What has influenced your thinking around the production?

I think a big thing which has influenced my thinking on the production has been about what a forest is and what it represents. I did a lot of reading into the way forests function and the societal behaviour of trees. I was quite determined not to have any trees on stage, mainly because everybody kept asking me how are you going to do the trees?!

But actually, when you look into trees and their behaviour, they’re extraordinary. There’s a network of roots in a forest, so all the trees are connected to each other. If one tree is struggling then other trees who have enough, will send nutrients to try and save that other tree through the root system, regardless of species.  They believe – it sounds ridiculous(!) – the success of the forest depends on the success of every single tree within that forest.  I took that as a metaphor for society, and what Shakespeare is asking us to think about as audience members watching this play, especially right now in a time of increased borders and a rise of – you could say – nationalism, and concern with ourselves.

In the play there’s a marked difference between the restrictive world of the court and the forest.  In our version of the play the audience will represent the trees. When the play reaches the forest scenes, the actors will be able to see the audience, whereas they didn’t have access to them during the court scenes.  The forest world is a world where we can interact and communicate with each other.

You have said this production was all about putting the ‘you’ in As You Like It – can you tell us a bit about what you mean by that and how will this be reflected in the staging?

I think putting the ‘You’ in As You Like It is something that Shakespeare has done with this play – he’s constantly playing with the relationship between the actors and the audience, and lots of the characters in the play go between being characters, being spectators, being actors – he’s referring to the act of theatre constantly (“All the world’s a stage”). And so I think Shakespeare is asking us as theatre-makers to reconsider our relationship to the audience, making the audience feel that their presence in the theatre matters, that it changes what we’re doing. And they can be directly involved with what’s happening on the stage – so we’re really embracing that with the production.

I think it’s also reflected in the actors that are part of this show, and the other two plays that are part of the same season.  We want the acting company to reflect the nation in all its diversity.  This play was written at a time when society was becoming more diverse, and the play itself is about celebrating and embracing difference.

What are your current thoughts on the style of the production? Can you give us any early insights into the process?

I’m not setting the play in a particular time or place.  It doesn’t feel like a play which needs a certain period setting. And I’m very aware as a director of not choosing a setting which restricts the play, and that only tells one aspect of the play so I always look for the approach and the framework that allows all of the play to live.

In many ways the play is a massive exploration of theatre itself.  So there will be elements of panto, live music, stand-up comedy on stage.  And there will be audience interaction, political debate and improvisation.

Although everyone will look and feel very modern, we’ll be using a real mingle-mangle of costumes from different productions, and will be playing with different genres, different times, different periods.  It’s going to be a real mish-mash that celebrates the art of theatre making.

Would you say As You Like It is as much about ‘finding yourself’ as ‘getting lost’?

I think sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. But Shakespeare isn’t asking us to get lost in order to just get lost – that would be pointless. He’s asking us to break down some of our barriers and to think outside of the boxes that we’ve put ourselves in, or that society has put us in.  And he puts the responsibility on the human being to do that for one’s self. I think the play is about the potential for change in humanity, and for us to be able to change the world we must first change ourselves and embrace other sides of ourselves.

We understand that this production features one of the most ambitious props and set elements ever created by the RSC’s production teams. Can you explain a little bit about where the idea for ‘Hymen’ came about?

Hymen is the god of marriage, which will be represented by a very large prop/puppet We have to believe in this God and yet, God is not a tangible thing. God is a leap of imagination, so how do we get 1000 audience members to take that leap in their imaginations and believe in this God? All of the actors will be involved in the scene in which Hymen appears – it will be a communal act, to give the sense of coming together and believing in a God or in something bigger than ourselves.

The role of Rosalind has been described as ‘the female Hamlet’ and is credited with more lines than any other female Shakespearean character. Was this something that attracted you to the play?

