Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman: “Songs crafted with great care and love of language and form”
A POWER cut, a piano and a bottle of wine. Such were the beginnings for one of the new songs unveiled by the fine folk duo Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman.
That tune, Year Without A Summer, closes their new album Almost A Sunset, and is based on Mary Shelley’s sodden holiday that created Frankenstein.
You don’t have to travel to Switzerland to find inspiration, and the song was written one wi-fi-less evening at their home on Dartmoor. Roberts is originally from Barnsley while Lakeman is hewn from the Devon lands and from something of a musical dynasty.
Many of their songs are inspired by books. Roberts, a prolific reader, shared her love of fine words and colourful characters from the past (human and animal). Ropedancer, a standout on the album, is based on one Charles Blondin, a Victorian funambulist (a tightrope walker to you and me).
As she sang, Roberts’s voice soared, still a wonder and undimmed by the years. Roberts and Lakeman are not prolific, but each of their albums (the first in 2001) are crafted with great care and love of language and form.
Roberts and Lakeman’s Selby setlist “was a marvel, full of welcome changes and shifts of style and pace”
This was reflected in the quality of the performance, which was consistently at a level only a select few can reach. Blondin once carried his (presumably soon to be and now ex) manager on his back across a chasm – but this concert never felt like a nervy high-wire act. We were in the safest hands. Like her Barnsley peer, Kate Rusby, Roberts and Lakeman occupy the more accessible end of the folk spectrum and even their more obvious material is full of melody.
This wonderful venue felt like an apt staging post for the duo, entertaining and selling beautifully scented, organically made albums that you can’t buy on Amazon or eavesdrop on Spotify.
The 16-strong setlist focused mostly on the new record, interspersed with deft nods to their past. Roberts was mostly at the keyboard, barefoot, gracefully leaning to the left as she drew out the emotion with exquisite control.
Her husband, meanwhile, was in his brown familiars, and his face mirrored the patterns he coaxed from his guitar. While Roberts’s voice can take on all comers, Lakeman’s playing, in its variety and feel, was equally magnificent.
The setlist itself was a marvel, full of welcome changes and shifts of style and pace – including the obligatory bawdy one (The Lusty Blacksmith) and a more left -field moo (Cows Of Mystery, which could have been awful but was anything but).
After 90 minutes, all too soon they were gone like the May blossoms that adorn their songs. Memories of this lustrous concert will linger longer.
PLAYING Leeds Brudenell Social Club on Friday will bring back memories of Stephen Jones’s early Babybird travels.
“We deliberately requested these places [Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, London and Cardiff] as it feels like a rite of passage to return,” he says of this month’s short tour.
“These cities featured in our first tours in 1996 and 1997 and are the most memorable for the between-song banter and the enthusiasm. Though I live near Manchester, these other cities are our musical homes too.”
Joining 60-year-old Stephen on the road will be guitarist Luke Scott and drummer Robert Gregory, fixtures in the line-up since 1995, and bassist Danny Lowe, a band member for 15 years. “Everyone’s doing different things these days – Luke is a senior lecturer in London – but as soon as we get into the tour van it’s like a Chuckle tour,” he says.
Babybird officially split after ten Top 40 singles and 11 albums in 2013, but Stephen continues to write prolifically – up to seven songs a day – for solo release on Bandcamp. Around 100 albums so far and still rising, recorded on a laptop, Stephen still bursting with “monstrous lullabies for an unstable world”.
“Writing tunes is just something I can do,” he says. “Mowing the garden, I’ll put off forever, but going upstairs to the ‘fourth room’ to write the lyrics, that’s the hard part.”
He has been known to write in six-hour bursts, but he does not have a set routine. “Sometimes at four in the morning, I’ll have an idea that I’ll put on the phone, but I’ve never been the kind of writer who will be writing every day because that’s what they do. There’ll be days where I get up and don’t want to do it, but when I do it’s a pleasure,” he says.
“Looking back to those early albums [lo-fi Stephen Jones recordings made initially on cassettes in his Sheffield bedsit over six years], I had no intention of releasing them, but people were coming over and stealing them and saying I should release them!”
Now as then, “I always write for myself. I think everyone does. If you write for an audience, you become an automaton,” he says.
One tour preview summed up Stephen Jones’s post-2013 career as one where he will still “persist and meddle”. “I don’t think I would use the word ‘meddle’,” he says. “But I need to keep going financially, so you have to persist, and even if I had another job, I would persist with making music – but I’ve never had to give it up.”
Born in Wellington, Telford (“the same place as the comedian Stewart Lee,” he notes), Stephen was raised in Repton, Derbyshire, and Nottingham, where he studied film; made those notorious bedsit albums in the Steel City; moved to Manchester, and then to London for 15 years.
Home for the Jones family is now Hale in Altrincham, just outside Manchester. “We were living in a really nice place in London, a maisonette, but with no garden and with two kids, we decided to move back north. Nice garden…and my wife’s mother lives up here too. I love being on the verge of the Lake District,” he says.
If one album were still to sum up Babybird, it would be October 1996’s Ugly Beautiful, the one with “songs to annoy, enjoy and employ God with”; the one with the singles Goodnight, Candy Girl, Cornershop and global hit You’re Gorgeous.
The poster for Babybird’s May tour that opens tonight and arrives in Leeds on Friday
“Obviously some songs I write are out-and-out happy and beautiful too, but that album title sums up everything. I like to write about subjects that aren’t necessarily dark but are realistic. When lots of songs have a sheen, if you’re going to write songs like a David Lynch film, there has to be beauty within,” says Stephen.
“I studied film on the creative arts course at Clifton, at Nottingham Polytechnic as it was then. Fassbinder movies; David Lynch; Eraserhead made a big impression on me. That’s my humour. Dark!”
You’re Gorgeous, a number three hit in autumn 1996, will forever be the signature song, with its theme of male exploitation and yet a misleadingly upbeat chorus. “It’s funny what happened,” says Stephen. “Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, whose humour I don’t like, did a version. The Wurzels have done a version. Pinky And Perky, they did it, without changing the lyrics. The Smurfs wanted to change the words, so we could say ‘No’ to that!” Dame Berwick Kaler once sang it in a York Theatre Royal pantomime too, by the way.
