'We're quite intrepid really'

It’s a running joke between us that when we’re in Liverpool, we like a bit of an ‘adventure’. Given that neither of us are known for roughing it, these adventures consist of trying new places to stay, and trying new restaurants!

This week, it being the night of the ‘footie’ and all, we couldn’t get into our usual places, so I’d been browsing on line and discovered these apartments.

We only got lost twice on the way there, despite having both printed directions and a map (I blame a particularly odd junction)!

Arriving we’re welcomed by John, who’s looking after the place. After showing us our room, we ask him whether there’s anywhere nearby to eat.

He looked us up and down. ‘Well, now, ladies like yourselves, I don’t think there’s anywhere near here you’d want to go’. He suggests an area which we’ve been to before, at the end of Penny Lane (yes, The Penny Lane).

We have the most delicious meal, and head back. The next morning, we need breakfast, and for once it isn’t provided. We’d passed a Tesco on our journey last night, so we decide call in there, to pick up supplies.

‘We’re very intrepid, aren’t we? We could be survivors’, C comments.

‘Oh, yes, drop us in Liverpool, with a few wine bars, and a Tesco at hand, and we can survive!’

They say it will be alright on the night, however...

‘I feel like Birnam Wood’, I mutter to K.

We exchange a glance.

We’re getting towards the end of Act 1 and I have just been asked to be a tree. So far, I have given the (thankfully empty) auditorium my Lucy Locket, and my Lady Brute, but surely this has to be the pinnacle, for there I am, standing on the stage of the Georgian Theatre, holding a green painted flat.

Through a combination of circumstances, I haven’t managed to get to either of the earlier rehearsals, so this is my only chance to go through it before we perform to the paying public. As it’s a rehearsed reading, thankfully we’re still on the book.

It’s getting on for 2.00pm, and we’re still in the first Act. When we get to Act 2, we don’t even manage a full run, and so no one has an accurate timing for the piece. This is to prove just a bit of a problem.

Once the performance begins, it feels like it’s actually going pretty well. Our excerpt from the Beggar’s Opera gets a round of applause, and the audience seem to be laughing in the right places. After the interval, I begin Act 2 sitting in the pit, and chatting to the audience before we start, they seem to be enjoying it.

During the interval, K has reminded the director that she has to leave at 5 to catch a train. No one is worried, as we’re sure to be finished by then.

By 10 to 5, however, we’re only about two thirds of the way through Act 2. K’s biggest scene is coming up. She’s playing Dora Jordan, famous 18th century actress, and as she goes through the scene where Dora auditions for the actor-manager, the director leans across to me, and whispers ‘will you take over the part of ‘Fanny’, so that K can get away’. I look a little blank as I was supposed to play opposite K in this scene. I read down the page, and realise that it’s supposed to be ‘Dora Jordan as ‘Fanny’’.

About a minute later, Dora No1 leaves the stage, and Dora No2 (me) moves forward. This clearly confuses the actor playing opposite me, who no one has been able to explain this to, but we carry on.

I continue to skim down the page, through a piece that we hadn’t gone over earlier, and I reach the point where it says ‘Dora sings’.
‘Oh S**t!’

As I neither know the song, nor have much of a singing voice, I have to improvise with a few trills and ‘la la la’s’. Thankfully at that point there’s supposed to be jeers and hissing from the other actors! Somehow, we carry on to the end of the play.

Afterwards the audience are very kind, even complementary, but I can’t believe that they didn’t wonder what the heck was going on!

Just because...

This has been running through my head for the last few days:

I'll be there for you
When the rain starts to pour
I'll be there for you
Like I've been there before
I'll be there for you
'Coz you're there for me too...

No one could ever know me
Seems you're the only ones who know
What it's like to be me
Someone to face the day with
Make it through all the rest with
Someone I'll always laugh with
Even at my worst I'm best with you

(with apologies for a couple of liberties taken with the lyrics)

Look me in the eye and say it's wrong

Five years ago, I took what was, for me, an unprecedented step and arranged to meet up with a group of people I only knew through an internet forum. That day, the Northern Division, or ND, was born, though it was a few days before the name was coined.

