Chloe Hart’s Catherine of Aragon, centre, vows No Way in SIX The Musical. Picture: Pamela Raith
HISTORY and hysteria combined, SIX The Musical’s run in York has been met with excitement befitting an A-list pop star. Sold out, every last newly refurbished Grand Opera House seat.
Make that SIX pop divas as this all-female show for the millennial age reactivates the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII in modern mode with attitude: a pop concert wherein the Queens tell their story in song in chronological order to decide who suffered most at Henry’s hands once he put a ring on that wedding finger.
From this talent and talons contest between Henry’s trouble-and-strife sextet will emerge the group’s lead singer. Move over The Spice Girls, here come The Spouse Girls, whose rhyming career path read: Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.
Heading for a beheading: Jennifer Caldwell’s Anne Boleyn
This is not so much history as her-story, as they gleefully point out, in a tale of Tudor girl empowerment, one with no appearance by ‘orrible Henry, but the obligatory girl-group infighting, albeit engineered sassily and sometimes saucily (wait for the Anne Boleyn joke) by co-writers Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.
“Musical theatre often has lame parts for women,” Moss once said. “We wanted to write loads of meaty, funny parts for women.”
That’s exactly what they have done, while also “making something which didn’t feel like a musical”, conjuring a 75-minute, straight-through, breathless show that began life as a Cambridge University student production in 2017. Since then, it has acquired more hi-tech trim in Emma Bailey’s set design for its staging with four ladies-in-waiting, leather and studs: musical director Caitlin Morgan on keys; Migdalia Van Der Hoven on drums, Ashley Young on bass and Laura Browne on guitar.
Stone in love: Casey Al-Shaqsy’s Jane Seymour pouring everything into big ballad Heart Of Stone. Picture: Pamela Raith
They provide the on-trend musical ballast for pop music devotees Marlow and Moss to mirror the tropes of this century’s pop queens: Beyonce for Catherine of Aragon’s No Way; lippy Lily Allen for Anne Boleyn’s Don’t Lose Ur Head; Adele for Jane Seymour’s Heart Of Stone; Rihanna and Nicki Minaj for Anne of Cleves’ Get Down; Ariane Grande for Katherine Howard’s All You Wanna Do and Alicia Keys for I Don’t Need Your Love. The pastiches are uncanny, adding to the fun and games, matched by the subject matter in the lyrics suiting the song style spot on.
You will have your favourites among those songs – for this reviewer, No Way, Get Down or the sudden burst of camp techno and yellow dark glasses for Haus Of Holbein with comedy German accents – but those choices will differ wildly. To these ears, the ballads carried less impact; others would insist Heart Of Stone is the peachiest number of all.
You will have your favourite Queens too, and again arguments can rage as to who and why, but SIX is rooted in team work, in shared empowerment, and so the show opens with an ensemble number Ex-Wives and closes with two more, Six and MegaSix.
Haus music: The Queens go German techno for Haus Of Holbein, the height of camp in SIX. Picture: Pamela Raith
The Wives are omnipresent, singing backing vocals when not each having their moment in the spotlight, drilled by Carrie-Anne Ingrouille in that high-energy brand of choreography beloved of Beyonce and Britney with glittering, flashy, big-on-bling costume designs by Gabriella Slade to match.
As for the performances – not so much regal airs and disgraces as setting the record straight under Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage’s dandy, defiant direction – they are indeed SIX of the best: Chloe Hart’s unbending Catherine of Aragon; Jennifer Caldwell’s fun-loving Yorkshire-voiced minx Anne Boleyn; Casey Al-Shaqsy’s true-love Jane Seymour; Jessica Niles’s wronged but life-of-luxury Anne of Cleves; Scottish-accented understudy Leesa Tulley’s tried-her-best Katherine Howard and Alana M Robinson’s resilient, broken-hearted survivor Catherine Parr.
Choose a winner? Yours truly is a Boleyn ally. Choose a loser? Alas anyone who was not quick enough off the mark to book a ticket.
SIX The Musical reigns at Grand Opera House, York, until October 16. Performances at 8pm, Wednesday and Thursday; 6pm and 8.30pm, Friday; 5pm and 8pm, Saturday; 3pm, Sunday. ALL SOLD OUT.
Parr empowered: Alana M Robinson’s Catherine Parr makes her statement in SIX. Picture: Pamela Raith
NEWSFLASH!
SIX more!
SIX The Musical is to return to the Grand Opera House, York, from June 27 to July 2 2023. Performances will be at 8pm, Tuesday to Thursday; 6pm and 8.30pm, Friday; 4pm and 8pm, Saturday, and 2pm, Sunday.
Tickets are on sale on 0844 871 7615 or atgtickets.com/York.
John Hewer, as Harold, left, and Jeremy Smith, as Albert, in The Steptoe And Son Radio Show, on tour at Grand Opera House, York
THE Steptoe And Son Radio Show, adapted for the stage by John Hewer, visits the Grand Opera York, on October 18 on its nationwide autumn tour.
Marking 60 years since the first broadcast of the classic BBC television comedy, the show is based on Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s original TV scripts.
The cast sees the return of Jeremy Smith and Hewer as Albert Steptoe and son Harold respectively, having starred in the UK tours of Steptoe And Son in 2017-2018 and Christmas With Steptoe And Son from 2019 to 2021.
The Steptoe And Son Radio Show cast
Smith trained at the National Youth Theatre, was a member of the Young Vic Company and has toured in productions ranging from farce to Shakespeare. Hewer works as a writer and director but is best known for his portrayal of Tommy Cooper in Just Like That! The Tommy Cooper Show and his performance as Tony Hancock in Hancock’s Half Hour – The Lost Episodes.
Steptoe And Son ran for eight series from 1962 to 1974 and spawned two film spin-offs. Telling the story of two warring rag-and-bone-men in their Shepherd’s Bush scrapyard home, Albert and Harold became household favourites across the generations and continue to entertain audiences today. One proclaims to be “a poor old man” while the other protests that he is “a dirty old man”. Both are right!
This latest adaptation features three classic episodes, transformed into a radio play. “The attraction is that these vintage stories will be presented with the emphasis now squarely on the script and the dynamism between the central characters,” says Hewer.
The tour poster for The Steptoe And Son Radio Show
“It’s a different theatricality. We’re still in costume and ‘in character’, but this time it’s a mock-up of a live studio recording, with its flashing ‘Applause’ lights and direct address from the performers making the audience feel directly involved.
“The three chosen episodes – Is That Your Horse Outside?, A Death In The Family and Upstairs, Downstairs, Upstairs, Downstairs – will easily familiarise and reacquaint audiences with the Steptoe saga, allowing them to explore all the foibles and tropes of this most iconic father-and-son pairing.”
Produced by Hambledon Productions and Apollo Theatre Company, The Steptoe And Son Radio Show is suitable for age 12 upwards. Box office: 0844 871 7615 or atgtickets.com/york.
Dr Richard Shepherd: Pathologist, professor, lecturer, author, apiarist and aviator, presenting Unnatural Causes at York Theatre Royal on Thursday and Leeds City Varieties on Friday
FORENSIC pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd is unearthing Unnatural Causes on his 22-date autumn tour, visiting York Theatre Royal on Thursday and Leeds City Varieties the next night.
Already this autumn, his latest true crime television series, The Truth About My Murder, has been running on CBS Reality since September 21, wherein he revisits high-profile cases from Great Britain and the United States of America.
