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How safe are women on the streets of York, ask Next Door But One in Rachel Price’s touring play She Was Walking Home

Anna Johnston as Cate in Next Door But One’s She Was Walking Home. Picture: James Drury

WHEN York community arts collective Next Door But One first took She Was Walking Home on tour in 2022, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) had just released data on safety in different public settings.

One in two women felt unsafe walking alone after dark in a quiet street near their home or in a busy public place, and two out of three women aged 16 to 34 had experienced one form of harassment in the previous 12 months.

Now, as NDB1 take their revived testimonial-based performance to schools, colleges and universities throughout York and North Yorkshire, as well as to York Theatre Royal Studio tonight (5/10/2023), the need for more conversations around women’s safety and the role we all play in it has been strengthened by a report from the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

It reveals that more than half a million offences against women and girls were recorded in England and Wales between October 1 2021 and March 31 2022 and that violence against women and girls accounts for at least 15.8 per cent of all recorded crime.

Director Kate Veysey in rehearsal for Next Door But One’s She Was Walking Home. Picture: James Drury

First produced as an audio walk around York city centre in 2021, She Was Walking Home is a series of monologues created by writer Rachel Price from the testimonies of women living, working and studying in York. 

“This project was initially called into action by the female creatives and participants we work with, who were all having more and more conversations around their own safety after a number of attacks and murders reported in the media,” says director Kate Veysey.

“With each stage of development, it has been the community that has guided us: the audio walk was created from 33 testimonies of local women; the 2022 tour was produced through feedback from listeners who wished to bring their friends, colleagues and social groups to engage in the conversation.

“The resounding message from that audience was the want from parents for their children to see this, for teachers wanting their schools to witness, and young women wanting their male peers to come with them. So that’s what we are doing.”

Emma Liversidge-Smith’s Joanne in She Was Walking Home. Picture: James Drury

People think of York as a safe place to be, says NDB1 creative engagement manager El Stannage, “but as a woman I can tell you it isn’t”. “We collected documentary information both written and conversational, keeping that door open for information for about a month, and it came streaming in,” she says.

“We had plenty to work with, then collected our own thoughts and commissioned Rachel to put those stories together as one tapestry, telling stories of women at different stages of life, their different experiences, whether harassment or abuse, focusing on the impact it’s had on their their lives, the ripples it’s had.

“For the latest tour, we’ve stayed with the original piece of theatre but kept abreast with what’s been happening, and we’ve kept in touch too with IDAS [Independent Domestic Abuse Services] and the Kyra Women’s Project, the York charity that helps women to make positive change in their lives.”

This autumn’s performances in schools, colleges and universities will not only inform students of the lived experience of women in their own communities, but also empower them to make the change now and see the benefits in their own futures; understanding the impact of their actions, ways in which they could intervene, question their own thinking or those of their peers.

Mandy Newby’s Jackie. Picture: James Drury

El says: “We’re really excited to be working with schools [age 14 upwards], colleges and universities this time, after the feedback we got from last year’s public performances that we needed to do that.

“The young people we get to work with in our participation programmes are bright, forward thinking and actively seeking ways to play a part in the growing world around them, so for us it just makes sense to bring this conversation to them, as they are the next generation to make change.

“But also, real change can only happen when the full community listen up and play their part too. That’s why we’re hosting public performances in the evenings at the same schools, colleges and universities, so that parents, carers, siblings, friends, teachers and other local residents can join in the same vital conversation.”

Through the autumn tour of this all-female production, performed by a cast of Fiona Baistow, Anna Johnson, Emma Liversidge-Smith and Mandy Newby, the mission will be to amplify the voices of York women, while also prompting conversations around where responsibility and accountability lies for their safety.

Fiona Baistow’s Millie in a scene from She Was Walking Home. Picture: James Drury

“Since the original walk, listened to by almost 800 people, there have been further attacks and murders of women, and still the rhetoric seems to be skewed towards rape alarms, trackers, self-defence classes and dress codes being the solution,” says NDB1 artistic director Matthew Harper-Hardcastle. “We needed to continue and challenge this conversation. The invitation is to come and watch but also to think.”

One audience feedback quote on NDB1’s website is particularly illuminating. “I like to think I’m aware of these issues and as a man have been ultra-conscious that just being on the same street can heighten anxiety,” it reads.

“This performance made me cry, but it’s such an important way to foster change, I left feeling that if more men could see and engage with it, we might just be able to smash that ‘block of granite’.”

Next Door But One’s She Was Walking Home is on tour until October 27 with student performances complemented by public performances at York High School, Malton School, York College, Scarborough TEC, York Theatre Royal Studio tonight at 7.45pm, University of York, October 20 at 7.45pm and York St John University, October 25 at 7.30pm. Box office details: www.nextdoorbutone.co.uk

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Frantic Assembly catch Metamorphosis bug to deliver Franz Kafka’s horror story of family cracking under mental stress

Frantic Assembly in Metamorphosis: “A story about a family with a big secret locked in one of its rooms”. Picture: Tristram Kenton

WHEN actor, writer and director Fraser Ayres advised Frantic Assembly artistic director Scott Graham to consider staging a version of Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis, his initial response was No.

“Why would I want to go anywhere near it? It comes with so much baggage and so much expectation,” he said. “Most people only know the opening to the story when you mention the title.”

That was in 2019, but roll on to 2023 to find Frantic Assembly touring London Olympic Games poet Lemn Sissay’s adaptation from September 11 to March 2 2024. Next stop York Theatre Royal, from October 10 to 14, following up on last October’s visit with an electrifying take on Shakespeare’s Othello.

Kafka’s 1915 novella tells the horror story of Gregor Samsa, a weary travelling salesman and sole breadwinner in his debt-ridden family, who wakes up one morning to find he has been turned into a giant beetle. Confined to his room, Gregor becomes reliant on the family that once relied on him.

 Its influence has spread through popular culture from video games to the Rolling Stones’ cover for their 1975, Metamorphosis, where the band members’ facial features were replaced by bug heads.

The existential, absurdist story has inspired films, operas and theatre productions too, not least Steven Berkoff’s famed 1969 physical theatre show. “If you make theatre and attempt this story, there is a worry that you are always going to be in the shadow of Berkoff,” says Graham.

Frantic Assembly artistic director Scott Graham, left, and Metamorphosis script writer Lemn Sissay. Picture: Adi Detemo

Nevertheless, the possibility of Frantic Assembly staging Metamorphosis became an itch for Graham that had to be scratched, mulling over Ayres’s reading of Kafka’s tale as a powerful story not so much about transformation as the power of perception.

Cue his change of mind. “It’s a story written with such restraint, and it contains so much fear and cruelty. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was written over 100 years ago, but it feels so timely. So now,” says Graham.

“Rather than an absurd event where someone turns into a giant beetle, we look at it as a story of gradual change, to becoming less human, and that brings it up to date as a critique of the burden of debt and how everything is designed to never be able to get out of it,” he says.

Graham had found the key that would allow him to unlock the story and open it up to exposure afresh, duly teaming up with BAFTA-nominated poet, broadcaster and speaker Lemn Sissay for the first time.