We weren’t all there at the beginning, some came along later. But somewhere in that wonderfully crazy Autumn and Winter of Christmas light switch-ons, road trips, radio tours, signings and dodgy nightclubs, a bond was formed. Despite what we said at the time, it wasn’t ‘all about the music’, and it quickly became about us.

This weekend was our anniversary, and there seemed no better place to celebrate it than Whitby, for who can forget such things as waterlogged campsites (and tents), getting barred from the Dolphin, the freezing gale that blew as we waited to get into Whitby Pavilion, the crazy golf, watching football in the freezing cold till Cat’s fingers turned blue, the 199 steps, the photograph in the window… It was a weekend for memories, for sadness, but also for celebration.

In those first few heady months, these people became closer than family. I know that on Saturday, there was no one I would rather have been with. The ND – it really is a state of mind, and we’re stronger together. I love you all to bits.*

*yes, even those who scared the cats.

'What good is sitting alone in your room, come hear the music play...'

If I had to list my top five musicals, then Cabaret* would be in there. So when I learned that the recent London production was to tour, I also knew that I wanted to see it.

When I saw the casting, however, I was slightly less enthusiastic. Wayne Sleep as the Emcee? Well, he played that part when I last saw a touring production about 20 years ago, and he was very good, but I’m not sure he or I have benefitted much from the passing years. Then I read that Samantha Barks had been cast as Sally Bowles. As the ‘Nancy’ who came third in ‘I’d Do Anything’, she was most remarkable for being very young, for John Barrowman struggling to find any emotion behind the eyes, and a rather unfortunate memory of Barry Humphries being a bit pervy in his ‘admiration’. I’ve always seen Sally as a role for an actress who can sing a bit, rather than a singer who can act a bit, as the point is that she’s really not very good. Judi Dench, who was the original West End Sally, has always seemed to me to be perfect casting. Would Samantha be up to the part?

Sadly no. She did seem too young – her mother would still have had her in school, not let her loose in Berlin! When Sally sings ‘Maybe this time’, it should feel like the song of someone who’s been through the emotional mill and is finally daring to hope again, but it wasn’t there. I feel Sally should break your heart a little with her wilful blindness to what is going on around her, but she didn’t. Instead the emotional heart of the story was the romance between the boarding house keeper Fraulein Schneider and Herr Shultz, the Jewish shop keeper.

It was an odd audience, with very little reaction or response, and they didn’t seem to get the show they were expecting as there was an air of shock at some of the nudity (a lot of which I did feel was gratuitous).

As for the ending, well, it didn’t ‘offend’ me, but I’m not sure if it added anything. You already know what will happen to this society under the Nazis, you don’t need to see it. What I love about the usual ending is that things seem to be contining as they were before, but we know they’re not. Cliff decides to wake up, and leave. Sally stays. That’s all we need to know.

*I still remember John Doyle’s fabulous production at York Theatre Royal back in 1995.

Backstage

As the tour guide opens one of the Perspex screens and we peer through, I whisper to Corinne ‘this is as close as we get to David’s view!’ There’s a moment, as we let this sink in.

We’re ‘backstage’ at The Courtyard theatre, and there’s not much of it. I’m standing pretty much where David Tennant would have been standing last night before he made his first entrance.

When we called in at the theatre earlier, I’d spotted the notice about theatre tours. We’d just missed the 11 o’clock, but there was another at 12, so we asked in the shop.

‘I’m sorry, it’s fully booked…but if you have a word, he might be able to squeeze you in.’ So we head into town, and back again (‘at least we’re getting exercise’), and wait. The 11 o’clock tour comes out. There are quite a lot of them. The 12 o’clock assembles. There doesn’t seem to be as many, so we’re in. Even better, it’s free, and you can take photos in the auditorium.

It proves fascinating, as he tells us about the creation of the ‘rusty shed’ as the temporary replacement for the RST, and we get to view the stage, still set for Hamlet, from each level. We decide that the top balcony will never be seats of choice, though the sightline isn’t awful. He explains that there’s only about three and a half feet below the stage, and how the actors in The Histories got calluses on their knees and elbows from crawling around underneath. Sometimes, theatre isn’t very glamorous!