Stephen wrote the song in his lo-fi recording days. “I always thought it might be a hit of course, but I was listening to Stewart Lee talking to Adam Buxton on his podcast about successful acts who wanted to be cults and those who are underground but who wanted to be successful,” he says.
“It’s a hard gap to straddle, but I’ve kind of done both and that’s why ‘Gorgeous’ is good, because although it can define you, I can keep going into the studio because all the airplay keeps the money coming in.”
Stephen has come through a heart attack too in 2017. “It did stop me in my tracks. It was like having an iron cage put over me, but it was coming,” he says, attributing what happened to alcohol. “Does it make you reassess? Well, you do for a while, but then you go back to a glass of wine.
“What I’m doing is the same as an office job. Now I get up every 20 minutes when I’m writing – and I go to the gym too. I was in a ward with four men who looked so much worse than me, but then depression comes, but you come out of that. The doctors say I’m in better health than ever, with a stent in me, and now I’m just having a good time doing these gigs.
“There’s no pressure to promote things, which doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s perfect now. I’m older now. I was inspired by the tail end of punk, seeing The Stranglers, and it’s still that DIY thing of glueing your sleeves together, thinking it’s totally up to you what you do.”
Stephen’s 20-year friendship with Johnny Depp found “lyrical diamond” Stephen attending the Hollywood A-lister’s guest appearance with guitarist Jeff Beck in Manchester last May in the aftermath of Depp’s successful libel trial against ex-partner Amber Heard. “I was meeting him in the dressing room, shortly after the verdict. I fell over and smashed my leg. I now have a huge tear,” he says.
Nothing that will stop him from performing in Leeds on Friday, however, still searching for the meaning of life that he happily acknowledges he may never find.
Babybird, supported by Terrorvision’s Tony Wright, Leeds Brudenell Social Club, May 5, doors 7.30pm. Box office: brudenellsocialclub.co.uk.
Did you know?
STEPHEN Jones has written two novels, The Bad Book in 2000 and Harry And Ida Swap Teeth (also the title of a Babybird B-side) in 2003. He wrote the score for the 2004 film Blessed.
Did you know too?
CHEF, cookery book writer, TV presenter and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay used Babybird’s song The F-Word in one of his TV series.
Flying Scotsman VR: The virtual reality experience at the National Railway Museum to mark the steam locomotive’s 100th birthday
AS Flying Scotsman meets virtual reality, Charles Hutchinson goes full speed ahead to keep you on the right track for entertainment by rail, on land or indoors.
New attraction of the week: Flying Scotsman VR, National Railway Museum, York
THE new virtual reality experience at the NRM celebrates Flying Scotsman in the iconic steam locomotive’s centenary year, taking visitors on a journey back in time and around the world, bringing the golden age of rail travel to life.
Commissioned by the Science Museum Group and developed in collaboration with Figment Productions and Sarner International, the experience uses free-roaming VR headsets to provide a multi-sensory experience that includes an understanding of how steam locomotion works from inside the boiler. Admission to the NRM is free but a charge does apply for Flying Scotman VR. Booking is advised at railwaymuseum.org.uk.
Steve Cassidy: Back among friends at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre
York stalwart of the week: Steve Cassidy Band, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, Sunday, 7.30pm
THE Steve Cassidy Band and friends perform a selection of rock, country music and ballads, combining something old with something new.
York singer, guitarist and songwriter – and former headmaster – Steve recorded in the 1960s with York-born composer John Barry and pioneering producer Joe Meek. Tomorrow night he is joined by his band members and guests at his favourite theatre. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.
Midge Ure: Synths in synch in Band Electronica concert of two Ultravox albums in full
Retro gig of the week: Midge Ure & Band Electronica, The Voice And Visions Tour, Grand Opera House, York, Sunday, 7.30pm
ON 2019’s The 1980 Tour, Midge Ure & Band Electronica revisited Ultravox’s Vienna album and Visage’s debut LP. Now, on his twice-rearranged follow-up tour, Voice And Visions, Ure marks the 40th anniversary of Ultravox’s synth-driven, experimental Rage In Eden and Quartet albums. Box office: atgtickets.com.york.
Space exploration: A spaceman lands in York in Lincoln Ligthfoot’s playfully surreal art at the Grand Opera House
Art talk of the week: Lincoln Lightfoot, Grand Opera House, York, Thursday, 6pm
YORK Open Studios 2023 artist Lincoln Lightfoot presents a 90-minute Grand Opera House Creative Learning artist talk and workshop to complement his ongoing exhibition in the Cumberland Street theatre’s box office.
In his retro art, Lincoln explores surrealist concepts reminiscent of the absurdist poster art that captured the Fifties and Sixties’ B-movie fixation with comical science-fiction disasters, but now played out on the 21st century streets and landmark buildings of York. Tickets: atgtickets.com/york.
Gary Meikle: Expressing his loathing of stupid questions in 2.5 comedy show at York Barbican
Likely to cause a stir: Gary Meikle, 2.5, York Barbican, Friday, 8pm
SCOTTISH comedian Gary Meikle returns to York Barbican with his third live show, or 2.5 as he calls it. Top professionals and industry people may have advised him not to be so crude or edgy, but “as a kid growing up in the care system, I was told that I’d be either dead or in jail by the time I was 30, so I tend not to listen to others and do things my way,” he says.
In a “continued celebration of me being me” in defiance of cancel culture, Meikle discusses equality between the sexes, medication side effects, his loathing of stupid questions and “how our ancestors were idiots”. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Guy Masterson: One actor, 69 roles in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood at Theatre@41
Tour de force of the week: Guy Masterson, Under Milk Wood, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, Friday, 7.30pm
CELEBRATING the 70th anniversary of Under Milk Wood, Olivier Award winner Guy Masterson portrays one day in the life of Llareggub, a fictional town by the sea somewhere in Wales, as he assiduously conjures up all 69 of Dylan Thomas’s ebullient inhabitants in a feat of memory and physical virtuosity.
