British Theatre Guide Blog

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!

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.

Last week we carried J D Atkinson’s review of Colorblind Shakespeare, a book on cross-race casting of Shakespeare’s plays.  On Sunday we ran an article on the case of Simone Clarke, the English National Ballet principal dancer outed as a member of the British National Party by The Guardian. Now in the last 24 hours the news has been dominated by the alleged racist abuse of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother, the Channel 4 “reality” TV show.

The latter is turning out to be an international incident, with protests in the streets of India and comment from Anand Sharma, India’s junior minister for external affairs.

I say “alleged racist abuse” because I have some doubt about whether or not the comments which I have heard - and I’ve only seen the news programmes: I haven’t actually watched BB itself - are racist.  They could certainly be construed that way.  What they undoubtedly are is abusive, unintelligent and bullying.

The thing is - as any secondary school teacher will tell you - this kind of thing is happening every day in schools throughout the country (and probably in workplaces too). The Jade Goodys of this world - not very intelligent, not very attractive, unable to relate to others except on the most basic of levels, scared of people who are different, having little feeling of self-worth and therefore aggressive in attempting to bolster what little they do have - need people they can despise and attack because it makes them feel good. The victim may be of a different race or colour, have different beliefs, come from a different class, be more intelligent or hardworking: it doesn’t really matter, so long as they are different and vulnerable.

They need their supporters.  Usually, because of their aggression, they have strong personalities and attract others who are weaker but have the same lack of self-confidence.  These suporters, like Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara, follow the stronger’s lead.  It is, in fact, likely that if Jade Goody wasn’t there, they would behave in a totally different way towards Shilpa Shetty. Indeed, one of Lloyd’s friends, Leeandra Anderson who is of mixed race, told the BBC, “I’ve known Danielle for five years now and not once has she had a racist undertone in her voice, ever.”

If there is racism there, it is not an ideological racism: it’s the sort which arises from the need to have someone to look down upon, to claim is inferior to you, to despise so that you don’t have to despise yourself.  It’s the bullying reaction of the small-minded (in every sense).

Hopefully this is a wake-up call to those who promote (and those who are taken in by) the cult of celebrity!