EXCHANGING BLOWS

Quartet at Chelmsford Cathedral

20.11.09

Wind quartet Exchanging Blows are popular on the lunchtime circuit, but it's been four years since they brought their wide-ranging repertoire to Chelmsford Cathedral.

They began with a breezy Mozart Overture, and ended with an equally sprightly McCartney number: When I'm Sixty-Four.

And the delicious sandwich filling included Bach [a clever arrangement of a movement from the Art of Fugue], an all-too-brief sequence of Byrd's English Dances, and Bechet – Petite Fleur inventively improvised by Pam Campanelli's soprano sax with Jane Sitch at the piano. The other duet was a “macaroni and rich cream” confection: the opening of Mendelssohn's Konzertstuck no 2, with Annie Forrester-Muir and Gail Copsey on clarinets.

The only original piece for saxophone quartet was by the prolific Gordon Jacob; much more interesting, though, was Pam's arrangement of Gavin Whitlock's colourful Celtic Suite, featuring a bewildering variety of instruments.

Moonglow was beautiful, but my favourite this time out was Gershwin's chirpy Nice Work If You Can Get It – nice lunch break too !

BUGSY MALONE

Young Gen in the Civic Theatre

13.11.09

The messiest show in town …

The kids in the audience loved the custard pies, and their high-tech successor the splurge gun, not to mention the soda syphon.

The kids on stage had a good time, too, with some very under-age tipplers in the Book Emporium. Fat Sam himself was played with considerable presence by Callum Crisell, and the title role by Sam Toland, slightly understated, maybe, but with loads of charm. Blousey Brown, the diamond amongst all the paste, was beautifully done by Sophie Walker – her Ordinary Fool number was the vocal highlight of the show for me.

Bart Lambert brought his special brand of sophistication to Dandy Dan, with Alice Masters as the vamp Tallulah. Like the acts auditioning for Oscar de Velt [Luke Higgins], some of the minor roles came and went so quickly that I'd no time to annotate the programme: some of the gang members were excellent in both versions of The Bad Guys Song. A name check for the cops – Henri de Lausun and Oliver Fox – for Martin Williams' Leroy, and for Elliot Elder's touching Fizzy, the dancer whose Tomorrow never comes.

After an evocative overture from Bryan Cass's band, the production began with six silk-clad chanteuses, neatly contrasted with the black frocks for the Speakeasy hoofers. More silk and feathers in Act II, leading up to the super-messy finale. No bullets, no hooch, no blood, of course, in this innocent underworld, just a Sarsaparilla racket and splurge after splurge.

It's twenty years since CYGAMS last gave us this children's Chicago. Fascinating to read in the programme just who was in that earlier show – including Jeremy Tustin, director this time around.

picture by Barrie White-Miller, Spearman Photography

THE CROOKED ROAD

Hutton Players at the Brentwood Theatre

14.11.09

Disabled daughter of a general, Helen Croft [Margaret Goldstone] has fallen on hard times. Reduced to taking in paying guests, she graciously holds out a helping hand to those in need.

But her scrapbook of deserving cases serves a darker purpose – blackmail.

Janet Allen's wordy potboiler [“intensely realistic drama”, say the publishers] premièred in 1958. It is rarely revived.

The Hutton Players' production, directed and designed by Ray Howes, used the space effectively to suggest the large garden, with ingenious sliding gauzes for the changes of scene. There were some fine performances, telling mood shifts, and dramatic confrontations. But not enough to make this old-fashioned piece, redolent of tea-tray matinées and weekly rep, into a worthwhile revival.

William Wells successfully inhabited the complexities of his character, the drug addict who “ finds release from a sadistic, possessive woman in the hardest, most honourable way “ - I quote the blurb again. And I liked Margaret Corry's Rose – a proud and touchingly maternal housekeeper. A little more contrast between Helen and her sister [Chrissie O'Connor] would have helped the drama, but both had their moments – Helen's hospital monologue for example. The below-stairs lovers were pertly played by Claire Hilder and Marc Barnes.

EDUCATING RITA

Greville Players at the Barn Theatre

11.11.09

Celebrating their half-century, the Greville Players continue a much older tradition in the old tithe barn, which once saw Wells, Shaw and Terry on its boards.

This pacy production brought out all the humour and pathos of the strange chemistry between the jaded lecturer, surviving on Scotch, and the gobby hairdresser with a hungry mind, determined to change her life through English Literature.

From the moment she scurried through the auditorium in search of the door to Frank's office and a new beginning, it was clear that this would be a definitive performance from Carol Parradine as the OU student caught between two cultures. Voice, accent, demeanour were all absolutely right for the part – a joy to watch. And she neatly mapped the transformation over the play's many scenes, till she is behind the desk, calling the shots, a success to eclipse Frank's failure.