Complemented by Matt Clifford’s soundscape, Under Milk Wood is bawdy and beautiful, sad and sensual and, through the music of language, leaves indelible, unforgettable images of humanity. Masterson, Richard Burton’s nephew by the way, has clocked up more than 2,000 performances, from Swansea to the West End, Trinidad to New Zealand, over 30 years. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Jessica Steel: Showcasing debut album Higher Frequencies at The Crescent
Made of Steel: Jessica Steel, The Crescent, York, May 7, 7.30pm
YORK powerhouse singer Jessica Steel performs her October 2022 debut album, Higher Frequencies, in full for the first time.
A fixture at Big Ian Donaghy’s A Night To Remember charity concerts at York Barbican, hairdressing salon boss Jessica made the album with songwriter-producer Andy Firth, late of the Britpop band The Dandys. “There’s an interesting contrast between uplifting music and sad lyrics throughout the album, as well as a recurring theme of finding hope through adversity,” she says. Box office: thecrescentyork.com.
Lloyd Cole: First York gig in 23 years
Commotion incoming: Lloyd Cole, York Barbican, October 17
LLOYD Cole will team up with former Commotions compadres Blair Cowan and Neil Clark at York Barbican for the only Yorkshire gig of his 17-date autumn tour to showcase his 12th solo album, On Pain, set for release on June 23.
On his first York appearance since a solo show at Fibbers in May 2000, Cole will play two sets, the first acoustic, the second, electric with the band. Box office: lloydcole.com/live or yorkbarbican.co.uk.
In Focus: Tim Crouch, Truth’s A Dog Must To Kennel, York International Shakespeare Festival, York St John University Creative Centre, tonight, 8pm
Tim Crouch: King Lear and a virtual reality head set combine in Truth’s A Dog Must To Kennel at York International Shakespeare Festival. Picture: Stuart Armitt
TIM Crouch’s 2022 Edinburgh Fringe First winner plays the York International Shakespeare Festival after visiting New York and playing a London season.
Taking on the character of The Fool, Shakespeare’s King Lear meets stand-up comedy meets the metaverse as Crouch dons a virtual reality headset to explore Lear in a post-pandemic world and interrogate theatrical form and the essence of live performance.
“It’s reductive to say I have a favourite Shakespeare play: King Lear. They’re all great but I have a relationship with this play that goes a little deeper,” says the Bognor Regis-born experimental theatre maker, actor, playwright and director, whose work rejects theatrical convention, especially realism, and invites audiences to participate in each performance’s creation.
“I played Lear at university [Bristol] at a King Lear Symposium at Ferrara in northern Italy, at the age of 20, which is a little young! I then directed a 90-minute production for the Royal Shakespeare Company ten years ago.”
The play contains everything, he contends. “Complex relationships. Love. Madness. Families. Obscene wealth and the hypocrisy of wealth. Towards the end, Lear becomes a socialist champion. He has this moment of enlightenment, realising that everything on top of that is superfluous,” says Tim.
“This egotistical figure has his power removed, his ego removed, discovering compassion in the truest sense.”
Tim then refracted King Lear through the Covid shroud of the past three years. “I also saw Lear in Trump and in some degree in Boris Johnson, seeing the world governed by egomaniacs, of which Lear is an example,” he says.
“Or like Succession [the television series about a wealthy family at war], where Brian Cox plays this grotesque maniacal figure. It’s Rupert Murdoch really!”
Tim views King Lear through the eyes of The Fool. “He doesn’t have a name; he’s slightly mysterious, he’s depressed and he leaves before the end of the play, before anyone has been killed,” he notes.
“He just disappears, and I’m fascinated by people leaving, just getting up and going, so I dramatise his moment of departure in this show.”
“What would a contemporary Shakespearean Fool be? I think it would be Stewart Lee,” says Tim Crouch
Tim exposes King Lear through a modern lens. “I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the world. Maybe it was always this way, but there are these deep schisms that are dividing the world. Men like Trump,” he says. “Playing this show in New York was extraordinary! Over here, there is civil war in Brexit, just as there is civil war in Lear’s family.”
Experiencing theatre only digitally during the pandemic has had an impact on his show too. “As a theatre maker, my passion for live theatre was exacerbated by lockdown when you could only watch theatre online,” says Tim.
“’Live theatre’ is tautological because, to me, theatre is only live, whereas in the pandemic, we had an image of theatre that was only on a screen, so that prompted me to put on a virtual reality headset at times in this play.”
What happens then? “The conceit of this piece is that I take The Fool back to the point of his departure, and now he will witness his exit, the blinding of Gloucester and what I think is the most powerful scene in theatre ever: the Dover cliffs scene where the blinded Gloucester’s imagination is brought into play through his son’s act of imagination, saving his father,” says Tim.
“Theatre is an adult form of imagination, taking us to a different place and learning from that journey, but keeping us safe while doing that. Shakespeare’s lines are very precise; they are an invitation to see what I see through language, to then narrate The Fool’s return through this middle-aged bald guy [Tim is 59] in a headset, that people will experience through their ears.”
Stand-up comedy features in Tim’s performance too. “That’s partly a nod to The Fool, wondering wondering ‘what would a contemporary Fool be’? I think it would be Stewart Lee, a comedian who doesn’t have an agent and does no social media,” he says.
“I don’t claim to be a stand-up but use the form to say things about the experience of being together in a room. When we’re in the same place at the same time, just look at how brilliant and transformative we can be through using our mind, our body, our imagination.
“But theatre is increasingly becoming the preserve of the wealthy, though the imagination dematerialises that, not succumbing to any socio-economic structure. Children have the greatest imagination, but sadly that then gets replaced with wanting to be TV stars and wanting to make money.”
Assessing the “international” in the York International Shakespeare Festival, Tim says: “The thing that I’m endlessly inspired by is that Shakespeare does and yet doesn’t exist in his plays when there’s now a thirst for autobiographical and biographical plays, which limits them.
“Whereas there’s a quality to his work and to the work of many playwrights of that time who didn’t nail their colours to one mast and can be interpreted by each age, nationality and culture. There’s an objectivity to these plays that requires whoever does a production to find themselves in them – which should be the case with every play, I think.”
Steve Tearle: Director, Narrator and Mystery Man. All pictures: David Richardson
THIS is as much Stephen Tearle’s Into The Woods as Stephen Sondheim’s wickedly witty Broadway show in a fusion of York and New York imaginations.
