photo credit: James D. Morgan (courtesy of Methuen Drama)
On Wednesday 27th April from 6.00pm to 7.30pm BST, you are invited to join an interesting free online discussion about the future directions of theatre in the UK.
Presented by Research@Central, an events creation group based at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the online discussion will prove worth watching, I am sure.
In December of 2021, Methuen Drama published Caridad Svich’s Toward a Future Theatre: Conversations During a Pandemic, which documents theatremakers’ dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic justice are addressed. This panel brings together five artists featured in the book to reflect upon their renewed commitment to theatre’s ability to effect and model change at a time when the arts sector finds itself in a precarious state of flux and transition.
The Panelists are, as of this writing, James Graham (playwright), Roy Williams (playwright), Jennifer Jackson (movement director), Suba Das (artistic director, Liverpool’s Everyman Playhouse), and Daphna Attias (co-founder of the site-responsive, immersive theatre company Dante or Die).
Caridad Svich is a playwright, an editor at Contemporary Theatre Review and founder of NoPassport theatre alliance and press. She received a 2012 Obie for Lifetime Achievement.
Tom Cornford is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and author of Theatre Studios: A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making.
James Graham is an Olivier-Award winning playwright and librettist and screenwriter. His works include Ink at the Almeida, the West End and Broadway.
Roy Wiliams is a Black British playwright and screenwriter. His works include Death of England and Sing Yer Out for the Lads.
Jennifer Jackson is a British Bolivian movement director, actor and theatremaker. Her work has been seen at the National Theatre, Royal Exchange Theatre and Lyric Hammersmith, among others. She is currently a Leverhulme Arts Scholar.
Suba Das is Creative Director for the Everyman and Playhouse Theatres. A theatre director, producer and dramaturg, he was Artistic Director and CEO of HighTide. Previously Associate Director of Leicester Curve, one of the UK’s major producing houses, Das was Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio and English Touring Theatre, and has directed for the Young Vic, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Nottingham Playhouse, Northern Stage and the Roundhouse. In 2017 he made his opera directorial debut with the world premiere of Sukanya by Ravi Shankar for the Royal Opera and London Philharmonic. Suba read English at Clare College, Cambridge and trained on the Birkbeck Director Training Programme. He is a Trustee of The Sage, Gateshead, Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation and Theatres Trust.
Daphna Attias is Co-Artistic Director of Dante or Die, a site-specific theatre company celebrating the human condition. She has directed all of the company’s works to date.
For more information, and to reserve your place, click here
13th June – GLOBAL INDIGENOUS VOICES at the British Library. Third in a series of Global Voices Theatre events, this was presented in association with Border Crossings as part of the tenth annual Origins festival 2019 . Fifteen-minute extracts from five plays from New Zealand, Alaska, Canada, and America were given a rehearsed reading for an audience of around 150. The event was guest curated by Madeleine Sayet and presented by Global Voices Artistic Director Lora Krasteva and Producer Robin Skyer. Global Voices Theatre is now an Arts Council funded organisation, yet another reason to celebrate their continued development.
18th June – CASH COW by Oli Forsyth. At Hampstead Theatre Downstairs until 20 July.
Tennis is a dynamic and
exciting visual game. CASH COW, as presented here, is. so static and non-visual
that it could play on radio with no loss whatsoever. A smart set and some fancy
lighting does not change the fact that this is a talk-heavy, resolutely un-visual
show.
The play’s viewpoint is rather
belied by the title. Two parents are told that their ten-year old child is
exceptional at playing tennis, so they invest effort and resources into honing
her talent. So begins a 20-year journey studded with tennis coaches,
globe-trotting, using drugs to manipulate natural development to fit the rigid
playing schedules, separation on different continents, and much more. Money is
the driver, and the child pays the price.
So at what point did that
ordinary, hopeful parent become too pushy, and then manipulative and then all-consumed?
