Elvis is in the building: Beverly (Katy Dean) reaches for a Presley platter as the party atmosphere turns ever more awkward in Abigail’s Party. Paul Hawkyard’s Tony, left, and Robin Simpson’s Laurence keep their distance. Faye Seerawinghe’s Angela, seated, left, and Janine Mellor’s Sue, await with trepidation. All pictures: Ant Robling, Robling Photography
Abigail’s Party, HT Rep, Harrogate Theatre/Phil & Ben Productions, at Harrogate Theatre, 7.30pm tonight and tomorrow; 2.30pm, 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk
HARROGATE Theatre’s HT Rep 2022 season of Three Plays, Three Weeks, One Cast opens with Mike Leigh’s caustic comedy Abigail’s Party, written in 1977, the year of The Queen’s Silver Jubilee and now revived in the year of her Platinum Jubilee.
Director Marcus Romer, Harrogate Theatre’s associate producer, had planned to have the Sex Pistols’ 1977 anthem God Save The Queen seeping through the walls from Abigail’s punk and booze-fuelled party next door, but the events of last Thursday afternoon saw a respectful change to Anarchy In The UK.
Romer has form for Abigail’s Party, having steered York Theatre Royal’s 2005 repertory production. Now the spirit of rep theatre is being repeated in a third such autumn season at Harrogate, the cast piggy-backing from one play to the next, rehearsing Abigail’s Party for a week, and now rehearsing Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight by day and staging Leigh’s suburban comedy of awkward social-climbing manners by night.
Husband-and-wife strife in Abigail’s Party: Robin Simpson’s Laurence and Katy Dean’s Beverly having a difference of opinion…again
The same process will follow next week, when Paul Hawkyard, Robin Simpson and Janine Mellor will knock John Godber’s Men Of The World into shape in the daytime rehearsal room under Amy Burns Walker’s direction before Harrogate-born Faye Weerasinghe, Simpson, Harrogate pantomime regular Katy Dean, Mellor and Ian Kirkby form co-producer Ben Roddy’s cast each night for Gaslight.
In rep tradition, there is a familiarity to the cast, not only Dean, but also Mellor from the 2019 HT Rep season’s On The Piste and Deathtrap and her dual roles as Dandini and a Snugly Sister in last winter’s Cinderella, while rising star Weerasinghe played the lead in Full English at Harrogate Theatre in June.
York audiences, meanwhile, will need no introduction to Hawkyard and Simpson, whether from Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre or their Mardy and Manky double act in Cinderella at the Theatre Royal last winter. Captain Hook and Mrs Darling await them in All New Adventures Of Peter Pan this winter.
Now put them all together in surely one of the most destructive yet indestructible of English comedies. Your reviewer is yet to see a duff production and Romer’s return to Leigh is another winner.
The quiet and the constant noise: Janine Mellor’s Sue and Katy Dean’s Beverly
It is Katy Dean’s turn to behave appallingly in the Alison Stedman-patented lead role of gauche Beverly, dark haired this time rather than bottle-blonde but still over-dressed for cheese and pineapple-stick nibbles in her fuchsia party dress.
Embroiled in a stultifying game of one-upmanship with dyspeptic, workaholic property-agent husband Laurence (Simpson), their latest playground for point-scoring is a soiree for their new neighbours, taciturn ex-professional footballer Tony (Hawkyard) and nervous nurse Angela (Weerasinghe) in their oh-so Seventies’ North London living room.
Joining them with reluctance written all over her face is Sue (Mellor), banished from her 15-year-old daughter’s party, fretful that it will get out of hand. as it inevitably does.
Leigh depicts a Britain heading towards the acquisitive Thatcherite era of material greed. Already the status-symbol fibre-optic lamps, drinks cabinet and brown sofas are in place in Geoff Gilder’s design.
Faye Weerasinghe’s Angela, left, and Katy Dean’s Beverly, standing, attend to Janine Mellor’s Sue after one too many top-ups
Tensions rise, tempers flare, the polite veneer gradually erodes under the influence as Dean’s monstrous Beverly has her sport at the hands of her guests and mocked husband amid the surfeit of gin top-ups and chain-smoked “little cigarettes”, with her recourse to Donna Summer, Demis Roussos and Elvis records failing to break the awkwardness.
For all her restless noise and surface swagger, the tactless and tasteless Beverly is lonely behind the perma-cigarette haze, frustrated by the absence of bedroom action, empty too, for all her superficial possessions and on-trend kitchen gadgets. Full of aspiration yet desperation.
Simpson’s Laurence is sullen and sunken in Beverly’s loud, crushing shadow, stewing at his shallow wife’s dismissal of his tentative, self-improving interest in art.
New to your reviewer, wide-eyed Weerasinghe is outstanding as the effusive, chatterbox nurse Angela, talking ever looser as the gin kicks in, then dancing as out of time as a stopped clock.
Paul Hawkyard’s taciturn Tony on the turn
Hawkyard, meanwhile, maximises minimum words as the humourless Tony, whose imposing demeanour goes from monosyllabic indifference to not-funny wound-up menace to sudden snapping point.
Mellor’s Sue is Leigh’s quiet voice of excruciating middle-class discomfort, stuck in the middle yet desperate to be elsewhere, having to put up with Beverly’s insensitive inquisition about her marriage breakdown and Angela’s well-meant over-fussing.
Very 1977 and yet full of English characteristics that have not changed, and probably never will, Leigh’s writing is as sharp as a punk safety pin, his contempt unconfined for values so anathema to him, his humour merciless and deeply wounding.
Romer squeezes Leigh’s sour lemon to the max, knowing just how far to go for the juiciest bitter comedy when Beverly keeps going too far. One hell of a party, one hell of a play, one hell of a knockout production.
Abiola Owokoniran’s Algernon Moncrieff makes his play for Phoebe Campbell’s Cecily in John Worthing’s garden
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest, ETT, Leeds Playhouse and Rose Theatre, at Leeds Playhouse until Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or leedsplayhouse.org.uk
CROSS-DRESSING comedy duo Hinge & Bracket went Wilde with The Importance Of Being Earnest in 1977. So did satirical duo Lip Service in 2001, the late Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding setting the Victorian comedy of manners in the 1950s.
In November 2015, Nigel Havers’ Algernon Moncrieff and Sian Phillips’s Lady Bracknell led the veteran Bunbury Company of Players’ “entirely faithful but completely unique” golden-oldies production at the Grand Opera House, York.
Three examples of how Oscar Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people” can bend to myriad interpretations. Now add Denzel Westley-Sanderson “sassy co-production” for ETT (English Touring Theatre), Leeds Playhouse and Rose Theatre, Kingston, where the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award winner “melds Wilde’s wit with chart-toppers, shade and contemporary references”.
He sets Wilde’s satire of dysfunctional families, class, gender and sexuality in Black Victorian high society, casting Daniel Jacob, alias drag queen Vinegar Strokes, as Lady Bracknell and adding to the gender fluidity with Dr Chasuble being played by Anita Reynolds, bonding in a lesbian relationship with Joanne Henry’s Miss Prism.