“I know how the living send out signals which are designed to appeal to our hearts. But the dead can only tell the unadorned truth. I listen to their stories,” he says.
Now retired, Dr Shepherd, 69, has worked for the Home Office on multiple cases and was the forensic expert for the Bloody Sunday inquiry, the Hungerford Massacre and the death of Princess Diana, also advising on the management of British fatalities following 9/11 in New York.
He has performed more than 23,000 autopsies and is a detective in his own right,solving the mysteries of countless sudden and unexplained deaths. He has faced serial killers, natural disasters, perfect murders and freak accidents.
His evidence has put killers behind bars, freed the innocent and turned open-and-shut cases on their heads. Yet all this has come at personal cost, having been diagnosed with diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after suffering flashbacks.
Heading out on tour from Wednesday (12/10/2022) to November 11 with Unnatural Causes, a title shared with his book that spent ten weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller chart, Dr Shepherdtells the stories of the cases and bodies that have both fascinated and haunted him the most.
Additionally, he will explain his admiration for the complexities of the human body and examine how he has lived a life steeped in death. This week’s York and Leeds audiences can take part in solving a real-life crime scene mystery too when he invites their involvement.
Why pick pathology as a career choice, Dr Shepherd? “Really, it’s quite simple,” he says. “It was a Damascene moment. A schoolmate’s dad was a GP and when he smuggled a book on forensic medicine into the classroom, like any curious 14-year-old boy, I thought that’s amazing and took it home,” he recalls.
“My dad was quite an ‘anorak bloke’, and instead of saying ‘that’s disgusting, you shouldn’t be interested in that’, he said, ‘you have to work hard if you’re interested in that’, and I ended up going to medical school. All because of that moment at Watford High School.”
Dr Shepherd trained as a doctor at St George’s Hospital medical school from October 1971, qualifying in 1977. It was a great place to be, at that time a very small school at Hyde Park Corner – it’s since moved to Tooting – with a very forensic component to it.
“I oscillated a bit around pathology. Bizarrely, I really liked obstetrics, but came back to qualifying in forensic pathology.”
Thirteen years later, in 1984, he was fully qualified, studies completed in Gower Street. “Most of those years, you’re being paid, remember, which makes it easier to study,” says Dr Shepherd, who took up a post at Guy’s Hospital in 1987. “It’s important to say that though I studied for 13 years, that’s the usual time for most consultants, but you do have a clear finishing point of a fellowship at the Royal College of Pathologists.”
Pathologist, author, professor and lecturer, Dr Shepherd spread his wings into television presenting (The Death Detective, Autopsy: The Last Hours Of…, Murder, Mystery And My Family) and theatre tours.
“I always did a lot of lecturing, mainly to medical student groups, but also to Rotary groups sometimes, and then did The Death Detective. It was going to be called Dr Dick, bit it was pointed out, ‘No, that might not be appropriate’!
“I wanted to not only tell the story of a case, putting the jigsaw pieces together, but also to say, ‘here is the face of forensic pathology’,” says Dr Shepherd. “I’m a nice bloke doing a terrible job with care and compassion.”
Looking back over the years, Dr Shepherd says: “I think society has changed. Often people don’t talk about ‘death’ now but about ‘passing’ and ‘passing on’, and we’re beginning to fudge the process; I suspect it’s becoming more hidden,” he says.
“I had to have my 14-year-old Jack Russell put down in my arms, and I thought it was important to feel that emotion in death, whereas now people are turning funerals into a bit of a media presentation with My Way and You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
Dr Shepherd does not watch such series as Silent Witness. “Not because I dislike them, but because they are so far from what I know to be the truth, like not showing bits of a brain. The reality is not there, but then people think that what they see on TV must be close to reality, but then it happens to them and it’s not like it is on the TV, and it’s a double blow. Deaths are sanitised, even in Casualty,” he says.
“A lot of people love how the forensic pathologists looks very clever on Silent Witness, and it all looks very exciting, but the reality is I don’t go around arresting people.”
How does he transfer his forensic expertise to the theatre stage? “I can talk about how I see things in my profession, but I can also talk about more about emotions; how the body has failed; how I can detect injuries and how they’ve been caused,” says Dr Shepherd.
“I have to be very careful for it not to be like a forensic lecture that I would give to students about how they would deal with injuries. On this tour, I’ll bring an imitation ‘body’ on stage with a knife sticking out of the chest. It’s a theatrical moment, and it’s always great to hear the audience gasp, so it’s close to reality, with no fudging. It’s the truth, but not the absolute truth because that’s too hard. The reality is, it’s that thing of life and death and going from one to the other.”
You may have seen Dr Shepherd contributing to Channel 4’s documentary Investigating Diana: Death In Paris on the 25th anniversary of her death in August. “It’s one of those deaths that I can feel viscerally, as many of us do,” he says, but he does not buy into any conspiracy theories. “She should have put her seat belt on.”
This month, his forensic mind is on his Unnatural Causes tour. “It’s the starting pointy of every report I’ve written: ‘Death is not due to natural causes’. ‘Death is due to unnatural causes’. It’s a phrase I have used all my professional life.”
Dr Richard Shepherd, Unnatural Causes, York Theatre Royal, Thursday; Leeds City Varieties Music Hall, Friday, both 7.30pm. Box office: York, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk; Leeds, 0113 243 0808 or leedsheritagetheatres.co.uk .
CBS Reality’s The Truth About My Murder is available on Freeview (67), Sky (146), Virgin (148) and Freesat (135). From a state-of-the-art laboratory, with ground-breaking digital technology, viewers will hear directly from the victim as Dr Shepherd uncovers the truth behind these perplexing crimes as told through the victims’ bodies.
These victims’ narratives are often re-written, hidden, manipulated, weaponised and concealed by their evil killers. In each case, Dr Shepherd will “separate fact from fiction and ensure the truth always prevails”.
Did you know?
Dr Richard Shepherd is an apiarist (beekeeper) and aviator (with a private pilot’s licence since 2004).
Did you know too?
His latest book, The Seven Ages Of Death, explores what death can teach us about living.
Tudor girl power: Jennifer Caldwell’s Anne Boleyn in SIX The Musical. Picture: Pamela Raith
HENRY VIII’s vengeful wives are not the only show in town. Charles Hutchinson finds alternatives aplenty.
Don’t lose your head over this but…SIX The Musical has sold out at Grand Opera House, York,October 11 to 16.8pm, Tuesday to Thursday; 6pm and 8.30pm, Friday; 5pm and 8pm, Saturday; 3pm, Sunday
DIVORCED, beheaded, scuppered. Those without a ticket for York’s hottest theatre show of the autumn are too late. Not one seat, even with a restricted view, is still available for Toby Marlow and Lucy Marlow’s irreverent historical musical romp that began as a Cambridge University show at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Welcome to their Queendom where Tudor queens turn into pop princesses as the six wives of Henry VIII take to the mic to tell their tales, remixing 500 years of heartbreak into a 75-minute celebration of 21st-century girl power.
Tom Chaplin: Solo songs of midlife musings from the Keane frontman
Take your pick at York Barbican: Uriah Heep, tomorrow, 8pm; Tom Chaplin, Tuesday, 8pm; Will Young: 20 Years Tour, Thursday, 7.30pm; Boyzlife, Friday, 7.30pm
SPOILT for choice at York Barbican in a busy, busy week. British rock titans Uriah Heep’s 50th Anniversary Tour is now taking place in their 52nd year after playing 4,000 shows in 60 countries. Keane frontman Tom Chaplin showcases September’s release of his second solo album, Midpoint, exploring a part of life that everyone goes through: midlife.