“Initially I was looking for a playwright to adapt the novella, but then I had a moment of inspiration, suggesting Lemn should do it. He’s a renowned poet, not known for adaptations, though he did adapt Benjamin Zephaniah’s teenage novel Refugee Boy [in 2013],” he says.

“I thought we could do something more than a flat theatre interpretation that could really reinvent it, and Lemn’s very personal response to the novella, and its story of a family in debt, does that.”

Graham continues: “I don’t think of it necessarily as a blooming of Lemn as a playwright because we never talked about it as a play. The freedom was there to bring ideas to each other and then create this work for the stage. That means he was not encumbered by expectations of being a playwright.

“It’s poetic – he’s brought that out – and what’s brilliant about this production is that it is a play but it’s something more immediate than that. There was always a risk if I said, ‘can you adapt if for the stage?’, it would mean he would just go off and write a play.

“Lemn’s immediate reaction was ‘No’, but it was about creating the right environment for him, so it was never just about a writer writing a play, but what could I bring to it too with movement. It was never just about the writing, so Lemn could feel like he was held in a safe place where he could explore being a playwright without being crushed by expectation.”

Lemn’s script reimagines Kafka’s story as a psychological tale of a family under pressure, crushed by external economic forces to the point of crushing each other.

“Gregor is the breadwinner and the family are like parasites upon him,” says Graham. “But when he transforms, he is less valuable to them and becomes a burden and we see what happens.”

Sissay describes it as “a story about a family with a big secret locked in one of its rooms”. “The change that happens to Gregor exposes the flaws and fissures and insecurities that already exist in the family,” he says. “There are so many different tensions already in play long before Gregor wakes up as a bug.”

Comparing his Frantic Assembly collaboration to a piece of “intricate origami”, Sissay argues that everything in his script can be found in Kafka’s story. “It’s all there, I haven’t invented. I wouldn’t dream of trying to rewrite such a brilliant text,” he says.

Grete and Gregor in a scene from Frantic Assembly’s Metamorphosis. Picture: Tristram Kenton

Academics have long argued over whether Gregor’s metamorphosis is actual or metaphorical, but Graham suggests it can be both, particularly in the liminal space of the stage where the audience has a different relationship to the material than as a solo reader.  

If you look very closely at the story, the clues are all there, and what happens to Gregor might be seen as a mental health crisis, says Graham. Long before Sissay began writing the script, Frantic Assembly, practitioners of physically dynamic and emotionally truthful shows, were exploring elements of the text already, particularly the fear and sense of the other or monstering that lies within it.

“I don’t think what happens to Gregor is a supernatural event. I think it’s a result of stress. The Samsa family are drowning in debt, a debt that has resulted because of the father’s bankruptcy. Like Gregor, the father has had a moment of transformation when he has gone from breadwinner to burden,” says Graham.  

“Gregor is desperate to get the family out of debt and the confined life they lead. He is aspiring to something else, particularly for his sister Grete, who plays the violin and who he hopes can take it further.

“One of the elements of the story is about aspiration, and what people from different backgrounds can aspire to, and that feels really timely because of the articulation of the idea that people from backgrounds like Grete’s can’t play the violin or shouldn’t aspire to a career in the arts.”

Kafka’s Metamorphosis comes with an unforgettable opening sentence: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

Tension, ambiguity and confusion: the Samsa family under stress in Frantic Assembly’s Metamorphosis. Picture: Tristram Kenton

“It is complete genius,” says Graham, but he wonders whether it might be a red herring that immediately makes everyone think the novella’s title refers to Gregor alone.

Sissay agrees: “I think the metamorphosis that takes place is as much about Grete as it is about Gregor. She is the person in the story who experiences great change of many different kinds. She is in the process of becoming a woman. It’s all there in the text, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It is so clear.”

The pubescent Grete is the family member closest to Gregor, and while her parents recoil when he becomes a bug, she takes on the task of entering his room and bringing him food. “Feeding somebody is an extraordinary act of intimacy,” says Graham, who points to the tensions and ambiguities and confusions already present in Gregor and Grete’s relationship, as indeed there are within the whole family.  

Ultimately those tensions will detonate in unexpected ways and with far-reaching consequences. “This is a story of a family under stress from without and within,” says Graham. “It looks like a normal family and operates like a normal family, but there are hidden weaknesses. When the cracks begin to appear, the structure cannot hold. It’s a tragedy.”    

Frantic Assembly present Metamorphosis at York Theatre Royal, October 10 to 14, 7.30pm plus 2pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

LEMN Sissay’s new poetry collection, Let The Light Pour In, was published by Canongate on September 21.

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More Things To Do in York and beyond, featuring shows for and about you. Here’s Hutch’s List No. 40, from The Press, York

Making his point: Grayson Perry in A Show All About You at Harrogate Convention Centre

FROM Sir Grayson to Dame Joan, Rambert’s return to Hancock’s re-creation, Lawrence to James, Charles Hutchinson puts the names in the frame for upcoming artistic and cultural adventures.  

A brush with an artist: Grayson Perry: A Show All About You, Harrogate Convention Centre, tomorrow, 7.30pm

ARTIST, iconoclast and television presenter Grayson Perry follows up A Show For Normal People with A Show All About You, wherein the new knight asks, “What makes you, you?”. Is there a part deep inside that no-one understands? Have you found your tribe or are you a unique human being? Or is it more complicated than that?

Perry, “white, male, heterosexual, able bodied, English, southerner, baby boomer and member of the establishment”, takes a mischievous look at the nature of identity, promising to make you laugh, shudder and reassess who you really are. Box office: 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk.

Steve Cassidy: Among friends at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre

York legend of the week: Steve Cassidy Band and Friends, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tomorrow, 7.30pm

YORK’S Steve Cassidy Band play a varied range of rock, country and ballads and always love performing at his favourite venue, joined as ever by guests this weekend. A three-time winner of New Faces, Cassidy recorded with York composer John Barry and Sixties’ sonic innovator Joe Meek. Box office: 01904 501935 or josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk.

Padding up: Dame Joan Collins reveals all in Behind The Shoulder Pads

National treasure of the week: Dame Joan Collins, Behind The Shoulder Pads, Grand Opera House, York, Monday, 7.30pm

TO coincide with the release of her memoir Behind The Shoulder Pads, Hollywood legend, author, producer, humanitarian and entrepreneur Dame Joan Collins, 90, is embarking on a 12-date autumn tour with husband Percy Gibson by her side.