“The play is a wonderfully silly comedy, so the most important thing is that it brings joy,” states Westley-Sanderson. “But it’s about reclaiming truth, and honouring truth. I hope it opens up the conversation so that people start to think about Black Victorians and their place in our history.
Portrait of Black Victorian society in Denzel Westley-Sanderson’s The Importance Of Being Earnest. Back row, left to right: Daniel Jacob’s Lady Bracknell, Adele James’s Gwendolen, Valentine Hanson’s Merriman and Anita Reynolds’ Dr Chasuble. Front row: Abiola Owokoniran’s Algernon Moncrieff, Joanne Henry’s Miss Prism and Phoebe Campbell’s Cecily
“If seeing Black people who look stunning in Victorian dress, who were rich, who weren’t just on the plantation, prompts some curiosity about Black Victorians, I’ll be very happy.”
That adds up to a serious message behind a fast-moving, fabulously frothy, elegant front, but still everything serves the comedy, just as it did in Lip Service’s version, when the much-missed Maggie Fox had said: “It’s become the tea and cucumber sandwich play with the handbag, and so it’s lost its shock – not least the secret meanings of some of the expressions Wilde wrote for his male friends – but it is a hugely scandalous piece.”
Behind polite society manners, everyone is harbouring a secret in Wilde’s 1895 comic drama. “It’s a play full of scandal, prejudice, lies and deceit; it’s Gentlemen Behaving Badly, and we wanted to bring back that thing of everyone trying to be someone else, but who are they really?” Maggie said, before playing York Theatre Royal 21 years ago.
Two decades on, art meets artifice in Westley-Sanderson’s account, beautifully and wittily designed and costumed by Lily Arnold, both for Algernon’s London abode and John Worthing’s country retreat.
Abiola Owokoniran’s immaculate, foppish Algernon paints with slapdash vigour rather than rivalling Eric Morecambe’s erratic piano playing in a change to the opening scene, one that ties in with the empty frames for portraits, through which Valentine Hanson’s butler Lane leaps or passes items.
In another exquisite adjustment, Lane serves cucumber martinis in crystal glass and bread and butter, rather than cucumber sandwiches.
Daniel Jacob’s thunderous Lady Bracknell
Later, John Worthing’s ward, Cecily (a delightful Phoebe Campbell), will be seen struggling with a lawn mower.
Later still, at the Worthing pile, a row of stern portraits in oil will be picked out one by one in light to re-emphasise the Black Victorian lineage. A new photograph of all the company closes the play, Jacob’s statuesque Lady Bracknell towering over everyone.
Westley-Sanderson talked of reclaiming truth and honouring truth, while bringing out the “silly comedy’s” joy, and he pulls off that dual mission. The set-piece spat over tea and cake between Campbell’s Cecily and Adele James’s affronted Gwendolen is choreographed comedy to the max; Hanson’s butler Merriman provides old-school physical comedy distraction as he struggles back and forth under the weight of luggage.
Justice Ritchie’s upright Worthing and Owokoniran’s maddening but lovable Moncrieff clash and make up with the timing of a double act. Henry and Reynolds bring new electricity to the demure, around-the-houses Prism and Chasuble.
Stephen Fry, Geoffrey Rush, Gyles Brandreth and David Suchet have all played men-in-drag Lady Bracknells. Jacob’s Aunt Augusta is different: a drag act dropping the drag act, although his “stand-and-deliver” Lady B never quite throws off Vinegar Strokes’ airs, all arched eyebrows and arch putdowns, playing to the crowd rather more than to the household gathered around on tenterhooks. More caricature than truthful character, but still carrying a knockout punch.
“My art looks like an explosion,” says York artist Tom Wilson
PROMPTED by his friends’ urges “to do something” with all that artwork filling his small York bungalow, Tom Wilson is to hold his first exhibition in ten years in aid of the people of Ukraine.
From 10.30am to 6.30pm tomorrow (15/9/2022) and Friday, myriad riots of colour by artist, playwright, theatre director and tutor Tom will be on display and for sale at St Bede’s, 21 Blossom Street, York, with free admission.
“I wish to thank the very kind and supportive staff at St Bede’s Pastoral Centre and the Bar Convent Living Heritage Centre,” says Tom. “They’ve been so accommodating. Just wonderful!
“There’ll be food and drinks available for all the visitors we’re expecting, and for those who’ll be disappointed they can’t make the exhibition, there’s still an opportunity to browse the work and purchase paintings online at https://north.art/directory/artist/tom-wilson/.”
In the frame: York artist Tom Wilson with two of his artworks
Originally from Salford, polymath Tom has lived in York for more than 16 years and started painting in 1996 after the loss of a good friend to cancer while living in Roehampton.
“I found it a comforting therapy and a kind of a healing activity,” says Tom, who has held three previous shows, the last one taking place in 2012 at the Friends’ Meeting House, in Friargate, to raise funds for the Haiti Earthquake Foundation.
“Starting to paint helped me to process losing this friend, who died very quickly, at only 50 years old. I did this painting, The Night Form, which was like an apparition, or typically what a kid would think of. Adults can think of things that are scary, but children’s minds go to places where there’s no structure, it’s just endless, so their experience is darker.
“But once you articulate something, get it on to a page or a canvas, it becomes less terrifying. More manageable. That’s how I felt.”
Embroiled, by Tom Wilson
Linking his painting past to his present, The Night Form will be on show at St Bede’s among the newer works.
“After living in London for more than 20 years, York gives me incredible peace of mind,” he says. Peace of mind that leads to Tom’s artistic expression both as an artist and playwright, as witnessed in August last year when council chaos and Covid clashed in his timely anarchic farce The Local Authority, presented by the Naloxone Theatre Ensemble at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre.
He is delighted to be mounting his first exhibition in a decade. “At least if I sell one or two paintings, I’ll be able to find my way in and out of the kitchen without risking life and limb,” says Tom, who is disabled and lives alone with his cat, Pendle. “I’m hoping to sell enough to make a difference by sending proceeds to support the people of Ukraine.
“It’ll definitely help with clearing out my bungalow. I got a new shed but filled that up within a day; I was going to try to use it as studio but that never came off! So I just use whatever space I’ve got, the kitchen mainly, but it’s not ideal. Unless you’re moving work on, there’s no point doing new work as it just clutters the place up.”
The poster for Tom Wilson’s anarchic farce, The Local Authority, premiered at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, in August 2021
His dynamic abstract artwork is influenced by Kandinsky, Max Earnst, Otto Dix, Outsider art, German Expressionism and Rayonism (Russian Expressionism). “Rayonism was like a punk movement, breaking away, to try to paint ‘rays of light’, and I took my ideas from their freedom from convention.
“However, it’s also important to find your own voice and your own style,” he says, after being excited and motivated by seeing multiple visceral and dramatic pieces of art.