On the pop front, singer, radio presenter, actor and writer Will Young marks two decades since his Pop Idol blossoming. No sooner have Boyzlife performed to 20,000 people at the Yorkshire Balloon Fiesta on Knavesmire than their Old School Tour sends the boy band duo of Boyzone’s Keith Duffy and Westlife’s Brian McFadden back to York. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Will Young: From Pop Idol young man to the polymath of today
Toasting the trailblazers: A Celebration Of Gilbert & Sullivan, Grand Opera House, York, tonight, 7.30pm
A 26-piece orchestra and soloists perform favourites from The Mikado, The Pirates Of Penzance and HMS Pinafore, complemented by less familiar gems in a glorious night at the light opera.
Taking part will be singers from Opera North, English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera, Carl Rosa and D’Oyly Carte, such as Alexander Robin Baker, Rebecca Bottone, Barry Clark, Siân Dicker, Yvonne Howard, Judith Le Breuilly, Timothy Nelson and Matthew Siveter. Box office: 0844 8717615 or atgtickets.com/York.
Bongo’s Bingo: A rave new world for a British classic at York Barbican
House music but not as you know it: Bongo’s Bingo, York Barbican, tonight; doors, 6pm; last entry, 7:30pm; first game of bingo, 8pm
MAKING its York debut only a stone’s throw from the demolished Mecca Bingo, Bongo’s Bingo “rejuvenates a quintessentially quaint British pastime with an immersive live show featuring rave rounds, nostalgia-soaked revelry, dance-offs, audience participation and crazy prizes in a night of pure and unadulterated escapism”.
Looking for a full house, promoter Jonny Bongo promises magic and music, mischief and mayhem in a bingo rave experience. Box office: bongosbingo.co.uk or yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Sayaka Ichikawa in Ballet Black’s Black Sun at York Theatre Royal. Picture: Bill Cooper
Dance pioneers of the week: Ballet Black, Say It Loud & Black Sun, York Theatre Royal, Tuesday, 7.30pm
CELEBRATING their 20th anniversary, Black Ballet present two new works on tour. Choreographed and directed by founder and artistic director Cassa Pancho and company artists, Say It Loud charts this pioneering company’s progress, from the uncomfortable reasons behind its existence to the frenetic, creative energy that makes it such a necessary part of the British ballet industry.
South African choreographer Gregory Maqoma’s Black Sun, danced to an original score by Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante, extracts energy from the sun and the moon giving rise to descendants of ancestors. These forces only meet to blacken, allowing us to draw from their powers as we prepare for life after life. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Dr Richard Shepherd: Pathologist, professor, lecturer, author, television presenter, apiarist and aviator, whose Unnatural Causes theatre tour will York and Leeds
Bringing death to life: Dr Richard Shepherd, Unnatural Causes theatre tour, York Theatre Royal, Thursday; Leeds City Varieties Music Hall, Friday, both 7.30pm
MEET Dr Richard Shepherd, a forensic pathologist who has solved the mystery of sudden and unexplained deaths aplenty, performed 23,000 autopsies and handled such cases the Hungerford Massacre, the Princess Diana inquiry and 9/11.
In Unnatural Causes, he not only tells the story of the cases and bodies that have haunted him the most, but also reflects on how to live a life steeped in death. Box office: York, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk; Leeds, 0113 243 0808 or leedsheritagetheatres.co.uk
Make It Better: The theme for Day One of York Design Week
Festival of the week: Kaizen Arts Agency, United by Design and Dogeatcog unite for York Design Week 2022, Make It Work, October 13 to 17
YORK Design Week turns the spotlight on projects, organisations and people who are breaking and bending rules to create a fairer society, inviting you to explore how we can come together to “Make It Work”. “Let’s find creative and practical solutions to complex problems through collaboration, performance, and play,” say the organisers.
“The idea is to positively shift conversation and behaviour around what design means and how it can offer innovative solutions to knotty problems. Our approach is open, accessible, and seeks to provide space for participants to experience unexpected perspectives and express their own voice.” Full details can be found at: yorkdesignweek.com.
Make It Grow: The green theme for Day Four of York Design Week
120 years and still going strong: York Musical Theatre Company in A Musical Celebration, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, Thursday and Friday, 7,30pm
YORK Musical Theatre Company’s 120th anniversary will be marked with two evenings of songs from past productions such as West Side Story, Oklahoma, Guys & Dolls, Annie, Acorn Antiques, Jekyll & Hyde, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Pirates Of Penzance, the company’s first show in April 1903.
Company members combine with guest solo artists in a celebratory production directed by John Atkin. Founded in 1902 as York Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society, York’s longest established amateur theatre company changed its name in its centenary year. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Ellen Carnazza, Andrew Purcell and Zach Atkinson in Badapple Theatre’s revival of The Frozen Roman, on tour this autumn. Picture: Karl Andre
What did the Romans ever do for us? Badapple Theatre in The Frozen Roman, on tour until November 13
GREEN Hammerton’s theatre-on-your-doorstep proponents Badapple Theatre take to the road this autumn with three actors new to the company: Zach Atkinson, Andrew Purcell and Ellen Carnazza.
In this revival of Kate Bramley’s play, they came, they saw, they built a wall, they went away again….or did they? When hapless villagers try to prevent a housing development being built in their midst, could the discovery of a burial site throw them a lifeline? Expect twists, turns and Latin puns as the situation in the village goes “ballisticus maximus”. For tour details, go to: badappletheatre.co.uk.
Ocean travel: Billy Ocean heads for Harrogate and Sheffield in 2023
Looking ahead: Billy Ocean, The Very Best Of Billy Ocean Tour, Harrogate Convention Centre, March 31 2023
BILLY Ocean will perform a hand-picked set of greatest hits and fan favourites on his 21-date tour next spring.
The Trinidad and Tobago-born British R&B singer, 72, has notched 30 million worldwide record sales and top ten singles on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Love Really Hurts Without You, Red Light Spells Danger, Caribbean Queen (No More Love On The Run), When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going, There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry) and Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car. The tour also takes in Sheffield City Hall on April 6. Box office: harrogatetheatre.co.uk; sheffieldcityhall.co.uk.
Doing her research: Susie Blake’s Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d, on tour at York Theatre Royal. Picture: Ali Wright
THIS is Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, but it is Rachel Wagstaff’s play.
For the stage, she has adapted Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (whose 2022 tour was cut short before its Grand Opera House run in York) and co-adapted Paula Hawkins’ The Girl On The Train too.
An earlier version of her take on Christie’s 1962 mystery The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side toured the UK in 2019. Now comes another crack at it for the Original Theatre Company, one that has modern sensibilities to shake up its outwardly old-fashioned mien.
Self-harm, repressed homosexuality and child loss burst through the surface in Wagstaff’s multi-layered drama rooted in the turbulence of fracturing mental health. The thunderbolt is Jane Marple’s explanation of why she has remained unmarried, still consumed by grief at her young love being shot for cowardice when serving in the First World War.
Philip Franks’s production is stylish, sharply dressed, light on its feet, played out in rooms with almost an excess of glass, in reference to the mirror of the title, reflective but also see-through. There may be plenty to hide but it can’t be hidden from view.
