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.

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

Stratford-upon-Avon. A walk along the river

A couple of weeks ago I was in Stratford-upon-Avon for the annual conference of the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS). The conference started on the Tuesday but as I was running a professional development course the day before, I’d travelled over on Sunday afternoon. Although it turned hot and sunny in the middle of the week, Sunday afternoon was rather grey and showery but it brightened up later in the day, so after my evening meal I decided to get out for a stroll. Stratford is only a small, albeit pleasant, town and the obvious place for a walk was along the River Avon.

I crossed the river over to the “left bank”

and then passed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on the opposite side of the river.  Built in 1932 it 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

There were plenty of swans swimming on the river

A little further downstream I passed the Holy Trinity church on the opposite bank.

Further on there was a footbridge and I crossed over to the right bank, now following the river upstream.

I passed the Holy Trinity Church, getting a closer view of the church where Shakespeare was baptised and buried.

It won’t have looked like this when Shakespeare was around, mind. Although some older stonework was visible it has the look of a Victorian neo-Gothic building, due to its restoration in 1836-7 and 1839-41.  I only found out later that Shakespeare is buried here, so, sadly, although I walked through the graveyard I didn’t visit his grave.

Carrying on I walked through the RSC gardens where there was a pavilion which had images of actors from performances at the theatre.

A little further along I reached the back of the RSC building, with a view of the Swan Theatre

Walking along the river side to the front of  the building I could see the bridge I’d crossed at the start of my walk. The sun was starting to set and the light was fading, but it was a pleasant evening and I felt like walking further, so I turned around and re-traced my steps, circumnavigating the river in the opposite direction.

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.

Romeo and Juliet at Blackwell

While we were on holiday up in the Lake District, the London based Globe Theatre’s touring company were performing Romeo and Juliet in the garden at Blackwell on three consecutive evenings, organised in conjunction with the Bowness based Old Laundry Theatre . We decided we’d like to and see it as we weren’t staying too far away.

As we’d left booking tickets to rather late the performances on the Monday and Tuesday were fully booked but we managed to get tickets for the Wednesday. This ended up working out quite well for us. The booking website was clear that the performance would go ahead in all but the most extreme weather conditions. So we made sure we had our waterproofs with us. Luckily, we didn’t need them. Although it had rained for the first two evening the Wednesday performance started in bright sunshine and it stayed dry. However, the temperature wasn’t so warm, especially as the sun began to go down, and we needed to wrap up well. The lamb stew and coffee we bought helped to keep us warm as well.  The setting, by the side of the house with views of Windermere, Grizedale forest and the Coniston Fells was familiar to us due to our regular visits to Blackwell, but magnificent none the less.

The play was performed by a small company of only 8 actors most (in fact, all except the two leads) had to play multiple roles, differentiated by their costumes and clever use of regional accents. They performed on a “double decker” mobile stage, very useful for the famous balcony scene but also cleverly used throughout the play. Its design was based on those used by Elizabethan companies, when most plays were performed by travelling players.

I’ve never seen Romeo and Juliet before – either on stage or the films made of it – and never read or studied the text. But the plot was familiar to me, so there were no major surprises. I thought the ending was a little weak. The warring clans were rather quick to make up after the deaths of the two lovers, but hey, who am I to criticise the Bard!

The company pulled the humour out of the play, more so than most productions (I was told!) and there was effective use of music too. The play started and finished with the actors playing instruments and singing and music and other sound effects were used to enhance the mood throughout the performance. The two main roles were played by young actors – Juliet was only meant to be 14 after all. I thought they did well. There were strong performances from Sarah Higgins as the nurse (with a broad Scottish accent) Matt Doherty as Tybalt, Paris and a Geordie servant, Tom Kanji as Benvolio and Friar Laurence and Stephen Elder as Juliet’s father.  The latter was particularly good in the scene where he insists that Juliet marries Paris, seamlessly going from the loving father to enraged dictator.

The performance finished as it was turning dark and we had a 30 minute journey back down the country roads to our cottage.

