In an attempt to ease out of character as the Daily Mail-reading apoplectic Outraged of Walthamstow I have turned into of late, this entry is going to attempt to find Reasons to be Cheerful.
The Olympic security recruitment stuff had me Tweeting, and writing to my MP. Not so much the fact that the G4S company is clearly an incompetent bunch of cynical swindlers, but that our elected politicians – of all parties, in national and local government – didn’t think to check during the last three years that the EIGHT HUNDRED MILLION POUNDS PLUS of our money being paid out to this bunch of twisters was doing what they said it would do, actually address unemployment issues in east London. In a country where there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people how on earth can they fall three and a half thousand short? And Mr Hunt the Government minister cheerfully and complacently calls it “a hitch”! They were being paid to recruit security staff, not brain surgeons! And now the farce of the Olympic bus-drivers collecting American and Australian athletes at Heathrow and then spending FIVE HOURS trying to find their way into London…..!!!
And today I find that the bank which “looks after”my hard-earned pennies and farthings (actually, my child, I can remember using farthings) that trusty high street ever-reliable depository, HSBC, has been boosting its profits by millions via deals with Mexican drug barons and Al Quaeda terrorists…
So, Reason to be Cheerful Number One: of course it’s the wondrous BBC 2 show “Twenty Twelve”.
Hugh Bonnevile, Jessica Hynes and indeed all of the cast are quite brilliant and John Morton’s script about the “Olympics Deliverance Commission” is extraordinary. Apparently written and recorded months ago, the parallels with real events leading up to the Olympics have been spooky, except that for the most part the real-life cock-ups are far less credible than the TV comedy ones – see second paragraph above. Last night’s plot centred on difficulties in selling tickets for women’s football, and – guess what – only yesterday afternoon the announcement came that half the seating in the Millenium Stadium will be closed for the opening women’s football match because of poor ticket sales…Morton is truly a seer, and a seer with a forensic instinct for ridiculous behaviour, of which there is no shortage around this wearisome, sad pantomime.
Reason to be Cheerful Two has to be “The Hollow Crown”. I already championed it last session, so won’t go on about it too much, but suffice to say that it’s consistently the best television Shakespeare since the Trevor Nunn “Antony and Cleopatra” with Janet Suzman and Richard Johnson back in 1974.
Needless to say, we old RADA tutors are glowing with pride at the smashing work done by our ex-students. I already mentioned Mr Whishaw and Mr Hiddleston, but there are also cracking performances from David Dawson as Poins and the increasingly stunning Maxine Peake as Doll Tearsheet.
The scene with Tom and David in the bath-house is already up there with Colin Firth’s wet emergence from the pool in “Pride and Prejudice” as an iconic fantasy…. My friend Lois phoned to say it had left her quite unsettled…
Settle down, settle down…Now on to Reason to be Cheerful Three. This section is especially for readers in Northamptonshire and Somerset, who have treats awaiting them at their local playhouses. According to the Daily Telegraph, reviewing “Hedda Gabler” at the Derngate Theatre starring yet another Radagrad says:
“Emma Hamilton, young and lovely as a Renoir… commands the part from her entrance, moving with a loose nonchalance that bespeaks both aristocratic confidence and appalling restlessness. Her graceful femininity shines a piercing light upon Hedda’s dilemma”
While The Guardian, writing about “The School for Scandal” at Bath Theatre Royal, observes
“masterpieces of comic timing from the cast, particularly Edward Bennett’s Joseph Surface, making swift shifts between sham “man of sentiment” and “artful, selfish” swindler”
So yet another accolade for Mr Bennett, who is, of course, available as a mentor for subscribers to www.ellisjonescoach.co.uk.
And so to Reason to be Cheerful Four: ladies and gentlemen, we give you THE JETSTREAM! Having spent weeks and weeks offloading
unspeakably soaking weather over the UK, this seemingly key feature of the upper atmosphere is shifting north, we are reliably told by the BBC, and as of Tuesday next we shall have proper mid-July weather, including quite a lot of sunshine. So, imbued as we Brits are with indelible faith in the BBC, I am quitting the Olympic chaos of London and heading to Stratford on Avon by canal-boat. If my laptop’s dongle works in the rustic heart of England, look for the next report to be a despatch from a land of golden sunlight, glistening on calm, soothing water…
The Blog
July 3rd THE CHINESE WAY IN ESSEX
And so to my nearest CDS drama school, the East15 Acting School, and their lovely, cosy Corbett Theatre at Loughton. My colleague and friend William Sun, vice-President of the Shanghai Theatre Academy (where I spent seven extraordinary weeks at the end of 2010, directing an Ayckbourn comedy in Mandarin) has brought a company of STA actors to these shores.