Returning to the Grand Opera House, where they presented Unscripted in February 2019, they will field audience questions and tell seldom-told tales and enchanting anecdotes, accompanied by rare footage from Dame Joan’s seven decades in showbusiness. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

Jarred Christmas: Presents a comedy bill in A Night At The Theatre at York Theatre Royal

Comedy gig of the week: Fingers & Fringe in A Night At The Theatre, York Theatre Royal, Thursday, 7.30pm

JARRED Christmas hosts a Thursday bill of Clinton Baptiste, Huge Davies, Jake Lambert, Laura Lexx, Michael Akadiri, Abi Clarke and Jack Gleadow. Eight acts, one night of comedy at the theatre. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

John Hewer, third from left, leads the cast as Tony Hancock in Hancock’s Half Hour at Grand Opera House, York

Nostalgia of the week: Apollo Theatre Company in Galton & Simpson’s Hancock’s Half Hour, Grand Opera House, York, Thursday, 7.30pm

FROM the producers of the Round The Horne and The Goon Show tours comes another radio comedy classic live on stage. Written by young up-and-comers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, pre-Steptoe And Son, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced sitcom to the BBC’s Light Programme in 1954.

Tony Hancock played a less successful version of himself, surrounded by Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams. Now, Apollo Theatre Company takes a trip back to 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, to join “the lad himself” and his motley crew for three “lost” episodes, whose original recordings no longer exist but were re-created for BBC Radio 4 as The Missing Hancocks. John Hewer (Just Like That: The Tommy Cooper Show) plays Hancock with Ben Craze and Colin Elmer as James and Williams respectively. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

Kieran Hodgson: Not big in this towering highland picture but Big In Scotland at Theatre@41, Monkgate, York and Selby Town Hall

Big in York, for one night only: Kieran Hodgson: Big In Scotland, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, Thursday, 7.30pm

IN 2020, the world changed forever as Kieran Hodgson – Gordon from the BBC’s Two Doors Down – moved to Scotland. Now he is travelling around the still-just-about United Kingdom to reveal how it is working out. For him and for the Scots. Tickets update: Sold out; for returns only, tickets.41monkgate.co.uk. Also playing Selby Town Hall, Friday, 8pm; box office, 01757 708449 or selbytownhall.co.uk.

Lawrence of Felt, Denim, Go-Kart Mozart and now Mozart Estate at The Crescent, York

Cult gig of the week: Mozart Estate, The Crescent, York, October 7, 7.30pm

MOZART Estate is the new name for Go-Kart Mozart in the further adventures of Birmingham native Lawrence, cult leader of Eighties’ indie guitar band Felt and subject of the re-released 2011 documentary Lawrence Of Belgravia.

Lawrence – Hayward is his neglected surname – later led the pseudo-novelty band Denim, whose biting social commentary was coated in a bubblegum strain of Seventies’ glam rock. After four Go-Kart Mozart albums, he switched to Mozart Estate for January 2023’s Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! And The Possibilities Of Modern Shopping. Box office: thecrescentyork.com.

James: New album and tour in 2024

Looking ahead: James with special guests Razorlight, Leeds First Direct Arena, June 8 2024

JAMES will follow up the April 2024 release of their as-yet-untitled 17th studio album with an eight-date arena tour, taking in Leeds as the only Yorkshire venue. Tickets go on sale on October 6 at 9.30am at wearejames.com, gigsandtours.com and ticketmaster.co.uk.

Mixing the album this week, Clifford-raised frontman Tim Booth, 63, says: “The new songs sound belting and will fit this arena tour. Really looking forward to celebrating with you. Expect a mixture of the expected and unexpected – just like life. Nothing but love.”

Rambert’s Death Trap: Ballet theatre of bereavement and loss in Ben Duke’s Goat and Cerberus at York Theatre Royal

In Focus: Dance show of the week: Rambert’s Death Trap, York Theatre Royal, Tuesday and Wednesday, 7.30pm

RAMBERT first toured to York Theatre Royal in 1951 and for almost 40 years were regular visitors to the city, performing there 17 times. Their last visit was in February 1990, and they return 33 years later with Death Trap, a “meta dance comedy, full of the turbulence of life and death” with themes of bereavement and loss, partial nudity, strong language and strobe and haze effects. 

Rambert’s last show, Peaky Blinders: The Redemption Of Thomas Shelby, drew audiences in excess of 100,000, Now comes Death Trap, devised by Ben Duke, of Lost Dog, in a darkly humorous programme of stylish, inspiring, story-telling, character-driven dance theatre that combines two short, savage, absir, funny works: 2017’s Goat and 2022’s Cerberus.

Inspired by the music and spirit of Nina Simone, Goat is danced to a band on stage performing such iconic songs as Feelings, Feeling Good and Ain’t Got No/ I Got Life. Cerberus enters a world where dance is a matter of life or death in a bittersweet musing on myth and mortality, complete with funeral couture. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

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REVIEW: A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction, York Theatre Royal. Sustainable tour concept ****; production ***; play **

Cycling and recycling: Sustainable theatre at York Theatre Royal in A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction, starring Stephanie Hutchinson, centre. All pictures: James Drury

THE opening of this “bold experiment in eco theatre-making” coincided with the publication of the State Of Nature 2023 report into the UK’s biodiversity.

The headline news? One sixth of our species is under threat of extinction. Meanwhile, in the latest state of the nation report, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is turning the blue tide against green change: more oil fields, no 2030 deadline ojettisoning diesl and petrol cars. So much for leading the way at Cop26.

To top it all, a 16-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage in connection with the felling of the 300-year-old Sycamore Gap tree – the landmark one from Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves – at Hadrian’s Wall.

What a week to be staging the closing chapter of the groundbreaking zero-travel tour of American playwright Miranda Rose Hall’s “darkly humorous, life-affirming one-woman show” that confronts the world’s urgent ecological disaster.

It is billed as a “fiercely feminist off-grid production that is part ritual, part battle cry, in a moving exploration of what it means to be human in an era of man-made extinction”.

That tells only half the story because the concept behind the tour, mounted by Headlong and partners York Theatre Royal and the London Barbican, turns out to be more impactful than Hall’s 80-minute diatribe.

Since opening at the Barbican, the play has travelled with an original creative template by director Katie Mitchell and black-and-white design palette by Moi Tran, but neither materials, nor people have been sent to Coventry, Plymouth, Newcastle, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Prescot.

Stephanie Hutchinson: Playing a dramaturg forced into performing on stage in the absence of her company’s actors, then putting all her research into a plea for saving animals and humans from extinction

Instead, each venue has provided its own director and performer, in York’s case, Theatre Royal resident artist Mingyu Lin and Leeds actress Stephanie Hutchinson.

Stephanie delivers a monologue, but she is not alone on the boards. A sound engineer and lighting technician sit to either side and eight cyclists fill the stage, the whir of their steady, rhythmical, kinetic pedal power being turned into electricity for the sound and lighting by a mechanism to delight any scientists in the audience.

Recycling is as important as the cycling: only existing theatre stock – props and the microphone – can be used, along with clothing from charity shops; the bicycles being lent by Recycle York.

A typical main-house production uses 60,000 watts per performance for lighting, 10,000 for sound. A Play For The Living’s cyclists generated the necessary amount here; far, far less wattage in total.

All this is uplifting, and food for thought, a potential blueprint for eco-theatre touring, in the vein of Coldplay making their Music Of The Spheres world tour “as sustainable and low carbon as possible”.

All power to the sustainable concept, but Hall’s play is under-powered by comparison: bleak and apocalyptic, as to be expected in this age of the Sixth Extinction, but the “dark humour” is strained, with unnecessary swearing, and the doomsday scenario runs contrary to the claim of being life-affirming.

