A brief visit to Kirkby Lonsdale

On the last full day of our holiday the weather was pretty grim. It rained all day so, other than going down for an evening meal in one of the pubs, it was a time for, reading, relaxing and doing a bit of tidying.

It was a little brighter the next day as we were loading up the car and we spent half an hour or so doing a little shopping, taking some meat from the local butchers and local cheese home with us.

Driving up to Appleby the previous Friday we could see that there were roadworks on the M6 between Lancaster and Preston and knowing that they were still be there as we drove home we decided that as we weren’t in a hurry to get home that rather than spend an hour sitting in a traffic jam we’d turn off and saunter across country a little. So reaching the turn off for Kirkby Lonsdale, that’s exactly what we did.

We pulled in an parked up on the edge of the small town near the Devil’s Bridge and wandered into town centre with old buildings, stone cottages, cobbled courtyards and narrow alleyways. We had a little mooch around the shops and then made our way towards St Mary’s church.

There’s been a church here since Saxon times but the current building is Norman in origin, although it has been substantially altered over the years, resulting in architectural features from a number of periods.

Norman/Romanesque features include the doorway at the foot of the tower

and three round arches with their associated columns, bulkier than the slender Gothic versions, with a couple of them decorated with diamond shaped carvings , like those in Durham Cathedral.

The other arches are later pointed Gothic style.

The Norman column at the western end of the church has a “Green Man” carved on the capital.

Some nice Victorian stained glass in the lancet windows behind the altar

After looking around the church we walked across the churchyard towards the river. “Ruskin’s View” was cordoned off so we descended down the Radical Steps to the river bank. The steps were built in 1819 by Francis Pearson, a local Liberal. The locals came to call them the Radical Steps on account of his political leanings. There are allegedly 86 stone steps, although we didn’t count them. They were rather steep and uneven and probably easier to go up than down.

The River Lune was running high after all the rain the day before., but we able to make our way along the riverside path

Passing this old house (an old mill, perhaps).

After a short while we reached the Devil’s Bridge, which probably dates from the 12th or 13th century, and is now a scheduled ancient monument. The sun directly behind it didn’t make for a good photo, though.

I did, however, get a decent shot of the Lune from on top of the bridge!

Returning to our car we set off and took the road through pleasant countryside towards Settle, where we stopped to pick up some groceries and a brew and a bite to eat. We then headed back through the scenic Ribble Valley re-joining the M6 at the Tickled Trout. Half an hour later we were back home. It had been good to get away for a short break. The weather had been mixed, but that’s what we expect in Northern England during the Autumn. Nevertheless we’d seen some sights and I’d managed to get up to High Cup Nick on a beautiful sunny day and it’s always good to get the chance to relax and catch up with some reading. Roll on the next break!

A horse……

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

We’d booked tickets for the matinee performance of Richard III at the RSC in Strtatford on the Saturday of the August Bank Holiday weekend. We set off mid morning for the short drive into the town so that we could spend a few hours having a mooch around. Stratford is only a small, albeit pleasant, town  but it’s very pleasant on the waterfront of the Avon, near the RSC theatre building. There was a craft market taking place so we spent some time browsing

before buying ourselves some drinks and a bite to eat. It was a hot, sunny day and it was peasant sitting close to the water.

Afterwards we made our way over to the theatre, where the crowd was beginning to assemble

Built in 1932 the theatre was designed by the then 29-year-old Elisabeth Whitworth Scott, it was the first public building to be designed by a female architect.  There was a major renovation of the theatre at the beginning of the 21st Century. While the facade was retained the inside was gutted and completely rebuilt and there were additions, including the viewing tower and new roof top restaurant. This was the third time I’d seen a production in the theatre (I’ve also seen a performance in the Swan Theatre which is part of the complex). The first visit was with J way before we had children and well before the remodelling, to see a production of Julius Caeser. The auditorium was rather old style with a proscenium arch with seating in three tiers – a traditional stalls, circle and balcony arrangement. Not being so well off at the time we were in the cheap seats up on the upper level in “the Gods” with the stage some way off. During the renovation the facade with it’s Art Deco touches was retained, but the inside was completely gutted and remodelled. It now has a “thrust” stage with seats around on 3 sides and the audience much closer to the stage than previously. The other two productions we’ve seen have been in the the remodelled theatre which re-opened in November 2010. (correction – since writing this I realised that the second visit was when my daughter was 15 or 16 – we went to see MacBeth her GCSE play – so that would have been before the remodelling)