Adrian Linford’s open-plan, rotating setting is two-fold, serving as the grand English manor house newly acquired by an unsettling presence, American film star Marina Gregg (Sophie Ward), and her film director sixth husband of eight years, Jason Rudd (Joe McFadden), and as the home of “spinster sleuth” Jane Marple (Susie Blake) too.
Housebound and frustrated by a sprained ankle, she either sits with her knitting or takes to crutches or a walking stick, ever restless both physically and mentally.
A third, unseen setting plays its part, a new housing estate that “alarms the villagers as much as it intrigues them”. Miss Marple’s home help, Cherry Baker (Mara Allen), has moved in there, and there is more to her than first meets the eye. It was ever thus in Christie’s world.
The price of love? Joe McFadden’s Jason Rudd and Sophie Ward’s Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack’d. Picture: Ali Wright
Marina and hubby are making her first film in 12 years at the manor house, bringing an entourage that includes loyal servant Giuseppe Renzo (Lorenzo Martelli) and production assistant Ella Zielensky (Sarah Lowrie). Young co-star Lola Brewster (Christine Symone) is acting even more oddly than they are, as the plot thickens.
The story unfolds in flashbacks as Oliver Boot’s Inspector Craddock, sorry Chief Inspector, as he keeps correcting, conducts a murder investigation. Blake’s Miss Marple nudges her way into the case, asking the better questions, frustrating Craddock, who delightfully refers to her as his aunt.
Putting her oar in too is Dolly Bantry, former owner of the manor house, exquisitely played by character actress supreme Veronica Roberts, a superb piece of casting by Ellie Collyer-Bristow, who happened to be watching Wednesday’s performance in the next seat.
Miss Marple’s relationships with both Boot’s exasperated Craddock and Roberts’s dabbling Dolly, forever calling by, are suffused with humour in Blake’s performance, but there is intelligence, a seriousness of purpose, to her marvellous Marple. Kindness, sadness, wit and wits about her too.
McFadden’s Rudd is fiery, protective, deeply concerned for Marina’s mental wellbeing, but what is his motive? Ward’s Marina is damaged, graceful, charming when the moment takes her, but capricious, cold, dismissive…and mysterious. Ice and fire, guilt and regret, where will it lead?
Franks’s direction skilfully balances the humour, the double-act to-and fro of both Marple & Dolly and Marple and Craddock, with the darkness of Marina’s troubles. The smoothly interjected yet jolting flashbacks intensify the intrigue, bringing super-fan Heather Leigh (Jules Melvin) into the plot, although Craddock keeps on blocking the attempts of her husband Cyril (David Partridge) to do likewise in a well-worked running gag.
Why do theatres – as well as TV – keep doing whodunits? A midweek packed auditorium would tell you why: we love a mystery to solve, trying to work it out before the sleuth, and when that story is told as adeptly as it is by Wagstaff with direction and performances to match, then crack on with The Mirror Crack’d.
Original Theatre Company in Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, York Theatre Royal, Saturday, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
“The hair is fun, the live performance is way funnier,” said the London Evening Standard of Maisie Adam’s haircut, the one to rival David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane for multiple choices across one barnet. Picture: Matt Crockett
MAISIE Adam took her first stage steps in youth theatre sessions in the Harrogate Theatre Studio.
Born in Pannal just outside the spa town, this former head girl at St Aidan’s High School would later return to the top-floor Studio in her fledgling days on the comedy circuit to perform at the Harrogate Comedy Festival.
Now, comedian, actor and writer Maisie is looking forward to tomorrow’s homecoming when she graduates to Harrogate Theatre’s main stage on her first UK tour, Buzzed.
The gig has sold out, as has tonight’s date at Leeds City Varieties Music Hall, although tickets remain available for The Leadmill, Sheffield, next Thursday.
“It’s super-exciting,” says a suitably buzzing Maisie, 28. “It’s wonderful any time I go back, but going there with this show, in that specific venue, will be special. Whenever I’ve performed there, it’s always been in the Studio, but this time, being in the big room, feels very touching.
“I’ll be channelling Tim Stedman,” says Maisie Adam, who every winter visits Harrogate Theatre’s pantomime, led by the boundless comic buffoonery of Stedman’s village idiot, pictured here in Snow White
“Me and my family go to the pantomime every year to watch Tim Stedman. He is pantomime! He’s fantastic. That’s the level of comedy you have to bring to the stage, so I’ll be channelling Tim Stedman!”
Post-Harrogate Youth Theatre and the National Youth Theatre, Maisie trained at East 15 Acting School in Southend, graduating with a BA in Acting and Community Theatre. However, after initial plans to act and write, including a Laurence Marks sitcom-writing mentorship in 2015, a return home to Yorkshire and temp jobs led to her comedy road-to-Damascus conversion in 2016.
Wholly inexperienced, Maisie did a full hour’s set in her stand-up debut gig at Ilkley Literature Festival as her first show took shape under the title of Living On The Edge.
Acting involves subsuming yourself to play another character, sometimes using it as a shield for shyness, in a team environment, whereas stand-up comedy is all about being yourself on stage, on your own, maybe even playing an exaggerated version of you, performing your own words.
“I think it’s that whole thing of fear,” starts Maisie. Not in comedy, but in theatre. “When you’re doing comedy, you’re in control. If it goes well, you get all the cheers. If it goes wrong, you can’t blame anyone else.
“If you’re continually doing the same play, you can get bored, but with stand-up, it’s different every night,” says Maisie. Picture: Matt Crockett
“But with acting, you could be a really good actor, but if the script isn’t good, or the other actors aren’t particularly good, or the director isn’t, or the show just isn’t working, you’re not in control.
“With comedy, there’s definitely that thing of being an extension of yourself, and there’s loads you can do with that, because it’s a chance to improvise.
“The more you do comedy, the better you get at it – and it’s fun as well! If you’re continually doing the same play, you can get bored, but with stand-up, it’s different every night, the venue, the audience, the interaction.”
Maisie made rapid advances on the comedy circuit with her anecdotal material and convivial manner. Within months of that Ilkley debut she won the UK’s largest stand-up contest, So You Think You’re Funny?, followed a year later by the Amused Moose National Comic Award for Vague, her 2018 debut Edinburgh Fringe show about being diagnosed with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy at 14.
Television appearances on Have I Got News For You, A League of Their Own, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Mock The Week and The Last Leg have piled up, and a podcast with fellow comedian Tom Lucy, That’s A First, has been running since 2019.
“The worst thing that can happen with comedy is that you feel safe and secure,” says Maisie. “If that happens, you’re not doing it right.” Picture: Matt Crockett
She loves the unpredictability of stand-up, the need to stay on her toes and keep her comedy radar tuned. “The worst thing that can happen with comedy is that you feel safe and secure. If that happens, you’re not doing it right,” says Maisie.
“You should want anything to happen on the night, and as long as you have a loose structure, knowing that ‘x’ and ‘y’ will be happening, then you can move things around and be open to anything.”
Buzzed, her follow-up to her 2019 show Hang Fire, has been extended from the regulatory 60-minute maximum at the Edinburgh Fringe – or 70 minutes as the Guardian review said – for the 2022-2023 tour. “It was 60 minutes,” says Maisie. “It was just that when you have other shows going on before and after you every day, that day the shows were running ten minutes late.”
Buzzed now opens with a 30-minute “very spontaneous, anything-can-happen” first half, then a break, followed by the full Buzzed show. One that the Guardian reviewer said was “bursting with puppyish pleasure”.