“I tend to use lots or orange and green in my work, and I think it’s all about the volume, not as in ‘amount’, but as in ‘turning up the amp’, like Jimi Hendrix did with his guitar, so the volume goes up.”
To achieve that Hendrix hum in his art, Tom favours painting on black boards, applying orange, Irish green and turquoise, mystical colours that “conjure up a feeling of vibrations”.
“There’s a lot of happy accidents with my stuff,” says Tom Wilson
“I’ve been using Sennelier crayons, oil crayons rather than wax ones, that are very soft, almost like lipstick, and not easy to work with. Picasso first commissioned them; they were made just for him, when he was struggling to find exactly what he wanted.
“A studio said to him, ‘you tell us what you want, we’ll make it for you’, and if it was good enough for Pablo Picasso, then it’ll do for me!”
Describing his artistic style, Tom says: “There’s a lot of happy accidents with my stuff. Some of it is manipulated experiments, like putting paint on one canvas, then putting another canvas on top of that and then pulling them apart like layers of skin.
“Sometimes it’s about ‘unlearning’ something that you loved or remembered in a painting and just going for it.”
“It’s all about the volume, not as in ‘amount’, but as in ‘turning up the amp’, like Jimi Hendrix did with his guitar,” says Tom Wilson of his painting style
In a moment of sudden candour, Tom says: “I can’t paint! My art looks like an explosion. I’ll be honest, I think I’m a chancer, not a natural-born painter. I can’t even draw. I’ll draw a dog and it looks like a dinosaur…an angry dog!
“But it’s important to have that freedom. Art isn’t a competition; it’s the way you articulate something. That’s the essence of creativity.
“Painting is like a voyage of discovery for me. Maybe other artists start with a painting they loved, maybe a seascape, but I’ll start without a plan. I’ll start with a mood, then make a shape, maybe a curve, and start following it, like jazz musicians improvising. It’s about the vibe, just as it is with jazz.
“Again, rather like music, I can do ten paintings to arrive at the one I want, so those ten paintings are like a rehearsal to get to where I need to be. You don’t show people the departure point; you show them the arrival.”
“I start with a mood, then make a shape, maybe a curve, and start following it, like jazz musicians improvising,” says Tom Wilson
He makes a further comparison with the jazz world. “Ask Ornette Coleman or Thelonious Monk what they’re going to play, and they’d say, ‘I don’t know’ and then start playing. It’s the same with one of my paintings,” says Tom.
“On top of that, I think it’s about expressing an anarchic humour, like John Lennon, Salvador Dali, Picasso.
“What happens is you go into an inner-child mentality, almost like writing with the opposite hand, and you find an area to explore and then the adult takes over to say, ‘right, we’ll take it this final point’.”
Tom loves applying boldness in his work; he can go four days without painting then suddenly have a flurry of six in two days, rampant with all those orange and green outbursts, and even applying Tippex, but not to correct faults! “No, it’s because it’s always ultra-white, almost like false teeth, whereas white paint can go grey,” he clarifies.
A profusion of orange, green and turquoise bursts out of a Tom Wilson artwork
The challenge with each painting is “knowing when to stop, that cut-off point”. “That’s one of those lessons I’m still learning. Don’t keep going back to it. Don’t be the ‘Tinker Man’, like Claudio Ranieri!” says Tom.
As for size, in the absence of a studio, in the confines of his kitchen, he tends to use A3 or A4. “But I’d love to be like Rothko, lobbing paint around a big studio!”
In the meantime, Tom’s rather more compact jazzy paintings at St Bede’s will be priced from £60 to £400. “But for those who can’t afford some of the artwork, there’s an alternative way to support the plight of the people in the Ukraine, by buying one of the T-shirts on sale,” he says. “They feature images of my art and very fine they look too.”
The banner for Tom Wilson’s exhibition at St Bede’s, York
Robin Simpson in rehearsal for the HT REP season at Harrogate Theatre
THREE plays, three weeks, one cast, the HT REP season opens tonight with two familiar faces reunited at Harrogate Theatre.
After performing together in the Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre company at the Eye Of York and playing a riotous Ugly Sister double act in Cinderella at York Theatre Royal last winter, Paul Hawkyard and Robin Simpson are part of the REP company for the quickfire season ahead, staged in tandem with Phil&Ben Productions.
Directed by Marcus Romer, first up from tonight to Saturday is Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, wherein Bev and Lawrence invite the neighbours round. Bev is ready to dance the night away; Lawrence is ready to drink it away. What could possibly go wrong?
The season’s co-producer, Ben Roddy, directs the September 20 to 24 run of Patrick Hamilton’s disturbing psychological drama Gaslight, the one where strange things keep happening to Bella. Things go missing, only to turn up again, and Bella thinks she is hearing noises, but is she? Before long she feels she may be losing her mind.
To conclude the REP back-to-back trio, Amie Burns-Walker directs John Godber’s comedy Men Of The World from September 27 to October 1. Recounting memorable coach trips from their past, three coach drivers take a trip down memory lane, looking at the small and often overlooked moments of magic in our lives
In Autumn 2018, Harrogate Theatre first teamed up with Phil&Ben Productions, alias Phil Stewart and Ben Roddy, to stage a rep revival season in 2018, Phil already being a regular in the Harrogate pantomime.
Paul Hawkyard in the rehearsal room for the HT REP season
HT Rep returned in 2019 with On The Piste, Deathtrap and The 39 Steps and should have staged Abigail’s Party, Gaslighting and Men Of The World in 2020, only for the pandemic to rule that out.
Traditionally, a repertory theatre company is a group of actors that performs a small number of plays for only a few weeks at a time.
Harrogate Theatre, for example, had operated as a touring venue up to the early 1930s when the growing popularity of cinema and radio saw a decline in theatre audiences. As an answer to the problem, William Peacock, the theatre’s managing director at the time, formed a repertory company, The White Rose Players, one of the first weekly rep companies in the country, and the theatre became a producing venue.
The White Rose Players performed around 45 plays a year and continued through to the mid-1950s. Now, for the 2022 HT REP company, Simpson (all three plays) and Hawkyard (two plays) will be joined by Janine Mellor (three plays); Katie Dean (two plays), Faye Weerasinghe (two plays) and Ian Kirkby (the Inspector in Gaslight).
Tickets for the 7.30pm evening performances and 2.30pm Saturday matinees are on sale on 01423 502116 and harrogatetheatre.co.uk. Book all three to receive a 20 per cent discount.
Effie Ansah and James Arden, left, in rehearsal for Pilot Theatre’s Noughts & Crosses. Picture: Robert Day
YORK company Pilot Theatre’s revival of Noughts & Crosses is even more topical than its award-winning 2019 premiere.
Sabrina Mahfouz’s adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel of first love in a dangerous fictional dystopia, rife with racism, will be on tour from this autumn to spring 2023, opening on home turf at York Theatre Royal from September 16 to 24.
