Archive for the ‘Theatre’ Category
Star collapses on stage
We went to the theatre last night to see Martin Shaw and jenny Seagrove in The Country Girl and were a bit miffed when we were told that Martin Shaw would not be appearing due to ill health. I read in the paper this morning what had happened yesterday afternoon.
Only a week after saying he was finding theatre acting an ‘incredibly frightening and strenuous process’, Martin Shaw dramatically collapsed on stage yesterday.
Just 20 minutes into a matinee performance of The Country Girl at Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury, members of the audience gasped as Shaw, 65 — star of BBC dramas Inspector George Gently and Judge John Deed — suddenly faltered
during a dialogue with his co-star Jenny Seagrove.‘He clasped his head in his hands and was unable to go on,’ I am told. ‘Jenny went to comfort him. He was heard murmuring “I’m sorry” as the curtain went down, and a paramedic from St John Ambulance rushed to help.’
The show, which was being performed in front of a sell-out audience of 600 people, re-started later with an understudy.
Shaw has only recently recovered from a chest infection, and theatre manager Peter Nicholson tells me: ‘He was taken to hospital but is apparently fine now.’
The play is due to finish its current tour with a run in the West End, which is scheduled to begin in October.
However, I must say that the understudy and Seagrove gave magnificent performances in a very powerful play about control, deceit, drink and life in general – thoroughly recommended.
Brilliant Richard Griffiths & Frances de la Tour
The Habit of Art – a new play by Alan Bennett was broadcast live tonight and we viewed it at the local cinema. It is all about a fictional meeting between WH Auden and Benjamin Britten, once friends but had not spoken for 20 years.
Auden often said that metre and rhyme led him down unexpected paths to thoughts he wouldn’t otherwise have had, and in this respect versification and fornication are not so different.
Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, WH Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, amongst others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station.
You are a rent boy. I am a poet. Over the wall lives the Dean of Christ Church. We all have our parts to play.
Alan Bennett’s new play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion’s spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.
‘In the end,’ said Auden, ‘art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning one’s living and loving one’s neighbour.’
Cast credits:
Frances de la Tour
Richard Griffiths
John Heffernan
Alex Jennings
Elliot Levey
Adrian Scarborough
Stephen Wight
Director – Nicholas Hytner
At our local cinema so have booked tickets
Auden often said that metre and rhyme led him down unexpected paths to thoughts he wouldn’t otherwise have had, and in this respect versification and fornication are not so different.
Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W H Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, amongst others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station.
You are a rent boy. I am a poet. Over the wall lives the Dean of Christ Church. We all have our parts to play.
Alan Bennett’s new play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion’s spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.
‘In the end,’ said Auden, ‘art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning one’s living and loving one’s neighbour.’
The Habit of Art contains strong language and sexual references.
World Premiere Cast:
Frances de la Tour
Richard Griffiths
John Heffernan
Alex Jennings
Elliot Levey
Adrian Scarborough
Stephen Wight
Director – Nicholas Hytner
Night out
Tonight I went to The Bellstone for a rare breeds sausage tasting en route for Cabaret at the Theatre Severn.
The sausages were delicious and the super market brands were easy to detect. Shropshire Lass was available from the Salopian Brewery and very good it was too.
I was torn away to the theatre and I thought it was going to be dire. I read the Christopher Isherwood short stories (Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris changes trains) many years ago and enjoyed them. Much later I saw the DVD and it was OK, just a vehicle for Liza to belt it out. This new production with Wayne Sleep as Emcee (a role he played on stage 25 years ago) and Siobhan Dillon as Sally Bowles is much more sinister, debauched and explicit (homosexuality and prostitution were only alluded to in previous versions). This was much more honest and disarming although some of the new songs are a bit weak.
I also have to admit this is the first production I have seen at our new theatre as the first season programme has been so dire and now we have panto to look forward to! The theatre works well from inside and the bar now serves real ale. The outside design is as awful as ever – a blot on the landscape of the town!
