Try a Little Tenderness

Up early to buy a new bike and then into town for lunch with Hsiu Chin in Borough Market. I love the market in the Winter, it feels uniquely old London with all the street food smells of roasting and grilling mixing with aromatic coffee and mulled wine. There's no room to move, but everybody is wrapped up, rosy cheeked, good humoured and google eyed at the range of cheeses, breads, meats and confectionery on display.





Hsiu Chin and I used to work together at Goldsmiths before I came to St.Mary's, she's still there. Princess Beatrice has just enrolled at the college, on a History degree, which according to Hsiu Chin has hysterically brought all the professors scuttling disgruntled back from their sabbaticals. No course in the history of the College has ever had such a stellar academic team and Ph.d students need not apply to run seminars for a year or two. Despite that I like the idea that the royal family have come to New Cross - it's about time.



I went on to see The Brothers Size at the Young Vic.

This is a short clip from rehearsals

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EyEGej_9Wyc

It's the first play in Tarell Alvin McCraney's Brothers/Sisters trilogy, although its action takes place in the immediate aftermath of In the Red and Brown Water - which I was really taken with when I saw it a couple of weeks ago. Here Orgun Size, trying to come to terms with losing Oya, invests all his energy and strength into his car repair business - whilst also trying to support his dreaming brother Oshooi, recently released from Prison and trying hard to keep to the terms of his probation, despite the temptation of the live for moment philosophy, espoused by his former cell mate, the moon like, Elegba.



Tarell's star is rising and I can't think there's more exciting work anywhere in London. The three actors Nyasha Hatendi, Obi Abilli and Nathaniel Martello-White give us ninety minutes of high octane storytelling, fusing narration, live action, chant and Yoruba myth. All underscored by a brilliant percussionist who gently and carefully evoked mood and psychology with the subtlest of poly rhythms.

The play ends with a fantastic singing of Otis Reading's Try a Little Tenderness - which is exactly the same song that Jim Cartwright chose to use as a set piece in his wonderful eighties elegy Road - a play that The Brothers Size has more than a passing resemblance to.

On the way home I stopped off at BAC to see my friends Paka, Kris and Kim perform their scratch performance of Bedtime, which they've been developing for a couple of months.

The piece is only 12 minutes long and only four people at a time get to see it as each member of the audience gets into bed with an actor and is told a bedtime story, before being tucked in and kissed goodnight. The intimacy of the work is touching and the company cleverly make the experience safe, by sharing the rituals of getting ready for bed - turning back the sheets, plumping the pillows, taking off shoes and putting them under the bed etc - with the audience. At the end of along day I would have been happy to stay longer under the duvet.

Bits and Pieces.

Lots of bits and pieces going on this week. Matt's regular reports from South Africa are proving inspiring reading and I'm so excited that the Robben Island project is up and rolling... despite a few hiccups and surprises on the way.

http://robbenislandbible.blogspot.com/

I'm hoping he'll be back in the country in time to prepare some form of presentation/ rehearsed reading for our Shakespeare festival in December. Meanwhile news that The Market Theatre are prepared to host a reading out in SA has left me scrambling through dates (and my bank account) to see if it might be possible to fly out for a few days and see the work down there.

We also had some great news from Theatre for a Change that Christian Aid and the Department for International Development have agreed to fund the work in Malawi. Given current economic circumstances it's a wonderful achievement by Patrick and his team out there to secure this money. We know from the Impact assessment we carried out last May that it'll make a genuine difference.

Closer to campus The Tempest's design team went over to Ham House to reckie the great hall. Steph immediately spotted that the first floor balcony that looks down on the hall has the shape of a boat and quickly ideas of creating an underwater effect for the audience - looking up from the depths - were being chucked around. Full Fathom Five!

The height of the hall immediately suggests that we should, as the Elizabethans and Jacobeans did, think of the Universe in terms of the vertical: heavens, earth, hell and the depths. Rather than the horizontal, which the cinematic age has prioritised.

The only bad note was leaving to discover my bike had been pinched from the railings at the front the house!!!

The Strawberry Hill Symphony.

We had a lot of fun in our Theatre Games class today. Tilly and I set the first years up with the challenge of creating a Junk orchestra, composing a symphony and performing it ... all by the end of the afternoon.

After initial discussion Sem was chosen to take charge and steered us through a roller coaster day.

The group quickly assembled tubes, pipes, balloons, bottles, saucepans, keys, shoe boxes, a picket fence (I didn't ask where it had come from... although it dawns with horror on me this evening that I've seen one similar in housekeeper Paula's front garden!!!!!!) Even a bed frame appeared. All was lugged into studio 3.

Drapes were sourced and hung, a programme printed, lights rigged.

Sophie was given the job of conductor and began to arrange her orchestra.

There were a few tense moments, usually accompanied by some hearty swearing, and at some points the joy of noise threatened to drown out a more strategic approach to composition, but everywhere you turned was industry and progress. Pairs began to put together short sequences and motifs, which soon built into an impressive palette of possibilities from which to create.

As you might expect on an Applied Theatre course there are several leaders who have to fight very hard to go along with an idea they haven't completely bought into, but I like the energy and it's a very positive sign that the work did come together.

At 3.30pm a small audience of 20 arrived and were treated to an eight minute piece performed with discipline and focus.

For these twenty students today was a first micro try out in organising themselves as a production company. It involved compromise, delegation, trusting others in the team to deliver and above all else to take responsibility for the jobs allocated to you. If you can do all of these things whilst all about is collapsing then you are valuable indeed.