Shakespeare made Richard III to be an outright villain – no doubt to curry favour with the Tudor monarch Elizabeth, who’s grandfather, Henry VII, had defeated Richard at Bosworth to claim the crown. There’s been a reappraisal by some historians following the discovery of his body underneath a carpark in Leicester in September 2012. Being a loyal Lancastrian, I’m having none of that! I’m saying that with tongue in cheek, of course. The truth is the “nobility”, who were all related, were all a bunch of ruthless mafia-like gangsters squabbling for power and inflicting damage on the majority of the population. Nothing changes

So, what of the production? The casting was “colour blind” which may upset some people. But a play isn’t a documentary and the colour of an actor’s skin is irrelevant for this play – we can ignore it and concentrate on their acting.

What we can’t ignore is the disability of Richard III. He is known to have suffered from scoliosis or curvature of the spine (confirmed by the discovery of his skeleton) and Shakespeare portrays him as a hunchback, using this as a metaphor for a twisted personality. In the production we saw he was played by Arthur Hughes, a disabled actor who has a rare condition known as radial dysplasia which means he has a deformed arm. In an interview in the Guardian he tells us

“With me, when I walk out on stage, it’s completely apparent that I have a disability. I can’t hide that. There’s a truth to it immediately, before I’ve even opened my mouth.”

“It’s not to say [able bodied] people can never play these parts. But I think it’s time that we had that lived experience shown properly.”

Guardian

Source: RSC website

He was very good – a strong performance, really hamming it up and portraying Richard as a pantomime villain.

I also particularly liked Kirsty Bushell as Queen Elizabeth, the wife of Edward IV, who is the main female character in the play, Minnie Gale as the vengeful and mad Queen Margaret (wife of the deposed Henry VI) and and Micah Balfour as Lord Hastings – a duplicitous character who supports Richard in his rise to power and then is turned upon and murdered.

Source: RSC website

The victor of Bosworth, Henry Tudor who became Henry VII, comes across as a saintly character. He wasn’t really – in real life he was probably just as ruthless as his predecessor.

The set was simple – with a large reproduction of the London Cenotaph dominating the stage and with very few other props. Much of the atmosphere was created by the lighting with strong highlights and shadows

It’s a long play – 3 hrs 10 mins (including a 20 mins interval) – but the strong performances kept us glued to our seats. The longer first half showing Richard’s ruthless rise to power and the shorter second half portraying his downfall. The final battle scene was simply portrayed, using the ghosts of Richard’s victims, who had visited him before the battle (old Shakespeare loved his ghost scenes to haunt the villains before their downfall – he uses the same trick in MacBeth) to form the horse that Richard loses (“A horse, a horse, my Kingdom for a horse”) and then to act as Henry’s steed as he vanquishes the doomed Richard.

Little Amal comes to Wigan

On a wet and windy afternoon Wigan was privileged to welcome Little Amal to our town. She was almost at the end of her 8,000 km journey from Gaziantep nearthe border of Syria and Turkey to Manchester. On the way she had travelled through Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium before arriving in the UK. After Wigan she will travel to Rochdale and then, on Wednesday, will come to the end of her odyssey in Manchester.

Little Amal is a 3.5 metre puppet by War Horse creators Handspring Puppet Company of a young girl refugee from that troubled and war torn region of the Middle East. Her journey has been undertaken to bring attention to the plight of young refugees forced to risk arduous journeys for the chance at a better life.

The project’s website tells us

Little Amal’s story began in Good Chance Theatre‘s award-winning play, The Jungle. The critically-acclaimed production was based on the stories Good Chance’s founders Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson encountered when they created their first Theatre of Hope in the 2015 Calais refugee camp. Little Amal appeared as a character in The Jungle who represented the hundreds of unaccompanied minors in the Calais camp who were separated from their families.

Walking with Amal website

Sadly, there are many people in this, and other countries who are unsympathetic or even hostile to refugees. They don’t want any “foreigners” or aliens “over here”, despite the horrors taking place in the countries where they have left, for which the UK and other Western countries bear more than a little responsibility.

They don’t understand

no one would put their children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
wants to be beaten
wants to be pitied

Extract from Home by Warsen Shire

As we left home it began to rain – very heavily – and we got drenched walking along the canal to Trencherfield Mill. Little Amal was due to arrive at 3 pm but this was delayed by 30 minutes due to the weather as the rain continued. We were already soaked, so it hardly mattered.