“Don’t tell me about reviews,” steps in Maisie. “I don’t read them. You’re being judged by someone who’s never done comedy but just goes and watches. That would be like me ‘reviewing’ Wimbledon. I mean, I enjoy watching tennis but why would I need to review what was good about someone’s tennis performance?!”
Leeds United: One of the two great loves of Maisie Adam’s life
While on the subject of sport, Wikipedia’s Maisie profile sums up her personal life as: Lives in Brighton. Engaged to Mike Dobinson as of December 2021. Also a Leeds United fan.
Mr Dobinson or the maddening LUFC, Maisie, who do you love more? “I think they’re of equal status! They’re the two loves of my life. 100 per cent.” One is much better for her mental health, however, she adds.
Her relationships, whether in love or with houseplants, feature in Buzzed and so does the footballing aplomb of 5ft 11inch Maisie. “I played at a relatively high standard as a kid. I got to county level,” she says. “I still play in a league in Brighton, but more of that in the show.”
Why settle in Brighton, Maisie? “I just needed to be nearer London, but the idea of living in London filled me with dread.”
Maisie Adam: Buzzed, Leeds City Varieties, tonight, 8pm, sold out; Harrogate Theatre, tomorrow, 8pm, sold out; The Leadmill, Sheffield, October 13, doors 7pm; Pocklington Arts Centre, February 17 2023 and The Wardrobe, Leeds, March 3 2023. Box office: Sheffield, 0114 272 7040 or leadmill.co.uk; Pocklington, 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk; Leeds, 0113 3838800 or theboxoffice.com.
“I’m incredibly lucky to be a part of this wonderful show, which has such a great message and allows people to be, unapologetically, who they truly are,” says Jennifer Caldwell, who plays queen No. 2, Anne Boleyn
DIVORCED, beheaded, Covid-19’ed, SIX The Musical could have passed this way before, but “localised lockdowns” hit Live Nation Entertainment’s six drive-in shows at Church Fenton airport for six in August 2020.
Now, the newly refurbished Grand Opera House, in York, has the delight of hosting the first North Yorkshire run of the “electrifying musical phenomenon that everyone has lost their head over”, fully booked up from October 11 to 16.
First presented by Cambridge University students in a 100-seat Sweet Venue room at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s musical has been catapulted into a West End and international hit en route to being named the Musical of the Decade by WhatsOnStage (as well as Best Musical 2020). Nominations for five Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical, came the show’s way too.
Songs from the SIX studio album are streamed on average 450,000 times per day, making it the second-highest streaming musical theatre recording in the world after Hamilton.
SIX The Musical’s debut York run has sold out already, but why is there all this hoo-ha over the vengeful wives of Henry’s irreverent musical romp?
Welcome to their Queendom where Tudor queens turn into pop princesses as the six wives of Henry VIII take to the mic to tell their tales, remixing 500 years of historical heartbreak into a 75-minute celebration of 21st-century girl power. These queens may have green sleeves (a reference to the Henry VIII-penned Tudor chart topper) but their lipstick is rebellious red.
“To be able to play the iconic Anne Boleyn and fill the iconic boots of the incredible humans who have played her before is a dream come true,” says Jennifer Caldwell
Among the cast for a third year is Jennifer Caldwell, playing Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, the one who was beheaded by a French swordsman on May 19 1536 after being found guilty of charges of adultery, incest and conspiracy against the king.
“I’m incredibly lucky to be a part of this wonderful show, which has such a great message and allows people to be, unapologetically, who they truly are,” says Jennifer, feeling very definitely luckier than Anne B.
“Having previously covered all the roles and had the opportunity to tell all those women’s amazing stories, to be able to play the iconic Anne Boleyn and fill the iconic boots of the incredible humans who have played her before is a dream come true.”
After covering the role of Anne Boleyn previously, “I had a lot of time to prepare and learn my own little nuances. I also read – a lot! – and watched documentaries to learn as much about our dear Anne Boleyn as I could,” Jennifer says.
She found rehearsing for the latest tour “great fun”. “Being able to go back to the drawing board and discover who my Boleyn is and be able to have ownership over that was really special,” she says. “Getting to bond with the new cast was wonderful too.”
SIX The Musical: Next week’s Grand Opera House run has sold out already
SIX is a very vocally demanding show, 75 minutes straight through and no interval. “I often live a little like a nun! I steam every morning and drink loads of water,” says Jennifer.
Picking out a favourite moment on the tour so far, she plumps for: “Being able to reopen after Covid. Feeling the love and appreciation from the audience. I cried!”
What should York’s audiences expect from the show, Jennifer? “Stupendous vocals, incredible choreography, laughter by the bucket load and…a whole lotta history,” she says.
“I want audiences to take away the message that we’re all enough on our own! We don’t need to be defined by anything other than who we are!”
Anything else? “I want them to leave with a stomach ache from laughing and aching cheeks from smiling too hard.”
SIX The Musical, directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage, heads into Grand Opera House, York from October 11 to 16; performances at 8pm, Tuesday to Thursday; 6pm and 8.30pm, Friday; 5pm and 8pm, Saturday; 3pm, Sunday. ALL SOLD OUT. Don’t lose your head still trying to acquire a ticket.
Joe McFadden’s Jason Rudd and Sophie Ward’s Marina Gregg in the Original Theatre Company’s production of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d. Picture: Ali Wright
2017 Strictly champion Joe McFadden is appearing in his first Agatha Christie mystery, The Mirror Crack’d, on tour at York Theatre Royal all this week in the role of Jason Rudd.
Joining Glasgow-born Joe, 46, in Rachel Wagstaff’s stage adaptation of Christie’s 1962 psychological thriller will be Susie Blake’s Miss Marple and Sophie Ward’s Hollywood star Marina Gregg for a story of revenge and the dark secrets that we all hide, presented by the Original Theatre Company.
In the sleepy village of St Mary Mead, a new housing estate is making villagers curious and fearful. Even stranger, a rich American film star [Gregg] has bought the Manor House. Cue a vicious murder; cue Jane Marple defying a sprained ankle to unravel a web of lies, tragedy and danger.
Here Joe answers questions, but not those posed by Miss Marple.
Who is Jason Rudd?
“He’s a film director who put his career on the back burner because his wife, Hollywood star Marina Gregg, is going through a hard time. Now he’s going to make a film about Henry Vlll and his wives with Marina as Catherine Aragon.
“He manages to tempt her back with a script that he’s been working on for quite a long time. You’re suspicious of his motives. There are so many people circling around Marina, this Hollywood star from a bygone era and you ask yourself: why are they so interested in her? What are they getting out of it?”
Cast an eye over your CV…theatre, TV, Strictly…
“I feel very lucky that I get to do musicals and to do plays – and to do the odd bit of telly now and again. It’s really an actor’s dream in that I’m not stuck doing the one thing. The usual thing is that you either do plays or you do musicals or you do TV, and it becomes hard to break into the others. I feel very fortunate I get to do all of them.”
Joe McFadden in the role of film director Jason Rudd in The Mirror Crack’d. Picture: Ali Wright
What have been your favourite roles?
“I couldn’t pick a favourite, honestly. It’s brilliant doing a play because you get a lot of time to sit down, as we have during The Mirror Crack’d rehearsals, and talk about the story. Working on something like Agatha Christie, it’s absolutely necessary because it’s so textured, so layered and there’s so much in there. On the face of it, it seems a simple whodunit but they’re all such complex characters. Nobody is really what they first appear to be.”
What’s the enduring appeal of Agatha Christie stories?
