month, tells the story of their development as children and astonishingly successful stage career together, both in the US and in Britain. “The thing that distinguished the Astaires as dancers and as a unified stage presence was sheer likeability, and an almost tangible sense of delight in what they were doing,” observes Riley.

Last week I sat in on a substantial chunk of a voice class at Manchester School of Theatre and found it quite an eye (and ear) opener.

Often when I visit a drama school I am lengthily shown round the building and only get into classes very briefly to say “hello”. That’s always interesting, of course, although I have to say that one drama/dance studio can look very much like another. And I have admired and politely waxed lyrical about hundreds of them in my time.

So it was a welcome - and very enlightening - luxury to observe in a classroom for long enough to find out what the learning is really about.