“Yeah, things have changed,” says Pilot artistic director Esther Richardson, whose original production played the Theatre Royal in April 2019. “That makes it really interesting to put it on again now.
“What’s changed is that, obviously the pandemic was a huge moment, but what also happened in 2020, the murder of George Floyd, had a massive impact across the world.
“There we were, teetering out of the first lockdown, with this huge anger about the state of the world; people taking to the streets to have a proper conversation for the first time about racial injustice, which had been swept under the carpet before that.
“Even though it was deeply painful, there are always possibilities of change at these times, and so people who hadn’t had the opportunity to take part in the discussion, or hadn’t been aware of the issue, were suddenly alive to it because of Black Lives Matter.”
In Blackman’s Romeo & Juliet story for our times, Sephy is a Cross and Callum is a Nought. Between Noughts and Crosses come racial and social divides as a segregated society teeters on a volatile knife edge.
When violence breaks out, Sephy and Callum draw closer, but this is a romance that will lead them into terrible danger. Told from the perspectives of two teenagers, Noughts & Crosses explores the powerful themes of love, revolution and what it means to grow up in a divided world where black rules over white.
Pilot’s premiere – launched before the BBC television adaptation – was seen by more than 30,000 people on tour, 40 per cent of them being aged under 20, en route winning the award for excellence in touring at the 2019 UK Theatre Awards.
The 2022-23 revival is expected to draw big numbers again, not least among the young target audience. “The whole topic of racial equality has really been taken up by university institutions and teachers talking about it, especially about decolonising the curriculum,” says Esther.
“So, suddenly there was a wider focus on what Pilot had been focusing on before the pandemic, but this is a conversation that everyone should have been participating in, just as we were by staging Crongton Knights, Noughts & Crosses, and before my time at Pilot, Roy Williams’s Antigone.”
George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has been the tipping point for racial equality to be taken more seriously, not least in the classroom. “Continuing Proficient Development sessions for teachers now sell out to help them address prejudice, racism and every other form of discrimination that young people may encounter at school,” says Esther.
Pilot Theatre artistic director Esther Richardson
“But the downside is that we’re in a time where so-called ‘culture wars’ are prevalent, where it’s prescribed that you must be on one side or the other, and that doesn’t help, stirring up strong feelings and even hatred.
“I’ve just been looking at the statistics for hate crimes in 2020-2021 and regrettably they’ve increased. The Home Office points to the reaction to Black Lives Matter as the most likely reason, leading to a rise in right-wing intolerance.
“That’s why Noughts & Crosses is so important because it’s an educative piece of theatre, a powerful story, a love story too, where young people get caught up forbidden love, and very often people have left the show seeing things through a different lens.
“We have a lot of evidence of how it’s not only been taken on in schools, but also by audiences in general who say how it has helped to change their awareness. That will be our mission again in bringing the play back.”
The Noughts & Crosses cast – bigger by two than last time – will be fronted by Effie Ansah and James Arden in their first leading roles as Sephy and Callum.
“I saw the open call, which was great, because opportunities like this don’t often come around,” says Effie. “So, I submitted a self-tape and contacted my agent to let her know.
“Prior to this, I’d actually submitted a time the first time Pilot did it, but I didn’t hear anything so perhaps I’d missed the deadline.”
This time, she was picked, to her delight. “I feel like I’ve wanted for the longest time to get my head around a black, confrontational female lead, and Sephy is all those things,” says Effie. “She’s young, complex, naïve, going on this incredible journey where she discovers her flaws and the flaws of her society.”
James, who is not represented by an agent at present, was tipped off about the auditions by his housemate. “The only experience I had of Noughts & Crosses was auditioning for the TV series, and I have to say Callum is a completely different beast in the play; much more exciting,” he says.
“Sephy and Callum get to tell the story more themselves, and telling it through soliloquies is an amazing opportunity. The play is epic, Shakespearean.”
Tickets for the York run are on sale on 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk. Pilot Theatre’s Noughts & Crosses will then tour from September 27 to November 26 and January 17 to April 1 2023.
All Swings And Roundabouts, by Adele Karmazyn, from her Pleasure Gardens exhibition at Village Gallery, York
POLITICAL division and soul power, sturdy stilettos and string sextets, doomed comedy and surreal gardens spark Charles Hutchinson’s interest for the week ahead.
Exhibition of the week: Adele Karmazyn, Pleasure Gardens, Village Gallery, Colliergate, York, until October 25
YORK Open Studios regular Adele Karmazyn is exhibiting new works in Pleasure Gardens, demonstrating her love of Victorian antiquities and oddities, weathered surfaces and nature.
Using her digital camera, scanner and Photoshop, Adele creates playful, surprising, surrealist digital photomontages, printing the images on to archival paper before hand-finishing with paint, pastel and gold leaf.
Drawing on idioms, metaphors and musical lyrics for narrative inspiration, she chooses her characters, then brings them back to full colour, intertwining them with creatures big and small, coupled with delicate foliage.
Nostalgia of the week: Giants Of Soul, York Barbican, Saturday (10/9/2022), 7.30pm
HOSTED by Smooth Radio’s Angie Greaves, the three-hour revue Giants Of Soul assembles performers from the late-1970s to the modern day, who have notched 18 British top ten smashes and 47 top 40 entries between them.
Step forward The Lighthouse Family’s Tunde Baiyewu; Grammy winner Deniece Williams; Rose Royce’s Gwen Dickey, on her farewell tour; Alexander O’Neal; Jaki Graham; Janet Kay and American Candace Woodson, who will be accompanied by an all-star ten-piece band of British and American musicians. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Chris de Burgh: Playing songs and telling stories at York Barbican
Rescheduled show of the week: An Evening With Chris de Burgh, His Songs, Stories & Hits, York Barbican, Thursday, 7.30pm
BRITISH-IRISH singer-songwriter Chris de Burgh heads to York for a night of songs, stories and hits, showcasing his latest album, 2021’s The Legend Of Robin Hood, on guitar and piano.
Born Christopher John Davison in Venado Tuerto, Argentina, de Burgh will be delivering “an exciting evening full of your favourite songs”, accompanied by a large lighting production. Here come The Lady In Red, Don’t Pay The Ferryman and A Spaceman Came Travelling. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Howell of anguish: Comedian Daniel Howell peers through the gloom in search of hope in We’re All Doomed
Doom’s day booking of the week: Daniel Howell, We’re All Doomed, York Barbican, Friday, 7.30pm
WOKINGHAM comedian, YouTuber, presenter and author Daniel Howell’s new solo show, We’re All Doomed, finds him as stressed and depressingly dressed as ever but nevertheless resisting temptation to give into apocalyptic gloom.
Armed with sarcasm, satire and a desire to skewer everything deemed wrong with society, Howell vows to find hope for humanity or at least to “laugh like it’s the end of the world (because it probably is)”. Prepare for savage self-deprecation, soul-searching and over-sharing of his deepest fears and desires. Box office: yorkbarbican.co.uk.
