The Grand Guingol.

The first of the Level 3 Theatre Arts shows at the Drama St Mary's theatre tonight. A turn of the century evening of chilling horror in homage of le infamous Theatre du Grand Guignol which opened as an intimate candle lit 200 seater in the Pigalle slum of Paris in 1897. A place of dark shadows and hidden corners.

The theatre spawned and specialised in a new gruesome genre employing naturalism to graphically reenact moments of murder, mayhem, insanity, tragedy and trauma in front of an insatiably voyeuristic audience. A typical bill of evening fare would include five or six short stories all ending horrifically. Victims were normally drawn from the lower class. Prostitutes, criminals and street urchins were all routinely slaughtered in ways designed to at once thrill and disgust the audience. The very fact that these characters are both powerless and dispensable produces a frisson of taboo breaking excitement.

It's a psycho-physical environment that the immersive theatre specialists Punchdrunk have in recent years seemed to be nostalgic for. A place where we're all complicit in the lust and gore whilst simultaneously harbouring the secret fear that we might be the next to feel the cold steel of the butcher's cleaver about our neck.

It was fascinating to see the students explore a form that has all but disappeared from the theatrical landscape and although at times it was tricky to understand whether they were attempting to accurately reproduce the style or merely parody it there was certainly enough in the four stories they offered to keep the audience engrossed for the entire evening. What better way to spend Halloween?

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Carlisle to Settle.

Last day of our break in the North. We walked the mile or so out of Kirby Stephen to the railway station which lies half way down the Carlisle to Settle line - often described as the most picturesque train journey in Britain. The station itself stands proud looking down on the Smardale valley. In recent years it's been lovingly restored and a small team of passionate volunteers and enthusiasts maintain it for the many tourists and locals who take huge pleasure travelling through the North of England.

Kirkby Stephen lies slightly up the line from the impressive glories of the Ribblehead Viaduct but there was still plenty to see. We kicked off our boots, warmed our hands on steaming mugs of tea and coffee and, faces pressed close to the window, headed up through the evocatively named villages and hamlets of the Eden Valley: Langwathby, Kikoswald, Armathwaite, to our arrival in Carlisle.

We changed here and took a short hop back down to the waiting car in Penrith; where after an impressive Sunday lunch we started the long drive back South. For all yesterday's battles with the elements we're almost half way to Robin Hood's Bay.

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Drenched in Westmorland.

The day started promisingly enough. We picked up supplies in the village shop and headed out across the fields to where a concrete footbridge crosses the furious M6 and onto the next stage of the walk. The path to Kirkby Stephen looks to be fairly straight forward on paper, but soon after we'd past the quiet hamlet of Oddendale the sky turned black.

For a few miles it was bearable. We made our way onto Ravensworth Fell, crossed an old roman road, waded through Lyvennet Beck, where Charles II rested his army en route to the Royalists final defeat at Gloucester and followed a dry stone wall round to an old cairn which reputedly marks the site of Robin Hood's Grave.

It would have been fantastically interesting but all the discovery and wonder was beginning to wear thin as the weather deteriorated and the cold winter rain lashed in, getting underneath our clothes and soaking us to the skin.

Eventually we made our way to the road and cadged a lift in a minibus full of Glaswegian young offenders, having a cracking lager infused jolly in the countryside; their harassed probation officer sulking at the wheel. They dropped us at The George in nearby Orton, where we had lunch thawing out by a roaring fire. Outside the weather seemed to be brightening so we wrung out our socks and set off again.

For the first few miles everything was more or less back on track we followed lanes, skipped stiles and made our way steadily across the peaty fields to Sunbiggin Tarn, a desolate spot, miles from anywhere. It was here, predictably, that the skies opened once more.

Shelter was a good two miles off in Newbiggin, so we gritted our teeth, put our heads down and ploughed onwards across Ravenstonedale Moor. By this stage the weather was so rough that we couldn't even refer to our sodden, pulped guide book and we quickly became lost amongst the sheep. Eleanor helpfully reminded me that Lear, made mad by the storm and the onset of hypothermia, began to take his clothes off in similar circumstances, a new threat that until that point I'd not considered.