In December the Lost and Found Orchestra (see image above) will play at the Festival Hall. It should be worth a listen.

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/calendar/productions/lost-and-found-orchestra-39235

The Norman Conquests

To the Old Vic to watch all three plays in Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy - The Norman Conquests, first performed in Scarborough in 1973.

Slightly odd, going to the theatre at eleven on a Saturday, a very different energy in the foyer, slight belligerence, slight disbelief. Half the punters, thermos flasks at the ready, excited about the long haul ahead; whilst the rest, disgruntled partners mainly, stood and wondered almost audibly whether being taken to the theatre before lunch constituted sufficient grounds for divorce.

The Vic wisely, judging the mood, didn't try and stop the bleary eyed from taking coffee hurriedly bought on Waterloo station into the auditorium.

I've done trilogy days before. I watched Michael Boyd's Henry VI plays as part of the This England programme at the RSC seven years ago and I was also one of the handful who saw Lev Dodin's brilliant Maly Theatre companies Brothers and Sisters trilogy in the unlikely setting of Wythenshawe Forum in the early nineties. The themes and time frames for these productions though (a near century sweep of medieval dynastic power struggle, and the tribulations of a Soviet kolchus through revolution, famine, war and industrialisation) mirrored the act of endurance on the part of the audience. On both occasions the collective joy, shared by stage and auditorium, at reaching the end of the final play was akin to arriving at the summit of Everest. The Norman Conquests takes place over a July weekend in a country house in Sussex - so I wondered if it would carry.

That it does is tribute to a genuine craftsmanship on the part of Ayckbourn himself and brilliant casting from Matthew Warchus, who directed the fun filled Boeing Boeing last year and seems to be championing the re emergence of farce as viable London theatre fare.

This work is outrageously out of date, crazily parochial and wonderfully, wonderfully funny.

There are superb performances all round. Stephen Mangan exudes dangerous spontaneity as the romantic man child Norman whilst Jess Hynes as initial conquest Annie, Ben Miles as Tom, Annie's nice but dim, nearly boyfriend and Paul Ritter as Annie's older brother, board game inventing, need for procedure, Reg, cut out brilliant supporting roles.

I suspect the plays tap deep into the British psyche, connecting with a tradition that traces thread through Shakespeare, restoration drama, Jane Austen and the sit com (I always think that Dad's Army and the rude mechanicals share the same comic DNA as do Basil Fawlty, David Brent and Malvolio.) The humour has a torturous purgatory to it, a love of failure, misrule and misfortune. Perhaps it enables us to recognise ourselves, perhaps we're just cruel, mischievous or merely repressed enough to love the moral rectitude of elegant character assassinations.

For writers gifted enough to understand the hypocrisy inherent in our own everyday comedy of manners and clever enough to wield the scalpel unnoticed, the seam remains deep and rich.

I loved every moment of the day.

Playing with Puppets

Had a great afternoon working with Tina and the third year designers playing with puppets in readiness for Tempest rehearsals which we'll kick off in vengeance after reading week. We looked at several different ways of working from animating everyday objects, to creating shadows, through to building full size figures with sheets and knots who need three or four animators to bring to life.

After they'd picked up some initial ideas the students went off to create individual characters from the play using whatever they could find lying about in the workroom.

Half an hour later we had a showing. Steph had created a little fat Prospero from a Maraca. Emma had made a human size Miranda from a tailor dummies head and a flowing sheet. Hardeep's Ferdinand started as a bottle of water. The relative scale of the characters made for some surprising combinations and sometimes subverted the text. In effect it quickly became Miranda's story.

We're off to Ham House next week to really look at the space - but I was really impressed by the speed and effectiveness of the puppet creations today - which makes me wonder if we couldn't actually create all the puppets live - Prospero's magic in action - or maybe even work with the audiences' creations? Lots of possibilities.

Blue/Orange

There's some really nuggets of gold on the BBCiplayer at the minute, including this fantastic version of Joe Penhall's brilliant Blue/Orange which first premiered at the National in 2000.

I really like Penhall's ear for dialogue and his sensibility to creating the well made play. There's real craft here in this story of a young black schizophrenic and his relationship with two psychiatric nurses. He's without doubt one of the finest chroniclers of of England in the new early 21st century. Please have a look.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074r35/BlueOrange/

A swift half with Cardboard Citizens

Cardboard Citizens brought their new hostel tour onto campus this evening and gave us a really great show. Once again it's very good to see a packed house and professional companies enjoying the experience of performing for our students.

The company, most of whose membership are or have experienced homelessness, are now the foremost practitioners of forum theatre in the UK. This means their shows are always interactive - a dialogue merging the boundary between stage and auditorium. Firstly a personal story is acted out, normally of an injustice or oppression, and left in unresolved state. On a second playing the audience are encouraged to intervene, joining the actors on stage as the protagonist to improvise alternative strategies so that defeat can be avoided.

Tonight the company offered us three short case studies to work on, all based on true testimony and scripted into dramatic form by playwright Sarah Woods.

In the end the audience opted to work with the story of Rowena, a Filipino nanny, who had left her own daughter in Manila to come to London and work with a family who kept her in virtual slavery. Although, in the short time we had to play, we couldn't find a way out for Rowena - the economics of her situation made it incredibly hard - the act of exploring the story revealed some chilling facts about migrant labour in the UK that helped the audience challenge their own assumptions.

After the get out the company joined us in the Union for a pint and chatted to the students, generously answering questions about their practice and experiences for two hours... invaluable time. We finally waved their van off at half eleven.