Open Day and What We're After!

We had a cracking open day today and it's hard to believe that we're now recruiting the third year of the re validated programme. This time next year all students will be on the same degree and we can really begin to assess how well the changes have worked.

Kasia, Ian and me led the talks today and re explaining what we do and why we do it gave me a reminder of how unique St Mary's is. X-factor we ain't!

Against received wisdom we've abandoned the supermarket freedoms of a modular structure and instead offer rigorous core training. It's a bold statement of intent that takes an element of choice away from students, but asserts our confidence as lecturers, who know what should be in the curriculum. By taking responsibility in this way and cutting options we've doubled the contact time between lecturers and students. Most have understood and responded well to the coherence of the new programme.

At the same time we've introduced modules designed to help students to think and learn - so that we're not just factory farming performing puppets, but genuine independent artists who are geared up to go out challenge, refine, liberate, advocate or make a revolutionary impact in the creative industries and beyond. There are a million and one ways to fly...

For us, back on the ground, the ideal situation will come when, as in drama schools, assessment is hidden and all of us are focusing on improving through work. I can see a future where our 300 or so students are operating like a large theatre company, off shooting into year group or pathway projects, but all contributing to a yearly programme of public performances and sharings, evolving from workshops, classes and rehearsal periods. Other needs would arise - for box office, marketing, review writing, education and outreach perhaps even catering and merchandising, but these could be developed expediently to the growth in confidence in ourselves as a creative powerhouse, with continuity assured as each year graduates into more responsible roles before flying the nest to do us proud in the industry itself and being replaced by the next cohort of potential artists, who themselves will evolve and adapt to tell the stories relevent to their generation.

We're getting closer.

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A Tale of Two Theatres.

Went with Level 1 on a whistle stop tour of the Royal Opera House this afternoon, made doubly entertaining by the eccentricities of the guide, who seemed petrified that we'd get lost in the rabbit warren of corridors, studios and offices hidden away behind the vast auditorium and stage and rather panicked whenever we seemed to dawdle or want to explore.

I have to admit I'm not drawn to the Opera - to me it has a musty Victorian air, as extreme as an intoxicating potpourri. For all the undoubted technical virtuosity, the vocal dexterity of the great singers and the breast swelling, cleavage raising, passion of the arias, I find it slightly ridiculous.

There were some fascinating moments as we trawled around the building, however. A window into the Fredrick Ashton studio, allowed us to watch a ballerina work through her impressive paces and admire the strength, precision and control of her work. The beautiful ironwork architecture of the old floral hall, raised a level from its original foundations offered a whiff of bright nouveau opulence and the gilded glory of the auditorium, huge and expectant waiting for the evening's performance of Mayerling.

Afterwards I travelled East to catch Cosh Omar's new farce The Great Extension at the Theatre Royal in Stratford. It was great fun and, along with a brave plot, the show seemed to play homage to the style of performance that Joan Littlewood pioneered here back in the fifties. Then, as now, the playing was broad, clear and compared with the psychological realism of their theatre rivals at the Royal Court, unambiguous. In some ways it was the fore runner of the great sitcoms of the late sixties and early seventies. The Rag Trade, George and Mildred, and Steptoe and Son, all featured actors and actresses, who cut their teeth on the stage here. It's hard to find this kind of performance in the mainstream.

If the style harked back, the narrative theme was bang up to date.

Omar, himself plays hero Hassan, a second generation Turk and secular Muslim Sufi, living

with transexual houseboy Sanjay, is trying - in a neat metaphor for EU expansion - to build an extension on his house. Ranged against him are his racist English neighbour Mr Brown, who disputes the land, Dave, a Jewish builder, hiring Polish workers and the orthodox Salafi Khan family, who have turned up to rescue their sister Jamila, from an accidental drunken marriage to Hassan, carried out, under influence, the previous evening. Insults, profanities, jokes and slurs fly about the stage in a glorious attack on the linguistic taboos of political correctness as each cultural stereotype is destroyed in turn. No sacred cows here. Eventually an Uber positive policeman, bearing a cunning resemblance to President Obama enters and delighting in the gathering of the creeds, forces everybody, against their will, to celebrate multi culturalism.