All in all an enjoyable evening.

Hamlet at the Royal Exchange

I’m a bit late getting round to writing this up, but a couple of weeks ago we went to see the latest production at the Royal exchange – Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s most well known plays. I’ve never seen a production of the play before and only had a sketchy knowledge of the plot as it wasn’t one of our set plays when I was a school. I knew that Hamlet was the Prince of Denmark, but the Royal Exchange had well known local actress Maxine Peake playing the lead role. She played the part as a man, though. However there were a few gender changes in the cast – Ophelia’s father had become her mother, one half of Rosencratz and Guildersterm was female as were the two gravediggers. These changes, increasing the number of female roles, didn’t seem to affect the story although, so I’ve been told, there were some omissions from the story with no mention of the war with Norway and Fortinbras, the King of Norway didn’t appear at the end to claim the crown when (spoiler alert!!!!) all the main characters had killed each other (or themselves). The latter was no surprise really, it was a Shakespeare tragedy after all.

The production is pretty much a sell out. We couldn’t get the tickets we wanted for a Saturday, our usual night for the theatre, so we had to settle for Tuesday night which meant going over to Manchester straight from work. I got something to eat before the play and as it was a long production I had a dash to the car park to make sure I was able to pay the discounted price –it goes back to the normal exorbitant cost after 5 hours. I made it with a few minutes to spare and would have been quite annoyed if I had to missed the deadline by just a few minutes. The charge would have more than doubled from the £5 discounted cost for theatregoers.

As usual a great production with an excellent cast. Barbara Marten, who was recently on TV in The Mill as Gertrude, John Shrapnel as Claudius were particularly strong. But the star was Maxine Peake. It’s not the first time a woman has played Hamlet – that honour probably goes to Sarah Bernhardt. But Maxine put her own stamp on the role. She played it as a man,nt a woman, and came across as a very convincing young man. Mad as a hatter, I thought, but was he?

Twelfth Night at the Everyman

It’s a while since we’ve been to see a production at the Liverpool Everyman theatre. For the last two years it would have been difficult as the buidling has been completely demolished and rebuilt. It reopened a few weeks ago and the first play was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The run finished on 5th April but we managed to catch it a few weeks ago. And very good it was too.

An excellent production with some outstanding performances. Mathew Kelly as ‘Toby Belch’ was extremely good as was Nick Woodeson as “Malvolio”, Adam Keast as the pompous as “Sir Andrew Aguecheek” and Paul Duckworth whose performance as “Feste” reminded me of Lilly Savage. But the cast as a whole were very good.

I wasn’t familiar with the story of Twelfth Night – my study of Shakespeare at school concentrated on tragedies and history plays, except for Midsummer. Night’s Dream we didn’t study any of the comedies. Janice knew the play but I told her not to tell me anything so I could experience it afresh. And. I enjoyed it very much. The beginning was little contrived. I couldn’t understand why Viola wanted to dress as a man. But that didn’t really matter. It was a device.

The production was excellent right from the beginning with Viola and the Sea. Captain appearing on stage through a pool of water. A very dramatic entrance. The main comedy scenes were extremely well done. They were funny. Slapstick, with excellent timing by the team of actors. And some improvisation too. At one point they brought out a trolley of cakes and jellies and started dishing them out to the front row. They also involved one of the ushers in the scene who ended up with a custard pie in her face (I spoke to her at the interval and she told me she wasn’t expecting that). The improvisation occurred when one of the audience put a couple of empty jelly cases back onto the trolley. Suddenly the actor playing Malvonio (well known TV actor Nick Woodeson) pointed at him and shouted "leave those jellies alone" and the other members of the cast then played along. Excellent!

After the applause at the end the cast came back on and started to dance around the stage in a choreographed routine with the audience all joining in by clapping along. This routine lasted for several minutes and finished with balloons and party streamers descending from the ceiling. Then it all ended. No one actor singled out for particular applause as is usually the case, but a recognition that this was an ensemble piece. Very democratic and very right too.