They are specialist performers, graduates of the Chinese Opera training, a discipline which takes as long to learn as it takes to train a brain-surgeon – literally. They are performing an adaptation by William and Faye Chunfan Fei of Strindberg’s “Miss Julie”, in traditional costume, and with specially composed music, which draws on traditional sources. However the composer has added a modern zest and pace to the delivery, and it isn’t loud and repetitive, as is often the case in this style of theatre. The show is crisp, light and FUNNY.
The performers are all utterly charming – Zhao Qun as Julie, with Qin Hao as Jean, and Yu Bowen doing a sharp female-impersonation as Kristin.
If you live in reach of Guilford, go at see them – they’re at the University of Surrey Theatre on Thursday – don’t think about it – just go!
There’s a blog – in English and Chinese – to be found if you click here:
blog.sina.com.cn/zhulixiaojie
The wondrous 2012 Shakespearefest continues. St Mary’s Moorfields would have been his parish church when he lived on Silver Street, and so Nicholas Fogg chose it as the venue to launch his new book, HIDDEN SHAKESPEARE, which uncorks the biography bottle one more time, and unleashes some new and provoking thoughts about Will’s life and loves.
I made a modest contribution to a very convivial evening, by giving readings of sonnets 20 and 130. You will be familiar with one, but not the other – so, go on, look them up… and when you’ve bought Nick’s book, you will see why we chose them…
I expect you’re all already hooked on “The Hollow Crown”? Yet more RADAgrads from my time coming to the fore. The quite remarkable Ben Whishaw has rightly had wonderful reviews as “Richard the Second” – and stand back, no sooner has Jamie Parker delivered Henry the Fifth down at the Globe, when along comes Tom Hiddleston, due to glue us all to our BBC2 screens next Saturday night in “Henry the Fourth” as Prince Hal, who of course will become his version of the hero of Agincourt.
I was with Nick Barter at the Chinese piece this evening, the former RADA Principal whose deputy I was for a decade or so, and we constantly reflect on how privileged we were to steer so many significant actors through their training. (I directed Tom in “A Chorus of Disapproval” where he brought nimble charm to the part of a sweet old man – somewhat different to the steely hunk pictured here.) The difference now is that we can offer training through www.ellisjonescoach.co.uk and we don’t have to worry about running a building!
Talking of buildings, does anyone have any recent information as to the Theatre Royal Margate? I spent a couple of exhilarating days visiting Jay and Paul Norris on the Kent coast last week, and during a lively tour of the cinque ports came across one of the three oldest theatres in the UK, built in 1789. 
I know it has a stunning interior, and is reputed to be far and away the most haunted theatre in the country, so I was sad to find it locked up and forlorn. There were some current posters outside, so perhaps, like so many of us, it still comes alive in the evening. If you know what’s happening there, could you please drop me an email via ellis@ellisjonescoach.co.uk?
Meanwhile, back at RADA a new era dawns. The Academy’s survival in recent years has in no small part been due to the success of the RADA Enterprises company under the leadership of the wise and witty Antonia Gillum-Webb, who’s moving on. She will be much missed and her team gave her a great send-off in the cabaret space in the Malet St bar. Not a natural cabaret performer, AGW joined in with gusto…
She’s marking the next stage of her life by tramping the hills of southern England in search of answers to life’s great issues…she has with her, we trust, some decent Welly boots…
June 22nd Purple poppies and Violence in the Shires
The endless, endless rain has at last coaxed open the first of the Waterside purple poppies, as advertised in an earlier episode of this blog….
What a season this has been – all that wonderful open air Shakespeare, battling with the elements. Having seen the remarkable Isango Ensemble from South Africa perform last month at Shakespeare’s Globe, on the day the Royals floated in the drizzle amongst the Jubilee Flotilla my friend Jodi and I headed to the Hackney Empire, to see their final London performance this year, of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. It seemed appropriate to balance the royalist fervour with a British classic of socialist literature, albeit transformed into a musical show set in 1960s Apartheid Johannesbourg.