Tim Lowe: Programming York Chamber Music Festival at the NCEM
Festival of the week: York Chamber Music Festival 2022, National Centre for Early Music, York, September 16 to 18
ARTISTIC director and cellist Tim Lowe turns his festival focus on the string sextet repertoire in the company of Tristan Gurney and Jonathan Stone, violins, Sarah-Jane Bradley and Scott Dickenson, violas, and Marie Bitlloch, cello, plus Scottish pianist Alasdair Beatson.
“We’ll play four of the very greatest sextets: Boccherini, the first string sextet, as far as we know; Brahms’s heart-warming/glowing Sextet in B flat; Richard Strauss’s sextet embedded at the beginning of his last opera, Capriccio, and Tchaikovsky’s joyous recollection of his favourite place in his Souvenir de Florence.” Full programme and ticket details at ycmf.co.uk.
Angels in Kinky Boots: York Stage’s musical is a shoe-in for joyous songs and staggering stilettos at the Grand Opera House, York
Musical of the week: York Stage in Kinky Boots, Grand Opera House, York, September 16 to 24
FACTORY owner Charlie is struggling to save his family business. Lola is a fabulous entertainer with a wildly exciting idea. Both live in the shadows of their fathers in seemingly different, yet surprisingly similar ways.
Learning to embrace their differences, they create sturdy stilettos unlike any the world has ever seen.
Up step York Stage director Nik Briggs and choreographer A J Powell to oversee a joyous show with 16 songs by Cyndi Lauper and a book by Tony-winning Harvey Fierstein. Box office: 0844 871 7615 or atgtickets.com/York.
Effie Ansah (Sephy) and James Arden (Callum), left, in rehearsal for Pilot Theatre’s Noughts & Crossesat York Theatre Royal and on tour. Picture: Robert Day
Political drama of the week: Pilot Theatre in Noughts & Crosses, York Theatre Royal, September 16 to 24
YORK company Pilot Theatre revive their award-winning production of Sabrina Mahfouz’s adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel of first love in a volatile fictional dystopia, first toured in 2019.
Sephy is a Cross and Callum is a Nought in a segregated society of racial and social divides. As violence breaks out, the teenagers draw closer, but their forbidden romance will lead them into terrible danger in this exploration of love, revolution and what it means to grow up in a divided world. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
Phil Ellis: Headlining The Comedy Network’s first triple bill at Selby Town Hall
Comedy launch of the week: The Comedy Network at Selby Town Hall, September 18, 7.30pm
PITCHING up at Selby Town Hall for the first time this autumn, The Comedy Network is launching a series of showcases of national circuit acts, each night featuring a master of ceremonies, support act and headliner.
First up will be Edinburgh Comedy Award panel prize winner Phil Ellis; Mancunian actor and comedian Katie Mulgrew, daughter of Irish humorist Jimmy Cricket, and compere Travis Jay, a writer for Spitting Image. Box office: 01757 708449 or selbytownhall.co.uk or on the door from 7pm.
York National Book Fair in the Knavesmire Suite
Looking for a book?York National Book Fair, Knavesmire Suite, York Racecourse, today, 10am to 5pm
“BRITAIN’S largest antiquarian book fair” is booked in for its second day in the Knavesmire Suite with all manner of book sellers, book binders and restorers, books, maps and prints to discover.
In its 48th year, this Provincial Booksellers’ Fairs Association event brings together an array of rare and antiquarian booksellers offering material for sale to collectors, scholars, dealers, readers and the curious. Items are priced from only a few pounds up to many thousands. Complimentary tickets can be booked at yorkbookfair.com; alternatively, pay £2 on the door.
An ensemble scene in the Duluth boarding house in Girl From The North Country. Picture: Johan Persson
THERE has been a previous Bob Dylan musical: a dance one set “somewhere between awake and asleep” in a dreamy circus of clowns and contortionists, spun around a coming-of-age conflict by director-choreographer Twyla Tharp.
Would it surprise you to learn that the Broadway run of The Times They Are A-Changin’ ground to a halt after only 35 previews and 28 performances in November 2006?
Girl From The North Country just sounds more apt: written and directed by Conor McPherson, elegiac Dublin playwright of The Weir, who had been sent a box gift of 60 career-spanning Dylan CDs by Bob’s management with free rein to select songs to wrap his story around.
That story is set in Duluth, Minnesota, birthplace of one Robert Zimmerman, as The Depression weighed as heavy as stones on saint Margaret Clitherow, in the America of November 1934, a place of racism, broken businesses and abused women.
Eli James’s Reverend Marlowe works his salesman’s pitch on Ross Carswell’s Elias Burke in Girl From The North Country. Picture: Johan Persson
Nothing is glitzy about Rae Smith’s scenic staging: a boarding house of worn furniture and worn, lost souls, complemented by panoramic backdrops in black and white.
And yes, McPherson’s cast of 19 actor-musicians do dance, but, like the revolving door of stories blown in on the wind, the pace tends to be slow in Simon Hale’s orchestrations and arrangements, unhurried, some in waltz time, peppered with sporadic bursts of freewheelin’ joy and abandon.
Narrated by the local doctor, weaving his way in and out of the plot as much as the 20 Dylan songs, McPherson’s episodic drama of troubles past, present and in-bound, has the widowed, weary Dr Walker (Chris McHallem) guiding the to and fro of drifters and dreamers, scammers and schemers “trying to figure out their lives” as they pass through the welcome-all boarding house.
If one Dylan chorus were to sum up McPherson’s Eugene O’Neill-inspired story of dysfunctional families, love lost, love never found, and the dangers in strangers, it would be: “How does it feel, ah how does it feel/To be on your own, with no direction home/Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
Frances McNamee’s Elizabeth Laine and James Staddon’s Mr Burke. Picture: Johan Persson
There may be the hubhub of life, the constant interaction, and yet the abiding state of being is one of loneliness. On your own, even when surrounded. As sung by Elizabeth, the demented wife of exhausted, despairing, play-away proprietor Nick Laine (a tinderbox Colin Connor), Like A Rolling Stone is indeed “Dylan as you’ve never heard him sung before”, all the more so for the voice emanating from Frances McNamee, winner of the UK Theatre Award for her performance as Meg Dawson in Sting’s musical The Last Ship, as seen at York Theatre Royal in June 2018.
McNamee is even more remarkable here, drawing more tears at the finale in the hopeful Forever Young, and taking the acting honours too. Elizabeth, much more than the narrator, is the key voice of truth here, lacking a filter to tone down her thoughts. For all her madness, she is as unguarded, outspoken and eccentrically funny as a Shakespearean Fool. Her silences and juddering, impromptu dancing speak volumes too.
Significantly, to emphasise the loneliness of each character “standing at a turning point in their lives, searching for a future, hiding from the past and facing unspoken truths about the present”, each song is delivered from the front, directly to the audience, not to fellow characters.