Waiting for Little Amal

Eventually Amal arrived, to be greeted by the Wigan Community choir. She passed through the crowd gathered in the mill yard and stopped to watch a the local WigLe Dance company who performed bravely in the rain.

She was then welcomed by local dignitaries, including The King of the North, Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who used to be MP for nearby Leigh.

Little Amal meets Andy Burnham

She then continued, walking along Pottery Road and Southgate before doubling back along Wallgate to The Edge conference centre for a performance by Manchester Street Poem – an art collective of former homelessness people.

Despite the awful conditions there was an impressive turnout from the people of Wigan braving the elements. Yet we were all wrapped up in raincoats and many with umbrellas. What we experienced was nothing compared to what refugees have to endure.

The spectators clearly enjoyed seeing this impressive puppet. It almost seemed as she was a real person – it seemed as if the puppeteers, although in full view, were not there, which is a credit to both their skill and the work of the people who created Amal.

I hope that they also took away with them an appreciation and some sympathy for the plight of the refugees.

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark

Home by Warsen Shire

A bit of culture

Over the past few weeks we’ve been busy soaking up a bit of culture

The Thursday of my week off work we had tickets for a production at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick. We’d planned to combine that with a lower level walk in the Borrowdale Valley, but plans had to change after J sprained her foot. Luckily she’d recovered enough to have a look around Keswick before a pre-theatre meal in the Fellpack restaurant

Our theatre tickets were for a performance of The Ladykillers, a play based on the 1955 Ealing Comedy a favourite film of mine that starred Alec Guinness, Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers. The play is based on the film, not the other way round and it had first been produced back in 2011 at Liverpool Playhouse, starring Peter Capaldi.

The plot followed that of the film, with a few differences. As with previous visits to the Theatre by the Lake we enjoyed the production. Is was well acted, particularly Dominic Gately as the Professor, who brought a real comic touch to the role. Devesh Kishore wasn’t as sinister as Herbert Lom as Louis – who could be – but I thought Luke Murphy made more of the part of Harry than Peter Sellers.

This week the weather mid week has been awful with heavy rain (we didn’t get it anywhere near as bad a further east and south, mind). We had tickets for two events – a play at the Royal Exchange on Wednesday and a musical performance at the Halle’s small venue in Ancoats on Thursday so we braved the rain and drove into Manchester two days on the trot.

Another pre-theatre meal, this time at Mowgli’s in the Corn Exchange

Light Falls a new play by Simon Stephens, with music by Jarvis Cocker, at the Royal Exchange, has had good reviews and was almost sold out, even on a wet Wednesday evening.

Connecting five relatives in five disparate English towns, from Blackpool to Durham, LIGHT FALLS is a richly layered play about life in the face of death, about how our love survives us after we’ve gone – and about how family, community and kindness help the North survive.

Royal Exchange website

As with just about everything we’ve seen at the Royal Exchange it was a good production with some excellent performances by the cast. Mind you, the first half in particular really lived up to the saying that “it’s grim up north”. It started by somebody dying before moving round the north of England to “visit” her husband and offspring who all had their own problems. Things resolved themselves a little at the end at the funeral and the ending was a little more optimistic.

Thursday evening and we were back in Manchester to see a performance by a young Polish pianist Hania Rani ( short for Raniszewska) at the Halle St Michaels venue, a converted church, in Ancoats. I’d come across her via Spotify, which has a “Discover Weekly” feature, where tracks are suggested based on your playlists. One week it had included one of her piano pieces from her recently released LP, Esja, and as I liked it I followed the link and explored the LP and some of her other music, including her LP with cellist Dobrawa Czocher.

Looking at Hania’s website I spotted that she was performing in Manchester at the start of a European tour so decided to get along. I had to buy the tickets online and was surprised to see that the start time was given as 7 p.m., which seemed rather early. Turned out that it was! We arrived in Manchester just after 6, parked up and walked across the city centre and Northern Quarter towards Ancoats, stopping off for a drink in a bar. We arrived at the venue at about quarter to 7 to discover that they were still conducting sound checks and that the doors were not due to open at 7:30. An apology would have been nice but the guy on the door seemed indignant that we’d turned up early (as had other people). So, a little dischuffed, we went back to the Northern Quarter for another drink.

I really enjoyed the concert, though. It’s a small venue, rather like the Liverpool Philharmonic’s “Music Room”, but it was pretty full. Hania played a fairly long set – about an hour and 20 minutes, without a break. I recognised many of the pieces from her LP but she also included a number of other pieces including 3 songs.

