The Business End.

We're getting to the business end of the year now where lecture classes begin to look more directly at the assignments and students begin the switch from idealistic consumers of new knowledge to pragmatic foragers for good grades.

For some pathway Drama students essay writing is really tough. Our focus on practical training means they're only really producing 6,000 words a semester and whilst many are grateful that the bulk of their time is spent in rehearsal rooms rather than libraries, it does mean an additional pressure that the joint honours students, who produce essays every fortnight, don't have.

This can lead to a mean approach with students looking to find out the minimum they have to do to pass rather than embrace the assignment as an opportunity to research and develop further their own unique interest in a field. The one off assessment also encourages a kind of conservatism, borrowed from their schooling, of believing that if clear guidelines are followed, high grades are guaranteed. There is some confusion when lecturers feign vague on this matter or answer student questions with further questions.

Overall though I do sense in the Level 1 and Level 2 classes that I teach a slight shift and the beginnings of an understanding that turning over your essay is the tip of a much more impressive ice berg. Reading plays and going to see theatre may exercise different creative muscles to physical and vocal workouts but are just as vital in developing an understanding and cultural security about the profession. Drama students seem to work more naturally from the inside out, finding expression for their experience. It soon runs dry though if they're not investing the other way. Looking at the world beyond themselves and storing their discoveries for the future.
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Political Cabaret.

The Level 2 Applied Theatre students performed their second political cabaret of the semester in the Dolche Vita this evening and tried something a little different. For the first half hour they provided us with the usual fare of review sketches, topical songs and provocative takes on contemporary events both within and beyond the University; all well received by an appreciative audience.

The second half of the show, changed tack. The students had teamed up with a writer from the Professional and Creative Writing degree who'd written a clever short piece set in the Starbucks, opposite the Occupy London site by St Paul's. It called for different skills from the performers and demonstrated how quickly good theatre can fabulate to shine new truths and fresh perspective on real events. This is a possible new direction for the work.

The evening ended with a short forum play looking at sexually transmitted disease with Natalie jokering. I was unsure how this might sit with the other work, but they played it with a light touch and brought exactly the right sense of playfulness to allow the audience to explore the issue. It provided a prototype for a longer piece of work.

Political Cabaret has been running for two years now and is beginning to establish itself on the Drama St Marys calender. It'll be interesting to see what the students made of tonight's variations and how that effects the work in the future.
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The Meaning of Feste.

We watched Trevor Nunn's film version of Twelfth Night this evening as part of the Shakespeare on film season I'm running to supplement the Early Modern Drama module. Filmed in and around the beautiful Penwith peninsula in Cornwall and set in the early years of the nineteenth century, it's a version that's grown on me over time.

I've often thought of Twelfth Night as the pivotal play in the entire canon. A moment of revelation for Shakespeare as a writer. The moment, perhaps, where he simultaneously becomes sure of his place in the world and his impending mortality. Nothing he wrote before was as tightly structured and nothing he writes afterwards is as freewheeling.

The key to my mini-theory is Feste who seems, particularly in the last moments of the play to be as autobiographical a character as Shakespeare wrote. His final song, which starts so clearly to lay out the ages of man, seems to loose heart after just four verses - compare this with Jacques in As You Like It, written just a couple of years earlier, who finds seven distinctions in his All the World's A Stage speech.

The song ends with a passionate statement in which personal ambition is resigned in favour of self-knowledge. The focus is shifting from virtuosity to craft.

'A great while ago the world begun

With a hey, ho the wind and the rain

But that's all one, our play is done

And we'll strive to please you everyday.'

Shakespeare was 38 when he wrote that and staring into middle age. The sixteenth century had come to an end. Within a year Elizabeth had died and England was once again thrown into religious and political uncertainty. His later works, all written under the new patronage of James I, would reflect a desire to provide intellectual and philosophical succour to the Jacobean world order. Illyria was the world that he left behind.

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The Comedy of Errors.

To the National to see The Comedy of Errors starring Lenny Henry as Antipholus of Syracuse. It's a rip roaring production played out with enough chutzpah and sense of fun to give even the most cynical theatre goer a good night out.


Director Dominic Cooke sets the play in a composite place somewhere between the West Indies, North Africa and Mediterranean Europe. He has a Romanian band thrown in for good measure. The openning section where the Syracusean merchant Egeon lays out the back story uses the full glories of Bunny Christie's inventive set, to create a vast poetic story board. A visual trailer for what's to come.

And what's to come is very good with Henry, who won rave reviews for his Othello a couple of years ago, revelling in the comedy. He has presence, a sense of ease with the language, great timing and, of course an anarchic spirit of irreverence. It made me wonder why we don't encourage more of our stand up comedians to take the comic roles in Shakespeare. Rickie Gervais as the Porter ? Frankie Boyle as Lear's fool? Paul Merton as Touchstone? or even Tim Minchin as Feste? If it hasn't hasn't already happened I'm sure it won't be long before James Cordon is offered Bottom. It just makes sense to put audience pleasing specialists into these roles.