Yes absolutely!  I was attracted to a woman who is working out who she is as the play unfolds. I think sometimes with Shakespeare’s women, it feels like they already know who they are. Or that their internal life isn’t really the thing that Shakespeare is exploring in the play. With Rosalind it’s completely different. She changes her mind all the time, and she changes her mind with us, with the audience.

She talks about this magician, this uncle magician, who she’s conversed with since the age of 3, and Lucy Phelps, who is playing the role, and I have talked a lot about who on earth this magician is. We feel that this magician is inside of all of us, representing the potential for change and to be different people.  The play is really all about Rosalind having a conversation with herself to find a way to contentment, and that’s not easy.  Sometimes you have to crawl through the dirt to get to the diamond. 

Many well known actors have played Rosalind for the RSC, including Peggy Aschroft, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins, Juliet Stevenson, and more recently, Katy Stephens and Pippa Nixon. What do you think Lucy Phelps will bring to the role?

Ah, Lucy Phelps! I think Lucy is relentlessly intelligent and rigorous in what she as an actress and as a woman wants from the world, and she does all of that with generosity and with the most infectious spirit.  I think you have to have both of those things to play Rosalind. And that’s something that she has very, very naturally.

Lucy’s never satisfied as an artist.  She’s always digging, she’s always chipping away.  But if you chip, chip, chip away in rehearsal, and then walk on stage and you’ve stopped chipping because you’ve decided what it is, then you’ve lost Rosalind – whereas Lucy has the bravery as an actress, to keep discovering… to keep searching…  

What do you hope audiences will take away from this production? 

I would like for the audience to take away a new relationship with their own ‘magician’.  To feel able to explore the possibility and potential of change, especially right now, with all of the uncertainty in this country and Europe and the rest of the world.  To feel that change is possible, and that change can come from working together, learning from each other and from being more honest.  Being brave enough to jump off the cliff into the unknown.

If you were given the chance to escape to the forest, what three things would you take with you?

My dog, Plato.

My husband.

And a really good walking stick!

Now it’s time to visit Canterbury’s The Malthouse Theatre. This fresh new production from Matthew Townshend Productions moves forward in time to the year 1958, and the scene is set with period decoration and includes songs written and produced exclusively for the production by upcoming musicians Ben Goble with JS and the Lockerbillies.

The classic comic love story is the tale of a Salford cobbler with three unruly daughters that owes more than a little to King Lear and Cinderella. The daughters work in the shop unpaid, whilst Hobson (John D Collins) spends his time drinking with the fellow members of the masons at the Moonrakers pub. It’s music that keeps the girls inspired, but soon forthright and spiky eldest daughter Maggie (Becky Hoyle) has had enough and breaks free. The younger sisters Vickey (Chloe Carrington) and Alice (Marie Kemp) have the opportunity to make their own escape – but family ties and expectations run deep.

Debts, relationships, family feuds and success are all explored in this pacy and vibrant adaptation that remains faithful to the original script even as it updates it. Marriage is the only option – a Hobson’s choice, meaning no choice at all – for these women, modern as they are. Cutting through generations, it shows that in family life, some stories never get old – and some things never change.

It’s interesting to see a play moved to a more modern period, but one that still isn’t contemporary to the audience. Layers of historical interpretation build up, and its clear how relevant the themes are to whatever time period they are played in. Rebellion of young generation against parental expectations, gender norms and restrictions, and class issues make it as universal and relevant as when first produced in wartime London in 1916. Austerity is a flavour from the 1880s through to 1950s and today.

The sense that change is coming is well articulated, with the sisters believing that dance and music and rock’n’roll is the sign of something new. Interspersing each scene with some rock’n’roll dancing is great fun, and keeps the energy up. Their choices may be limited, but the delivery of this play means that the audience never feel constricted or bored.

It’s a brilliant show, with just the right mix of entertainment and thought provoking exploration.

