British Theatre Guide Blog

Robert Lepage has been working with North East-based Theatre Sans Frontieres (sorry: no way of easily inserting accents!) on a piece called Lipsynch, which was performed at Northern Stage this week.  This is a work-in-progress so there was no press night and no reviews (although the regional morning paper, The Journal, did run one), so there is no review on the BTG.  However it would be wrong of us to let the occasion pass without some comment: hence this blog entry.

Lipsynch is, at the moment, almost five and a half hours long (including two intervals) but will eventually run for nine hours.  In its present incarnation it is a series of seven interlocking stories, each based around one of the characters in the main story.  An international cast of nine play a whole host of characters and much use is made of Lepage’s trademark multimedia and a set which is brilliantly constructed to change - before your very eyes - from an aircraft to a house to a tube train to a film studio to a restaurant and so on.

The changes are done in full light in front of the audience and much of the multimedia is operated from onstage - and very visible - consoles.  Video cameras are very much in evidence.  At times, indeed, we see characters metamorphose into others in front of us. In other words, this is alienation in a very Brechtian manner, setting up the kind of tension between the naturalistic playing and the theatrical artifice which Brecht intended us to feel.  Throw in the fact that the structure of the piece, both as it stands and as one assumes it will develop, is similar to a novel, and you have a fascinating hybrid which I found held my attention throughout and it certainly did not feel as though I’d been sitting in a theatre for that amount of time - although I have to say that, had it been in the old Northern Stage auditorium, with its original and not-terribly-comfortable seats, I am pretty sure I would have been hoping for it to finish long before it did!

There is more emphasis on text or, as Lepage expressed it in his Foreword in the programme, voice.  Four languages are used (English, French, German and Spanish), sometimes with surtitles, sometimes without.

Some people did leave at the first interval.  A good half of the row where I was sitting did not return.  They may, of course, have moved to seats closer to the stage but I don’t think so.  I suppose that it’s inevitable that something as different as this will not appeal to everyone and that was confirmed by what I heard (evesdropped on!) at both intervals.  There was a lot of “I’m not sure what’s happening but I’m enjoying (or not) it”.

It will be interesting to see the final piece but I’m given to understand that it won’t be performed in Newcastle.  Someone else will have to let us know what it’s like!

Rehearsals for A Cold Coming have now started. It’s difficult: we’ve got very little money (the profits from a few years of corporate and TIE work) and a considerable amount of that is going to have to be spent on paying for the play (fortunately Chaz Brenchley, the writer, is taking little more than a token payment) and publicity.  So we’re doing it on the dreaded profit share basis. 

But this is different from many profit-shares: it wasn’t a case of the company asking the actors to work for what could be very little but the actors deciding that they wanted to do the play so much (and, incidentally, show what they can do, because it’s a very demanding play) that they’d do it on that basis.

What it does mean, though, is that I have to fit in rehearsals around their (paying) commitments and sometimes doing the Times crossword would be much easier - and quicker to work out!

But we’ve started.  We had a general meeting a couple of weeks back where we spent three hours delving as deeply into the play as we could and this week I began working with individual characters.  On Saturday two actors came round to my home for two hours each and for two days this week I worked with most of the others (one is in France however), again for a couple of hours each, in the theatre.

Essentially what we were doing was deconstructing their characters and looking at them in relation to the others and the story.  The discussions have been fascinating and we’ve gone far beyond the simple idea of motivation, building up back-stories from often tiny clues in the text.  If I say that among the items covered have been solipsism, medical ethics, alienation from society, euthanasia, academia, Rudyard Kipling, self-worth, language and hierarchy, you’ll see that these discussions have been pretty wide-ranging.

Then today (no, yesterday: it’s after midnight) we began looking through words and movement at key moments when the main character (who has been away for nine months) first meets others, each at a significant moment in the development: essentially a further deconstruction, this time of the play.  We’ve two more days of this, and then we’ll have the play in pieces around us and it will be time to start fitting it togther again.

So far we’ve come away from each session exhilarated, with an even deeper respect for the play than we had at the first read-through of version 1.  This is Chaz’s first play, although he has about twenty novels and a huge number of short stories to his credit and we’re all finding it tremendously challenging - and we’re loving every minute of it!

More to come at the end of the week!

So the DCMS has asked ACE to consider three possible scenarios for funding under the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review, the best of which is an increase in line with inflation.

