Canterbury Tales Catch up.

Work on The Canterbury Tales is beginning, after a slow start, to gather momentum. We've now confirmed the venues and times and routes around the properties. Monday afternoon was spent up in Hackney with the liaison team finalising the Sutton House show and seeing exactly how we can adapt the rehearsal room work into the site itself. Logistically there are many questions to ask and it still feels as if we are inching forward towards the show rather than making leaps and bounds.

The fundraising team have been doing brilliant work and raised nearly £1,000 to supplement our production budget. Their biggest initiative is the SIMMathon which will take place Friday week, and coincide with the elections for the Student Union executive. 104 runners from every sector of the St Mary's - students, academics, security, caterers, support, senior management etc. will each run a lap of the track. Together they'll complete a marathon - we hope in under three and a half hours. It should be a fantastic chance for the University to come together as a community in itself, raise some money and, if we're honest, have a bit of a laugh.

Whilst this has been going on the designers have made great progress with the costumes and are beginning now to tackle some of the technical problems of doing the show in two contrasting venues. How do we create visual effects that will work both in the intimate chamber settings of Sutton, and the gorgeous open garden spaces of Ham?

Rehearsals are also beginning to take shape. The plan has been to get a rough and ready sketch of each of the tales and then try and refine them in more detail for the venues. A small team of students are engaged with rewrites to make each show absolutely specific to its venue. It's taken some time for the cast to trust the playful, bold and unapologetic way in which we they need to perform, but there are signs of breakthroughs, of abandonment and of genuinely confidence in the material. It's beginning to get exciting!

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Ferry Cross The Mersey.

Back in Liverpool this weekend for a friend's wedding in the august surroundings of the Atheneaum followed by a Sunday of further flaneuring exploration of the city and its maritime past.

We wandered down Matthew Street through the decrepit cultural quarter past a graffiti covered statue of John Lennon and a string of tourists posing to have their photographs taken outside the Cavern Club before making our way down to the Pierhead and a round trip on the Mersey ferry out over to Seacombe and then down the Wirral to Woodside and Rock Ferry where the Great Eastern was broken up.

Everything from the huge vessel was sold (one of the topmasts is still visible as a flagpole on the Kop at Anfield) and it made me wonder how many ashtrays, copper pipes, ornaments, bits of decking from the great ship must still be sitting on mantelpieces, hidden in lofts or recycled in a hundred different ways all over Merseyside. The traces must be everywhere. Rock Ferry is derelict now. It's beach smoothed over at every tide, its past pretty well hidden. The ferry turned and headed back for the iconic Liver building on the northern bank.

Back on land we went for a walk up to the Adelphi, where Dickens had a parting dinner before his first voyage to America and then via Rodney Street to the crumbling red brick warehouses and factories around Cain's brewery immediately South of the city centre. There's so much wasted space here waiting for development, for better times, for bright ideas. Industrial ruins at the foot of the Anglican cathedral, a city too large for its income.

We followed the shore path back to Disneyland heritage world of Albert Dock before heading, as night fell, back to Lime Street and the train South.
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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Up to town to catch up with Vixter, who's been working on Kneehigh's newest project The Umbrellas of Cherbourg which opens next week. We sneaked in at the back to grab a preview. In terms of scale and panache this show is the antithesis of The Red Shoes, and demonstrates the vast range of project work which now seems to fall under the company's parapluie.

Based on the sixties movie it's a strange and haunting piece of work, quite unlike anything else in London at present. On one level it's the complete triumph of idea over content as a thrown together mix of song, dance and complex design compete to provide a spectacular telling of a simple tale. On another there is something stylistically elegiac and profoundly beautiful about this story of passion replaced by pragmatism.

The cleverest trick is to have the evening fronted by cabaret hostess and torch chanteuse Meow Meow, who wittily leads us into the show through a series of lessons into French culture and language. Her great humour and playful recognition of our own potential prejudices enables us smooth passage from the fore stage into the sea mist of the harbour town and the light operatic world of the play itself.

From here on in it's uncharted territory. Director Emma Rice focuses on keeping things moving and so the story of young love, unplanned for pregnancy, separation and heart ache are at times lost in artful staging and theatrical bravado. It's had to deny the romanticism of the reunion at the end, however, where, despite recognition of earlier promises, the former lovers charmingly refuse the past and politely carry on their separate trajectories. Meow Meow returns to remind us C'est La Vie! before releasing us from class and sending us out onto Shaftesbury Avenue grateful for the times to come.

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Comedy Store Nostalgia.

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The Comedy School held a huge fundraiser at The Comedy Store in Leicester Square last night with the aim of raising £10,000 to support projects that draw attention to the dangers of knife crime. Keith had persuaded a host of top acts to come and perform which made for a fantastic evening, brilliantly compered by Jeff Innocent.