Hania is originally from Gadansk but now shares her time in Warsaw and Berlin. Her label, Gondwana Records, is Manchester based, which is why her tour was starting there. I think that her style is best described as minimalist classical – rather like the music of Michael Nyman, Philip Glass and Max Richter – with jazz and other influences.

Here’s a couple of her pieces, both from her LP

and here’s a piece performed with Dobrawa Czocher

There is a light that never goes out

“When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government” ― Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

Last Saturday we went over to Manchester to see a matinee performance of the current play at The Royal Exchange. The theme of There is a light that never goes out : scenes from the Luddite rebellion is given away in the title – it’s about the Luddites, based on events in Westhoughton (only a few miles from where I’m writing this) and Manchester in 1812.

Luddite is used as a derogative term these days – for people seemingly opposed to progress. But in the early 19th century progress and new technology was putting people out of work, driving down living standards and forcing men, women and children into working long hours at backbreaking work in the new factories and mills. Ordinary working people were powerless – they didn’t have the vote – so the only way they had to strike back was with violence directed at the source of their oppression – the factories and the machinery they contained.

The play is based on factual material – newspaper articles, police reports and eyewitness accounts – studied by the authors and cast. So the story is told from the perspective of the participants – the workers themselves and, also, one of the factory owners who agitated for reform – for the employers but certainly not the workers.

It’s a modern production so isn’t a straight story told scene by scene like a historical drama on TV or in the cinema. The cast take several roles, costumes and props are minimal and music and lighting are used to create the atmosphere and the noise of the factory. The actors speak the words of the workers, but there’s improvisation too using modern language and slang.

The Royal Exchange itself (the building, that is) also features in the play – a protest meeting held there on 8 April 1812, turned into a riot.

Ultimately the Luddites were defeated and they were viciously suppressed by a brutal state. Their cause was, essentially hopeless, as it was impossible for them to stop the march of technology. However, in Manchester and the nearby towns, the spark of rebellion wasn’t extinguished. And neither was the brutality of the state. Only 7 years later, on Monday 16 August 1819, a mass meeting of workers demanding Parliamentary reform, held on Peters Field in Manchester was attacked by cavalry of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry with sabres drawn. 18 people were killed and 400–700 were injured. A massacre that became known as Peterloo. Another defeat for the workers, but struggles continued and eventually their demands were realised. But it took a long time and wasn’t achieved without many other struggles. It wasn’t given to us on a plate.

There’s a lot of events taking place in Manchester at the moment commemorating Peterloo – the play is part of that, I guess in that it celebrates Manchester radicalism. Before the play we called into Manchester City Art Gallery and had a look round the exhibition Get Together and Get Things Done which explores

with people the wider theme of the crowd through international historic and contemporary art and group activity, looking at how an art gallery can be shaped by the crowds that use them.

One of the photographs on display was of a Chartist rally on Kennington Common London in 1848 when people were still campaigning for the more or less the same demands being advocated at Peterloo, 29 years later.

I was struck by this print, produced by L’Atelier Populaire during the 1968 events in Paris.

Today we are faced with a similar problem as in the 19th Century – the rampant charge of new technology. Is history repeating itself? How will people, and governments, respond?

The Industrial Revolution was the original Northern Powerhouse, but not everyone bought into the future it promised. Angry workers smashed the new machines and were written off as enemies of progress. Their 19th-century complaint, that bosses were using technology as an excuse to beat down the workers, resonates now more strongly than ever.

Royal Exchange website

The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe

Last week I was back down in London with work. I had a consultancy assignment on the Wednesday so traveled down Tuesday afternoon. Rather than spend the night in my budget hotel room I decided to see if I could get a ticket for the theatre. I’d never been to the reconstructed Globe on the South Bank and managed to get a seat for the production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Getting a seat was important for me. As a reconstruction of an Elizabethan theatre, most of the patrons have to stand in the area before the stage, just like the Elizabethan “groundlings”. But at my age I didn’t fancy standing for over 2 hours.

The play is a comedy – a rather bawdy farce, in fact. The main character, Sir John Falstaff, was played by an actor from Salford, Pearce Quigley , who I’ve seen many times on TV and who played the father in Mike Leigh’s film, Peterloo.

The structure and layout of the Globe means that it’s easy for the actors to interact with the audience. And they certainly did during this play. I wouldn’t have liked to have been stood too close to the left hand of the stage last Tuesday!