Isango’s work is joyous, inspiring, and gloriously exuberant. They’ve gone back to South Africa now, but look out for their return next year, or catch them in Capetown, if you’re reading this in that part of the world.
Meanwhile I slipped off into the idyllic English countryside for a friend’s wedding in the rural area once known as Huntingtonshire. We stayed on the eve of the nuptials in the local eighteenth-century coaching inn called, almost inevitably, The George. After a convivial supper at a pub elsewhere in the village, we retired to our motel-style rooms in the old stables, aware of a somewhat noisy disco in the main building. In the morning we found out that a dispute amongst the local lads and lasses at the disco had led to unbridled warfare, with at one point ten falling upon one and biting off his ear…
Could the weather be to blame? This is the oddest British summer I can remember – I mean we’re a pretty long-suffering bunch, we’re used to an unreliable climate, that’s probably why we’re still more-or-less afloat as a nation – but this is not just maddening, it’s cruel! A few scattered dollops of sunshine – like a kindly word from the nice one in a nice & nasty cop scenario – and then we’re plunged into yet more driving deluge and vicious winds.
It held off for a few hours last Monday, when I caught a striking promenade production at Hendon School. The Cactus Productions team has used their impressive address-book to involve significant contemporary playwrights, including Mark Ravenhill, Judith Johnson and Philip Ridley, in creating a five-part sequence of stories inspired by the legends of King Arthur. The shows draw on inputs from all parts of this big comprehensive school, and mixes in high-level professional work from the Cactus team, including marvellous costume and design work from Annie Gosney.
The Once and Future Plays may yet re-appear at another venue – watch this space. As ever, bulletins will be posted here and at www.ellisjonescoach.co.uk
Last night once again an example of a stoic Shakespeare audience. Down at the Bankside Globe I was hugely glad I’d invested in under-cover seats for “Henry V”, watching the fiver-a-head groundlings tugging up their parka hoods as the heavens opened and unleashed a drenching downpour. The joy of good live theatre is that adversity can be shared, and Jamie Parker’s brilliant, conversational delivery of the great soliloquies completely included the sodden audience in “we band of brothers”, and they all chuckled appreciatively as the water streamed down their faces.
It’s a very tidy production by Dominic Dromgoole, with lots of good, bright verse-speaking (notably from Kurt Egyiawan as the Dauphin and an old comrade from my days’ running the theatre at Keswick, James Lailey as Westmoreland) and a warm, intelligent delivery of the Chorus by Brid Brennan. To hear the lines about “this wooden ‘O'” from that stage in that space made me feel quite dizzy.
Henry Vs are lining up: the Propeller version is due any minute at Hampstead, and Jude Law is just over the horizon, as part of the new Michael Grandage season in the West End.
These Globe productions are a great showcase for Jamie Parker’s talent, which made such an impact in “The History Boys”.
Given that his fine acting is matched by great vocal and keyboard skills, maybe before long we’ll be seeing another RADAgrad making an impact on the West End musical stage? One of my most treasured memories of RADA was a now near-legendary production of “Guys and Dolls” by Geoff Bullen. I used to sneak in at the back of every performance to catch Jamie and Sian Brooke wringing every delicate nuance out of the song “I’ve Never Been in Love Before….”
Talking of which, I saw Sian at Will Norris’s wedding – she was looking GORGEOUS and clearly expecting a Happy Event some time quite soon. And followers of this blog will also be pleased to know that Andy Bone and Vissey Savafi’s trailed new production is now up and running – well, gurgling in a cot. He’s a boy, and so far is the Boy With No Name. We hope (for his sake) we will be able to make an announcement soon, and give him appropriate “and introducing…” billing.
News just in: Will you please welcome…Jimmie Bone!
May 30th Poppies, Bath imports and books
A bonus of living in the marshes is a wondrous supply of self-seeding wild flowers. The first to arrive at this time of the year are the poppies:
First come the Flanders fields variety, and soon we’ll have hosts of the big purple ones – watch this space.
Radagrad news has been percolating down the M4. Having exhorted you to catch Jamie Parker as “Henry V” on tour last week at Bath, I suddenly see large adverts in tube stations announcing the show’s arrival at Shakespeare’s Globe next week – so we must all hasten to the South Bank…
Meanwhile, Ed Bennett, not content with a season of langorous dalliance in “Lovesong” at Hammersmith is now performing in a sexy new play at the Bath Ustinov Studio, Sarah Ruhl’s “The Next Room or The Vibrator Play”.