This is particularly affecting in I Want To You, a duet where, side by side, the Laines’ writer son Gene (Gregor Milne in his outstanding professional debut) and Katherine Draper (Eve Norris) say what they could never express to each other or bring to fruition, blighted by circumstance.
Writer-director Conor McPherson in rehearsal with James Staddon and Frances McNamee for Girl From The North Country. Picture: Johan Persson
McPherson talked of his “little stories” of failing men and the women they fail being like parables in the Bible, simple, human, rather than political statements, made meaningful by Dylan’s songs. They are, it should be said, made even more meaningful by multiple excellent performances that both devastate and uplift you.
Joshua C Jackson’s Joe Scott, a wrongly imprisoned black boxer seeking a new life, and Justina Kehinde’s Marianne, the Laines’ adopted black daughter, are particularly impactful. Nichola MacEvilly understudied most ably for Keisha Amponsa Banson as Mrs Neilsen on press night, and Teddy Kempner (Mr Perry), Ross Carswell (Elias Burke) and James Staddon’s insufferable Mr Burke add much to the torrid tales.
Far removed from the glut of jukebox musicals or the glittering campery of plenty more, Girl From The North Country is more in keeping with the emotional punch, the highs and the lows, the sadness and the joy of Billy Elliot, Once or Spring Awakening.
Oh, and who can resist the sight of Rebecca Thornhill’s heavy-drinking Mrs Burke playing drums in a red dress or Carswell’s nod to Dylan in playing the mouth organ?! Not forgetting a round of applause for the band, The Howlin’ Winds, especially Ruth Elder’s violin and mandolin.
Girl From The North Country runs at York Theatre Royal until tomorrow (10/9/2022). Performances: 7.30pm tonight; 2.30pm, 7.30pm tomorrow. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.Further Yorkshire dates: Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, November 29 to December 3; Sheffield Lyceum Theatre, January 17 to 21.
Justina Kehinde’s Marianne Laine singing out front in Girl From The North Country. Picture: Johan Persson
Seat of power: Claire Morley, as Macbeth, in Northumberland Theatre Company’s modern-day Macbeth. Picture: Jim Donnelly
YORK actor Claire Morley is starring in Chris Connaughton’s all-female, three-hander version of Macbeth for Northumberland Theatre Company.
Directed by associate director Alice Byrne, she is joined in Shakespeare’s “very gruesome” tragedy by Gillian Hambleton and Melanie Dagg on an autumn tour to theatres, community venues, village halls and schools that visits Stillington Village Hall, near York, tonight (8/9/2022) and Pocklington Arts Centre on September 29.
This streamlined, fast-paced, extremely physical re-boot of Macbeth with original music will be told largely from the witches’ perspective, exploring ideas of manipulation through the media and other external forces. Expect grim, gory grisliness to the Mac max in two action-packed 40-minute halves.
Claire Morley and Gillian Hambleton in a scene from Northumberland Theatre Company’s Macbeth. Picture: Jim Donnelly
Here CharlesHutchPress puts Claire Morley on the damned spot, demanding quick answers, like Macbeth confronting the “secret, black, and midnight hags”.
How did you become involved with Northumberland Theatre Company, Claire?
“I saw they were holding auditions earlier this year and went along as I liked the sound of the company and its mission to take shows to rural places who might not have regular access to the theatre. Then, about a month ago, I moved up to Northumberland for rehearsals.
What does an all-female cast bring to what is often seen as a toxic, machismo play, where even Lady Macbeth says “unsex me here”?
“To be honest, it’s not something that has massively concerned us in rehearsals as we’ve been exploring the characters and their relationships first and foremost. There are some lines about what it is to be a man, which I imagine might ping out more to the audience and make them see the text in new ways.”
Cut out to be king: Claire Morley, Melanie Dagg and Gillian Hambleton in Macbeth. Picture: Jim Donnelly
How are the roles divided between the three witches?
“Chris Connaughton has adapted the script so that the witches bookend the play; this gives us room to play with the witches in the sense that they are manipulating and telling the story.
“So, in the first scene you will see us choose who gets to be Duncan and Macbeth, for example. As there are only three actors, we do all play multiple roles, which has been really fun.”
What are the benefits of staging Macbeth as a three-hander?
“Well, practically, it’s much easier to tour with only three actors in the van! But I’ve also found that it means we have had to really streamline the script and think about what serves the story and what is superfluous.
“I think this makes the production pacy and easy to follow and will be great when we take it to schools for those students studying it for GCSE.”
“As there are only three actors, we do all play multiple roles, which has been really fun,” says Claire Morley, left. Picture: Jim Donnelly
What is the set design and costume design for NTC’s Macbeth?
“As NTC is a rural touring company, we take everything with us in the van, so, when we get to a venue, we build our stage and lighting rig and set up costumes and props.
“Where we can, such as in Stillington, we’re performing in traverse, which means that the audience sit either side of the stage. I think this gives the show an immediacy as the audience will really feel part of the action, and privy to our thoughts.
“When we’re at Pocklington, for example, we’ll be performing on their stage, so we have to adapt to the venues we’re in!
“The sound and lighting design really add to the atmosphere and help us change scenes and moods without elaborate set changes.”
Claire Morley, centre, as Henry V at Agincourt in York Shakespeare Project’s all-female Henry V in 2015. Picture: Michael J Oakes
Does NTC’s Macbeth have a particular period setting?
“We’ve given the play a modern feel. You’ll see how the witches receive some of their prophecies on mobile phones!”
How does this production compare with your previous all-female Shakespeare experiences in York in Maggie Smales’s Henry V, in 2015, and Madeleine O’Reilly’s Coriolanus in 2018.
“I had an absolutely amazing time working with York Shakespeare Project on Henry V and Coriolanus and I hope that all theatre companies continue to implement diverse casting.
“What differs this time is more the circumstances. I’ve never been on tour before and that is the biggest difference! It’s hard work travelling and doing the get-ins and get-outs but I’m in fantastic company and I’m having a great time.”
Something wicked this way comes: Northumberland Theatre Company in Macbeth, Stillington Village Hall, near York, tonight (8/9/2022); Pocklington Arts Centre, September 29, both 7.30pm. Box office: Stillington, 01347 811 544 or on the door; Pocklington, 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
The tour poster for Northumberland Theatre Company’s Macbeth, playing Stillington and Pocklington
Goole by name, ghoul by nature: Liam Brennan’s stern Inspector Goole in An Inspector Calls. Picture: Tristram Kenton, 2019
STEPHEN Daldry’s award-garlanded reimagining of J B Priestley’s haunting family drama An Inspector Calls will return to its York roots next year.
Premiered at York Theatre Royal in 1989, this time it will play the Grand Opera House for the first time from February 7 to 11 2023 on its 30th Anniversary UK and Ireland Tour: so called because the London premiere was staged in 1992 at the National Theatre.