“They’re so rich, there’s so much in there and it really keeps you guessing. It’s not so much a whodunnit as a social commentary. The Mirror Crack’d is, as I’ve discovered, about mental health. At the time it was written, Agatha Christie was very much ahead of the curve.
“It’s a real examination of this movie star, Marina, and how, when you get to a certain age, you’re not in the running for the parts and you’re cast aside. It’s about the tragedy and unfairness of that. My character adores Marina and will do anything to protect her.
“We discover he’s been there for her in the past but you’re not sure what his motives are and, as is the way with Christie, discover he’s not all he seems to be by the end of the evening. So, it’s really great charting how much you show to an audience and who the red herrings are. Quite exhausting mentally”.
Have you gone back to the book, the TV versions or the film?
“I haven’t really read the book because some details have changed. Rachel Wagstaff has done a wonderful adaptation. It’s kind of confusing for me because I’ve watched the Julia McKenzie TV version and the Rock Hudson/Elizabeth Taylor film version and they’re all slightly different.
“What you do get from them is a feel for the period, the style and the characters. It’s difficult when you’re so familiar with the other source material because you’re torn between what you’re doing and what they’re doing.
“I feel like I don’t need to read the book or watch the films again. Not at the moment. Perhaps when we’re all finished I will.”
2017 Strictly champion Joe McFadden in a waltz with Sophie Ward in The Mirror Crack’d. “I’m trying to dredge up from the corner of my mind how to do it,” he says. Picture: Ali Wright
You are appearing in your first Agatha Christie thriller…
“Absolutely my first. My mother was a massive mystery fan. She loved a sleuth, Murder She Wrote, Poirot, all the detective shows, so I was brought up watching these films and TV shows. I do have a real fondness for them because they get you involved.
“You’re not passive when watching, you’re actually trying to work out whodunit. And while you’re working it out, you’re being entertained and getting a real insight into these human beings and their particular circumstances.”
The Mirror Crack’d brings together three regulars from ITV’s Yorkshire series Heartbeat: you, Sophie Ward and director Philip Franks. Plenty of conversation points, no doubt?
“We’re having a great time reminiscing and comparing experiences. I’ve done a number of long-running series and there’s something to be said for knowing the other actors and knowing the crew. It’s nice with a job like Heartbeat or Holby City, where you have a shorthand with people and a relationship with people. Those were particularly lovely jobs to do.
“I was happy to do them for as long as I did: two years of doing Heartbeat and five years in Holby. I’m sure every job is not as happy as those but I was very happy to do them for so long.”
What made you sign up for Strictly Come Dancing in 2017?
“I did agonise over the decision to do it because back in the day, 20 years ago, actors didn’t really do reality TV shows. It was a new thing. I thought long and hard about it and took advice from various people, friends in the industry, but ultimately my reason for doing it was I wanted to learn how to dance. I wanted to have this world champion teach me to dance. That opportunity only comes along once in a lifetime. I felt it would be silly not to grab it with both hands.”
It could not have worked out better: you won!
“I’m so glad I did it, not because I won but because it was such a brilliant experience. It was about saying yes to things and not being afraid of the unknown. As human beings we like the familiar, the same thing, and that’s a dangerous place for an artist to be because you want to challenge yourself and challenge people’s perceptions of you. Strictly was good for that.”
Champion Joe McFadden’s advice to this year’s Strictly Come Dancing contestants: “Get as much sleep as you possibly can because the tiredness is like nothing you will have experienced in your life”
What was the hardest part of doing Strictly?
“Being myself on screen, which I hadn’t really done before. The most daunting thing was all the speaking and the live television but even that stuff ended up being massively enjoyable. Talking to Zoe Ball on It Takes Two became one of my favourite parts of the week because she made it so lovely. The fans are so appreciative and so warm that you feel the love everyone has for that show, something I perhaps wasn’t aware of going into it.”
What’s your advice to celebrities taking part in the new series of Strictly?
“Just to enjoy every moment, because you never know when it’s going to end, and get as much sleep as you possibly can because the tiredness is like nothing you will have experienced in your life. Just enjoy it because it will be over in a flash. It goes so quickly. Don’t take it too seriously, throw yourself into it and do exactly as your partner tells you.”
Will there be any dancing in The Mirror Crack’d?
“We do a bit of a waltz. I’m trying to dredge up from the corner of my mind how to do it.”
How do you feel about touring?
“I toured with Priscilla Queen Of The Desert for seven months and toured with two different Ghost Stories before that. I love touring. As an actor, you either love it or hate it. I try to get out to see places and not stay in my digs all the time.
“The great thing for Priscilla is that I didn’t drink for the whole time I did the show, which meant I got up in the morning, went to the beach, did the museums. I love how we get to go to these places that you never would at any other time.”
Joe McFadden fact file
Television credits include: Raffaello Di Lucca in Holby City from 2014 to 2020; Alistair in Casualty in 2009; PC Joe Mason in Heartbeat, 2007 to 2009; Jack Marshland in Cranford; Dallas in Sex, Chips & Rock’n’roll; Prentice McHoan in The Crow Road and Gary McDonald in The High Road.
Theatre includes: Priscilla Queen Of The Desert The Musical; Torch Song Trilogy (Menier Chocolate Factory); She Loves Me (Chichester Festival Theatre); Rainbow Kiss (Royal Court Theatre); How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (Chichester Festival Theatre); Aladdin (Old Vic Theatre) and Rent (Shaftesbury Theatre, London).
Joe won BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing glitter ball with partner Katya Jones in 2017.
Sophie Ward: Cast as Hollywood star Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack’d. Picture: Ali Wright
Questions for Sophie Ward, an actor playing an actor in The Mirror Crack’d
SOPHIE Ward returns to the York stage this week for the first time since playing the lead role of Eunice in the Classic Thriller Theatre Company’s staging of Ruth Rendell’s tale of murder, A Judgement In Stone, at the Grand Opera House in October 2017.
In the Original Theatre Company touring production of The Mirror Crack’d at York Theatre Royal, Sophie, 57, is cast as Hollywood star Marina Gregg.
Is The Mirror Crack’d your first experience of performing an Agatha Christie story?
“No, I did a television version of A Caribbean Mystery with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple and also Go Back For Murder, which was a play by Agatha Christie.
Is Marina Gregg based on anyone in the movie world?
“There was a star called Gene Tierney who was the inspiration for this character, and quite famously Elizabeth Taylor played the character in a film, when Angela Lansbury was Miss Marple. Marina is entering a new chapter in her life, a bit more peaceful. She’s doing films she likes with her husband and finding some respite in buying this big house in an English country village. It’s a new start for her.”
Marina is an actor, as are you, do you identify with her in any way?
“There are lots of things that I understand and I’ve worked in a lot of productions from that period. So, it’s a world I know a little bit about but I hope it’s not too close to my own life.”
Did you experience Hollywood when you were commuting between England and America?
“I did quite a lot of television in various shows but not films in the US. I met my wife [Rena Brennan] in Los Angeles so we like to spend time there. I’d like to get over there more, but my mother-in-law lives in Florida, my mother is in London, and I have grandchildren in England. With work and family, it’s not been easy to get over there in the past few years. A small matter of the pandemic.”
Sophie Ward’s Marina Gregg and Susie Blake’s Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d. Picture Ali Wright
Have you and The Mirror Crack’d co-star Joe McFadden comparrd experiences working on Heartbeat?