This production has had rapturous reviews.
Richard Loftus wrote
“Katie Lightfoot, as the lonesome housewife Catherine, commands Ruhl’s playful and poetic script with her colourful delivery and witty characterisation….. As Leo Irving,
Edward Bennett humorously penetrates Catherine’s loneliness…”
Taking a break from humorously penetrating female loneliness Ed has texted me to say the reviews have all been fantastic, and the show is now likely to transfer to London later in the year. Again, watch this space.
My stepson, the artist Tom G Adriani, has linked me up with a pal of his, Michael Anthony Bond, who’s become Events Manager at the Hoxton Hall Theatre. Often a forgotten corner of London’s ancient theatre-land, this lovely Victorian music hall is currently being refurbished and re-energised by its Quaker owners and Hackney Council.
Michael gave me a tour of it on Monday, and he has lots of ideas for using the many spaces around the building for shows, exhibitions and events. I found the whole place really exciting, and hope to be able to create some work there in association with www.ellisjonescoach.co.uk I will report back when we’re a bit further down the line.
Yesterday I had a highly enjoyable walk over Hampstead Heath with an old friend, the writer, historian and producer Colin Shindler, with whom and for whom I worked a lot in my television acting days. Colin has produced twenty books over the last decade, the most recent two of which have just been published. One is a timely collection of reminiscences from that now inevitably dwindling generation of men who in the 1950’s spent two years of their life in National Service.
Lots of young people today probably won’t know that in those days every British male of 18 would receive in the post his compulsory “call-up papers”, and be whisked off to join the army, the navy or the RAF. The Second World war was over, but we were still involved in many conflicts, in places like Aden, Korea, Egypt and Cyprus, and the MOD needed lots of recruits.
I escaped it by several years, but I remember friends’ older brothers being trucked off to places like Catterick Camp, and returning several months later thin and fit, with brutal “short-back-and sides” haircuts. The antidote to these was of course the arrival of Elvis, with his sleek long black hair and wondrous quiff – but then Uncle Sam nabbed him into the “draft”, the American version of the “call-up”, and Elvis was shuttled off to an army camp in Germany and given a crew-cut!
Colin’s other new work is the follow-up to his extremely successful autobiographical book, “Manchester United Ruined My Life”, cunningly called “Manchester City Ruined My Life”.
The sheer brilliance of the titles is stunning. Colin is of course a life-long “Blues” supporter, but what an inspired way to create a readership across the fan-base of two major football clubs! Try as I might, as a Hull City supporter I can think of no equivalent way to engage the followers of the Tigers and say, Scunthorpe United…
The book’s reviews have been great. The Daily Mail said it was “…skilful, entertaining and heading for the top of the league” and the Manchester Evening News declared “This could still be the most important football book since Fever Pitch…”
Jubilee Weekend is almost upon us. Have a good one, ma’am…
May 23rd At last some sunshine…
The weather these last few weeks has been SO depressing. The wind has streamed out of the north, lashing the reservoir into a grey mush, stripping the last of the blossom from the apple trees, chill damp air seeping through the walls of the house. So hurray! today at last the sun broke through, gleaming sunbeams bouncing off the marigolds and next door’s pig…
Term’s over, the American students have dispersed, and AT LAST there’s been some time to complete arrangements for the TYA six-past on-line foundation course. It’s being quietly launched next week on the site www.ellisjonescoach.co.uk/ – if you’re interested drop me a line at ellis@ellisjonescoach.co.uk.
The weather destroyed a theatre event for me last week. I was due to see BABEL, the outdoor production over in Islington. But the night my friends and I had booked was preceded by several days’ constant downpour, and notwithstanding being culture hounds, the thought of standing about watching soggy actors in a muddy field in steady rain I’m afraid lost out to staying in a cosy Indian restaurant in Bloomsbury.
A quietly exciting development has been an approach from the Central School of Speech and Drama to direct a final-year production in the autumn. We’re going to do “Absolute Hell” by Rodney Acland, a forgotten nugget of war-time drama re-discovered by Sam Walters and John Gardyne at Richmond in the late 80s, and subsequently revived at the National in a production starring Judi Dench. After so many years directing at RADA, to be asked to direct at Central is bit like Alex Ferguson being invited to do some coaching at Man City…
Talking of football – what about that Chelsea-Munich final?!! Wonderful stuff – right up there amongst Most Memorable Sporting Events like the four-minute mile and Dean Windass scoring the goal at Wembley heralding Hull City’s exaltation to the Premiership. Well OK, they only lasted two seasons, but they were heady days for those of us who recalled the years of languishing in the third division, the days of Bovril in chipped mugs on Bunker’s Hill at Boothferry Park.