Sondheim rooted his 1987 Broadway musical in a grown-up twist on the Brothers Grimm stories that casts a new light on such familiar fairy-tale frequenters as Cinderella (University of York student Rebecca Jackson); Beanstalk-climbing Jack (Jack Hambleton); a skipping Little Red Riding Hood (CAPA College and PQA York student Missy Barnes/Rowntree Players panto regular Mollie Surgenor); Rapunzel (Juliette Brenot); Snow White (Elizabeth Farrell) and The Wolf (Ryan Richardson, looking not unlike Sam Smith in their Gloria tour get-up).
James Lapine’s book for Sondheim’s songs centres on the plight of the Baker (Chris Hagyard) and the Baker’s Wife (Perri Ann Barley), a childless couple seeking to lift the curse placed on them by a once-beautiful Witch (a towering performance from Pascha Turnbull).
Flour power: Perri Ann Barley’s barren Baker’s Wife and Chris Hagyard’s Baker in NE’s Into The Woods
Venturing into the woods, they must search for the ingredients that will reverse the spell: a milk-white cow (Erin Greenley, in white jeans and boots), hair as yellow as corn (from Rapunzel); a blood red cape (from Little Red Riding Hood) and a slipper of gold (from Cinderella).
Here they will encounter the fairy-tale folk, each on a quest to fulfil a wish, and into the story come the likes of Cinderella’s Prince (Sam Richardson), Rapunzel’s Prince (Kristian Barley), Cinderella’s Mother (Rebecca Warboys) and the Ugly Sisters, Florinda (Ali Butler-Hind) and Lucinda (Morag Kinnes).
Sondheim steers a path away from pantomime into terrain altogether darker, behaviour worsening, human foibles bursting through, enchantment turning to disenchantment, living unhappily ever after until the denouement. Steve Tearle nudges the playing style back towards panto, without changing the fruitier post-9pm-curfew content.
Missy Barnes’s Little Red Riding Hood: “Something of the Wednesday Addams about her”
He also introduces a young ensemble to swell the company ranks to 50, playing woodland birds and forest dwellers in pointy ears, who gather at Tearle’s feet in his role as string-pulling Narrator and Mystery Man too. He plays free and loose with the script, interjecting adlibs in his north-eastern accent in the manner of a Dame Berwick Kaler pantomime.
Sondheim’s style is deadpan, even noir, as well as being witheringly witty, as paraded in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street too. Tearle’s style is broader, tongue pushed into the cheek in pursuit of “highly camp fun”, typically expressed in the performances of Richardson and Barley’s Princes and Melissa Boyd as Jack’s Mother, although Missy Barnes’s Little Red Riding Hood on Thursday night had something of the Wednesday Addams about her.
In a “big” joke, Helen Greenley’s diminutive Giant’s Wife arrives in massive platforms and a startlingly deep, echoing, discordant voice – compared by one audience member to Mr Blobby – that brings to mind the Wizard Of Oz at the moment he is exposed as a fraud.
Hagyard and Perri Ann Barley play it closest to Sondheim’s tone, while Pascha Turnbull, regularly cast as “larger than life, formidable women”, takes on the bewitching role she has “yearned to play for many years”, combining the show’s most powerful singing with her suitably domineering presence. Not for the first time, Jack Hambleton stands out as one of York’s rising talents.
Bean there, done that: Jack Hambleton’s Jack of Beanstalk-climbing notoriety
Scott Phillips conducts his musical forces with glee and oomph aplenty; Adam Kirkwood’s rainbow palette of lighting complements Tearle and Faye Richarson’s woodland setting with its camouflage gauze and three rotating scaffolding towers, forever on the move, whether occupied by Jack or Rapunzel or whoever.
The fabulous costumes, designed by award-winning Ashington fashion designer Paul Shriek, go with the many shrieks that pierce the sylvan night air.
Experimental, experiential and wildly ambitious, amber-gambler Tearle’s Into The Woods heads deliriously into the weird. It certainly brings a smile, but would the late Sondheim take Tearle’s tribute as a compliment? We shall never know.
Box office: 01904 501935 or at josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.
Entwined: Rumi Sutton’s May and Emma Thornett’s Fly in a scene from Gus Gowland’s musical Mayflies, in rehearsal at the Central Methodist Church, York. Picture: Sam Taylor
THE world premiere of York Theatre Royal resident artist Gus Gowland’s new musical, Mayflies, opens tomorrow with a cast of Nuno Queimado, Rumi Sutton and Emma Thornett.
Except that you will not see all three of them on stage that night (28/4/2023), nor indeed at any performance in the run until May 13.
To explain, Mayflies tells the story of a romantic relationship between May and Fly, who match up on a dating app and begin a tentative conversation, whereupon their romance grows into something real. Then they meet.
Same story each show, but Gowland uses a rotating cast whereby any performance could feature a configuration of Nuno (May), Emma (Fly) or Rumi (“the super-talented one” because she can play either May or Fly).
“Come on three nights and you will see all three configurations,” advises director Tania Azevedo, a specialist in bringing new musicals to the stage, with credits for the award-winning But I’m a Cheerleader (Turbine Theatre) and as resident director for & Juliet in the West End.
Nuno Queimado’s May and Emma Thornett’s Fly in a touching moment in Mayflies. Picture: Sam Taylor
“Gus has specifically written what to our knowledge is the only musical able to be played by anyone of any age, gender, sexuality or race. May and Fly don’t come from anywhere specific; they have no identity whatsoever, which feels really special because it’s such a joy to watch, whether it’s Nuno and Rumi, Rumi and Emma or Nuno and Emma: we’re making a show that is universal. You get to experience the bravery to fall in love, whether you’re straight, gay, young or old.”
Composer, lyricist and writer Gowland, director Azevedo and musical director Joseph Church ran a full week of auditions, seeing more than 300 actors. “There had to be some decisions made at the beginning,” says Tania. “We could have had just two actors but settled on three, which allows us to really show how flexible the script is.
“Within that, we wanted to select people from different backgrounds and with differing vocal qualities, not just your average musical theatre performers. We also needed playful actors, able to cope with changes, as this show will be as fresh as it can be, with the latest re-write finished only a few weeks ago.