He tells us we can’t go on the stage, which has a shiny black floor for Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s and the Dream – all Gregory Doran productions. Apparently they initially let groups go on the stage as long as they took their shoes off, but he objected. Someone pipes up ‘so, the clog dancers* don’t damage it then’. We curl our lips slightly in the metaphorical direction of Mr Doran.

As we pass by the back of the stalls, we spot a list of scenes

‘Look, no pirates’
‘Maybe we could just add them back in!’

It’s very tempting!

Then, we’re backstage. It’s very narrow. There are a few props, and a quick change area, and a scenery dock behind a curtain. He opens one of the screens and it’s only as I look out that I get a real sense of the size of the theatre, and just how little space the actors have. As I resist the urge to step onto the special surface, I don’t ask the guide any questions. I don’t need to. I’m just drinking in the theatre magic.

*In Love’s Labour’s – for a minute there I thought I was watching Northern Broadsides!

'Suit the action to the word, the word to the action...'

After three months, I made a return visit to Stratford at the weekend, seeing Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Hamlet. I’ve given myself a few days to reflect on it. Partly because of work, but also because I wanted it to settle in my mind.

When I first saw Hamlet, some of the directorial decisions and cuts jarred to the extent that they marred the production, and I marked David Tennant’s Hamlet as a ‘very good Hamlet, with the potential to be great’. This time, the choices and cuts didn’t bother me in the main, as I was expecting them, and therefore they didn’t detract from what was happening on stage.

And what was happening on stage was amazing. There was theatrical magic in the air, and he was everything that I’d felt he could be. It was like hearing some of the speeches for the first time. Lines I can repeat in my head along with the actors sounded new minted. He actually made me cry in the soliloquies, even ‘to be or not to be’! For a self confessed ‘theatre snob’ who is incredibly difficult to please when it comes to Shakespeare, it was mind blowing.

He seemed so young, and so vulnerable in his performance, heightening the tragedy of wasted potential. His interaction with both father and mother was very emotional, with the closet scene immensely powerful.

The strength of his performance did mean that others got less attention, though Penny Downie, Oliver Ford Davies and Peter de Jersey all impressed me. I couldn’t find the ‘smiling damned villain’ in Patrick Stewart’s Claudius though, apart from one or two flashes.

I still don’t think the placing of the interval added anything, and I still miss the pirates, ‘let be’ and Fortinbras at the end, but I almost cried as he tenderly stroked Yorick’s skull, and was in tears throughout the last scene – hence my issue with the abruptness of the ending. Yes, the rest really is silence after the loss of such a sweet prince, but I need time to mourn before the cast come on to take their bow.

As the lights went down, I glanced at Corinne. ‘I’m going to stand’, ‘Me too’, and we were on our feet. He deserved it. And he knew – he could tell that it had been a good one, as you could see it in his grin, and his face. It was once of those theatrical experiences that I want to save forever, and it’s part of the magic, but also the transience, of theatre that I can’t and it has to live in my memory*.

I don’t have the words to capture it really. It’s still not the greatest production of Hamlet that I’ve seen, but on Saturday night’s performance, he has become my best ever Hamlet.

*But come on, RSC, you know there’s going to be a market if you record it – it’s been done for lesser productions

Everybody Dies

I mention that I’m going to see Hamlet in Stratford.

‘What’s it about? I’ve never seen it’

I know I look a little dumbstruck. Does she really not know? How do you sum up the greatest play in the English language in a few words?

‘Well…It’s about Hamlet’. She looks at me questioningly. ‘Prince of Denmark’. Clearly this means nothing, so I begin.

‘Hamlet’s father has died. He’s a student and he’s come back from Uni. His uncle has become king, and married his mother. He sees the ghost of his father on the battlements and he tells Hamlet he was murdered by his uncle’.

‘And was he?’

‘Yes, but at first Hamlet isn’t sure, so he pretends to be mad and tried to trap him. When the players come to court, he asks them to perform a play that’s like the murder of his father, to see his reaction. Claudius (that’s the king), does react, and Hamlet goes to kill him, but doesn’t, and is banished. Oh, and the girl Hamlet loves goes mad and kills herself because he rejected her and killed her father, and her brother comes back and challenges Hamlet to a duel, and everybody dies!’

‘Oh! So, it’s not a barrel of laughs then!’