Apparently, the best we can seek is a “good death”, in a messianic finale that would not have been out of place delivered from a church pulpit, topped off by the York Theatre Royal Choir’s hymnal finale, delivered in funereal black, re-emphasising that message. Brecht & Weill would have loved it.

Saddling up to spark electricty: the cyclists from the cycling city of York doing their bit for “eco-theatre making”

Stephanie had talked in advance of being determined not to be preachy, but Hall’s tone ended up being exactly that. Rather than delivering a TED talk, “in a story like this, we need to care,” said Ming in her interview.

True, but we need to do more than care, amid so much dead talk. We need to act. Faced by footage of animal after animal facing extinction, it had the depressing, deadening air of futility. Not the intention surely, but where was the battle cry, the rallying call, rather than that hallelujah chorus of an incoming “good death”?

Lists can have an emotional impact – listen to Steve Earle’s mining disaster memorial It’s About Blood for proof – but the emotional elements of A Play For The Living are botched. The explanation of why Stephanie’s character, Zero Emissions Theatre Company dramaturg Naomi, is forced into being on stage for one night in an impromptu performance, after her fellow company founders are called away to a tragic emergency, is too around-the-houses.

We are here to care about extinction all around us, not a human accident. Likewise, we are not here to judge Naomi’s acting skills – or Stephanie being an actor playing someone who is not a natural actor, although she does just fine in that elaborately structured transition.

Later, Naomi talks of her dog disappearing, but again it is not the same as a creature’s extinction, so why include it here?

You will often hear that a play should not be expected to come up with answers, but what is the purpose of this one?  To encourage more responsible behaviour through its sustainable touring model, definitely, but where was the positivity that mankind can and will work together to save the planet and its endangered inhabitants, from the Little Brown Bat to the Kingfisher? Its absence spoke volumes. Maybe we really are all doomed as Private Frazer forecast in Dad’s Army.

The end.

Performances: 2.30pm and 7.30pm tomorrow (30/9/2023). Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

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James Willstrop to serve up Frederick Frankenstein in Pick Me Up Theatre’s Hallowe’en show Young Frankenstein

Squashbuckling: World champ James Willstrop swaps from court to stage to perform for Pick Me Up Theatre

PICK Me Up Theatre artistic director Robert Readman will direct the northern premiere of Mel Brooks’s stage conversion of Young Frankenstein at the Grand Opera House, York, over Hallowe’en.

The York company’s rehearsals are progressing well for the all-singing, all-dancing horror-movie spoof musical that will run from October 31 to November 4.

“From the creators of the record-breaking Broadway sensation The Producers comes this monster new musical comedy,” says Robert. “The comedy genius, Mel Brooks, has adapted his legendarily funny 1974 film into a brilliant stage creation of Young Frankenstein. I saw the West End production and loved it.”

Grandson of the infamous Victor Frankenstein, Dr Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced “Fronk-en-steen”) inherits his family’s castle estate in Transylvania.

Sanna Jeppsson: Playing lab assistant Inga in Young Frankenstein

Aided yet hindered by hunchbacked sidekick Igor (pronounced “Eye-gore”), leggy lab assistant Inga (pronounced normally), devilishly sexy Frau Blucher (Neigh!) and needy fianceeElizabeth, Frederick finds himself filling the mad scientist shoes of his ancestors, striving to fulfil his grandfather’s legacy by bringing a corpse back to life.

“It’s alive!” he exclaims as his experiment yields a creature to rival his grandfather’s monster. Eventually, and inevitably, this new monster escapes. “Hilarity abounds,” promises Robert, in Young Frankenstein’s combination of madcap success and monstrous consequences.

Working in tandem with Thomas Meehan, Brooks gleefully reanimates his horror-movie send-up of Mary Shelley’s novel with even more jokes, set-pieces and barnstorming parody songs that stick a pitchfork into good taste. Among those songs will be Puttin’ On The Ritz, Please Don’t Touch Me, He Vas My Boyfriend, The Transylvanian Mania, There Is Nothing Like A Brain! and many more Transylvanian smash hits.

Leading Readman’s cast will be erstwhile world squash champion James Willstrop, continuing his transfer from court to stage after playing Captain Von Trapp in Pick Me Up’s The Sound Of Music last Christmas.

Helen Spencer: From Hello, Dolly! to hello, Frau Blucher

Starring opposite him again will be Swedish-born Sanna Jeppsson (Maria in The Sound Of Music), here cast as Inga. Jack Hooper, Mr Poppy in last year’s Nativity!, will be Igor; Helen Spencer, seen latterly as the Mother Abbess and Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly!, will play Frau Blucher; Jennie Wogan-Wells, the Narrator in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, will be Elizabeth Benning.

Craig Kirby, Mr Tom in Goodnight Mr Tom, will be in Monster mode and further roles will go to Tom Riddolls as Sgt Kemp, Sam Steel as Bertram Bartam and Andrew Isherwood, fresh from directing Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, as The Hermit.  A supporting ensemble will play Transylvanians, students and more besides.   

“Every bit as relevant to audience members who will remember the original as it will be to newcomers, Young Frankenstein has all the of panache of the screen sensation with a little extra theatrical flair added,” says Robert. “Young Frankenstein is scientifically proven, monstrously good entertainment.”

Pick Me Up Theatre in Young Frankenstein, Grand Opera House, York, October 31 to November 4, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Thursday and Saturday matinees. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

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When cycling meets recycling in York Theatre Royal sustainable show A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction

Pedal power: Cyclists at York Theatre Royal with the mechanism that turns their kinetic energy into electricity for the lighting and sound in A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction. Picture: James Drury

A PLAY For The Living In A Time Of Extinction is a darkly humorous, life-affirming one-woman show, written by American playwright Miranda Rose Hall and powered at each performance by cyclists.

Undertaking a “life-changing journey to confront the urgent ecological disaster unfolding around us”, this fiercely feminist off-grid production is part ritual, part battle cry in a moving exploration of what it means to be human in an era of man-made extinction.

Billed as a “bold experiment in eco theatre-making” on a groundbreaking zero-travel tour, Hall’s witty, ambitious 80-minute play has toured across the country under Headlong’s banner while the people and materials involved have not. 

After London, Coventry, Plymouth, Newcastle, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Prescot, the last stop is York Theatre Royal, where resident artist Mingyu Lin follows up co-directing the 100-strong company in the Theatre Royal’s summer community production of Sovereign by directing a cast of only one, Leeds actress Stephanie Hutchinson, in the role of Naomi from tonight to Saturday.

Stephanie will not be alone, however. Not only will she be accompanied by the York Theatre Royal Choir, last heard in Sovereign at King’s Manor, but also by eight cyclists, pedalling on specially adapted bikes that will power the lighting and sound.

“What’s been done is to find a way to be both sustainable and tour,” says Ming. “The concept of the play never changes but the talent working on it changes at each venue. Cyclists are recruited at each venue to power the show. The only thing that’s moved physically is the technology which transforms kinetic energy into electricity – and that all comes in one big box.”