“They need to be playful to discover the juice within it. It will always have their imprint on it, stretching the concept as far as possible.”
Portuguese-born Nuno, who played the alternate Alexander Hamilton in the West End run of Hamilton, says: “Gus hasn’t written specifically drawn characters but doesn’t shy away from very specific themes, but the device he uses to change the configurations is what’s so special. That’s the juice that sets it apart from other shows.
“Then they meet”: Nuno Queimado’s May and Rumi Sutton’s Fly in Mayflies. Picture: Sam Taylor
“What’s great in the rehearsal period is being able to carve out the characters in 3D, finding out what’s different in each of our characterisations.”
To aid that journey, mood boards have been steadily filled with ideas and notes in the rehearsal room at the Central Methodist Church in St Saviouragte.
Tania rejoins: “What’s been really interesting is how generous they’ve been to each other, truly working as an ensemble with a collective understanding of the story while searching for the differing nuances of each pairing, so we’re developing the individuality of each character. Even with the same blocking, each pairing will feel really different.”
Emma, whose credits include War Horse, says: “To get that distinction between the different combinations, Tania has allowed us to develop why my Fly is different from Rumi’s.
“Having two people playing the same character at different performances brings a different dynamic to each scene, which will end up with it feeling like it’s a different show.
Director Tania Azevedo and musical director Joseph Church overseeing a rehearsal for Mayflies. Picture: Sam Taylor
“This is so rare in musical theatre because it usually has a prescribed time and place and specific type of acting, with freedom being somewhat restricted, but here it’s unique for allowing the true actor’s craft to be infused into the songs.”
Nuno says: “Tania, as the director, will go back to what’s important to squeeze as much juice as we can from each scene, whether we have to be busy or relaxed or open to being vulnerable, but always sticking to what the scene needs. Keep asking what each character needs: that way it doesn’t ever let the oven of creativity get cold.”
Another dimension to the show is representing the world of online dating. “What’s fascinating is that for a third of the play they can’t see each other as they’re connecting through online dating, which has had such an impact, especially since the pandemic when it was the only way to connect and find a new partner,” says Tania.
“No longer do people meet in a bar if you’re looking for love now. Chances are they will meet online. It’s interesting to see how the relationships changes when they’re in the same room [at an hotel], reading texts, talking on the phone or voice noting…”
…”And whether they react and how they react or not, in each situation,” says Rumi, who is making her York Theatre Royal debut after appearing in Hex and Heathers The Musical.
Mayflies composer, lyricist and writer Gus Gowland, seated, with York Theatre Royal cast members Emma Thornett, left, Rumi Sutton and Nuno Queimado
“The impact on when they’re in the room together face to face is pretty extreme,” says Tania.
To add another ingredient, Mayflies does not plough the straight furrow from the relationship’s beginning to finale. “It’s not chronological!” says Nuno. “It keeps jumping between online and offline and we keep jumping backwards and forwards too!”
Those worlds have to be represented in the designs of TK Hay, who so thrilled audiences with his innovative geometric carapace of one and a half miles of fibre-optic cable lighting for the multiverse story world of University of York alumnus Nick Payne’s Constellation at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, last autumn.
“The main thing I told him is that it’s a musical with only two people but we need to make it exciting on a big, big stage,” says Tania. “People have an expectation of how opera will look and we have to find a way to present things in a new style.”
Gus Gowland’s Mayflies runs at York Theatre Royal from tomorrow to May 13, 7.30pm; 2pm, May 4 and 11; 2.30pm, May 6 and 13. In a special deal, you can see all three casting configurations for the discounted price of £15. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Jill and Stephen Outhwaite at their Dress Circle of York costume-hire emporium
THE sale of contents from Stephen and Jill Outhwaite’s costume-hire emporium Dress Circle of York is running online until May 11.
When the final curtain fell on their 18-year business in converted buildings at the Outhwaite family farm at Low Grange Farm, Haxby, on December 19 2020, they said: “Ideally we’d like to sell Dress Circle as a going concern, and we’d love it to go locally preferably.”
No such scenario has played out, although Sian Thomas’s Silver Linings Theatrical Costumiers and Liam and Owen Nardone from Nardone’s Academy of Performing Arts, in Lochgelly, Fife, Scotland, have made significant purchases.
“We did try to sell Dress Circle as a business, but it was just too big and made more difficult by Covid,” says Jill. “It’s a shame as it would have been nice for it to have gone to one site but it wasn’t possible.”
The remaining items – 1,288 lots in total – are being auctioned by Ryedale Auctioneers, Angus Ashworth’s Kirkbymoorside firm that features in the television series The Yorkshire Auction House.
“A team of four from the auctioneers has been cataloguing the auction over three weeks for the largest single stock sale of its kind they have ever done,” says Stephen.
Viewing days will be held at Low Grange Farm, off Moor Lane, Haxby, on May 7, 9 and 10 from 10am to 4pm, with the auctioneers in attendance on the Tuesday and Wednesday. Alternatively, viewing by appointment can be arranged by contacting Jill by email at jill_outhwaite@btconnect.com.
Full details of this timed auction, concluding at 7pm on May 11, can be found at ryedaleauctioneers.com/upcoming-auctions, where you can view the catalogue and register to bid.
The auction includes vintage wedding dresses; full and part sets, from a family of squirrel costumes to dresses for My Fair Lady, costumes for White Christmas and full sets for Monty Python’s Spamalot and ’Allo ’Allo!; more than 1,000 hats; two massive boxes of former Opera North costumes for Nabucco; stage make-up; theatre props and much more. View the lots at https://bit.ly/43BQOXF
“Before our retirement, we were the biggest business of our type in the North East,” says Jill. “We covered as far as Blyth, in Northumberland, down to north Lincolnshire.
Dames’ dresses by the dozen at Dress Circle of York
“I’ve counted up the number of companies, schools, film companies, event companies and more that we dealt with, and I’m sure I’ve missed out some, but it must have been around 160, and then there were all the individuals over the years too,” says Jill.
