THE WINTER'S TALE

THE WINTER'S TALE

Shakespeare's Globe at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

30.03.16


One of the four “late romances” staged in the Indoor Jacobean Playhouse this winter – Dominic Dromgoole's farewell to Shakespeare's Globe.
A sad tale's best for winter, Mamilius reminds us, and there is sorrow in Michael Longhurst's sumptuous production, but there's passion and humour too, and a warm glow to match the candlelight.
The space is exploited to the maximum – actors and musicians all over the stage and spilling into the auditorium. Garlands for the shearing, bright light for Bohemia, but stygian gloom for Leontes' court and the marauding bear.
Insanely jealous Leontes is played by John Light, his obsessive rage melting into grief and regret. Rachel Stirling is his Hermione, coolly regal with flashes of wit and passion. Tia Bannon makes an excellent Perdita – on both sides of the 16 year interval [nicely narrated by Sam Cox's ancient shepherd], and Niamh Cusack is a feisty Paulina.
James Garnon, a regular on the Globe stages, extracts every ounce of humour from Autolycus, with what sounds like a banjolele in his hand. The music is a constant presence, Simon Slater the composer, with a versatile band in the gallery, led by Stephen Bentley-Klein on violin.

ORCHESTRA OF THE SWAN

ORCHESTRA OF THE SWAN

M&G Concert at the Civic Theatre

02.04.16

The Swan, as in Avon. This ambitious chamber band is based in Shakespeare's Stratford, and will be playing there on the Bard's Birthday later this month.
For the last of this season's M&G Civic Concerts, they brought with them three pieces from Italy, and three from England. And a superstar soloist, the guitarist Craig Ogden.
Vivaldi's Guitar Concerto in the first half – full of fun and sunshine, with eloquent conversations in the beautiful Largo between Ogden and Nick Stringfellow's agile cello.
After the interval, Malcolm Arnold's Guitar Concerto, first played in 1959 by Arnold's friend Julian Bream, to whom it is dedicated. Witty dialogue between orchestra and soloist, a lovely big tune, and emotional intensity in the extended slow movement, inspired by the legendary Django Rheinhardt.
Superb musicianship from Ogden in both, and one of the best pre-concert talks we've had here, in which he revealed trade secrets with sandpaper and ping-pong balls.
The orchestra rounded the evening off with a brisk Simple Symphony [Britten], and also included a luscious Crisantemi [Puccini] and a Pergolesi Concertino to start, showcasing the Orchestra's rich, burnished string tone.

A bonus Elegy, from Ireland's Downland Suite, which features on the Swan's new CD.

HENRY V

HENRY V
Antic Disposition at 
Middle Temple Hall
30.03.2016

for The Reviews Hub

This unique staging premièred last year in the Temple Church. Now, before setting off on a tour of English Cathedrals, it's moved round the corner to the equally evocative Middle Temple Hall, one of the very few performance spaces still in use that Shakespeare himself would have known.

It is a powerful and timely adaptation. It blends the Bard with Housman, Shakespeare 400 with Antic Disposition's 10th birthday, the Great War with Agincourt, fought over the same fields of Northern France 500 years earlier.

In this Elizabethan auditorium, it's an intimate, minimalist experience. Munition crates for furniture, ration cans for crowns, Croix Rouge cardboard mitres, bandages for tennis balls. Set in a field hospital, it begins stunningly with glimpses of frenzied activity in the wood-panelled corridors outside as the wounded are rushed in for treatment. At such close quarters, there's no room for artifice; the costumes and the performances are all totally convincing.

The central concept – that a mixed ward of French and British soldiers collaborate to mount a production of Henry V – is very strong, bringing fresh insights into the play: not only the nationality thing, but the thankless, unsung role of the Poor Bloody Infantry in both conflicts.

The Chorus's prologue – there'll be much work for our “imaginary forces” in the next two hours – is shared between the two camps. The traverse staging often reminds us of the gulf between, “fire answers fire” …

A superb company of actors from both sides of the Channel. Freddie Stewart makes a compelling, very youthful, king – mischievous with the glove, thrillingly inspired in the Breach scene – wonderfully staged – and caught up in his own oratory in the Band of Brothers speech.
Amongst a uniformly excellent company, James Lavender, reminiscent of Bairnsfather's Old Bill, begins as an awkward amateur actor [the Salic Law survives the scissors] and is also a marvellous Pistol. His wife, Mistress Quickly, is touchingly done by Louise Templeton, who also gives a superbly bilingual Alice, waiting woman to Floriane Andersen's engaging, amusing Katherine. One of the most moving moments comes just before the interval, when James Murfitt's Bardolph, about to be shot for looting, confuses the theatre with the grim reality of the trenches and suffers a total breakdown. The King calls him by his name - “It's not real ...”, the nurses try to calm him, the company gathers round to sing Housman's White in the Moon.
The Shropshire Lad settings by Butterworth, killed in action in 1916, were one of the inspirations for this production. The Lads In Their Hundreds is sung in the original, the rest newly set by composer Christopher Peake, at the upright in the performance. They are a constant reminder of the futility of war, from the jaunty, jingoistic Leave Your Home Behind Lads, to I Hear The Bugle Blow as the men stand restless – greyhounds in the slips – till the whistle sends them over the top.
And at the end, the Lads in Their Hundreds again, bitterly barked out as the men are recalled to the front. “The lads who will die in their glory and never be old.” The play is done, the actors have muttered modest congratulations, the French and English march their separate ways, and the two women are left alone, Nurse Katherine still clutching her bridal bouquet of poppies.