In keeping with York’s status as a cycling city, more than 50 people have applied to be volunteer cyclists, including community cast members from Sovereign, members of York Theatre Royal’s Access All Areas Youth Theatre strand and participants celebrating International Day of Older People. Consequently, a different set of cyclists will saddle up at each of the five performances, with a maximum of eight putting in a shift each show, by comparison with a maximum of four elsewhere.

Coinciding with the start of rehearsals, York Theatre Royal has begun an environmental campaign encouraging staff and community members to pledge to do better for the environment in a manner that they choose.

“We are definitely at a turning point,” says Stephanie Hutchinson, who plays Naomi in A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction at York Theatre Royal. Picture: James Drury

This includes an opportunity for all to share their pledges with the chance to be featured in the digital programme for A Play For The Living. Pledges can be made on social media with the hashtag #IPledgeWithYTR or through a display in the York Theatre Royal foyer. 

Sharing learning from Europe and Katie Mitchell, director of a version of the play in Switzerland, Headlong’s innovative touring model is the first of its kind in Great Britain. The Barbican, in London, played host to the beginning of this journey, since when a blueprint of the show has been brought to life by a different team of theatre makers in each venue as part of an international experiment in reimagining theatre in a climate crisis.  

“There’s been a little bit of serendipity for me to be directing the York leg,” says former University of York Eng. Lit student Ming. “When I was working on programming for Headlong, when I was still living in London, during the pandemic we were looking at plays to put on after Covid, and I came across A Play For The Living because it was on the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize shortlist, an international playwriting prize with UK funding,” she recalls.

“On the short list were five plays and we really wanted a play by a female writer with a strong theme. All at Headlong decided they liked this one, and we had a meeting on Zoom with the writer, Miranda Rose Hall, who was very, very passionate about the risk of extinction and climate change, and you can really feel that in the play.

“We got an email from Katie Mitchell, who’d directed a smaller-scale production with two cyclists, and we decided we wanted the ethos of the production to reflect the ethos and energy of the play by having more cyclists.”

Ming knew she would be moving to York Theatre Royal as resident artist by the time the tour was put in place. “One of the reasons I wanted to leave London is that I really want plays to come out of London, and  I thought you could have local directors and actors for each tour venue, but also not spend loads of money on the set, with only the mechanism for converting pedal power into electricity and a LED neon flex lighting system going from venue to venue,” she says.

“Working from an original design and black-and-grey colour palette by Moi Tran, each theatre must provide the staging, the microphones, the bicycles and the cyclists, and the theatre is not allowed to use anything new. Everything has to be from the Theatre Royal’s existing stock or charity shops for costumes. The Recycle York shop is lending us the bikes.”

Reflecting on the tour’s zero-travel policy, Ming says: “It really makes you aware of the cost of touring theatre in terms of sustainability and the use of electricity in your artistic vision, but I think those challenges turn into opportunities. Too much freedom can make you lazy.”

Leeds actress Stephanie Hutchinson

Stephanie Hutchinson will be performing in a one-woman show for the first time. “The amount you have to learn is crazy,” she says. “I had to find a sense of what the play is about, and there’s a video by the writer, explaining the show and why she wanted to write it, that’s been really useful.

“I would say that rehearsals have been interesting and challenging but very positive and working with Ming has been nothing but positive. It’s a different experience because I’ve never done a monologue before, especially as it’s one this long and it’s just me speaking on stage.”

Stephanie’s character Naomi is “part of a theatre company that has made a play especially for you, those living through extinction, but the actors have not shown up yet. In the meantime, Naomi has a plan.”

“I keep thinking throughout, ‘I really want to get the audience thinking and talking about extinction’,” says Stephanie. “Naomi is asked if she’s read The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, a book by Elizabeth Kolbert [the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, university visiting fellow and environmental journalist for the New Yorker], because we’re going through the Sixth Extinction right now” …

…“We’re losing creatures at a quicker rate now than in the days of the dinosaurs,” points out Ming.

Hall’s play posits that “the difference between death and extinction is this: death is to cease to exist. Extinction is to extinguish. I think of death as individual. Extinction is collective”.

“We are definitely at a turning point,” says Stephanie. “Naomi is thinking, ‘we need to do something on this, a play, but she’s a dramaturg, not an actor, but when the actors who’d normally be doing it have an emergency, she has to go on stage. So it’s set up as a sort of improvised ‘gotta make a show’.”

Ming says: “It’s interesting for an actor to be playing someone who’s not an actor and wouldn’t normally be on stage, so that’s been fun.”

“It shouldn’t be preachy, and Naomi isn’t going to be preachy, but maybe provoke conversations,” says Stephanie. Picture: James Drury

Stephanie says: “I like how it’s educational, with Naomi learning as well as the audience, taking it in as if she’s learning it for the first time as she tells you all these facts.”

As Ming puts it, the playwright has created a story and character with emotional stakes at play, “not a TED talk”. “It stays engaging because there are parts that are so personal, so it to-and-fros  between Naomi’s story and the wider story,” says Stephanie.

“In a story like this, you need to care,” says Ming. “The stakes must be there from almost the top of a play, and that’s something that really works with this play, where you get to care about it and you invest in the conceit of the dramaturg telling it.”

Stephanie adds: “I find it easier to express that in the moments when Naomi is feeling vulnerable, and you can definitely play with the emotion there.”

Last question: why should we see A Play For The Living in this time of extinction? “I don’t think a  pedal-powered production on this scale has been done before, and a tour of this type has never been done,” says Ming.

“It’s definitely life affirming because, yes, ‘extinction’ is in the title, but so is ‘living’ and the sustenance of life is worth fighting for.”

For Stephanie, “it’s something new, something I’ve never come across before. It shouldn’t be preachy, and Naomi isn’t going to be preachy, but maybe provoke conversations,” she says. “She won’t have the answers, but we’re all going through this, and we must all go through it together.”

A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction  runs on pedal power at York Theatre Royal from tonight (27/9/2023) until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk. 

Copyright of The Press, York

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REVIEW: Pick Me Up Theatre in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, until Sat ****

And then there were ten: standing, Mark Simmonds, left, Martyn Hunter, Mike Hickman, Andrew Roberts, Ian Giles, Rory Mulvihill and Andrew Isherwood; seated, Jeanette Hunter, left, Florence Poskitt and Jessica Murray, in Pick Me Up Theatre’s And Then There Were None

NOT to be mistaken for Lucy Bailey’s “21st century reinvention” of Agatha Christie’s best-selling crime novel, bound for the Grand Opera House in November, this is the first of three Pick Me Up productions, made in York, one per month, this autumn.

For the record, Pick Me Up producer Robert Readman secured the rights for staging And Then There Were None before the Fiery Angel, ROYO and Royal & Derngate co-production emerged over the horizon.

He had put in place an autumn season to show off all the talents at Pick Me Up’s disposal: experienced hands for the “straight play”, Christie’s posh house party thriller; blossoming youths in The Worst Witch in late-October, and musical comedy exponents in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein the following week.