Although, being a too serious type of person (according to my family!) I usually would plumb for a tragedy rather than a comedy, but I enjoyed the production. The cast were very good, The production was light-hearted and there were plenty of laughs. Pearce Quigly was excellent in the role of Falstaff and his comic timing was pretty much perfect. For parts of the play I could have been watching Monty Python as Richard Katz, in his role as the French Doctor Caius, with a comical accent could quite easily have been mistaken for one of the French knights from Monty Python’s Holy Grail.

After the play, leaving the theatre, I had a good view over the City of London.

It was a balmy evening so I walked back to my hotel, clocking up a few more miles towards my 1000 mile challenge target.

All in all a good evening and certainly better than sitting working or watcjing the TV in my hotel room

“The Duchess of Malfi” at the Swan Theatre

On the Monday evening during my stay in Stratford I managed to get tickets for the RSC’s production of The Duchess of Malfi in the Swan Theatre. There were no performances of the current show in the main theatre (Macbeth, with Christopher Ecclestone) that week but I  wasn’t disappointed as I had an enjoyable evening along with an Australian friend who was over for the conference.

The Swan is, like the Globe on the Southbank in London, a recreation of an Elizabethan / Jacobean theatre. In this case it’s u-shaped with a “thrust stage” surrounded on 3 sides, with stalls and two galleries.

The play was is a Jacobean tragedy by English dramatist John Webster and was written in in 1612/13. The blurb on the RSC’s website summed up the plot

A defiant woman is destroyed by her corrupt brothers in this violent revenge tragedy, full of dark humour.

The production had some modern twists –  modern dress, gymnastic dancing and some modern songs and started with the lead actress, Joan Iyiola, dragging a large animal carcass on to the stage. It stayed there, but it’s significance only became apparent in the second half.

Joan Iyiola was a powerful and very sexy duchess and I thought that Nicolas Tennant as the self serving Bosola was also very good.

After the interval, occupants of the front rows, where the seats are below stage level, were given blankets to cover their clothing and shoes. The reason became apparent early in the second half when the carcass was cut and began to leak blood – symbolising the brutality of the story where the Duchess’ brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal, have their sister murdered for marrying outside her class

By the end of the play the whole stage was covered with blood. And being a Jacobean tragedy all of the major actors lay dead on the floor, drenched with the red liquid.

Othello at the Abbey

When working away from home and staying in a hotel for five nights, like this week, it’s good to get out of my hotel room. So on Tuesday I booked a ticket to see the latest production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The Abbey, which opened on 27 December 1904, styles itself the National Theatre of Ireland. It’s located in the Centre of Dublin on the north bank of the Liffey in Lower Abbey Street. Traffic during the evening is always busy in Dublin, especially along the Quays. But roadworks due to the building of the new extension to the Luas tramline required a diversion in congested traffic to reach the Irish Life car park I intended to use. So the journey was more unpleasant than usual.

It’s 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare, and in celebration the Abbey’s latest production is one of his well known plays, Othello. Although I knew the general gist of the plot, it wasn’t a play I was particularly familiar with, so it was going into it with a relatively open mind. However, being a Tragedy there was a good bet that the main characters were going to end up dead.

As during previous visits to the Abbey, I enjoyed the evening. It was a modern dress production with the characters speaking in a variety of Irish twangs. Except for Othello, that is, who spoke in a distinctive West African accent. There were some strong performances, particularly Marty Rea as a sly Iago. He spoke in a Northern Irish accent and looked rather like a young Gerry Adams.

I also enjoyed the performances by Karen Ardiff as Armelia and Gavin Fullam as Roderigo. Peter Macon was a powerful Othello, if a little bombastic, and Rebecca O’Mara was an attractive Desdemona.

Othello is brought down by the “green eyed monster”, his jealousy, engineered by Iago who was motivated, no doubt, by racism. I wasn’t entirely convinced by how easily he was able to manipulate Othello and induce his jealousy. I guess that’s a weakness of the plot, partly due to the inevitable time limitations, but I’m not sure that the production got this completely right.

Despite this reservation it was an enjoyable evening, and a much easier drive back to the Naas.

Husbands and Sons at the Royal Exchange

They say it’s grim up north, but it’s miserable in the East Midlands, at least that’s the picture D H Lawrence paints in the three plays that were performed simultaneously in the latest production by the Royal Exchange in Manchester.

Lawrence is best known for his novels such as Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover set in the Nottinghamshire coalfields where he grew up. But he was also a playwright. The Royal Exchange have taken three of his plays, A Collier’s Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Daughter-in-Law, and combined them into a single production. All three are domestic dramas set in the homes of mining families, in communities similar to that in which Lawrence grew up.