The Malthouse Theatre, based at King’s School, opened earlier this year, after a 28 million scheme converting the Victorian-built Malthouse into a performance and rehearsal space. It’s a great space, with the audience at the level of the stage, so feeling very much ‘in the action.’

Developed in direct response to the growing number of teenagers in the UK struggling with their mental health, Crowded tells the story of ordinary young people whose anxiety, depression and desire leads to harmful and destructive behaviours.

Giving voice to emotions that are often unspoken due to social stigma, Crowded is a powerful, funny and uncompromising story, presented in a striking, immersive spoken word style with the audience part of the action. It is written and performed by three inspiring poet performers: Desree, Laura Rae and Slam the Poet, with additional text by Rosemary Harris.

I caught up with Slam the Poet to find out more.

Why did you decide to write Crowded?

We wanted to tell a story of mental wellbeing that could give multiple, diverse perspectives simultaneously. So often stories are so single-minded! And can easily focus on tragic, clinical scenarios. We wanted a story that could more flexibly adapt itself to the very varying realities of people’s minds.

What does the medium of spoken word offer?

For me, a unique opportunity to explore the sonic qualities of words, their percussions and harmonies. Other artists have notes on a keyboard, and the performing poet has their words. I love manipulating language to make it expressive in more ways than dictionary definitions can contain

It’s an immersive show, with the audience as part of the action – what impact does this have?

Well, we haven’t started touring yet, so we’ll have to wait and see! But for me, that is part of the point. With an immersive show, the audience are there with you in the action, not 10m away in a dark seating area. The unique & changing nature of each performance will challenge us to give it freshly each time, and hopefully that will allow audience members to feel deeply involved in the stories.

The writing of Crowded was a collaborative effort – what was this process like?

Mostly, collaboration happened in plotting our narrative. We were given a lot of freedom over our characters and their individual paths, which we wrote quite independently of each other. Then there was lots of work with Rosemary Harris, our dramaturg and mentor, to help weave it together as a cohesive piece of theatre.

What do you hope audiences take away from the show?

I hope it does something to normalise the storms that can spark in our heads on a daily basis. Minds are unpredictable, childish and wild things! But we feel so much pressure to control them. Hopefully this will help people reflect on how they might do better by letting themselves feel what they feel, and not adding the extra stress of judging it as right or wrong.

]]> https://andsoshethinks.co.uk/crowded-spoken-word-and-mental-health-drama/feed/ 0 https://andsoshethinks.co.uk/a-taste-of-honey-at-the-marlowe-theatre/ https://andsoshethinks.co.uk/a-taste-of-honey-at-the-marlowe-theatre/#respond Fri, 04 Oct 2019 19:09:02 +0000 https://andsoshethinks.wordpress.com/?p=9945 Shelagh Delaney was only 19 when she wrote A Taste of Honey, first staged in 1958. She’d been to see a dull play in Manchester by Terence Rattigan and felt she could do better. She sent it to Joan Littlewood, along with a note explaining that she was something of a theatre novice, but had left feeling that ‘I had discovered something that meant more to me than myself.’

That’s what great theatre should do. Take you outside of yourself. Provide you meaning. Make your reconsider things. As excellent as the National Theatre’s new adaptation of the seminal drama is, no doubt its an impact that was felt far more keenly back in the 1950s and 1960s. After all, A Taste of Honey features a single mother, an unwed pregnant girl, a gay best friend, and a black sailor. Racy stuff indeed.

Bijan Sheibani’s production for the National Theatre was first produced at the Lyttelton Theatre in 2014 and is designed by Hildegard Bechtler with sound design from Ian Dickinson, composition from Benjamin Kwasi Burrell, lighting design by Paul Anderson and movement from Aline David. It’s currently on tour around the UK – and stopped off at Canterbury’s The Marlowe Theatre.