York Stage, York Light Opera, Rowntree Players, Bev Jones Music Company, Helmsley Arts Centre’s 1820 Theatre Company and Stephen Tearle’s NE Musicals York were among the companies grateful to theatre costumiers Stephen and Jill and their team of Sophie, Sue, Elaine, Caroline, Emily, Susan and Guy.
So too were Hessle Theatre Company, Be Amazing and Pauline Quirke Academy (James Aconley), Pauline Quirke Academy in Harrogate, Stockport and Halifax, the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield and Panto Ever After in Halifax and Marsden.
Many a farm has diversified, whether into ice cream, maze attractions, fields for solar-heating generation or wedding party teepees, wind farms, holiday cottages, film studios, business parks, beer breweries, the list goes on…
But theatrical costume hire? Pantomimes, fancy dress, make-up and accessories too, that is another world, one of fantasy, fable and fabulous fun. “Dress Circle of York came into being in 2002 when Jill and I brought the theatrical costume-hire business into an empty barn,” says Stephen, who has a history of acting, directing, set building, applying theatrical make-up and running a youth theatre [he founded and ran Flying Ducks Youth Theatre in York for many years].
“Combined with Jill’s experience of costuming shows and a history degree and encouraged by the Government and our accountant to diversify, when the farming wasn’t that good, we took the first step into developing Dress Circle, acquiring stock from Geraldine Jevons and Sue Morris.
“The business grew and developed in a way not dreamt of, as we built up a team of staff with a wealth and diversity of experience in costume and the theatrical world.”
In a normal year, from the end of October through to early December would be Dress Circle’s busiest time. “On average, we dressed 30 shows in those few weeks,” says Jill.
Not only theatre companies called on their Aladdin’s barn of costume opportunities. So too did those seeking clothes for weddings and even funerals; war-themed weekends; big parties with a dress code; bikers gathering in Helmsley for a charity Christmas ride and vintage car enthusiasts headed for the Goodwood Festival of Speed in West Sussex.
Everything could be found, from Lady Gaga and Tina Turner styles to Madonna cones; from Victorian and Edwardian clothes, through Seventies’ Glam to the modern day; from the full kit bag for Cinderella, Beauty And The Beast and Monty Python’s Spamalot to a Gruffalo; from Father Christmas outfits to The Pink Panther.
Re-living 1980s’ fashion at Dress Circle of York
No fewer than 16,000 costumes and much more besides: hats and more hats; prop after prop; military attire; blazers and tailcoats; socks and handkerchiefs; umbrellas and swords; waistcoats up to a 60-inch chest, ties, scarves, suits-you-sir suits, dress upon dress. Aprons. Everything a panto dame could dream of matching with bold lippy and a wig. Anything for a Steampunk sci-fi enthusiast.
So much glamour, such theatrical flourish, awaited visitors to these most untheatrical of premises. “It was built for cattle, and over the years we had pigs and grain in it too,” says Stephen.
“We insulated all the walls, but heating-wise you don’t want gas because it puts moisture into the atmosphere and electricity is expensive, so I enquired about a wood burner.”
No ordinary wood burner, but one as big as a fledgling dancer’s dreams. “We got it from Dowling Stoves in Scotland, though originally he was from Helmsley,” says Stephen. “It’s been the only heating we need in here; it keeps a nice dry barn, really good for drying costumes.”
Costumes have been leaving Dress Circle gradually since the 2020 closure. “One of the first people to contact us after we decided to sell Dress Circle costumes individually was Sian Thomas, from South Yorkshire, who as well as being a freelance costumier is also head of wardrobe for Hull Truck Theatre and had hired from us in the past,” says Jill.
“Sian, who has mainly late 19th and 20th century costumes, wanted to start up her own hire company on a smaller scale with the prospects of growing in the future and we were delighted to help.”
When Nardone’s Academy of Performing Arts heard of Dress Circle’s closure, enquiries were made over costume sales. “They wanted costumes for their own shows as they do about six a year and to start a theatrical costume hire company to supply other theatrical companies in their area,” says Jill.
“They’ve been down twice to see us and are coming again to collect the rest of their costumes in the near future.”
What will happen after May 11? “It depends if everything sells; if we can then empty the building at last,” says Stephen. “Angus [Ashworth], from Ryedale Auctioneers, has said they could take whatever costumes are left to sell at the auction house.”
Not all theatrical enterprises will be ending at Low Grange Farm. Flying Ducks continue to rehearse in one of the buildings and Stephen is still making set designs, keeping that wood burner alight.
Midge Ure: Recalling Ultravox’s Rage In Eden and Quartet albums with Band Electronica
MIDGE Ure & Band Electronica finally play their postponed Voice & Visions Tour show at the Grand Opera House, York, on Sunday.
The York gig should have formed the tour’s opening night when first arranged for February to April 2022, but “ongoing uncertainty around Covid-19” led to Ure putting the itinerary on hold.
“The tour has been postponed twice and dates got moved around. Some we could do, some we couldn’t,” he says. “We did four dates in September and now we’re doing 30 shows in April and May.
“Tech-wise, I’ve moved a few things, but set-wise, no changes. Electronic noises, yes, but everything else is ‘direct injected’,” says Scotsman Midge, 69.
Ure & Band Electronica last played the Opera House on October 20 2019 on The 1980 Tour, when Ultravox’s 1980 album, Vienna, was performed in its entirety for the first time in four decades, complemented by highlights from Visage’s debut album, as Ure recalled the year when he co-wrote, recorded and produced the two future-sounding records.
Such was the “overwhelming response” to this retro excursion that Ure decided “the logical and emotional follow-up” was to reprise the nostalgia trip for the Voice & Visions Tour to mark the 40th anniversary of Ultravox albums Rage In Eden and Quartet, released in September 1981 and October 1982 respectively, backed up by landmark songs from Ure’s back catalogue.
“The synthesiser can be absolutely heart-rending and very emotional in its impact,” says Midge
“The 1980 Tour was all about celebrating the year of 1980, not just for me, doing the Vienna album and the first Visage album, and recalling all the new technology that went with that very exciting time and the response to that,” says Midge.
“We had people there who’d seen Ultravox, people who’d been too young, so to hear it being played in such an authentic way was mind-blowing. Requests came for us to do more of the albums.” Hence Midge is “delving back in time to revitalise two standout albums from my career”.