The Royal Exchange is a “theatre in the round” where the audience is close to the action. For this production the set took us inside the homes of the three families with plans for their houses marked out on the floor. The three plays were, in effect played simultaneously with the action interwoven, flitting from one home to the other in turn. However, when the action was taking place in one household, the actors in the other parts of the set weren’t still. Movement and domestic actions continued in the background. Personally I found this somewhat distracting. And although the set was meant to portray neighbouring houses in a mining village, there was little attempt at interaction between the three families. The production still largely came across as three seperate plays stitched togethor somewhat unconvincingly. One of the defining characteristics of mining villages was their sense of community and this was missing here.

As usual with the Royal Exchange the acting was extremely good. Anne-Marie Duff, well known from TV, is featured in the advertisments for the production and plays the female lead in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd gave a strong performance. Martin Marquez, as her husband, was a convincing drunkard. However, I was particularly impressed with Julia Ford who played the wife of a miner in A Collier’s Friday Night, who favoured her son over her daughter and husband. The son, like Lawrence, was a college boy and the play echoes the theme of Sons and Lovers. One quibble. I know quite a few people from the East Midlands and I have to say that the majority of the actors’ attempts at a Nottinghamshire / Derbyshire accent were far off the mark.

I’ve never been able to finish a D H Lawrence novel. I’ve tried, but I dislike his writing style and his themes. And these plays were not unlike his novels. Men are men and are hard, cruel and unsympathetic. His women are strong but badly treated by their men folk. Life is hard with little to smile about. Everyone is miserable. Lawrence’s work is about individuals who are doomed to a life of gloom and misery. There is no sense of the strong community and fellowship that was characteristic of mining areas. Little to suggest the determination to fight back. There is talk of a strike in The Daughter-in-Law, but the main emphasis is the domestic strife between the wife, her husband and her mother in law. No sign of the good things of life. It can’t be denied that life was hard in mining communities in the early 20th Century. However, there were little rays of sunshine that could bring joy and some happiness to the lives of the miners and their families. But not according to D H Lawrence.

So something of a “curate’s egg”. Largely unsympathetic characters and, for me, an unrealistic portrayal of traditional mining communities. But strong performances by an excellent cast.

Posted with Blogsy

Lady of the Lake

The Theatre by the Lake in Keswick “does exactly what it says on the tin” – it’s a repertory theatre situated close to the northern lake shore of Derwent Water.  It opened in 1999 with funding from an Arts Council Lottery Fund Grant. It has a main auditorium and a Studio theatre. From May to November every year a resident company of up to 14 actors perform a Summer Season of six plays in repertory.

(Picture source; Visit Cumbria website)

We’ve thought about going to see a play there while we’ve been on holiday in the Lake District, but, for various reasons, haven’t been able to to. But during our recent break in Keswick we got tickets to see their production of The Lady of the Lake by a young playwright, Benjamin Askew, in the Studio Theatre.

Studio performances in theatres are usually devoted to new and/or experimental works. And this was the premiere of the first play by, Benjamin Askew who is originally from the Ribble Valley in Lancashire and who spent childhood holidays in the Lake District.

The playwright builds on the Cumbrian take on the legend of King Arthur. There are claims that Penrith is the location of the Round Table and that  his sword, Excaliber, was found in and returned to  Lake Bassenthwaithe. Some have even suggested that Carlisle was the location of Camelot.

The play locates Avalon, a pagan realm, in Cumbria, ruled over by the Lady of the Lake. Arthur and his men, faced with a Saxon invasion, have retreated to Carlisle. This is the seeing for a tale involving a conflict between pagans and Christianity, pagan ritual, incest and ambition and a struggle for power.

(Picture source: Theatre by the Lake website)

There was a cast of seven, relatively large for a Studio production. I thought the two young female performers, Charlotte Mulliner (Nimue) and Emily Tucker (Morgan), were very good, and there was a strong performance by Ben Ingles as the psychopathic warrior Owain.

The “Game of Thrones” and other series set in a mythical or semi-mythical Dark Ages have become very popular on TV and this play rather reminded me of them. I also saw some similarities with the Simon Armitage versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey which we’ve seen in recent years at the Royal Exchange and Liverpool Everyman.

The play was, perhaps, overlong and a little over the top, especially during the second half. The plot got a little over-complicated too, at times. So Benjamin Askew still needs to work on his craft. But overall an enjoyable evening.