Readman is a Christie aficionado – he could pick her as his specialist subject for Mastermind – but decided to spread the directorial workload for the season ahead, having already cast And Then There Were None before the handing the reins to cast member Andrew Isherwood to steer a film noir-style nail biter.

Law and order: Rory Mulvihill’s judge, Sir Lawrence Wargrave, left, and Andrew Isherwood’s Detective William Henry Blore

Readman will direct Young Frankenstein, preceded by Rosy Rowley overseeing The Worst Witch, but his creativity is at play in And Then There Were None too in his design for a Christie murder mystery set in 1939 with Europe on the brink of war.

Christie had talked of a bleak house that should feel like it had long been empty, furnished but stark and unwelcoming. Readman, with his collector’s eye for acquiring props, furniture, costumes and more besides at his Chicken Sheds warehouse in Bubwith, delivers the period look to the T. 

Furniture from a friend’s house move, tick. A redundant fireplace from another friend’s refurb, tick. The glass-framed doors from York Theatre Royal’s production of Private Lives, tick. The ten little soldier boy models, from Readman’s research, tick. An Ercol chair from the Readman family stock, tick.

He assembles them on an end-on/side on set that dominates the Theatre@41 black box, deliberately so to give Isherwood’s production an oppressive, claustrophobic air. There will be no escape from Soldier Island, off the Devon Coast, for the eight house guests, butler and his housekeeper wife, assembled there at the intriguing invitation of a certain Mr and Mrs U N Owen (whose identity and whereabouts shall indeed remain unknown).

Passing judgement: Jessica Murray’s Emily Brent vents her spleen at Florence Poskitt’s Vera Claythorne in And Then There Were None

One by one, they are introduced to the audience, first the husband-and-wife staff Rogers and Mrs Rogers, played by husband-and-wife Martyn and Jeanette Hunter, Martyn delightfully understated, Jeanette gone, spoiler alert, all too soon.

Not before Rogers follows instructions to play a sternly delivered recording that declares all of them to have a wicked past and a secret destined to seal their fate, each being marked for murder.

As the weather turns thunderous, cutting the island rock off from the mainland, let the bloodbath begin, the toy soldiers disappearing one by one with each murder, in accordance with the lines of a sinister nursery rhyme on display above the mantelpiece.

Andrew Roberts has a cameo, West Country accent and all as Fred Narracott, delivering the guests to the island, before re-emerging as spiffing, fast-living, flippant Anthony Marston. Florence Poskitt’s outwardly level-headed but on-edge Vera Claythorne is welcoming guests on the Owens’ behalf; Mike Hickman’s devil-may-care Captain Philip Lombard likes to be seen keeping spirits up and his spirit intake up even higher.

What the butler saw or did he? Martyn Hunter’s Rogers and Jeanette Hunter’s Mrs Rogers in And Then There Were None

Andrew Isherwood soon sheds the dodgy accent of his cover as a wealthy South African, Davis, to be revealed as retired Detective William Henry Blore.

Ian Giles’s old boy, General MacKenzie, appears to be losing his marbles; Jessica Murray’s disapproving religious zealot Emily Brent knits feverishly, and Mark Simmonds’ Dr Armstrong is as earnest as brown bread.

Rory Mulvihill’s Sir Lawrence Wargrave is wont to dominate, a judge by profession, with a  permanent black-cap countenance and a voice that commands the stage and those around him alike.

Isherwood’s direction skilfully steers a path through dark humour, heightened tensions and chilling revelations, capturing Christie’s scathing dismissal of so many restrictive institutions, and his cast applies both light and increasing shade. 

Ian Giles’s General MacKenzie holds forth in And Then There Were None as Florence Poskitt’s Vera Claythone looks on quizzically

Hickman’s mysterious Lombard is particularly good at keeping up a front; Poskitt may be associated with wide-eyed, squishy faced comedy but here delves into disturbing inner turmoil, a revelation that affirms she should not be pigeonholed.

Mulvihill, latterly flourishing in diverse roles beyond his musical theatre leading-man prowess, is in terrific form once more, his grave Wargrave judging everyone to damnation.  

Will Nicholson and Adam Coggin’s lighting blends in just right with each scene’s tone and Readman’s scenery in Isherwood’s engrossing production that benefits from one other Readman decision: replacing the play’s happier ending with the novel’s original darker denouement, with permission from the Christie estate. Right again, Robert.

Performances: 7.30pm nightly, plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Pick Me Up Theatre’s poster artwork for And Then There Were None
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REVIEW: Original Theatre Company in Murder In The Dark, York Theatre Royal **

Tom Chambers’ Danny Sierra in Murder In The Dark. Picture: Pamela Raith

AFTER a five-and-a-half-hour slog from Norfolk that felt like one long detour,  your reviewer took to his Upper Circle seat last night just in time to be greeted by the sound of a car. A cruel joke, but one in keeping with the tone of Torben Betts’s ghost story.

“It’s fair to say that Murder In The Dark is something of a departure for me as regards genre,” says Betts in his programme notes. “If I am known for anything as a playwright, it’s for dark comedies of social embarrassment with a bit of political commentary thrown in.”

What is Murder In The Dark? Despite its title, this is not a modern twist on an Agatha Christie whodunit, thereby offering an immediate contrast with Original Theatre’s last Theatre Royal visit with The Mirror Crack’d last October. An immediate contrast too for Susie Blake, swapping Miss Marple for farmer’s wife/religious zealot Mrs Bateman.

Betts’s challenge from Original Theatre artistic director Alastair Whatley was to “write something that would, hopefully, both disturb and entertain”. The result is still a dark comedy of social embarrassment, but with a bit of moralising about the price of fame thrown in, in a supernatural psychological thriller cum dysfunctional family drama.

Rather than clever twists and turns, in the sleight-of-hand manner of The Woman In Black, thudding bumps in the road are administered in the style of a horror movie with a relish for shlock humour.

Betts enjoys pulling the rug from under your presumptions from the off, even setting up a routine thriller opening where washed-up pop star Danny Sierra (Tom Chambers) and his young girlfriend Sarah (Laura White) are led into a dingy, creepy rural cottage by the strange, eerie Mrs Bateman and her scary dog (heard but never seen) after a car crash .

It is New Year’s Eve: the nearest shop is 20 miles away, but the hostile weather means they are cut off anyway; the electricity is on the blink; the television keeps sparking into life with Three Blind Mice; there is no wi-fi connection; the loo and the shower are in a shed outside.

Car crash? Rescued by a frankly weird woman? How very Kathy Bates and Misery. Susie Blake will go on to give this chameleon play’s most enjoyable performance as someone who knows more from the past than she is letting on.

Tom Chambers, by contrast, has to wade through the quagmire of playing the deeply unlovable but once adored Danny Sierra (real name Nigel Carmichael,before pop stardom came his way with Dance Party Five and their chart-topping Murder In The Dark).  