The local audience as culturally diverse as the characters on stage, laughed until they cried and went home delighted. There's an advertising campaign for the Olympics that proudly asserts the world is coming to Stratford in 2012. The truth is they're already here.

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Our Own Little Piece of Shit Paradise.

Went to see Stef's show Our Own Little Piece of Shit Paradise in an awesome octagonal hall at the Lillian Bayliss Old School, tucked away on a housing estate just off the Kennington Road. Stef had worked the piece in response to Shooting Rats, a play originally written in Austrian by Peter Turrini in 1967, but brilliantly updated and transposed to contemporary London. The work has been programmed as part of Oval House's Elsewhere season, which seeks to explore some of the disused and hidden spaces in Kennington, Vauxhall and Lambeth.

Both pieces explore ideas of worth, value and reputation and paint rather depressing pictures of young love at the end of the decade. In Shooting Rats Ads takes Evie on a date to the rubbish tip, to shoot the rats that live there. Through a series of flirtatious exchanges and come clean admissions they begin to strip away, literally and metaphorically, the inhibitions, games and possessions they've affected to assertively define them. Their descent together towards a form of innocence offers protection, even in the face of the original expectations that both of them started the evening with. For all the lack of self -belief and the pessimistic sense that the tip is an inevitable destination, it's a tender end.

Stef's piece interlinked five characters in a series of hopes, betrayals and disappointments, with the real weight coming through excellent performances by Monsay, back working with Stef a year on from Yard Gal, and Natasha Sparkes, who seems a real talent. Stef's great skill, as a director, comes in her uncompromising ability to get performances of total physical commitment from her cast. The energy at the heart of the work hints at self destruction and whilst this is, in itself, disturbing, the investment and immediacy of the action makes for an almost electric theatrical experience.

In the pub afterwards Mons told us slightly more positive stories of her experiences at the BBC (She's been filming recently for Holby City and a new drama AWOL, to be broadcast next year.) Although she's unfazed, and certainly unchanged, by her new found success it does sounds as if she's eating producers alive. It's great to see recent graduates making an impact.

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On Location.

Great session at Ham with Harvey Eddington, who heads up the National Trust's Film Unit. His job is to liaise with location managers and directors to source the right venues for different shoots. These hires and the free publicity a beautifully shot film can bring, are a big part of the Trust's income, but it all need incredibly careful risk management. Camilla, who looks after this end of things specifically at Ham, also came in to talk through the conservation issues.

In the new year Disney are swooping to make a new movie of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel John Carter of Mars starring Willem Dafoe, Sam Morton and James Purefoy. I could see the third years ears prick up when they heard the news. Just as Shakespeare hung around the travelling players, until they took him to London, so perhaps a film crew might just pick up a couple of rookie graduates who are prepared to make themselves useful and do some of the dirty work.

We're starting to look forward to Christmas now and the storytelling weekend we have at the house which begin in early December. We want something more flexible than last year, with stories being told by one or just a couple of actors, mingling with the visitors and choosing the moment. It needs to be short, light, but full of impact and colour. The question for now is who tells the stories? and why do they tell them? Travelling players? Ghosts? Statues? Magicians? It's all up for negotiation and the only risk seems to be that we swamp the event.

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Spotting the Danger.

The big national drama this week has been the appearance of Nick Griffin, of the British National Party, on last Thursday's Question Time. It's spawned more immediate debate and commentary than almost any other single event that I can remember.

I watched the programme with a growing sense of disappointment - not with the BBC for broadcasting, but rather because of the rather smug way in which the politicians lined up to put the boot in.

I'm not in favour of giving racists the oxygen of oxygen, let alone the oxygen of publicity, but in a democracy once a critical mass has passed -and the BNP did pick up a million votes at the European elections - it's time to scrutinise and deconstruct the arguments. TV can do this, provided it retains an objective.

My worry was that the politicians' anger (although justified) and the orchestrated collective attack only plays directly into the mythology of the underdog, fighting the complacent arrogance of those in power - Robin Hood's merry men, Henry V's troops at Agincourt, the Spitfire pilots at the Battle of Britain. It's the very folk mythology the BNP are constantly trying to appropriate.