Putting safety first we found some farm tracks and followed them over the hill and onto a lane leading down to a solitary farmhouse. The farmer, unfazed by our adventure, was kind enough and pointed us back towards the village, some two miles East of where we'd ended up.

Newbiggin, he promised, owned a public telephone box and with no reception to be had on the Moor there was no alternative but to continue. Wrinkled as prunes we squelched our way along the road, finally arriving just before eight o'clock. A call to a local taxi firm put us out of our misery and so drowned and defeated we arrived less than triumphantly in Kirkby.
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Farewell to Lakeland.

Up early to carry on with our Coast to Coast walk. We caught the 108 bus from our lodging in Penrith and followed its picturesque route along the western edge of Ullswater down to Patterdale to recommence our walk with a steady climb heading south out of the village towards Angletarn Pikes.

The sky was clear and it wasn't long before we were high enough to enjoy commanding views back towards the Helvellyn and adventures past. Higher we climbed scouting around the tarn itself, following a dry stone wall past Satura Crag, through a peaty field to rest by a gate and share out some fruit pastilles in celebration at completing the first 50 miles of our journey from St Bees. Against every prediction we've had wonderful weather all the way

Another short climb took us around the Knott and onwards for a glorious view both of the old roman road leading up to High Street and down the Straights of Riggindale to Haweswater, a once gentle lake, now turned into a huge reservoir, capable of quenching Manchester. From here a short walk took us to Kidsty Pike - the last obstacle of Lakeland.

We lingered for a few moments taking stock of the brooding mountains to the West that somehow we'd found a way across before turning East to stare across the more gentle gradients of the Westmorland Plateau to come; the landscape rolling far away to the Pennines on the horizon.

We pressed on, descending through Kidsty Howes to Haweswater edge and followed the shoreline for several miles, noticing the fells fall away to be replaced by a gentler terrain before arriving at the village of Burbanks, built especially for the workers who helped flood Mardale some eighty years ago.

The light was fading now as we began to cross the fields towards our ambitious overnight stop in Shap. We made it to the charming Rosgill bridge which crosses the Lowther and here decided that rather than lose our way in the dark we should follow the road in, forsaking the ruins of the old Abbey. Beside hunger had begun to set in.

It didn't take long before we were offered a lift by pensioner Flo, who was concerned that Southerners might not be easily visible, and gratefully driven the final mile and a half to the comforting delight of a boots off, good dinner and a raging fire at the Greyhound Inn.
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The Lost City.

Partly inspired by an excellent BBC documentary on the history of ceramics Eleanor and I stopped off in the lost city of Stoke on Trent en route for another couple of days Coast to Coast walking. It's a fascinating place which, possibly because of the large number of service stations on the M6 between Birmingham and Manchester, few people turn off to visit.

And first impressions are of slow decline. Sentinel chimneys standing idle, a canal with no traffic and streaks of rust running down redundant iron pipes that have long since stopped carrying the water needed by the factories. We parked the car and walked across James Brindley's revolutionary canal interchange which links the Mersey to the Trent to the old Etruria works where a young entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood based his burgeoning business and placed the potteries firmly on the map as the world renowned centre for ceramic production with endorsements from all the crowned heads of Europe and commissions across the globe. The canal was championed by Wedgewood to ensure his pots could be transported smoothly. Too many were broken on the bumpy eighteenth century roads. The site is chained and remarkably quiet now.

After lunch we went to search out signs of industry and took a advantage of a free tour around Emma Bridgewater's factory, half a mile south of the city centre. It was quite inspiring. Whatever you think of her stuff, and I find it a little twee and nouveau nostalgic, she has certainly done the town a great service by resurrecting a pottery works here. All of her stuff is produced in the factory and 200 local craftsmen and women are employed to turn out over 30,000 pieces a week. From small beginnings 25 years ago the turnover is several million pounds a year. Mood in the factory was good, the royal wedding and the diamond jubilee have provided a couple boom years, which everybody hopes will stay.

'Whatever else the recession makes us forfeit,' said our amiable guide, 'people will always needs cups and plates.'