“Joe was in the series after my era on Heartbeat, but we have that in common, which is really nice to be able to talk about. I was on the show for two years, quite a big chunk of time to do one job when you’re an actor. We’ve been catching up on our time in Heartbeat.”
How was lockdown for you?
“When we had our first lockdown, I was quite happy doing a lot of gardening for a while. But I think we all had thoughts of a reassessment of life and of what we were doing. I had time to ask myself, ‘Am I going to carry on with acting when this situation finishes’.
“As it turns out, I do want to carry on and I did miss it during lockdown, but it was really great to have that time to think about things. You’re on a wheel, which you get on and keep going round and round. It was good to think ‘I’m choosing to do this and not just carrying on’.”
Where does Marina Gregg fit into the kind of roles you play these days?
“I’ve had the opportunity to do lots of different parts. Marina is very much a movie star with all the charm and challenges that can bring. I’m thrilled to be playing her.”
What are the strengths of Rachel Wagstaff’s new adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d?
“This is one of Christie’s later books and things are changing in society and in St Mary Mead. Rachel’s version shows that they’re quite conscious of that in the village. The characters aren’t stock characters; they are all interesting, three-dimensional people and Rachel has managed to include all their stories.
“As an audience we need to care about them. You want to understand people and not just see another character murdered. Every character is valuable to the story.”
Sophie Ward in the role of misfit Eunice in Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement In Stone at the Grand Opera House, York, in October 2017. Picture: Geraint Lewis
Have you returned to the book or film and TV versions?
“Obviously what we’re doing is our version. Rachel has done an amazing job so that’s what we work on and that’s where my imaginative world is: in Rachel’s world. But I’m really interested to see other versions and find out more about that world. Then you have to focus on Rachel’s version.”
You have written two novels, the first one, Love And Other Thought Experiments, being longlisted for the Booker Prize. Is a third book on the horizon?
“My second book [The Schoolhouse] came out in May and I’m hard at work on the third one. It takes me about five years to write a book.”
What prompted you to ‘go back to school’?
“First I did an undergraduate degree part time, then I did an MA, and I’ve just finished my doctorate at Goldsmiths. There’s a lot of waiting around in our job and I left school after my A-levels, didn’t go to university, just carried on working.
“I really wanted to go back to school. I knew my children would be coming up to that age soon and wanted to be able to talk with them about going to uni, what it meant and what it was. I studied, it took me about 15 years, and out of that came the idea for my first novel, which was a mixture of the things I’d been studying.”
You are an advocate for gay and lesbian rights…
“I try to be supportive and feel open about my life. I did write about equal marriage for the Guardian. I felt very strongly about it, about everyone being able to have that option to get married. I am involved to that extent but there are people whose whole careers are seriously applied to gaining our rights. I’m a very small part of that.
“There have been a lot of changes, changes in the law and people’s attitudes, which has been amazing to see and experience. But I never take it for granted because, as we see in other countries, either things don’t progress in the same way or they’re going backwards. You can’t be complacent.”
Sophie Ward: Actor, gay rights advocate and novelist
What’s coming next for you after The Mirror Crack’d tour?
“I have a research trip for my next book.”
Somewhere exotic?
“I can’t really say as I’m still developing the ideas and immersing myself in a new world. Let’s just say ‘travelling’!”
Sophie Ward fact file
Her first acting role was at the age of ten.
Now playing Rachel Johnson, opposite Kenneth Branagh’s Boris Johnson, in This Scepred Isle on Sky Atlantic/Now TV.
Appeared opposite Claire Foy and Paul Bettany in A Very British Scandal (BBC); starred in Troubled Blood (BBC/HBO), an adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s novel.
For the past four years, Sophie has hosted the European Diversity Awards and she works closely alongside Stonewall.
Original Theatre Company in Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday, 7.30pm nightly; 2pm, Thursday; 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
Richard Digby Day: Theatre director, professor and lecturer
RICHARD Digby Day, artistic director of York Theatre Royal from 1971 to 1976, will talk about his life and work in the theatre world at a fundraising event there tonight at 7pm.
Now 80, this esteemed stage director, international professor and lecturer in Britain and the United States is credited with discovering actors Hugh Grant and Ralph Fiennes in a career where he served as artistic director of Bournemouth Theatre Company, New Shakespeare Company at Regents Park Open Air Theatre, Welsh National Theatre Company, Nottingham Playhouse and Northcott Theatre, Exeter.
He is well-known for his work in classical theatre, notably the plays of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. He is vice president of the Shaw Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has staged more productions of Shaw’s work than any other living director.
Richard is noted for his productions of Stephen Sondheim musicals too, and his work has been seen in the West End and on tour extensively throughout the UK, Canada, Denmark and Ireland.
He has worked with many of the theatre greats, not least bringing Dame Judi Dench to the Theatre Royal stage, and he is a contemporary of Sir Ian McKellen, the two having begun their professional careers working on many of the same productions with Digby Day serving as assistant director.
He came back to York three times to direct waggon plays from the York Mystery Plays with the York Settlement Community Players for the Merchant Adventurers’ Guild, presenting The Last Judgement in 1998, 2002 and 2006. “The last one was the most modern, and I wouldn’t have done it twice more after the first time if it wasn’t so rewarding,” he says.
“There was a great stock of actors, like Ruth Ford, who was not just a wonderful actor but a wonderful person.”
Now Richard returns to the city for 50 Years On: Richard Digby Day In Conversation in the Theatre Royal Studio tonight when creative director Juliet Forster will host the event to raise funds to support ongoing work at the St Leonard’s Place theatre.
“I look back on my days as York Theatre Royal as a time of great excitement, a very good time,” says Richard. “What those days meant to my career and showed to other people was that I could run a theatre, because I was not just the artistic director but also director of the whole thing. I really had the final say in relation to whatever the board wanted.
“I was thinking about this, how the Sixties and Seventies were a wonderful time for the theatre in a way that has not been replicated since. I was in the right place at the right time, as I was at Exeter too. I’d just finished working for the Welsh National Theatre Company at the Casson Studio, in a very rough street in Cardiff: Ruby Street in Splott. I’d founded the company and started it but couldn’t cope with the Welsh politics, so I left.”
What happened next? “There was as an advertisement in The Stage saying York Theatre Royal was looking for a new artistic director, when Donald Bodley was leaving, having made that wonderful addition to the building [the foyer],” Richard recalls.
“I was interviewed in September 1971 and all the candidates were told to hang around…and then it was announced that I’d got the job, in front of all these disappointed-looking other people.”
Richard can reel off the productions that came thick and fast under his artistic direction: “We did The Circle, by Somerset Maugham, starring Jessie Matthews, who appeared twice in the first year. In York Minster was Murder In The Cathedral by T S Eliot, and because there was no studio at the Theatre Royal at that time, we did two plays at York Arts Centre [in Micklegate], Tiny Alice by Edward Albee and Old Times by Harold Pinter. There was an extraordinary range of performances going on,” he says.
“That’s the difference when you compare it with today’s theatre. That time was the flowering of theatre, whereas today money is short and very rarely do actors stay together for more than one play.”
More work comes to Richard’s mind. “We did some work at the University of York; two plays in the De Grey Rooms and a whole series of poetry readings at York Art Gallery,” he says.
He settled in quickly. “York Theatre Royal was well set up: long before I arrived there, it was a working regional theatre with its wardrobe and carpentry departments, and York always tended to have actors that stayed for more than one production,” he says.