Jazz oozes out of the stage, smokily set. Helen (played by Jodie Prenger) enjoys her alcohol that ‘consoles from life’ as she tries to muddle through a life that hasn’t been fair to her and her daughter Jo (Gemma Dobson). She has ‘wear and tear on her soul’ and finds solace in the bottle and with men, and warns Jo that it’s ‘work or want in your future.’ She might seem to throw herself at any man who comes to the door, seeking marriage, but that’s all that was out there for women of her generation. Jo’s pregnancy puts her in a difficult situation as an unmarried woman, but the baby makes her feel important.

The prose is sparky and witty, and there are some great one liners. We’re invited into the moody living room of the women, although the large stage doesn’t convey the claustrophobia of the living situation . The songs from a three piece jazz band are well placed, and add to the rhythm of the play, punctuating it perfectly.

It might have been the eve of the time when everything changed alongside Larkin, Lady Chatterley, and The Beatles, but this was no liberal society. Yet Delaney aimed to make socially inclusive theatre that challenged boundaries.

Perhaps the reason that this show, as good as it was, didn’t hit home very hard is because we are far more liberal than back in the 1950s – even in today’s shadow of intolerances. The punchy impact that would have been seen on that stage at The Theatre Royal, Stratford, in 1958, just can’t resonate in the same way in 2019.

That’s not to take away from what Delaney did. She created a powerful piece of theatre at a time when the boys’ club still ruled, working class women didn’t have a voice, and gritty life in Salford didn’t belong on the stage. A Taste of Honey changed the theatre landscape. And for that reason it deserves to be seen, decades later.

‘Fiction holds up a better mirror to the world than any list of facts’ says Mary. We see her adding in characters, musing on themes, deciding on plot twists, and creating the story that we are all so familiar with today. She roams the stage in a long leather coat, wielding her pen, reader to inflict drama and damage.

It’s a horror tale, but one that deals with so much more, such as the place of women, revolutionary spirit, what it means to be a creator, and personal responsibility. Mary asks outright ‘What are we? What is nature?’ Mary’s conscience is tussled by all of these issues, as her novel plays out behind her, sometimes taking over and causing her to query ‘is it real or is it a story I write?’ She’s funny, and wry, connecting with the audience through short and sharp asides. ‘Now that was a proper deathbed scene,’ she boasts. ‘You’re welcome.’

The stage is stark, off white, and chilling, acting just as well as the icescapes of the Arctic as the library of Frankenstein’s family. Eerie and provactive, it’s the perfect place for a psychological drama to unfold. The monster (Michael Moreland) is out for murderous revenge, and capers around with speed and ferocity as he seeks to harm. There’s always more to discover in the world, and Dr Victor Frankenstein’s (Ben Castle-Gibb) pioneering spirit comes across well. He’s an avid and ferocious learner, just like Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron were, without whom the novel would never have been written.

The actors double and even triple up, which can get a bit confusing, especially in such a fast paced production. The audience needed to know the story before attending – this is not a place to come to cold.

It is a story that has been told and retold in hundreds of different versions since it was first written, but at its heart is a rebellious and potent statement from a young author. ‘This is the story of a man facing up to his own creation,’ says Mary, early on in the play. It’s testament to her abilities that over 200 years later we are still exploring this issue through Frankenstein. This meta textual version is a great way to do that.

The production is touring until the end of November. It is directed by Patricia Benecke, with composition and sound design by Simon Slater, lighting design by Grant Anderson and designed by Becky Minto.

Delaney wrote it in just ten days after seeing Terence Rattigan’s Variation of a Theme at the Opera House in Manchester and believing she could do better. Covering relationships, female strength, families and more, it’s a bold and vibrant play that still remains relevant today. Despite being sixty years old, it’s a seminal piece of work with many themes and aspects that still ring true.

The National Theatre production sees Bijan Sheibani (Barber Shop Chronicles), directing Jodie Prenger (Oliver!, One Man, Two Guvnors, Abigail’s Party UK tour) as Helen in this new production.