Some of the comedians Arthur Smith, Jo Brand, Neil Mullarky were veterans of the venue's hey day when the alternative scene was finding its feet in opposition as much to the racist misogyny of the traditional circuit as to the policies of Thatcher's government. Others Andi Osho, Rob Grant, Mr Cee all had a moment to pinch themselves that they were here. It's a bit of a Mecca for comedians.

Maybe it was the pre-show soundtrack of Madness, The Beat and The Specials but a wave of nostalgia swept over me. As a teenager watching telly in my room, I was offered, through The Young Ones, Friday Night Live and Spitting Image, brilliant glimpses of how satire and song might provide some form of morale boosting contrast to the depressing orthodoxy of the age. At a time of rising unemployment, attacks on the Unions and the wasted potential of the inner cities this was form of solidarity that seemed hopeful, energised and above all fun.

Tonight, though, the venue paid tribute to the twelve years that Keith has dedicated to using comedy as a tool for education, rehabilitation and prevention. He made his target. It was wonderful to be here.
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The Heretic.

Off to the Royal Court to see Richard Bean's latest satirical offering The Heretic, featuring a stunning central performance from Juliet Stevenson as Dr Nina Cassell, an earth science professor whose research has led her to dismiss as melodramatic the apocalyptic claims of the climate change lobby.

Bean has a neat line in mixing controversy with well observed humour and a sense of the ridiculous. His early epic sweeps of northern agriculture Harvest, and fishing Under the Whaleback brought to London audiences a elegy for a changing way of life. More recently his work has crudely tried find a populist and provocative way of questioning liberal sensitivity, firstly through the broad brush strokes of England People Very Nice and then more recently by drawing parallels between Irish Republicanism and al-Qaeda in The Big Fellah.

The Heretic is a return to form - discomforting the Court's audience by explicitly pitching environmental extremism against censorship and academic freedom against political expediency. As much as we despair of Cassell's seemingly blinkered research, we also despise the coercive and patronising way in which the institution seeks to silence her.

The script is peppered with wonderful lines and horribly recognisable situations. The HR officer trying to convince Cassell that a written record is needed for a verbal warning. A young student reminding her that 'ridicule has no place in student centred learning environments.'

Bean is still a naughty boy, playing to the gallery and flicking two fingers towards the soft complacency of the liberal intelligentsia. When the writing is as good as this, however, he almost gets away with it.

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The Red Shoes

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Kneehigh have brought their ground breaking The Red Shoes back to London for a short run at the BAC. Giving London audiences the chance to catch up with the show that really brought the company to the world's attention almost a decade ago.

Based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, a drag Queen Lady Lydia narrates the adventures of a young girl who tricks her blind elderly guardian into buying her a pair of red shoes, which make her dance with delight. Joy soon turns to despair, however, when the girl realises that the shoes will neither stop dancing nor will the come off. Great for parties, but not church, first dates or funerals.

In a final act of agony, and to avoid damnation, she visits the butcher who, in a gruesome scene, amputates her feet and replaces them with a pair of clumsy wooden clogs.

Told with childlike brutality, The Red Shoes reminds us all that at the heart of all good theatre is the essential search for a bigger and more beautiful life. A search perhaps for meanings that might sustain us and a sense that beyond the sad, the surreal and the complication of daily existence lies the brave truth that sharing stories, generously, in good company is the most wonderful gift that we can give each other. More than any other company that I can think of Kneehigh, almost with a shrug of their shoulders, provide a Theatre of Solace.

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As Loud As Silence.

The ever wonderful Lost Banditos returned to Drama St Mary's on Friday evening with their new show As Loud As Silence. Kasia has been in Portugal for the last few weeks with the company devising the work and this was it's first play in the UK.

As with the previous Destination GB the work was full of beautiful images and charming moments of surprise and humour.

Set in post-war Ukraine a troop of gypsy musicians, the band of champions, travel the countryside playing wherever they are welcomed. One of them, Pushka, curious to write new songs, goes on a voyage of discovery to learn how to read and write. A journey that leads her to the west, away from all that she's known.

In Paris she falls in love with a German librarian, who slowly helps her to achieve her dreams and when Pushka returns to her village for her grandmother's funeral, the librarian follows, bringing with him a French record producer who wants to record the unique sound of the band and share it with the world.

...and then the story abruptly ends. A narrator, desperate for a fun filled ending, quickly tells us that the communists used the recording to help identify the gypsies and eradicate them. He wonders whether we really want to come to the theatre to hear about that and wouldn't we prefer just to resurrect the band and dance? It's a heart breaking question. Sometimes things are safer kept in the memory.

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