PW Productions are mounting the 2022-23 tour that will see Liam Brennnan playing Inspector Goole, just as he did on the last visit to York when performing to sold-out audiences at the Theatre Royal in September 2018.
Writer-director Daldry’s ground-breaking production has accumulated 19 major awards, including four Tony Awards and three Olivier Awards, and played to more than five million theatregoers worldwide, en route to becoming the National Theatre’s most internationally lauded show.
Written at the end of the Second World War and set before the First, Bradford playwright Priestley’s thriller opens with the mysterious Inspector Goole calling unexpectedly on the prosperous Birling family home. Whereupon their peaceful family dinner party is shattered by his investigations into the suicide of a young, discarded, pregnant factory girl.
A scene of devastation: Brian MacNeil’s over-sized doll’s house design for An Inspector Calls, on tour at York Theatre Royal in 2018
Inside, the year is 1912; outside it is 1945 as urchins play in the rain-swept, thundering wartime streets in the year when Priestley wrote his play. A pillar-box telephone and steam radio denote the latter era, as does the Bogart raincoat of Brennan’s sternly Scottish Inspector Goole.
Under Goole’s forensic, assiduous, tongue-loosening style of questioning, the impact mirrors a wartime bombing raid as the ground buckles beneath them.
Priestley’s socialist uprising of a play dramatises the dangers of casual capitalism’s cruelty, complacency and hypocrisy. Over its 105 unbroken minutes, Daldry’s German expressionist interpretation builds a political layer, one whose resonance renews with each era.
In 1989, his wish was to send Margaret Thatcher’s Tory philosophies to the grave, to damn the pursuit of individual gain; in 2009, when playing Leeds Grand Theatre, parliamentary expense claims and duck ponds were in the headlines.
In 2018, Inspector Goole’s final speech, with its wish for collective responsibility and someone, anyone, willing to say sorry, rubbed against an age of austerity, intolerance, division and worsening working conditions.
Roll on 2022-23, a 12th year of Tory rule, as inflation rises and strikers rise up in an over-hot world but one where people can’t afford to heat themselves through the winter while oil and gas shareholders can afford to burn fivers by the barrowload.
Liam Brennan, left, and Jeffrey Harmer are all smiles as they rehearse for the latest tour of An Inspector Calls, heading for the Grand Opera House, next February
Dorset-born British theatre and film director Daldry will be at the directorial helm once more. Over the years, he has received Academy Award nominations for his films The Reader, The Hours, Billy Elliot and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, while his West End theatre work includes David Hare’s Skylight at the Wyndham’s Theatre and Peter Morgan’s The Audience at the Apollo Theatre.
His multi award-winning production of Billy Elliot The Musical ran for 11 years at the Victoria Palace, London, before embarking on a national tour. Latterly, he has directed several episodes of the Netflix hit series The Crown, taking on the producer’s role too.
Joining him in the production team will be Oscar-winning composer Stephen Warbeck (Shakespeare In Love), lighting designer Rick Fisher and designer Ian MacNeil, whose audacious original set is still extraordinary, still breath-taking: an over-sized doll’s house set on stilts to raise its smug, partying Edwardian occupants for moral examination by Priestley, the inspector and the audience alike.
Alongside Brennan’s Inspector Goole will be Christine Kavanagh as haughty, social-climbing Sybil Birling; Jeffrey Harmer as bumptious former Lord Mayor Arthur Birling; Evlyne Oyedokun as daughter Sheila Birling; Simon Cotton as her arch fiancé, Gerald Croft; George Rowlands as Sheila’s unhappy, inadequate, lush brother, Eric Birling, and Frances Campbell as parlour maid Edna, complemented by understudies Philip Stewart, Beth Tuckey, Maceo Cortezz and Rue Blenkinsop.
Tickets for An Inspector Calls at Grand Opera House, York, cost £13 upwards on 0844 871 7615 or atgtickets.com/York.
Evlyne Oyedoken in rehearsal with Jeffery Harmer, left, and Simon Cotton for the 2022-23 tour of An Inspector Calls
Here, George Rowlands (who will play Eric Birling) and Evlyne Oyedokun (Sheila Birling) escape Inspector Goole’s forensic scrutiny to answer questions of a different kind ahead of the 2023 tour of An Inspector Calls.
An Inspector Calls is on the school curriculum, sure to attract GCSE pupils and their parents alike to next year’s tour. Did you study it at school? If so, did you enjoy it? Does your appreciation of the play differ as an adult?
George: “I did read it at school, although I can’t really remember much of it. But I did always like it. I always think at school, when you sit down and analyse every single word, it can make you go a bit crazy, and I always thought it ruined books and plays. But now that I’m an adult, or more importantly now that I’m an actor, I definitely have more of an appreciation for it.”
Evlyne: “I actually didn’t study it at school; I studied To Kill A Mockingbird. I’d heard about An Inspector Calls but I didn’t really know what it was, or really anything about it. It wasn’t until I got this audition that I actually read the play for the first time, and I still didn’t quite understand it. It took me a while to realise how many layers this play actually has.”
“It took me a while to realise how many layers this play actually has,” says Evlyne Oyedokun
What makes J B Priestley’s play so timeless and Stephen Daldry’s production so engaging?
Evlyne: “Well, the fact that is has three timelines helps. It’s set across three timelines – you’ve got 1912, which is where the play is set; then you’ve got the future, which is the Blitz, 1945, and then you’ve also got the current now, 2022.
“It’s amazing. You’re flicking through the past, present and the now constantly, and it’s so reflective on humanity, so it makes it so relevant, and people can really see themselves.”
George: At the end of the day, at its centre it’s a play about somebody in distress, and that doesn’t get old, does it? I think at different points in time, when we’ve put it on over the last 30 years, it’s been relevant. And this time around I think it’s more relevant than ever because of what’s going on in terms of the strike action and housing crisis.”
Give three characteristics of the character you will be playing?
George: “Eric is well educated because he’s been sent to public school. He enjoys a drink, probably a little bit too much. He really wants to be respected by his dad. Unfortunately, the combination results in some pretty catastrophic things.”
Evlyne: “Well, Sheila’s absolutely besotted with Gerald. She is very self-absorbed and in her own world, as she’s been brought up that way. She absolutely adores clothes.”
“Being an actor beats doing any other boring job,” says George Rowlands
What made you want to be an actor?
Evlyne: “Oh gosh! With me, I actually didn’t ever want to be an actor, it happened by accident. From a young age I was struggling with people and I never really spoke – I was pretty much mute to people I didn’t really know.
“My mum advised me to go and see a youth company at the weekends, so I did that, and I didn’t realise how natural it was to act as it is to live in the real world. I was a lot freer.
“That’s how I realised it’s the only thing I can do. Drama school taught me how to speak and acting taught me how to be more of a human than I ever was.”
George: “I think it beats doing any other boring job. I did find out quite early on in Year 6: for the end-of-school plays we did The Wizard Of Oz and I completely rewrote the script because I thought it was rubbish, and obviously made my parts the best.