The BNP is a party that stokes up our fears of 'the other.' It exploits our weakest emotions and our laziest thoughts. It offers security in the tribe. The programme may have exposed Griffin in the eyes of the cosmopolitan media but I'm not sure how it played out on the sink estates of Burnley, Dagenham or Bradford, where it's easy to target immigration and Islam as the cause of unemployment, poverty and deprivation.

As as leader Griffin is more of a ridiculous clown than a reincarnated Hitler and, although the protests outside the Beeb were welcome, I don't believe that violence is needed to bring down the BNP in its present format. As Bonnie Greer, the best of the panelists, demonstrated, for now, the best attack is honesty, intelligence and humour. Clowns can be nihilistic though and do need watching.

If there is a parallel then the rhetoric of the BNP reminds me of Milosevic's early nineties defence of Serbian nationalism, against the perceived threats from Bosnian Muslims; a rhetoric which, unchecked, caught fire and ended up in the genocides and ethnic cleansing that split the former Yugoslavia. It wasn't just Slavic temperament or unfinished business that caused this, it was the false fear multiculturalism. It's rhetoric which still echoes in the Balkans today. Karadzic's trail in The Hague opens on Monday, it'll be a reminder to the world of the what can happen when we stop wanting to live and learn from each other. For anti-racists, controlling the pitch is as important as asserting the true narrative.

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Freudian Slips!

Tonight was the first preview of Katie Mitchell's new production Pains of Youth at the National. Love it or hate it- with Katie there's rarely middle ground, her work is always an event and she's one of the few directors working in British theatre who consciously re invents text. She is a supreme auteur, the arrowhead steering both Ferdinand Bruckner's play, written in 1928, and Martin Crimp's translation into a strange, eerie, semi conscious reality. It's no surprise, given her experimental track record, that several people walked out before the interval.

The play itself is perfect material. Set in inter war Vienna, six bored young medical students explore their desires in a complicated entangled game of power, attraction and submission. It's a sharp display, with carefully sequenced scene changes, suggesting a reductive view of emotional connection and a clear, forensic rather than erotic, focus on the role sex plays in constructing and controlling adult relationships.

The whole piece is dimly lit and continually underscored by a creepy, paranoid percussive score, which highlights the menace and fear of every movement, gesture or knock at the door.

So where is the brilliance? Well in all honestly it's in the acting - wiry, intimate and precisely observed. It's untheatrical in a conventional sense, but breathtaking in its behavioural authenticity. Geoff Streatfield is wonderful as the predatory Freder, directed to play most of his action upstage, adding to his alluring sense of confidence and ability to break the rules for his own means. He's brilliantly supported by Leo Bill, as the weak willed Petrell and Lydia Wilson as the self-assured and curious Desiree.

At curtain there was a luke warm reaction from the audience who seemed unsure whether the attention to detail had bored, challenged or fascinated them. It'll be interesting to see what the critics think after press night next week.

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Cameron Direct

David Cameron breezed into Richmond this evening for a town hall style meeting, face to face with the electorate of Richmond Park. It's an idea borrowed from America and a tactic used brilliantly by Obama in his campaign last year. It's clear that the Surrey side of the river is going to be a key battleground for both Tories and Liberals in the months leading up to the election with the Tories putting up environmentalist Zac Goldsmith to take on right leaning Liberal Susan Kramer. It'll be a fascinating contest. The Labour party will do well to save their deposit.

Cameron is certainly slick, well staged managed, jacket off, composed and confident in this kind of informal forum. In many ways it's a perfect work out for the more publicised exchanges in the media boxing ring and he used the time to test his command of brief and hone the message.

He's genial, but scratch the surface and there's some pretty unreformed right wing intolerance hiding away - particularly on Europe and immigration. He also floated an idea which I've not seen in any policy discussion or document of a Citizenship camp for all sixteen year olds. It felt like a soft form of National Service - safe enough to mention as an aside in Richmond, but unlikely to see its way to manifesto.

On my way out of the hall I bumped into my friend Chris, who writes for the Richmond Times. We both looked a bit embarrassed about the company we were keeping.

'Hello Mark,' he said 'I didn't know you were a... a... a... I didn't know you ... I didn't know you voted... I didn't know you were a... a.... a...'

'Don't worry Chris,' I said putting him out of his misery ' I'm not!'

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