“For the second season in Spring 1973, Phyllis Calvert [the English film actress], who’d been in the company before the Second World War, began a long association with me directing her in five plays. The first Shakespeare I did here was The Tempest, in association with the New Shakespeare Company at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, in London, where I was artistic director for a long time.
“A city without the arts will never be a complete place,” says Richard Digby Day
“We had Michael Dennison playing Prospero, and the production began in York, went on a little tour, then played Regents Park.”
Judi Dench would return to her home city with Michael Williams to appear in a new play, Content To Whisper, adapted by television writer Alan Melville from a French work. “I can tell you this now, because Judi and I often laugh about it: we knew on the first day of rehearsals that we shouldn’t be doing it, but we did the best we could with it and it packed the theatre! I don’t know if people liked it or not, but they were just content to see Judi back home,” says Richard.
“Looking back, I was able to do a lot of interesting productions and the seasons were a lot more classically based than they are now: Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, but a lot of modern plays too, like the first out-of-London production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus. The National Theatre offered us the rights for it, so we said yes, and then followed it with Hamlet, starring the Scarborough-born Frank Barrie as Hamlet.
“That was the third time I’d directed Hamlet and the nearest one I felt to getting it right. Frank’s father died in the middle of the run and he had to keep going, with all that connection with Hamlet’s father dying.”
Just as Damian Cruden would do later during his 22-year tenure as artistic director, Richard enjoyed using the theatre space in different ways. “We had all the seats taken out and did a promenade production of The Two Noble Kinsmen [Shakespeare’s play co-written with John Fletcher]: the first time it had been done for many years, for York Festival in 1973,” he says.
“In my last season, we had seven plays by Samuel Beckett to celebrate his 70th birthday and we did them on the stage with the safety curtain down and the audience seated on the stage too, and we did this in a repertory season where we closed the main-house auditorium one night a week for the Beckett plays.”
Typical of Richard enjoying the challenge of “making theatre in places that aren’t necessarily theatres” was his production of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf in the Assembly Rooms, “I had the belief that wherever there was an audience, wherever there were actors, that could be a theatre,” he says.
As he heads back to York once more, where he once lived on Tadcaster Road in a “dear little cottage and courtyard” overlooking the racecourse, Richard says: “The city has provided many memories, 50 years of history, but it’s not the place I came to in 1971. I don’t say it in an entirely negative way but any city that has its manufacturing heart taken away can never be as interesting as it was.
“I used to get up at six in the morning and walk down to the shop to buy a paper, and you would see all these workers bicycling to work. You could smell that work. I find what’s happened to Britain so sad, though of course York has so many attractions that it’s made an industry out of tourism.
“There were always tourists but it was completely a working, industrial city, where under all that history was the industry that was supporting it.”
From 1980 to 1984, Richard was at the helm of Nottingham Playhouse. “That was not a happy time,” he says. “I would have to say that Mrs Thatcher interfered in the arts. In particular, William Rees Mogg wrote a ghastly report on the arts when he was made chairman of the Arts Council: a most unsuitable person for the post.
“It was not an easy period and eventually I thought, ‘I just don’t want to go on running a theatre’, so I left and I’ve never really run a theatre since then, but I’ve done lots of other things, like being the director of the National Theatre Institute, in Waterford, in Connecticut, for eight years.”
Richard directed plays aplenty at the Lyric in Belfast. “It was at the height of the troubles, which was a very interesting experience,” he says. “Where I was staying, one night the windows were shattered by an explosion nearby, but on the whole, you learned to get on with things and not be distracted by the divisions.”
Richard has directed star names in one-person shows, from Edward Fox to Eileen Atkins, Margaret Wolfit to Geraldine McEwan. “Most recently, Eileen Atkins put me in touch with Dame Joan Plowright for a show where I interviewed her: it was a wonderful opportunity to get to know a wonderful person, doing the shows at the National Theatre and Chichester,” he says.
Reflecting on the contrast between now and 50 years ago, Richard says: “Theatre is not funded properly, with very few exceptions. The most worrying thing is the lack of performances of classic plays, and often when they’re done now, they’re very badly spoken, even at places where there’s no excuse, like the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“By comparison with Peter Hall’s days, what the National Theatre is doing now is not what it should be. So, I am concerned. I say this as an old man, but one who tries try not to have too many set ideas, but if you look at the list of what was playing in the West End 30 years ago and what’s on there now, I’m deeply concerned.”
His passion for theatre, his conviction in its importance, remains unbowed, however. “A city without the arts will never be a complete place,” he says.
50 Years On: Richard Digby Day In Conversation, York Theatre Royal Studio, tonight at 7pm. Tickets cost £20 plus an optional additional donation to York Theatre Royal. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Paul French’s Prospero, right, with Effie Warboys’ Miranda and Jacob Ward’s Ferdinand in York Shakespeare Project’s The Tempest. Picture: John Saunders
PAUL French first performed in a Shakespeare play in his York Shakespeare Project debut in All’s Well That Ends Well in 2014.
By 2016, he was playing Lear in King Lear and now is the lead once more, cast as Prospero in The Tempest, in YSP’s climax to performing all 37 Shakespeare plays in 20 years, concluding at York Theatre Royal tonight.
“I’d never done any Shakespeare until 2014, so it was an amazing development for me,” he says. “I didn’t start acting until my early forties, then I moved up here, and I had no idea I would like doing Shakespeare until I did it.
“I had a family and job but now I’ve retired, though it’s been a slow process with doing theatre, after doing a job that gave me the flexibility to do the York Mystery Plays [in York Minster] in 2016, and it just so happened that Ben Prusiner, from that production, was directing Lear, and then I did Volpone with Ben’s own company [Re:Verse Theatre].
Paul French’s Lear and Charlotte Wood’s Cordelia in Ben Prusiner’s King Lear in 2016. Picture John Saunders
“It’s all been pretty fortuitous. None of it was planned. My wife is now asking, ‘is this going to be your last Shakespeare?’, and I say, ‘I don’t know’, because I didn’t know I’d ever do one, but I love it, especially the rehearsals.”
Over the past few years, Paul has attended acting classes to develop his skills further and done films to diversify his craft too. Everything helps towards playing such a demanding role as Prospero.
“I remember when I did All’s Well That Ends Well, playing the king, which is not a huge part, saying to a fellow actor, ‘I’d love to do Lear and I’d love to do Prospero’, and you think, ‘how will that work out, with all the people who can do it?’, and yet here we are now, with all these blessed words to get out of my head!” says Paul.
He has enjoyed that experience. “It’s been very interesting to develop Prospero from having first read the play and having ideas of what he’s about and then exploring it. It’s a pleasure working with the other actors, starting with the huge scene with Miranda [Effie Warboys], setting up the story,” he says.
Paul French’s Prospero and Effie Warboys’ Miranda in rehearsal for Philip Parr’s production of The Tempest. Picture: John Saunders
“It’s fascinating how it all develops, and I now think Prospero is more like me than I first thought he was.”
Director Philip Parr chips in: “That’s sort of how it should work. The part should become greater than the actor by an alchemical process.”
Assessing the art of acting, Paul goes on to say: “Acting is reacting; acting is listening; acting is being in the moment.” Philip chips in again: “Acting is not acting!”
“I think it won’t happen with this cast, but with actors who are not experienced, there’s a tendency to not know how to react if the performance is suddenly different on one night,” says Paul. “But here, for The Tempest, we want it to be different, to just see what happens!”
York Shakespeare Project in The Tempest, York Theatre Royal, tonight (1/10/2022), 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