Now it’s possible that this is a bit of psychological warfare in advance of the CSR so that if ACE is offered, say, 1% above inflation, everyone will dance for joy and love the Treasury, but when the best of the alternatives on offer is an increase linked to the Retail Price Index, that begins to seem very unlikely - although I would be delighted if Gordon Brown were to prove me wrong.

However the government has to find a considerable amount of money to fund the vastly under-budgeted 2012 Olympics - we still don’t know how much they are going to cost, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s going to be more than any of the already massive figures which are currently being bandied about.

They’re going to take some of it from the Lottery, further reducing the amount of money available to the arts, and there is talk of a council tax levy on London residents, and that is certainly not going to prove popular - Labour MPs with London constituencies will be faced with a lot of flak there - but, given the figures that we hear, a lot is going to have to come from somewhere else.

And then there’s the problem of inferior military equipment and the commitment to Iraq and Afghanistan.  More money required!  And there’s the NHS, schools that are falling apart, an aging population and the not looming but actually already here pensions crisis…

Peter Hewitt points out that ACE costs the average household 39p a week.  A 5% increase in funding would cost less than 2p. Even taking into account all the other financial problems which we face, is this too much to spend on an industry which is an nett income-earner?

Many years ago I had my first experience of the use of radio mics in a theatre.  It was the Sunderland Empire and the show was Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert in, I think, 1974.  The theatre is close to Sunderland’s main police station and, at that time, the main fire station was between the two, so the radio mic receiver kept picking up transmissions from the police and fire service, which did tend to spoil the show a bit!  It was amusing at first, I admit, but soon became very annoying.

Later certain frequencies were set aside for theatrical use and, today, there are certain frequencies (I think it’s five) which are free and others which, although reserved for radio mics, require a licence.  Because of the short range and low power of radio mics (they require no more than a 9v battery), they are not subject to interference from other users of the same frequency if they are more than about quarter of a mile away Indeed, it may well be less - I haven’t used them for some years.

Once the switch is made to digital broadcasting, the Office of Communication (Ofcom) intends to auction off the entire current radio spectrum to the highest bidder.  If the radio mic frequencies are included in this sell-off - and currently it appears they will be - then entire sound systems in theatres throughout the country - and that includes the short-range radio communications that many theatres now use to keep backstage and front of house in contact - will become obsolete, so either liecences will have to be purchased from the buyers of the frequencies, if they are willing to sell them and they charge a reasonable fee, or new, digital equipment will have to be bought.

In the first case the purchasers can, as it were, hold the theatres to ransom and charge huge amounts, or, in the second, theatres will be faced with replacing entire sound sytems at great expense, which they can of course ill afford.

As we report in our news story today, Equity is urging its members to write to their MPs asking them to sign an early day motion to persuade the government to except these frequencies from the sale.  But it is not just Equity members who will be affected: it’s also members of BECTU and the MU, as well as ordinary theatregoers and members of amateur operatic societies. 

I would urge everyone who has the interest of music theatre (indeed, of theatre in general) at heart to take a look at that story and send off a copy of the letter (which we have reprinted there) to their MP.  The analogue switch-off is not due for some years, so let’s get in early and try to prevent the major problems before they occur.  It is a technical problem about which MPs (and, let’s be honest, even most of the theatregoing public) will not be aware, so the more we can do to make our Westminster representatives aware of both the problem and our concern, the better. 

Let’s all get writing!

I was doing a six session Drama course with recovering drug addicts for Adult and Community Learning (I’ll not say where).  The idea was to work with them to produce a short play.  They wanted to do A Christmas Carol so, working with them, I produced a 30 minute version which we began to rehearse.  We were half way through the rehearsals when I was inspected.  It’s a few years since I last worked for ACL so I was top of the list for inspection.

The inspector came, sat at the back and watched the whole process.  At the end she was very enthusiastic.  “I loved that,” she said, “and the learners got so much out of it.”  She then went on to say all sorts of nice things about the session, the response of the guys I was working with (I do hate that words “learners”: it’s bloody patronising) and the quality of the work they produced.

Although arrogant (and experienced) enough to believe that I do a good job, I was nonetheless relieved to hear that, but then my pleasure was rather spoilt by the next comment.

 ”I’ve given you a grade 2,” she said. “It would have been a grade 1 but you didn’t have a written lesson plan.”

“Could you have written a lesson plan for that session?” I asked.

 ”No,” she said.