Adam Thompson's Frank was a lost soul, enthusiastic but unfocused, a reluctant Pygmalion to Rita's latter-day Eliza. I liked the way he became increasingly desperate as his facile teaching techniques were revealed as inadequate faced with a student as individual as Susan, though I imagine him as a little more lined and lived-in … His clothes were unfeasibly natty, I felt.

I liked the trim-phone on the desk; I was less convinced by Frank's certificates and his skivertex books.

This is a didactic play, revisiting themes dear to Willy Russell's heart. As Rita says when she explains her hairdresser's philosophy, change must come from within, and in this play education is the key to that change.

It is thirty years old now, and I'm not sure it updates all that well – I've said before that I'm not convinced that education is seen now as an agent for social change. And the Open University has changed almost beyond recognition over the years.

But a polished revival of an important and entertaining play. Educating Rita was produced for the Greville Players by Jan Ford, and directed by John Richardson.

THE HABIT OF ART

THE HABIT OF ART

Lyttleton Theatre

09.11.09

spoiler alert - this preview review contains quotations and plot detail !

Well, it couldn't have been written by anyone else.

The perennial themes – the insecure outsider, literature, young boys. The trademark recycling - “I saw a bishop with a moustache the other day”: Forty Years On, forty years on – the caller misunderstood: Habeas Corpus – and even “Theatre, magic of ...” recalls Her Big Chance.

The heart of the play, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is the imagined conversation in 1972 between Wystan and Benjie, Auden and Britten. “I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men ...” Britten has called for re-assurance about his new opera, Death in Venice. Peter [Pears] disapproves. Auden is not only encouraging, but alarmingly keen to help, to write the libretto, and takes an editorial pencil to Myfanwy Piper's work. “Aschenbach is me, of course,” he muses, as the rent-boy reclines on the piano stool. Mind-boggling to imagine what that collaborative piece might have been. Auden has similar thoughts - “think what [Richard] Strauss could have done with it ...”. He recalls that Mann was his father-in-law, and the age of the boy Tadzio is discussed - “Mann writes him as 11, your opera has him as 14, you're casting him as 17 – at this rate he'll soon be drawing a pension !” But the passage where the two men relate the plot of the novella, which they both knew well, sounds false, and was one of the few longueurs.

Above Auden's “shit-heap” of a room, Britten's puritanical piano with a wooden chair by it. A rent-boy arrives from the agency. An auditioning treble sings from The Turn of the Screw. Both men, on their different levels, are seeing boys. The spires of Oxford thrust urgently into the sky behind. And surrounding the stage are giant manuscripts, notes.

But this is Caliban's Day, the play we never see. We are in a rehearsal room at the National, and the acting area is surrounded by desks, chairs and bicycles. The treble spends much time tinkering with one of the bikes, presumably not his own, at the back.

The director is absent. So it is up to Kay the Stage Manager – a superbly droll and ultimately tragic Frances de la Tour – and Neil the unwelcome Writer – Elliot Levey, looking not unlike Sher's History Man – to comment on the play and keep things moving.

This device – like the device in Neil's play of having Humphrey Carpenter as narrator – allows Bennett to try things out, consider alternatives, and make jokes at his own expense. Six o'clock strikes in the play, and all desire fades. And at six in the rehearsal room, Fitz [Griffiths/Auden] must go off to voice-over a coffee ad for Tesco. As Auden wrote : Without a watch he would never know when to feel hungry or horny.

An alternative ending is tacked on. Not Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats with The Sea Interlude in the background, but the boy, the outsider, excluded from the literary elite, and departing to the strains of Show Me The Way To Go Home. And then the Stage Manager, also excluded in her way, turning out the lights as she leaves.

The insecure Donald, who plays Carpenter, was beautifully done by Adrian Scarborough – he even got to appear as Carpenter's cross-dressed party piece, Dame Constance Fetlock, singing Douglas Byng's Doris, a Goddess of Wind.

Much fun is had with the pitfalls of working with the author, with the difficulty of learning lines, and with the rehearsal process, complete with prompts and reading in – two actors are off doing Chekhov, so we see Stage Management, and Jennings, filling in as the college servants, the furniture, the famous facial fissures and the children of the artists: their compositions. Some of this writing is dire, presumably satirically so. Elsewhere, though, the fictional playwright has written some superb passages, and here the device seems to fade to let Bennett speak.

It would be interesting to know how the shape of the play developed. At what stage did the rehearsal device appear, or Carpenter. Was the mask for Auden ever a serious possibility ? What difference did the replacement of Gambon make ? And did these two giants, contemplating death at the end of their career, have special resonance for Alan Bennett, who has now outlived them both by ten years or so ?*

"For a long time, years even," Bennett recently wrote, "it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate you do not put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there."

*Alan Bennett answers some of these questions in the London Review of Books

Enter, finally, the real Alan Bennett - Tim Adams in the Observer.

recorded in 2010, screened again in cinemas for the NT's 50th birthday: here are a trailer, plus a brief clip ...