“I like storytelling and I like the creative and artistic aspect of it. With this production, it has enabled that part of acting, and it’s been a really good creative process.”
Evlyne Oyedokun’s Sheila Birling and Simon Cotton’s Gerald Croft in the rehearsal room for An Inspector Calls. Picture: Mark Douet
When on tour, are there any essentials to have in your dressing room or top tips for making yourself feel at home in each city?
Evlyne: “I’m really bad at this stuff! A lot of people tend to make their dressing rooms cosy with nice blankets and things. I just bring everything that I have in my bag and that’s pretty much it.
“Some people put up fairy lights and flowers, but for me I’m very simple. With autism, as long as I’ve got really comfy clothes, a phone charger and headphones to cancel out sound, I’m all good.”
George: “I’m sharing a room with Simon [Cotton] who’s playing Gerald. I don’t know…I think a bottle of water goes a long way. A bottle of water and some Vaseline is not a terrible idea – for the lips, obviously! I get chapped lips.”
What is the most challenging part of being a performer?
Evlyne: “For me, it’s not being able to see your work or the story you’re creating because you’re so involved and living in the moment of it. You don’t really see the end result. I feel that the end result is mainly the response from the audience; if they got the story then we’ve done our job.”
George: “With other jobs, you can put a direct amount of work in, you can work more, you can do this and this, and your results will be better because of it. Like if you’re studying for an exam, the more you revise, the better the result.
George Rowlands’ Eric Birling and Christine Kavanagh’s Mrs Birling in rehearsal. Picture: Mark Douet
“But with acting it doesn’t work like that because being good is so subjective – there’s no grade. I think that’s quite hard. Putting lots of work in and not knowing really how it will go.”
Evlyne: “One of the sayings at RADA was, ‘plan it, know it and forget it’. It’s the hardest thing to do, but it’s the most rewarding thing to do.”
If you could swap roles for a performance, would you?
Evlyne: “If I had to be someone out of all the characters, it would definitely be the inspector, because I’m obsessed with crime documentaries and serial killers, everything to do with murder, unsolved murder, unsolved mysteries, death row, all of that! I’ve pretty much seen everything and I re-watch it to go to sleep.”
George: “If I could pick any character, I’d probably pick Edna [the parlour maid]. I would love to play her. If you haven’t seen this production, there’s a special thing that Edna is part of – a little bit of magic. She’s amazing.
“My second choice would be Mrs Birling. I really like Mrs Birling; she’s got such sass and doesn’t have the insecurities that Eric is stuck with.”
Jason Battersby: Actor, dancer, singer and now York Theatre Royal pantomime star
THE actor, singer and dancer who will play the title role in All New Adventures Of Peter Pan at York Theatre Royal comes with “flight experience”, as this winter’s pantomime producer somewhat mysteriously puts it.
Jason Battersby will be taking one giant leap in his pantomime debut, but he is no stranger to the character of Peter, having appeared as the Lead Shadow last Christmas in Wendy And Peter at Leeds Playhouse, where he flew through the air as he shadowed the ever-boyish Peter.
Precisely what flights of imagination Jason will experience in the Paul Hendy-scripted Theatre Royal pantomime have yet to be revealed but definitely he will take to the air again.
Flying lessons for the Playhouse show will come in handy this winter too, although wondering if the pantomime will be working with single-line or double-line flying. Whichever system is used in York , the key to flying is the harness he must wear.
Jason Battersby, back right, playing the Lead Shadow in Wendy And Peter at Leeds Playhouse last winter
“It can be restricting,” he says. “When you rehearse you have all these ideas of what you want to do but then you put the harness on and realise you can’t do them. It can be painful too if you don’t quite put it on the right way.”
Before last winter’s appearance, Jason had neither read J M Barrie’s book nor watched the Disney film. He researched Peter and his creator Barrie for the Leeds show, in particular exploring the parallels between the character and the Scottish writer’s own life.
The Shadows were used at Leeds to represent the many facets of Peter’s complex personality: cocky, childish, curious, naïve, as Jason described the boy who never grew up. Now he is excited to be playing this fly-by-night in York.
“Pantomime is perfect for telling Peter’s story because he never stops playing,” he says. “It’s going to be wonderful to bring that to family audiences and have fun with it.”
As with Peter, there are many sides to Jason: actor, dancer, singer, songwriter and music producer, all by the age of 22. Such is the variety of his work so far that he has chalked up childhood roles in Macbeth, The Nutcracker and Waiting For Godot with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, plus numerous productions for Youth Music Theatre UK and National Youth Music Theatre, most notably performing Whistle Down The Wind in the presence of Prince Edward.
Jason Battersby in rehearsal for Wendy And Peter at Leeds Playhouse
This summer has been spent starring in the musical Crazy For You at Chichester Festival Theatre. While York Theatre Royal will mark his pantomime debut, he did appear in Santa Claus The Musical, a show with pantomime elements, when he was seven, having started ballet classes some years before.
Two years later, he was training with the Royal Ballet School and when he turned 11 he faced a difficult choice. “You have to decide at quite an early age if you want to be a ballet dancer and continue with that training,” he says. “I thought ‘yes, it’s something I enjoy’ but I’d never really wanted to focus on one specific aspect of performance.”
Ballet was duly left behind in favour of acting and musical theatre, as well as pursuing his interest in making his own music. “At school, I had a bunch of friends who did music, and I was one of the boys in my school who could sing. Then I found I appreciated watching them write music and dove into that myself,” Jason says.
“I’ve always found writing your own songs very therapeutic. I feel as if I write them for myself and if other people listen that’s fine. Music for me is quite grounding. Communication for me has always been a little bit difficult and there’s something about writing lyrics I really like. Pop songs get right down to the root of what you say. I really enjoy being producing music where I am the creative force behind it, with no outside influence.”
Shadow play: Jason Battersby, left, with fellow cast members in the Leeds Playhouse rehearsal room for Wendy And Peter
When it comes to ambitions, Jason recalls as a young performer often being asked that same question: “What’s your dream role?”. He had a “really stupid” answer he used to fall back on: “It’s anything I get paid for,” he would say.
Now he takes the question more seriously. “In this industry, it’s great to have ambitions and dreams but it’s far more important to be realistic and know that as actors we’re not constantly working,” he says.
Come November, he will be joined in the panto rehearsals by creative director Juliet Forster’s already confirmed cast members for the third collaboration between York Theatre Royal and Evolution Productions: CBeebies’ Mandie Moate in her first pantomime as feisty fairy Tinkerbell; social media sensation Jonny Weldon as Starkey; Faye Campbell as Elizabeth Darling and fellow returnees Paul Hawkyard as Captain Hook and Robin Simpson as Mrs Darling after last winter’s Ugly Sisters double act, Mardy and Manky.
All New Adventure Of Peter Pan will run at York Theatre Royal from December 2 to January 2. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
The poster for All New Adventures Of Peter Pan at York Theatre Royal