This exciting week-long programme of live arts events, fringe activities and happenings around town is an opportunity to showcase creativity and arts in the local area, through unique and exclusive experiences.

What’s on?

There will be interactive street theatre and dance performances in Park Mall, all to interact with the community and provide events and an atmosphere in Ashford town centre. Bootworks Theatre will perform We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat, which is a show for small-town communities, about small-town communities. You’ll see Comedy Cavemen, a posse of Palaeolithic cavemen characters causing mischief and spreading an environmental message.

You’ll be able to see street art created by great local artists. Create your own art with The Open Air Drawing-Room a drawing group offering some landscape painting. Each artist (audience member) also makes a Cyanotype portrait which will be exhibited as a mirror image to the final painting – A Sea of Faces – embracing JMW Turner’s pioneering interest in photography and his desire to find new ways to embrace art. This project invites the public to engage in setting the world record for a painting that has been created by the largest number of artists – which is pretty exciting!

Circus will come to the streets, you can see performance poets in pubs, and there will even be a spoof version of JAWS outside the Picturehouse cinema. Frantic features spectacular acrobatics and dance-theatre, choreographed around a wheel, with a hidden water system for a joyous finale danced in pouring rain. CONFiCo present JOiNT, a playful and curious piece exploring the interplay between individuality, commonality and the body’s facility. Acrobatics, globe walking, dead celebrities, French finesse, trumpeting and mime mayhem make L’Hotel an enchanting show to delight the audience. For kids there’s Tutu Trouble, an exciting original new physical theatre show for children.

At Revelation Ashford, there will be live DJ sets by Huey Morgan from Fun Lovin’ Criminals and BBC 6 Music and Terry Hall of The Specials, warming up festival goers with their music and sounds.

Mr Harper’s Birthday Party

In December 1911 George Harper made an anonymous offer to present the Hubert Fountain to Victoria Park. So as well as all the above, there will be a Victorian-themed Mr. Harper’s Birthday Partyfamily fun day on Sunday 21 July, which acknowledges and celebrates his gift, with games, arts, workshops and music – and the traditional birthday cake races.

Why host Create Platform?

It’s all part of an effort to make Ashford a creative place to be beyond just the Create weekend. “It is really important for the growth of Create, as well as Ashford’s cultural offer, to extend beyond the one big day in the park,” says Chris Dixon, Arts & Cultural Industries Manager at Ashford Borough Council.  “The introduction of Create Platform three years ago has allowed for more opportunities for local artists, as well as generated broader engagement from audiences, venues, and sponsors.”

Originally published on the Create Festival blog.

Kate Wasserberg and Out of Joint Theatre have now revived Dunbar’s play for the #MeToo era, and it seems highly relevant. Grooming, discrimination, money, relationships, power – it’s all there.

So whilst Rita, Sue and Bob Too is informed by Dunbar’s own experiences, it’s not an autobiographical play. It was also never intended to be a piece of social comment. But what she has done very well is observe some of the nuances of living life on an estate and brought them to life.

As well as questions of consent and sex, the play raises important issues around class. These young girls are so vulnerable because they live in a society that tells them they have no future, bar finding a boyfriend. They can be groomed because they have nothing else to be.

That’s what makes the classic textbook grooming of Bob (James Atherton) so apparently simple. A married man, he is pretending to drive Rita (Taj Atwal) and Sue (Gemma Dobson) home, and starts a fling with both of them. They feel in control and flattered, but really are being used. Atwal and Dobson are bold and believable as 15 year old girls, perfectly encapsulating that desperate need to be seen as an adult whilst being innocent. What we ask of our teenagers is complex and demanding – they’re still children, yet in cases like this, we demand agency. With an unpromising future ahead of them though, what do we expect.

The writing is tough and spirited. In fact, despite dealing with complex issues, it’s really funny. The wickedly acute observation delivers startling insight and raises many questions. A fantastic production.

The play is currently on tour, including a visit to The Marlowe, Canterbury.