Danny is a self-pitying alcoholic, and one by one, family members from the crash arrive at the cottage to paint the full picture, the day after his mother’s funeral. His more talented, songwriter brother William (Owen Oakeshott), discarded in pursuit of fame. His ex-wife Rebecca (Rebecca Charles), discarded (but he still loves her, he protests). His songwriter son Jake (Jonny Green), neglected, drifting, resentful.

In truth, they are all unappealing, not great company on stage, the general nastiness turning scenes rancid, but not aiding Betts’s pursuit of comedy, which keeps changing its tack too, briefly farce at the start of the second half, but more often clunky.

Did Jake and later Danny see a young woman in a ballerina dancer’s costume or were they imagining it? Not telling!

Perhaps this supernatural undercurrent prompted director Philip Franks to say “we’ll see whether my more adult theory – that horror often puts its finger on what worries us most as a society at any given time – will also hold true” in Betts’s play. Hence Betts’s moralistic tone.

Horror story, nightmare, fever dream, sometimes hammy comedy thriller, suffused with ugly family politics, Murder In The Dark never settles on one path, to the detriment of being as unsettling as it needs to be. What’s more, too clever by half in its trickery, it makes less sense the more the plot thickens but unravels as logic takes a hike.

Murder In The Dark? Left in the dark, more like. Definitely not a whodunit, it ultimately has you asking Betts, “whydunit?”.

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More Things To Do in York and beyond, from a remote island murder trail to science lessons. Hutch’s List No. 39, from The Press

Mark Simmonds, left, Martyn Hunter and Ian Giles rehearsing Pick Me Up Theatre’s And Then There Were None at Theatre@41, Monkgate, York

AND then there were ten as Charles Hutchinson picks his cultural highlights, from Christie mystery to prints aplenty,  Wax words to science explosions, extinction fears to singers’ farewells.  

Thriller of the week: Pick Me Up Theatre in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, running until September 30, 7.30pm (except tomorrow and Monday); 2.30pm, today, tomorrow and next Saturday

TEN strangers are summoned to a remote island. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they are unwilling to reveal and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder.

As the weather turns and the group is cut off from the mainland, the bloodbath begins and one by one they are brutally murdered in accordance with the lines of a sinister nursery rhyme in Agatha Christie’s murder mystery, directed for York company Pick Me Up Theatre by Andrew Isherwood, who will play retired Inspector William Blore too. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Michelle Hughes’s Kilburn White Horse, on show at York Printmakers Autumn Fair

Print deadline: York Printmakers Autumn Fair, York Cemetery Chapel and Harriet Room, today and tomorrow, 10am to 5pm

IN its sixth year, the York Printmakers Autumn Fair features work by 26 members exhibiting and selling hand-printed original prints, including Russell Hughes, Rachel Holborow, Michelle Hughes, Harriette Rymer and Jo Rodwell.

On display will be a variety of printmaking techniques, such as linocut, collagraphs, woodcut, screen printing, stencilling and etching. Artists will be on hand to discuss their working methods and to show the blocks, plates and tools they use.

Pulling a face: Comedian Phil Wang returns to York on his Wang In There, Baby! tour

Seriously silly: Phil Wang, Wang In There, Baby!, York Barbican, tonight, 7.30pm

AFTER his Netflix special, David Letterman appearance, role in Life & Beth with Amy Schumer and debut book Sidesplitter, Phil Wang discusses race, family, nipples and everything else going on in his Philly little life in his latest stand-up show, Wang In There, Baby! Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.

Cinder Well: Songs of mystery at The Band Room, Low Mill. Picture: Georgia Zeavin

Gig of the week outside York: Cinder Well, The Band Room, Low Mill, Farndale, North York Moors, tonight, 7.30pm

CINDER Well, multi-instrumentalist Amelia Baker’s experimental American roots project, showcases her mysterious April 2023 album, Cadence.

The title refers to the cycles of our turbulent lives, to the uncertain tides that push us forward and back, as Cadence drifts between two far-flung seas: the hazy California coast where Baker grew up and the wind-torn swells of County Clare, western Ireland, that she has come to love. Box office: thebandroom.co.uk.

Ministry of Science Live: Lighting the flame for experiments in Science Saved The World at Grand Opera House, York

Explosive children’s show of the week: Ministry of Science Live in Science Saved The World, Grand Opera House, York, tomorrow, 12.30pm and 4pm

MINISTRY of Science take an anarchic approach to science communication, looking at the scientists, engineers and inventors who have shaped the modern world, while proving that each and every one of us has the ability to change our world for the better.

Expect 20ft liquid nitrogen clouds, exploding oxygen and hydrogen balloons, fire tornados, hydrogen bottle rockets, ignited methane and even a self-built Hovercraft. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

Confronting ecological disaster: Stephanie Hutchinson in A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction at York Theatre Royal. Picture: James Drury

Play of the week: A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction, York Theatre Royal, Wednesday to Saturday, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Saturday matinee

DIRECTED for York Theatre Royal by Mingyu Lin, Miranda Rose Hall’s play heads out on a life-changing journey to confront the urgent ecological disaster unfolding around us. Part ritual, part battle cry, this “fiercely feminist off-grid” one-woman show offers a moving evaluation of what it means to be human in an era of man-made extinction.

Leeds actress Stephanie Hutchinson will be joined at each performance by eight cyclists, who will ride specially adapted bicycles to power the electricity required for lighting and sound. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

Ruby Wax: A search to find meaning on a series of life-changing journeys

Waxing lyrical: Ruby Wax: I’m Not As Well As I Thought, York Alive festival, Grand Opera House, York, Thursday, 7.30pm

IN 2022, American-British actress, comedian, writer, television personality and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax, 70, began a search to find meaning, booking a series of potentially life-changing journeys. Even greater change marked her inner journey, as charted in her book I’m Not As Well As I Thought and now in her “rawest, darkest, funniest show yet”. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

The Manfreds: Last tour together for singers Paul Jones and Mike D’Abo on 60th anniversary itinerary

Nostalgia of the week…for the last time: Maximum Rhythm’n’Blues with The Manfreds, Grand Opera House, York, Friday

JOIN legendary pioneers of Sixties’ British rhythm & blues The Manfreds as they celebrate 60 years in the business. Vocalists Paul Jones, 81, and Mike D’Abo, 79, are touring together for the final time, alongside long-standing members Tom McGuinness, Rob Townsend, Marcus Cliffe and Simon Currie, to rejoice in Do Wah Diddy Diddy, If You Gotta Go, Go Now, Pretty Flamingo, My Name Is Jack and Mighty Quinn. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

Daniel Martinez Flamenco Company: Three performances in one day at the NCEM

Dance at the treble: Daniel Martinez Flamenco Company, Art Of Believing Special Edition, National Centre for Early Music, York, October 1, 3.30pm, 6pm and 8.30pm

LAST at the NCEM in November 2022, the Daniel Martinez Flamenco Company returns to York for three performances in one day of Art Of Believing, a 90-minute show suffused with emotion, passion and grit.

Works from Martinez’s Herald Angel Award-winning production Art Of Believing will be complemented by previously unseen pieces performed by musicians, singers and dancer Gabriela Pouso. Box office: 01904 658338 or ncem.co.uk.