We see the slide down the slippery slope of good intentions, as the parents
lose control of – and contact with – their daughter. At what point did their
child become artificially induced into being a product? At what point did the
parent start to refer to himself as the manager and promoter? And at what point
did the parents sit down and agree “I made her” and “she owes us”?
Anyone can see that the
extremes that the parents go to seem bound to engender damage in youngsters who
need space and help in exploring themselves. What is very telling is that every
discussion with the child featured in the play is dominated by the parent – and
the (unseen) child’s answers are always one word- OK, no or yes. The child, as
far as I remember, is never even given the respect of a name- always referred
to as her, she, love or honey. So at no point in the whole 20 year span of this
story do we ever hear the parents having any sort of discussion with the child,
asking for her own ideas and what she wants to do.
At one point it is suggested
that the coach is physically abusing the child, and the parent’s rightful
initial revulsion is rapidly distorted by the calculation of the effect that
any action will have on their investment, causing the audience to draw parallels
– so surely both the coach and the parents are abusing the child, just in
different ways?
Escalating dramatic
distortions of relationships climax with inter-familial lawsuits and the ending
is effective, suggesting the price of “success” is not worth the paper its
written on.
As the distortions in
behaviour happen incrementally over time, the play’s jumping about in time helps
us to see the differences in a more marked way, but the audience have to do a
lot of work in placing the pieces. Where it backfires is that the scenes are so
short and bitty that one tires of the monotony of the concept, trying the
audience’s patience and making the show feel much longer than its 90 minutes.
The fact that I have not been
a parent or a child prodigy may colour my take on this, but I found it
impossible to care for any of these characters, or to be particularly drawn in
to this long 90-minute piece that a lot of the audience watched with their eyes
shut.
Perhaps this show will be a
wake-up call for those countless parents out there who are driven to push their
child harder than they once pushed themselves. Perhaps it will cause them to
consider the price that will be paid by all parties. And whether kids should
just be allowed to be kids.
21st June – Royal Central School Graduation show – a musical A PERMANENT STATE OF EMERGENCY. Final year students in a specially-commissioned new musical, directed by Sue Dunderdale.
27th June – THE BASEMENT TAPES – seen as part of the Incoming Festival at New Diorama Theatre in London.
It is always exciting to see
new work from other parts of the world visiting the UK and so I was intrigued
by this New Zealand originated show which sounded full of possibilities. Sadly,
most remained unrealised after this disappointing, overlong hour.
You spend a lot of time in the
dark during this show. About half of the running time, in fact. Listening to a
taped voice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make for great theatre, in my opinion.
We are in a basement of a
house in New Zealand. A teenage girl rummages around in boxes of her dead grandmother’s
belongings in a superficial attempt to sort things out, making more mess as she
goes. The piece gradually morphs into a kind of spook story as the discovery of
a cassette tape player and some significantly labelled tapes reveals the voice
of the deceased grandmother describing in dreamlike detail a murder that she
may have committed.
There were significant moments
of potential when I hoped that the show would spark into life, with the
discovery of the tape machine and tapes: the smell of a garment embodying the sensory
memory of the grandma was also a telling moment: also, the first notes of the
dead grandma’s voice. All had much more potential but they appear to have just
been used as punctuation.
However, the indulgent dancing
to loud music which occupies the first five minutes, the poor and immature jokes,
as well as what felt like padding to fill out the hour started to try the
patience. When we strayed into spooky
territory with weird lights and sounds, it all just got a bit daft. Miserable
old sod? Maybe. But it appears I was not alone. The teenagers sitting just
along from me were checking their twitter feeds repeatedly while all this was
going on. A group listening to a voice in the dark can be a very interesting
experience, but here it just didn’t seem to ignite. Mind you, the illuminated
exit signs and phone screens dotted around the audience didn’t help.
This could have been a very
touching examination of teenage experience of bereavement, but it proved very
hard to care for this careless teenager in this teenage Stephen King mash-up. The
soundscape created was just OK but could have been a lot more textured and
interesting (and scary!).