Production Photograph by Scott Rylander

A MUSICAL SEQUENCE FOR HOLY WEEK

A MUSICAL SEQUENCE FOR HOLY WEEK

London Concord Singers at St Botolph's Bishopsgate

23.03.16

for Remote Goat

A journey through Holy Week – varied scenery, and some spectacular views along the way.

None more so than James MacMillan's Tenebrae Responsories. A long way from the more familiar Renaissance polyphony, though Gesualdo's ghost is sometimes to be heard. Written ten years ago, it is a mighty challenge to any choir, the chromatic descending phrases in particular. But the Concord Singers, under their new conductor Jessica Norton, tackled it boldly, and brought out the dramatic, descriptive strengths of the piece as well as its moving religious power. MacMillan relates the crucifixion with humming, a crisp attack for “Deus Meus” and ornamented chant, including an effective one-woman recessional from soloist Rowena Wells.

Drama, too, in Bach's Jesu, Meine Freude, in the triple defiance of the “Trotz”.

The beautifully balanced sound of the Concord Singers, with a pleasantly resonant bass section, was heard to excellent effect in Gabriel Jackson's O Sacrum Convivium, and John Tavener's much-loved The Lamb, both very simple works at heart, as Ms Norton pointed out in her enthusiastic and informative introduction.

Robert Hugill, one of the choir's tenors, contributed a contemplative setting of the Resurrexi, with a repeated Alleluia motif.

A much more joyful Hallelujah at the end of the journey: Handel's setting sounding fresh and clear in this a cappella performance – a splendid climax to a typically eclectic programme.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND
Eastern Angles at the Village Hall, Purleigh
18.03.2016
for The Reviews Hub

“Somewhere in England” - that's as precise as the wartime censors will allow. But we're in Suffolk, most probably – Horham is mentioned – and this is another fascinating piece of social history acted out under East Anglian skies.
Polly Wiseman's powerful play tells of the experience of Joe Turner, a black GI who spends much of the war supporting the bomber pilots of the USAAF. He enjoys fraternising with the locals, a pint in the pub. But encounters with a woman, a girl and a prejudiced airman bring imprisonment and the threat of worse.
The drama uses seven characters – four actors – to represent a spectrum of views. It uses a simple traverse staging, a few crates, corrugated iron and bunting, to pit honesty against hatred, patriotism against freedom. At first sight, the British seem more tolerant, more liberal than the segregated US forces. 
Viv, a land girl from London with a fiancé in the Merchant Navy, is chatted up by smooth-talking Chester, a suave pilot, but falls in love with Joe, encouraged by precocious 15-year-old Ginny, a local girl hoping to join the Sixth Form of the Grammar School. Amid the tensions and the traumas of warfare, relations between these four people become hopelessly, violently entangled. The knife Viv wears in her garter, the possibility of a “mongrel” baby, the constant presence of death stoke the fires of prejudice.
In the second half, we meet a journalist for Tribune, a titled lady from the WVS who will use any means to discourage inter-racial affairs - “the only victims are the offspring...”, and the fascinating historical figure of Walter White, a man of mixed race, who, as we would say today, identified as black, and was prominent in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
But the play wears its weighty themes lightly. The writing is fast-paced and engaging, often amusing, the characters rounded and human, even “the dreadful Chester”, who eventually comes to question his motivation and realise what fear and peer pressure have driven him to.
Gari Jones's production engineers tense, powerful confrontations across the width of the stage. Ingenious dramatic shorthand has the journalist deliver the letter the same actress has just taken, as Ginny, from Joe. And he looks on from his distant cell as White peruses it. The Swing music that brings the races together punctuates the scenes. And in his darkest hours Joe's fine voice sings strongly of liberty and emancipation: “Keep your Hand on the Plow and Hold On !”
Four excellent actors give compelling performances in the intimate arena of a remote village hall – just such a hall as might have held the Saturday night hops where local girls begged gum and Hershey bars less than a lifetime ago.
Joshua Hayes is the conflicted Chester as well as the principled, determined Walter. Grace Osborn young, ambitious Ginny and the journalist, and Georgia Brown the tragic Viv and the bigoted Lady Reading. Nathanael Campbell is the modest, unassuming Joe – an engineer back home – whose experience stands for thousands of men of color who tasted freedom and equality a thousand miles from home.
In a moving coda, we're back in the Suffolk cornfield where Joe and Ginny first meet, and all her silly girlish pre-conceptions fall away in seconds.
An economical, eloquent historical drama which speaks directly to Britain today, where prejudice and mistrust persist alongside liberal multiculturalism.