Kenny Thomas: Rediscovered songs and big hits on the Him Tour 2024 at Grand Opera House, York

Looking ahead: Kenny Thomas, Him 2024 Tour, Grand Opera House, York, May 19 2024

ISLINGTON soul singer-songwriter Kenny Thomas will front his all-star band in York on his nine-leg British tour next spring, showcasing songs from his “lost” third album, the never-commercially-released Him, alongside his greatest hits.

“Over three decades on from when I first started out, this tour demonstrates that soul music is here to stay,” says Thomas, 55, whose Best Of compilation will be out on November 3. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

In Focus: Stephanie Hutchinson on starring in a one-woman show for the first time in A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction

Stephanie Hutchinson: Starring in one-woman, whole-world drama A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction at York Theatre Royal

STEPHANIE Hutchinson had never imagined she would do a one-woman show.

Come Wednesday, however, the Leeds actress will be giving her solo turn for five performances in “a bold experiment in eco theatre-making” and a “fiercely feminist off-grid production” at York Theatre Royal.

The title, A Play For The Living In A Time Of Extinction, is an indication that this Headlong, London Barbican and York Theatre Royal co-production will be unlike anything you have seen before.

Hands up anyone who has witnessed a stage production powered by bicycles. Only The HandleBards on their open-air Shakespeare travels come to mind.

Strictly speaking, Stephanie will not be on her own. Eight cyclists per performance will be pedalling away to power lights and microphones, while the York Theatre Royal Choir will be participating too.

After a Barbican run, Miranda Rose Hall’s play is on a zero-travel tour using an eco-friendly blueprint. The rest of the production, from local actor to cyclists, is provided by the theatre hosting the show, culminating in York next week.

“I don’t want the audience to feel they’re just being talked at,” says Stephanie. Picture: James Drury

Stephanie sees it as a co-operative production, not only a one-woman show. “I’ve not seen A Play For The Living but heard a lot about it,” she says.

Her character, a dramaturg called Naomi, pressed into impromptu service as an actress, is fearful of death but is determined to confront fears about an impending ecological disaster.

“What caught my eye was just how sustainable the production is,” she says. “Naomi is described as a woman in her 20s who is scared of dying. She’s already had to go on stage and act in front of people. She’s confronted that fear. Now she’s facing her fear of dying and wants to have a conversation about it.

“I like how interactive it is. It’s not just me, not just a verbal splurge. She wants to know what others are thinking. I don’t want the audience to feel they’re just being talked at.”

Despite the subject, A Play For The Living is not all gloom and doom, emphasies Stephanie. There are funny moments. Gloomy and funny is her hope for the experience.

Stephanie Hutchinson in Badapple Theatre’s production of Elephant Rock, part of the TakeOver festival at York Theatre Royal in May last year

“I don’t think it’s just a message play,” she says. “Naomi’s having a conversation, making the audience aware of what she’s found during her research. It’s also like an ode to the Earth as well because the Earth has given us so much but in return we’re not treating it back very well. It’s almost like she’s blessing the Earth and thanking it. But we do need to be careful – if we keep going the way we’re going, future generations might not have it.”

Stephanie was last seen on York Theatre Royal’s main stage in Green Hammerton company Badapple Theatre’s Elephant Rock during the TakeOver season in May 2022. Her other credits include Shake The City, based around the clothworkers’ strike in Leeds in 1970, staged at both Leeds Playhouse and Jermyn Street Theatre in London.

All this is something of a surprise for Stephanie who did not nurse acting ambitions from a young age. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I was a teenager. Then when I was 15, 16, I was going to theatre classes where you’d do singing, dancing, acting and I was like, ‘I quite actually like this – can I do it at uni or go to a drama school?’.

“So, at 18, I went to Salford University and graduated with a BA (Hons) Performing Arts. I’ve managed to carry it on, although I’m not quite sure how I’ve done that. My ambition is just to keep on going because I can’t really see myself doing anything else. Even in my day job, I do role play and that’s acting on the side. Acting is getting paid for doing what I love.

“I thought I would never do a one-person show. I am feeling very happy where I am at the moment. Very happy.”

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REVIEW: Alan Ayckbourn’s Constant Companions, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until October 7 ****

Leigh Symonds’ engineer Winston and Naomi Petersen’s automaton house maid ED in Alan Ayckbourn’s Constant Companions. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

ALAN Ayckbourn wrote his first play for the SJT, under a pseudonym, in 1958, and writer and theatre have been pretty much constant companions for six decades.

Constant Companions is his 89th play and second premiere of the year after Welcome To The Family at the Old Laundry Theatre at Bowness-on-Windermere in May. That one travelled from the near future to the past; now he goes back to the future again, one just around the corner, “some time soon to come” where science fiction becomes science friction, but whether past or future, as ever Ayckbourn is above all else reflecting the present, our constant characteristics.

In Ayckbourn’s words, Constant Companions is “a look at a very possible future – in fact a very probable future of androids and artificial intelligence”, built around three parallel stories on Kevin Jenkins’ tripartite set design, each rooted in a relationship between human and robot. Who is in control? Who is malfunctioning more? Only time will tell.

In his bachelor pad, bored, lonely Don (Andy Cryer) is trying to assemble his new robo-sex toy, his Konstant Kompanion, designed to his desire for a big bust, who, once assembled, is never seen but heard from the bedroom inflicting disasters on his bathroom to pratfall comic effect.

Helping Don, on the phone but distractedly, is Leigh Symonds’ Winston, with plenty on his hands already re-tuning ED (Naomi Petersen), the attic-abiding, errant automaton maid of Andrea De Santo ((Tanya Loretta-Dee)

An engineer working on the hoof, by the manual but by trial and error too, he has the manner of a diffident, crushed soul, but goes from lost-love deflation to reinflation by ED’s seductive manner. There will be a sting in this tale, one of manipulation, but their central scene is beautifully written, confessional, gradually revealing, and slower paced than the comedy that fizzes around it.

In her sleek executive office, with all its hi-tech mod cons and a swishly dressed assistant (Georgia Burnell’s aspirational Sylvia), high-powered lawyer Lorraine (Alexandra Mathie) has red-carded her rotter husband in favour of JAN 60 (Richard Stacey), a smooth-operator robot janitor as calmly efficient and deadpan as a Wodehouse butler but with the humour button set to hyena-manic and an alarmingly agreeable, pre-programmed  manner, right word, right place, right time.  

Linking all three bereft human stories is a need for love and companionship, but what of the androids’ motives, their needs, their rights, where will all that artificial intelligence lead? A prescient darkness is at play in Ayckbourn’s mischief-making, a sense of inevitability too where the human failings, vulnerabilities and contrary own goals of today will have ultimate consequences in our imminent tomorrows.

You could call it gallows humour. The Ayckbourn truth is we shall never change, pre-programmed in our own way to fall in love, to fail, to self-destroy, to still crave affection, and we shall laugh at those failings in the company of this ever astute writer-director’s typically brilliant cast. The androids, however, will of course have the last laugh. The ultimate mod con at our expense.