Romeo and Juliet
This Ludlow Festival 50th anniversary open air production at Ludlow Castle was bawdy, brilliantly acted and musically a triumph – never seen it played like this but the words are as fresh as when they were first written. Did not get a universal crit approval but whoever cared about the crits.
Costume and setting evoked a feral, primitive world on the edge of anarchic collapse, reminiscent more of Mad Max. A steel spiral staircase dominated the stark, austere set – the music throughout is menacingly percussive, stripped of any lyricism or sense of ritual order. The Capulet ball is more of an All Blacks haka than a dance of harmony.
Crits say it lacks romance and maybe of the old fashioned kind but it evokes love as it is seen in the 21st century – for good or bad – I loved it. Air and breath come to mind not necessarily in that order!
West Side Story
Went to the Hippodrome this afternoon to see West Side Story which I wrote about earlier.
Romeo and Juliette in a modern setting and to think this was written more than 60 years ago and Shakespeare did it 450 years. But the music of Leonard Bernstein and the Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim are stunning and always will be.
Set in New York in the mid 1950s, the musical explores the rivalry between two teenage gangs of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The young protagonist, Tony, who belongs to the American gang, falls in love with Maria, the sister of the rival Puerto Rican gang’s leader. The dark theme, sophisticated music, extended dance scenes, and focus on social problems marked a turning point in American musical theatre.
Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury
I went tonight on a pre-opening internal tour of our new Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury. Readers of this blog will already know that I thought the lack of an architect for this project was a severe cost cutting mistake and has produced a building to equal our Market Hall 60′s monstrosity – Shrewsbury’s most hated building. Well, it has a contender now.
What is the object of signage – to communicate – another failing of this building and it’s design.
However, I have to admit there is nothing wrong with the interior – for a small regional theatre it ticks all the boxes.
I have posted an album of pics I took tonight – see side bar or the link to Col’s pics in the left side bar.
The bar is nice but not a real ale pump in sight – I was assured that this would be corrected.
I would like comments on this please. Am I being to hard on the external design?
Ken Campbell – great entertainer will be sadly missed
Ken Campbell who has died suddenly aged 66, was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre of the past half-century. He was a writer, director and monologist, a genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing the improvisational capabilities of the actors who were brave enough to work with him.
An Essex boy who trained at Rada, he never joined the establishment, though his 1976 play Illuminatus! (co-written with Chris Langham) – an eight-hour epic based on an American sci-fi trilogy – was the first production in the National Theatre’s Cottesloe auditorium, with a prologue spoken by John Gielgud. His official posts included a brief spell as artistic director of the Liverpool Everyman in 1980 and a professorship in ventriloquism at Rada.
He was first renowned in the early 1970s for the Ken Campbell Road Show, in which a company including Bob Hoskins, Jane Wood, Andy Andrews, Dave Hill and Sylvester McCoy (“The Human Bomb”) enacted barroom tales of sexual and psychic mayhem while banging nails up their noses and stuffing ferrets down their trousers.
Bellingham Bares All for Calendar Tour
Tour dates have now been confirmed for the stage version of Calendar Girls featuring a naked Lynda Bellingham, Patricia Hodge and Sian Phillips.
On stage, Patricia Hodge plays Annie (Walters on screen) who, after losing her husband to leukaemia, teams up with her close friend and fellow WI member Chris, played by Lynda Bellingham (Mirren on screen) to raise money for the local hospital by producing a calendar. They’re joined by Sian Phillips, Elaine C Smith, Gaynor Faye and Julia Hills as the fellow calendar girls of the title, and by Brigit Forsyth as non-stripping WI president Marie.
Scarfe
At provincial theatres there are often strange productions but this is one that I will enjoy as I have always been a scarfie – just bought tickets. I love cartoonists and the more extreme the better.
A scarfie is really someone from Dunedin – named by Jafa’s as it is so cold down there in south island you need a scarf perpetually – heard tell it is snowing down there at the moment.
A Jafa is "just another f****** Aucklander" or Australian for that matter.