In the wake of the global success of Vienna, Ultravox headed back to Conny Plank’s Cologne studio to record their second album with Ure as frontman, Rage In Eden, a top five entry in autumn 1981, replete with the singles The Thin Wall and The Voice.
Quartet, their third studio set with Ure, arrived in quick succession with production by The Beatles’ producer, George Martin, no less. It became their third top ten album, boosted by four top 20 singles, Reap The Wild Wind, Hymn, Visions In Blue and We Came To Dance.
Why work with George Martin after the experimentalism of Kraftwerk producer Plank? “Ultravox would not listen to anyone. We were very dogmatic in what we wanted to achieve, so the idea of someone saying ‘you need to edit that’, ‘stop doing that’ was alien to us, but everyone respected George,” says Midge, recalling their headmaster/pupil relationship.
“To hear it being played in such an authentic way was mind-blowing,” says Midge Ure
“He was a more traditional producer, but he still had tricks up his sleeve, like having the guitars playing backwards. I loved working with George and I don’t know many that didn’t.
“Here’s an example: we were in the studio at Montserrat, spending a lot of time in front of the mixing desk while he worked on the faders, when he pointed to his eyes one day and said, ‘music doesn’t come from here, it comes from here’, pointing to his heart.”
Jumping between guitar and keyboards, vocalist Midge is touring with Russell Field, his regular drummer for 25 years, and India Electric Co members Joseph O’Keefe and Cole Stacey, who handle bass, keys and violin duties. “They’ll be doing their own 45-minute set prior to getting the chance to do their homework with me,” he says.
“Back in the 1980s, when Ultravox first called it a day, by then we were touring with 23 synthesisers because that’s what we needed to do to generate that sound. Now it can be done with fewer instruments.”
In a show focused on electronics, experimentation and synthesisers, lighting will be important too. “Technology in lighting is changing just as rapidly as in music. We’ve gone for lighting that does a variety of things: changing from stroboscopic to wide beams to narrow beams, using different colours, to enhance the feeling of a song, like a good video could do,” says Midge.
The poster for Midge Ure & Band Electronica’s Voice & Visions Tour, visiting York, Bradford and Hull
“So, when the song is moody and atmospheric, I want the lighting to be moody and atmospheric too, rather than using graphics, where people at the back end up just looking at them.
“I was lucky enough when I was a young lad to see David Bowie perform on the Ziggy Stardust tour at the Glasgow Apollo, and I remember when they played Space Oddity that they put a spotlight on the mirror ball. The implicity of that has stuck with me. Something simple yet so effective.”
More than 40 years on from synthesisers making such an impact in the electronic music of Ultravox, Midge says: “The synthesiser can sound and calculated, and is very effective when used in that way, but it can also be absolutely heart-rending and very emotional in its impact.”
Midge Ure & Band Electronica, The Voice And Visions Tour, Grand Opera House, York, Sunday (30/4/2023), 7.30pm; St George’s Hall, Bradford, May 11, 8pm; Bonus Arena, Hull, May 12, 8pm. Box office: York, atgtickets.com/york; Bradford, bradford-theatres.co.uk; Hull, bonusarenahull.com.
Midge Ure also plays Let’s Rock Leeds, Temple Newsam, Leeds, headlined by Soft Cell and OMD, June 17. Box office: letsrockleeds.com (general admission sold out already).
Did you know?
MIDGE Ure & Band Electronica first played the Grand Opera House, York, in November 2017 when headlining a 1980s’ triple bill with The Christians and Altered Images.
LLOYD Cole will team up with his former Commotions compadres Blair Cowan and Neil Clark for a 17-date autumn tour, headed for York Barbican on October 17 in his only Yorkshire appearance.
Cole will play two sets, the first acoustic – as was the case at Pocklington Arts Centre in March 2012 and April 2017 (with son William), Selby Town Hall in April 2014 and long before at Fibbers, his last York appearance, in May 2000. He will be joined by his band for the electric second act.
The Buxton-born singer, songwriter and guitarist will be showcasing his 12th solo album, On Pain, produced by Chris Merrick Hughes for release on June 23 on the earMusic label.
Like his last studio set, July 2019’s Guesswork, the album was recorded in his Massachusetts attic studio, The Establishment, this time with Commotions co-founders Cowan and Clark co-writing four of the eight compositions and playing on the recordings too.
“I’m excited to still be finding new methods, new perspectives, new sounds,” says Cole, 62. “’The album’ may be nearing commercial death, but my career has been in that state for almost 30 years and here we are, still, and I still want to make albums. I still want to be heard.
The poster for Lloyd Cole’s York Barbican gig
“I’m very much looking forward to being on stage with Neil and Blair in October. We have no intention of producing a retro show.”
Cole has chalked up 16 studio albums, the first three with The Commotions: Rattlesnakes (1984), Easy Pieces (1985) and Mainstream (1987).
Eleven solo albums have followed: Lloyd Cole (1990); Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe (1991); Bad Vibes (1993); Love Story (1995); Plastic Wood (2001); Music In A Foreign Language (2003); Anti Depressant (2006); Broken Record (2010); Standards (2013); 1D (2015) and Guesswork (2019).
Add to the list his album with The Negatives, 2000’s The Negatives, and one with German electronic musician and composer Hans Joachim Roedelius, 2013’s Selected Studies Vol. 1.
Tour tickets are on sale at lloydcole.com/live; York, yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Glenn Tilbrook: Teaming up with Beautiful Landing at Leeds Brudenell Social Club
GLENN Tilbrook & Beautiful Landing play Leeds Brudenell Social Club on June 11 as one of three warm-up shows for Glastonbury Festival.
Fifty years since he first answered an advert placed by Chris Difford, looking for like-minded sorts to form the Deptford band that became Squeeze, an ending is nowhere in sight.
Squeeze made their recording bow with the Packet Of Three EP in 1977, leading to such enduring pop classics as Take Me I’m Yours, Cool For Cats, Up The Junction, Another Nail In My Heart, Tempted, Labelled With Love, Black Coffee In Bed and Hourglass, alongside landmark albums Argybargy, East Side Story and Some Fantastic Place.