“In any case,” I said, “it’s a poor lesson that doesn’t leave the plan behind in the first five minutes. You’ve got to respond to the way the group reacts.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “You know that and I know that, but I have to tick the boxes and if there’s not a tick in ‘Lesson Plan’ box, you can’t get a grade 1.”

I used to believe that teaching is an art, that the teacher (and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a primary or secondary school teacher, a teacher in a university or a drama school), knowing what (s)he intends the class to achieve in both the long and short term, presents the material in a way which is sensitive to the mood of the class as well as their abilities, adapts and changes the lesson to make the best impact in the situation with which (s)he is faced in the lesson, is ready to move off in a totally different direction if that is what it takes to achieve the long term aim - in short, is responsive to the needs of the class. 

It appears I was wrong.  Somone sitting in an office somewhere, possibly in Whitehall, has reduced a good lesson to a series of tick boxes and one size fits all.

The word “bollocks” springs to mind!

Sorry.  It’s not theatre but if this is how the Learning and Skills Bollocks is trying to organise education - including drama education - then the outlook isn’t very healthy.  Please, someone, tell me this bollocks hasn’t got into actor training.  Please.

Take a look at the article by Scottish theatre journalist Mark Fisher in the Guardian.  Dealing with the impact theatres have on the environment, he works out that the business does pretty well but could do more.

During the Christmas period I directed a touring panto which, for a couple of weeks, had three shows a day in all parts of the North East.  There was one day when we did a gig in Sunderland, then travelled down to Middlesbrough (a van and a car), and then back to Sunderland for the evening gig, just three quarters of a mile from the morning’s venue.  That was a bit extreme, but every day saw the company dotting around the region pumping out the CO2 like nobody’s business.  I hate to think how many times that little convoy went up and down the A1 and the A19 day after day for the run of the tour.

What can you do?  If a venue wants the show at a particular time on a particular day, you can hardly say no and expect to keep the gig.  No matter how eco-friendly we may want to be, sometimes the nature of the business militates against it.

It is good to hear that the West End has had yet another good year.  Or, at least, that the membership of SOLT has.  That includes all of the West End theatres (except Jermyn Street), some off-West End theatres (the Barbican, the Globe, the Old Vic, the National and the Royal Court, but although it includes the Carling Apollo, Hammersmith, it doesn’t include the that borough’s Lyric), and the major opera and dance houses (Coliseum, ROH and Sadler’s Wells, although it doesn’t include The Place which is so important in the contemporary dance world).

But we mustn’t assume that the West End is representative of British theatre or that its state reflects that of theatre throughout the country - or even in the rest of London.

It could, indeed, be argued that its health (or otherwise) reflects that of the British (in particular, London) tourist industry rather than of the theatre.  It would be interesting to know what proportion of West End tickets are sold to tourists, either from abroad or from the rest of the UK, although I doubt whether that information is available or even accessible.  I suspect that the National, the Royal Court and, possibly, the Barbican are a better gauge of theatre’s as opposed to tourism’s health.

The big musicals, certainly, depend to a large extent upon tourist numbers.  On the very simplest of anecdotal evidence level, I have two friends for whom a London visit is not complete without a visit to the Dominion to see We Will Rock You.  One wonders if audiences for WWRY and Mamma Mia! are not reflections of the popularity of Queen and Abba respectively rather than anything else?

It would be interesting to know how the non-West End theatres are doing - the Finborough, the Arcola, Southwark Playhouse, the King’s Head, the Tricycle, New End, Hampstead, the Almeida, Hackney Empire, Stratford East, for example.  Are they sharing in the West End’s success?  Are they getting record audience numbers or record box office receipts?

 They are genuine London theatre, not London tourist-orientated theatre.  How many people visit London and go to one of these?

(And before you ask, yes I do.  My visits to London over the last couple of years have included seeing shows at the Arcola, the Almeida, the Riverside Studios and the Drill Hall as well as the National, the Court and a number of West End houses.)

By all means let’s celebrate the financial success of the West End, but we mustn’t let it blind us to the position elsewhere, where, for example, BAC could come to a grinding halt in May or Southwark Playhouse might have to close because it has to move out of its current premises.  Or, looking more widely afield, where the Royal and Derngate in Northampton could just vanish and where theatres throughout the country are currently waiting and worrying for their local councils to decide if they are going to be cut - for, make no mistake about it, councils are having to make cuts and theatres are very tempting targets when savings have to be made.