Bridgewater's firm feels the right size. It's working at capacity, but there are no plans to expand and threaten the familial feel of the enterprise. It's a very British brand in a very British setting. Stoke though could do with one or two other returns. I was surprised to learn, given the morning stroll past derelict buildings, that more pottery is manufactured in the region than anywhere else in the world. Still the unemployment figures are dangerously high and the skills that have sustained Stoke for over two hundred years lie, for the main part, dormant, waiting for a renaissance.

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Early Returns.

Troubling article in The Sunday Times today about the fall in applicants for HE courses. Universities across the country have been bracing themselves for a reduction in the number of students seeking a place in 2012, but it's been a bit like staring into a dark cave, with nobody knowing for sure exactly how the rise in fees will effect school leavers. This week UCAS will publish figures up to October 15th - which was the deadline for Oxbridge (received wisdom suggests that 10% of all applications are made by this date.)

Early returns from some London institutions suggest a dramatic fall. Goldsmiths suggests a 34% decrease and City University are looking at a 40% drop. St Mary's own speculative figures, taken from open day visitors, suggested that we were holding up (but of course there's nothing to suggest the old ratios between visitors to applicants or offers to undergraduate take up will sustain in the new world.)

I still think that Drama St Mary's have got it right by focusing on creating degrees that take the best of the Drama School and merge it with courses which, for want of a better word, explore and analyse creativity, through active problem solving. Very few of our graduates go onto academic careers, but many do get work in the theatre industry and nearly all of them leave with an understanding of the need to create opportunities for themselves, rather than waiting around to be recognised and discovered. We hope this dynamic approach to promoting a new breed of resourceful, self motivated practitioner will help us to avoid the coming storm. Let's see.

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Unlucky?

A really difficult night at the National watching Mike Bartlett's new play 13 which is about to go to press at the Olivier.

Bartlett, who's yet to turn thirty, is often heralded as a new hope for British theatre. A playwright who can capture the drama of the new world, where communication is as likely to happen by tweet, text or skype as it is by prolonged face to face dialogue and where the technology exists for people to form intimate relationships even if they never actively share the same space. I very much wanted to like it; but unfortunately I found it patronising, complacent and trite.

As with last year's hit, Earthquakes in London, Bartlett's new work is big on ideas. Amongst many other things a messiah like figure, former philosophy student John reappears after six years in the wilderness and begins teaching a doctrine of belief in belief at Hyde Park Corner. Simultaneously a modernising Cameron-esque Tory prime minister, played with Thatcherite authority by Geraldine James, weighs up the moral responsibility of an invasion of Iran. Whilst her friend, John's former lecturer Dr Christopher Stockley, a tweeded atheist in the Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins mould, delivers public lectures on the pre-eminence of Western culture. The three character's are linked by Simon, the Prime Minster's son, John's best friend at Oxford, who tragically died jumping of Magdalen Bridge on May Day.

Slowly, and completely unbelievably given the obvious sentimental psycho-babble that he speaks, John begins attracting crowds of upwards of half a million people to his daily orations which have moved from abstract ideas to a more concrete anti-war stance. His evolving popularity eventually forces the Prime Minister to meet him in Downing Street for a reunion and private talks.

For all the intercut dialogue, flashing lights and the weird, hugely expensive set - a towerblock size black cube that performs all kinds of configurative tricks - it's this scene between a young idealist, his atheist former lecturer and the Prime Minister that is the most interesting allowing as it does an ideological and informed debate between received authority and naive idealism to take the stage. This for me was the kernel of a better more intimate and sensible play. It's lost in the vast swathes of the Olivier.

I'm always mindful when writing reviews of work that I don't like that I might just not be getting it. In the mid-nineties I remember critics almost unanimously blasting Blasted, partly because they failed to grasp the bold innovation in form that Sarah Kane was proposing. Some of them later apologised.

Perhaps I'm just too stuck in a concept of makes good theatre to be able to see the merit of the play, but I'm convinced that the A-level and undergraduate students who packed out tonight's preview deserve a greater intellectual challenge than this pseudo-profound attempt to provoke youthful rebellion. There are real causes, real problems and, I hope, real solutions for young people to take a lead in finding. A work like 13 gives the impression of being radical and uplifting, but ultimately it's earnestness does nothing but reinforce the consensual and compliant nature of early twenty first century politics. For all the imposing threat of the enormous black cube this show is, I suspect, as meaningless as a house of cards.
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