Squeeze’s demise in 1998 – not permanent – saw Tilbrook embark on a solo career that spawned the albums The Incomplete Glenn Tilbrook in 2001 and Transatlantic Ping-Pong in 2004.
In 2009 came Pandemonium Ensues, made with his solo band The Fluffers, followed in 2011 by The Co-Operative, an album of spirited original songs and covers with his friends from Nine Below Zero.
2014 brought Happy Ending, Tilbrook’s most personal and political solo work in a series of evocative portraits of time, people, and places, featuring writing and vocal contributions from Chris McNally, Simon Hanson (Fluffers/Squeeze drummer), Dennis Greaves (Nine Below Zero) and his children Leon and Wesley.
Squeeze re-formed in 2007 and have kept Tilbrook, 65, busy touring around the world, but he still finds time to take his solo show out on the road from time to time.
Now he is joined by Beautiful Landing, a young five-piece indie band from South East London to leaf through the Squeeze and solo back catalogues, complemented by covers and surprises.
Kevin Clifton’s Scott Hastings and Faye Brookes’s Fran in Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical
Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical plays Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm, Wednesday and Saturday. Box office: atgtickets.com/york. Also Leeds Grand Theatre, July 3 to 8, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Wednesday and Saturday matinees. Box office: 0113 243 0808 or leedsheritagetheatres.com.
NOT to be confused with the glitterball dazzle of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, the 2023 tour of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom nevertheless has Strictly royalty at its core, like writing running through a stick of rock.
Australian-born judge Craig Revel Horwood both directs Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s musical and reactivates his Aussie roots for the voiceover introduction, delivered with camp exaggeration and frank humour.
2018 Strictly champ Kevin Clifton is “thrilled to finally be fulfilling a lifelong ambition to play Scott Hastings”, donning the golden matador-dandy jacket for the ten-month tour.
“When I was ten years old, I first watched the movie that would become my favourite film of all time. This is my dream role,” he enthused – and boy, does it show in his every move, back leading the cast after missing a couple of shows with a foot injury.
We knew he could dance, not only from his seven seasons in Strictly, but when blazing a trail across the Grand Opera House stage in Burn The Floor. Should you have seen him in Dirty Dancing The Musical in London, or on tour as Cosmo Brown in Singin’ In The Rain, Stacee Jaxx in Rock Of Ages or The Artillery Man in The War Of The Worlds, you will know he can sing too.
Now comes a corking Aussie accent as Kevin from Grimsby becomes Scott Hastings, the ballroom wild card from a dance family (like Clifton himself), who falls foul of the Australian Federation with his radical, rebellious moves.
The Open champion-in-waiting instead finds himself dancing with Fran (Faye Brookes, so pink and perky and perfect in her previous York visit in Legally Blonde The Musical). At the outset, Fran is handier with the cleaning regime than as a Bambi novice on the dancefloor, but she is plucky beneath the reserved, bespectacled surface, and step by step, the unlikely pair inspire each other to defy both family expectation and ballroom convention, casting specs and fear alike aside.
Set in 1990, Luhrmann’s funny yet furious, glitzy but gritty, sometimes silly and often highly camp work is a gorgeous romantic comedy, Cinderella tale and rebel with a cause story rolled into a dance drama of the kind beloved by Bollywood. In Revel Horwood’s hands it revels in that campery, being fruitier than Drew McOnie’s 2016 British premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, putting you as much in mind of The Rocky Horror Show or Rock Of Ages.
Clifton’s Scott is on the edge, his dancing so electric, to the point where if you touched him you would receive a shock, such is his frustration with the strictures of his obsessive mother Shirley (Nikki Belsher).
A grotesque diva of a ballroom teacher with a shark’s smile, her ruthlessness has shrunk husband Doug (a rather too young-looking James McHugh on press night, understudying Mark Sangster) to taciturn timidity.
Amid the battle of Hastings, rule-breaker Scott is also determined to defy the bent judging of Barry Fife (Benjamin Harrold, understudying Gary Davis as more of a reprobate young spiv than a seedy old stickler).
Scott must follow his heart, answer to his true calling and find true love. Out of the shadows steps Coronation Street star and Dancing On Ice runner-up Brookes’s Fran in a typically terrific demonstration of her triple threat skills as singer, dancer and actor. Her duet of Beautiful Surprise with Clifton is a second-half high point.
Shirley and Barry are not their only barriers, so too are Danielle Cato’s aptly named dancer Tina Sparkle and, at first, Fran’s protective Hispanic dad, Rico (Stylianos Thomadakis, the best of the first-night understudies, again for an older-looking Jose Agudo).
From disdain to guiding light, he shows Scott how the paso doble should be danced, leading into a wonderful, pedal-to-the-floor ensemble finale to the first half. This turns into the show’s best routine, shot through with machismo but leavened by humour and ultimately glee, under the spell of Revel Horwood and Jason Gilkison’s witty, swish, elegant, sleek and fun choreography.
As with fellow very Australian musical movie The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, Strictly Ballroom is rampantly ripe to bear full fruit on the musical theatre stage.
It does so by bolstering the film’s hit songs, such as Time After Time, a swoon of an Hispanic take on Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps by Karen Mann’s Abuela, and the climactic Love Is In The Air, with new musical numbers by David Foster, Sia Furler, Mozzela Neff-U, Linda Thompson and Luhrmann himself.
Mark Walters, best remembered in York for his set on the tracks for Berwick Kaler’s Dick Whittington (And His Meerkat) at the National Railway Museum in 2015, excels here too, both in set design and costumes.
Beautifully lit by fellow York Theatre Royal alumnus Richard G Jones, the domed set evokes the glamour of the ballroom dancefloor, while the clever insertion of boards that pull out enables swift changes of scene to bars, homes and a dance studio.
Barry Fife’s boudoir cameos are an amusing pop-up too and a screen backdrop is put to good use in depicting Australian skies, townscapes and landscapes.
In a week shadowed by the death of Australia’s greatest comic export, Barry Humphries, whose The Man Behind The Mask tour opened at this very theatre last April, Luhrmann and Revel Horwood combine to put an Aussie smile on the face once more with razzle dazzle aplenty, aided by Clifton and Brookes, as lovable as Fred and Ginger.