Elsewhere there is some marvellous support from Chris Jarman as the other Antipholus, Lucian Msamati and Daniel Poyser as the Dromios and stealing little moments, the wonderful Claudie Blakley and Michelle Terry as tottering wag-esque sisters Adriana and Luciana.

This isn't a show that reclaims or reinterprets the play for our times. In many ways Cooke's production is a classic rendering. It doesn't half leave you with a smile on your face though.
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Tales from a Sea Journey.

Our old friends NIE returned to the Drama St Mary's theatre this evening with their new show Tales from a Sea Journey. It was lovely to see them bring their peculiar brand of Post-Brechtian clowning back for a new generation of students to enjoy. It was wonderful to see ex-student Kieran back, playing a brave Norwegian sea captain.

Unlike their earlier trilogy, which sought to dramatise the cataclysmic history of twentieth century Europe by telling the stories of three families, this new show focuses more directly on the way stories help us to pass time, to form communities and to dispel our fear of loneliness. Whilst it lacked the political bite of previous work there was a metaphysical dimension at work here.

The company created the show a year ago when they spent ten days as passengers on a container ship travelling from France to Guadalupe in the West Indies. Each member of the company was asked to take along three stories and a couple of songs for the rest of the actors to learn. They fused this process with observations and tales from their own adventure. The result is a wickedly funny, kaleidoscopic treat of tentative offerings, songs and fables, made poignant by the ever present awe inspiring vastness of the Ocean. We're tossed and turned from moments of gloriously silly slapstick to sublime majesty.

As in previous work NIE stand to assure us that stories are our real solace, inspiration and the only thing we can genuine offer in the face of the unfathomable mysteries of the deep.
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Collaborators.

To the National Theatre to see John Hodge's witty new play Collaborators, intimately staged in the Cottesloe. The play, based in part on truth, centres around the relationship between the dissident writer Mikhail Bulgakov and Josef Stalin, brilliantly played by Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale.

It's 1938 and Bulgakov's new play about the life of Moliere has been declared subversive and withdrawn from the stage. In a Faustian pact to get it back on, he takes a commission to write Young Josef, a hagiographic play celebrating the dictator's impeccable revolutionary credentials. Unfortunately the writer's artistic sensibilities make the task impossible and despite some nasty threats from Mark Addy's blackly comic secret policeman he finds himself struggling to make the first night, scheduled for Stalin's surprise 60th birthday party.

Stalin, who of course, doesn't do surprises, steps in and arranges a series of secret scripting meetings where he delights in swapping roles with Mikhail, typing up glorious scenes from his heroic past whilst temporarily handing over the reins of the USSR, to his adversary.

The leading actors are superb. Russell Beale's Stalin weaves easily between avuncular openness and childish impatience - under which we sense a monstrous ego held short. Whilst Jenning's imbues Bulgakov with the painful realisation that principle has pragmatic parameters and the tired disappointment of a man who, taken off guard, has fallen a little for the devil.

Nick Hytner and Bob Crowley create a surreal, constructivist universe, where dreams, desires, fictions and startlingly reality mix in full absurdist glory. It all made for a dark and delicious evening, designed to puncture any optimistic belief that art can flourish in a totalitarian system.
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We Are Three Clever People.

Are there some stories that essentially can't be dramatised? Last May I had an uninspiring evening at the Richmond Theatre watching Shared Experience explore with little dramatic punch the relationship between the Bronte sisters and their characters. Polly Teale's script had strong intent in that it showed how fantasy helps us escape claustrophobic circumstance but having made its point the play faded.

Tonight at the Rose in Kingston it was the turn of another acclaimed touring company Northern Broadsides to find a way into the dark and lonely world of Haworth Parsonage with their production of We Are Three Sisters. Again it made for a long night.

In someways the piece is a triumph of conceptual elegance over good storytelling. Writer Blake Morrison and critic Susannah Clapp realised, over dinner a decade ago, that the Bronte sister's story had some obvious parallels with Chekhov's The Three Sisters. They floated the idea to Broadside's Artistic Director Barrie Rutter and a script was developed.

It's a bold idea, but it's realisation lacks conviction. Essentially it's Chekhov's play (without soldiers) set in rural Yorkshire, but the doggedly enforced biographical detail needed to replace Olga, Masha and Irina with Charlotte, Emily and Anne and unsubtle grafting of fact and fiction felt incredibly self-conscious and at time even precocious. Charlotte, searching for a publisher, stares out and parodies Irina's famous lines on Moscow with a cry of 'To London! To London! To London!' A looser relationship between the two stories would have allowed the audience to enjoy making their own connections.

I really admire Susannah Clapp, both as an editor and critic. Barrie Rutter has forged a fantastically muscular, no nonsense approach to classic plays through Northern Broadsides and Blake Morrison's eulogies to his parents are amongst the most poetic memoirs ever written; but something about this meeting of minds has served to flatten what could have been an interesting restaging into a rather predictable academic exercise.
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