In The Paper

In this week’s issue of The Stage, you’ll find our special guide to postgraduate training courses, as well as:

• Susan Elkin examines the rise of the purpose-built theatre in schools
• Brian Conway gives a punter’s eye view of what it’s like when a West End star is a no-show
• We preview the National Student Drama Festival
• Sir Alan Ayckbourn talks about returning to work after his recent stroke
• Pianist Bobby Crush talks about how he survive the wane of variety by turning to cruise ship work.

Read on for some previews of the inside pages.

The increasing number of schools building on-site theatres can only be a good thing, says Susan Elkin in this week’s Insight:

At St Swithun’s School in Winchester… the £4.5 million, 600-seat theatre has full theatre lighting, sound and communications systems, along with motorised front curtains and cyclorama. It is a very long way from the homespun amateurishness of the old school hall…

Outside the independent sector, few schools can afford to accommodate something which is just a theatre. It usually has to double as a space for music performance, speech days and even as an exam room. “The job of the designer is to negotiate as many compromises as possible,” says [Theatretech designer Mick] Way.

It’s just a year since Sir Alan Ayckbourn suffered a stroke, but already he’s back in action, directing the complete staging of his Intimate Exchanges series of plays.

I thought just after I’d had the stroke that at least I can write, even if I had to dictate. But funnily enough, the directing side is returning far quicker. Writing, I suddenly realised, is an enormous drain on the resources. I thought, don’t plan to write the new play in a week, which I used to do, leave it a month. I think after a month I’m going to go barmy with it. All those people running around in my head. The reason I wrote them so quickly was to get shot of the characters.

The Stage is available in most branches of WH Smiths and many other leading newsagents every Thursday, priced £1.30. Subscription packages are also available.

Posted by Scott Matthewman at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In this week’s issue of The Stage, you’ll find a special 8-page guide to musical theatre training, more of which below. Also this week:

• Duncan Turner looks at the launch of new national digital radio station theJazz.
• Sylvester McCoy, about to start as the Fool in the RSC’s King Lear, looks back on a career that has spanned “everything except ballet”.
• Liz Thomas previews the weekend’s Eurovision: Making Your Mind Up, with background information on each of the hopeful UK entries.
• Designer Timothy Bird, fresh from winning the Olivier for his designs for Sunday in the Park with George, talks about his new project, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
• Producer Charles Vance on the contribution that amateur theatre has made to the performing arts world.

Read on for some previews of the inside pages…

Our eight-page guide to musical theatre training has lots to offer. Royal Academy of Music headteacher Mary Hammond tells just how vital training is in all areas of entertainment:

“It’s true that you can learn an awful amount on the job, but equally, I think that any kind of training can give you an innate sense of what to do in order to have reserves to fall back on. What I find is that people are working steadily, it’s not difficult to work for four or five years after you leave, it’s having the skill to sustain it.”

Mountview’s head of musical theatre, Paul Sabey, talks about the school’s selection process and the training they provide, while How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? finalist Laura Sicurello talks about life after the show, and how her Mountview MA course in musical theatre is helping her:

Since September, I can’t believe how much I have learnt in such as a short time. I have no doubt about the move that I have made. Just in relation to my singing, I am learning techniques that I was blissfully unaware of before, things I’d never have known without the guidance of these excellent teachers. And I’ve never felt so fit in all my life.

Laura’s fellow finalist (and eventual winner), Connie Fisher, is a Mountview alumna — and we look at what her fellow graduates from the class of 2005 have been up to since.

He’s busy rehearsing to take up the role of the Fool opposite Ian McKellen’s King Lear, but Sylvester McCoy took some time to talk to Jeremy Austin about his career to date, and the approach he’s taking to the character under the directorship of Trevor Nunn.

It’s not quite the comedy relief fool. Every fool has comic relief in it, but this one is a bit nuts. It’s good to be played by someone who has comic baggage about them… For 30 or 40 years, I have been living off comedy and eccentricity, and in a way that’s what you can bring to the fool at the same time as the serious side. It is a great play. You can play on both things and bring them together, so you don’t see any of the joins.

The Stage is available in most branches of WH Smiths and many other leading newsagents every Thursday, priced £1.30. Subscription packages are also available.

Coming up in the next couple of weeks: Guides to postgraduate courses (March 22) and dance training (March 29).

Posted by Scott Matthewman at 3:08 PM | Permalink

In this week’s issue of The Stage:

• Alistair Smith looks at the Conservative Party’s new Arts Task Force
• Sofie Mason asks where the substantial roles for women are in modern theatre writing
• Mhora Samuel of the Theatres Trust argues that directors, producers and performers need to be closely consulted on venue design
• Our annual Summer Schools supplement tells you everything you need to know to find the course that suits your needs
• Director Tim Supple talks about his new production, an Indian-themed version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream now playing tat he Roundhouse.
• Shameless creator Paul Abbott shares his top ten tips for would-be TV writers.
• Actor John Hannah on the latest instalment of ITV’s thriller, Cold Blood.

Read on for some previews of the inside pages…

Sofie Mason, co-founder of OffWestEnd.com, argues in this week’s Insight that an absensce of substantial roles for women in theatre is symptomamtic of a lack of courage in contemporary writing:

[It has] been argued that women’s roles are tougher to write as they are more psychologically complex than men. Whether this is true or not, if drama has the power to explore the complexity and contradictions of human life, then forgetting 50% of the population will inevitably lead to a shallower exploration and we are so much the poorer for it.

The Roundhouse’s new adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream features an all-Indian cast speaking seven languages. Director Tim Supple talks to Nick Smurthwaite about the challenges he faced:

To restrict ourselves to performers who worked only in English would be to miss out on a wealth of different ways of making theatre and telling stories. India is multilingual and whatever else a Shakespeare production might do, it should seek to reflect the time and place in which it is made. Besides, the Indian theatrical traditions were naturally compelling and I found their impact on Shakespeare endlessly fascinating.

Actor John Hannah reprises the role of convicted killer Jake Osbourne in ITV’s chilling drama series, Cold Blood. Despite the dark nature of the material, Hannah insists that he’s able to leave it behind:

Do I take anything of the film home with me? No, even despite the fact that a lot of the material is extremely disturbing, and that, yes, some people have told me they are actually physically rather nauseated by the content of the films. You check it all in as you leave the set each day.

I guess that, as actors, we all have a bit of black humour within us. And police people that I’ve talked to all admit to that too. They tell me that if they didn’t, they’d be driven barmy. They have to crack the ‘bad taste’ gags to carry them through.

The Stage is available from most branches of WH Smith and many other newsagents every Thursday, price £1.30. Alternatively, you can subscribe and receive your copy by post each week.

Posted by Scott Matthewman at 2:52 PM | Permalink