I caught a glimpse on television yesterday of the Shakespeare’s Globe production of Henry the Fourth, starring one of the Radagrads from my time, Jamie Parker. They’re currently out on tour with Henry V and Jamie’s still in the company, of course playing the King. Catch it if you can – he’s a cracking actor (he was in “History Boys”, the one who plays piano) and is just about perfect casting as Hal.
May 2nd Shakespeare, Ayckbourn and Shanghai
Last week started with a special end-of-course treat for the NYU students in London – a talk on Performing Shakespeare by Frank Barrie.
This isn’t really a talk, it’s a one-man performance, as Frank slips effortlessly from rich anecdotes of his splendid career into full-on delivery of great soliloquies. He’s played lots of the leads – Hamlet, Lear, Coriolanus and many other significant roles – in distinguished companies at the Bristol Old Vic, at the National Theatre, and in theatres all over the world.
He gained a huge international following with his famous one-man show about a great Victorian tragedian, “Macready!”, which toured the world. As well as being a fine actor, Frank is also an authority on Victorian acting, and the grand finale of his talk is a stupendous rendering of a Shakespeare soliloquy performed with a full range of gestures as required by the huge theatres in which the likes of Kean and Macready performed, and prescribed in detail by the acting manuals of the time.
Here’s William Charles Macready as Lear – and we felt sure his spirit was with us in the Senate House lecture room on Monday, and no doubt enjoying every moment.
Frank, of course, is a mentor for our ellisjonescoach.co.uk web-site. Perhaps we should offer a course in Acting with Gestures? What do you think?
(You can let us know your thoughts via ellis@ellisjonescoach.co.uk)
Last week also saw an odd conjunction of plays, bringing back memories of an amazing project in the autumn of 2010, when I directed the first-ever production of an Alan Ayckbourn play to be performed in Mandarin on the Chinese mainland.
But that’s another story which I’ve written up elsewhere, so to return to last week, the American students and I took ourselves off to the Tricycle Theatre to see “Neighbourhood Watch”, a production which originated in Scarborough under Sir Alan’s direction, and arrived in Kilburn via a long list of touring dates, including a run of several weeks at the 59E59 Theater in Manhattan.
Well, as some of the reviews have noted, although it’s got lots of good things in it, it’s not really “vintage” Ayckbourn. The acting is good, but the show suffers a bit from being an in-the-round presentation re-configured for proscenium theatres, and doesn’t thus have scenery. There are several lines, for instance, commenting on the wall-paper in the room in which the plot unfolds, and if the audience is watching the show through invisible walls and has to imagine the wallpaper that’s fine, and in fact it feeds the comedy. But when the walls of the room are there but represented by black drapes it’s not quite the same thing, and it feels a bit like a run-through rather than a performance. That said, the American students and I all enjoyed it a lot, and there’s some lovely work from the company, including yet another RADAgrad from my time, Phil Cheadle (right of the picture, with Matthew Cottle).
The next night we went to the Young Vic, to see “Wild Swans”, a staging of Jung Chan’s epic book about the journey 3 generations of her family made through the 20th century in and near Shanghai. The core of the story is the tragedy of the way in which her father and mother’s youthful zeal in working for the Chinese communist revolution led to grief, hardship and despair.
The production only runs for about 90 minutes, and so the rich detail of the book is inevitably compromised – but the acting is strong, and the staging wonderful. The direction is by Sacha Wares, and there’s striking visual work by the design team – Miriam Buether and Wang Gongxin.
It’s an international co-production, a collaboration between the Young Vic, the Actors Touring Company and the American Repertory Theater. The final collage of images is of the massive construction work in Shanghai towards the end of the last century, which resulted in today’s astonishing forest of sky-scrapers amongst which I worked in 2010. And amongst which, alongside the glistening shopping malls hosting Dolce and Gabbana, Marks and Spencer etc you can still see the grinding, pitiful poverty the Revolution set out to banish all those years ago…
