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600 years of music in only 90 minutes? Ready, get set, go Green Matthews at Pocklington Arts Centre on Friday

Chris Green and Sophie Matthews: Speeding through 600 years of tunes, songs and humour

ADVENTUROUS musicians Chris Green and Sophie Matthews pack 600 years of musical history into 90 minutes at Pocklington Arts Centre on Friday night.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, ending up in the 20th century and incorporating everything in between, Green Matthews’ fun and fast-moving show undertakes a whistle-stop tour of Western musical history.

Featuring long-forgotten songs, tunes and jokes too, Chris and Sophie paint a vibrant and vivid picture of our musical DNA, mixing the familiar and the obscure, the raucous and the reflective and the courtly and the commonplace.

“A Brief History Of Music combines the vigour of the medieval period, the musical intricacy of the Renaissance, the grandeur of the Baroque and the pomp and bombast of Victoriana,” say Green Matthews.

“Add to that the wit of Blackadder and 1066 And All That and the stage is set for a veritable musical feast, complete with a bewildering array of instruments such as cittern, rauschpfeife and virginal – and that’s just the first 100 years!”

CharlesHutchPress asks Sophie Matthews to give a brief guide to A Brief History Of Music.

How did you choose what to put in and leave out of A Brief History Of Music?

“We try to take the audience on a musical journey, taking a snapshot of each different period using both music and instruments to paint a picture as we go.”

What drew you to doing such a marathon task of a show?

“We love music from all different periods of history, and it was tough deciding on one to do a whole show on, so we didn’t – we did them all.”

Green Matthews: “Taking a snapshot of each different period using both music and instruments to paint a picture as we go”

Why do you finish in the 20th century when we’re nearly a quarter of a century into the 21st?

“We feel that when you move into the 20th century, music becomes more about nostalgia than history, and also music in the 20th century moves so very quickly in a way that it doesn’t with earlier periods. Perhaps that’s a whole other show to be explored.”

How did you research long-forgotten songs?

“There are some really interesting resources both digitised online and in libraries around the country. However, a lot of the research starts by hearing someone else playing something that inspires us. You can then go on to find other things.”

How do Blackadder and 1066 And All That play a part in the show?

“We love the humour that they both bring to history. Our presentation is very light hearted and we love to make people laugh. We never take ourselves too seriously.”

What instrumentation do you use in the performance? What, for example, are the ‘rauschpfeife’ and ‘virginal’?

“I am a woodwind player and Chris plays fretted strings and keys, which work well together. The rauschpfeife is a woodwind instrument from the 16th century with a reed like an oboe inside a cap to blow through. It’s really loud and it died out because there’s no control over the volume.

“The virginal is a kind of small harpsichord. The difference between the harpsichord and the piano is that a piano has hammers inside that strike the strings and you can do that hard or soft, making it louder or quieter, and the harpsichord has quills inside that pluck the strings. But here, again, there’s no control over the volume, so it died out.

“We also have more familiar instruments such as recorders and lutes and three different kinds of bagpipe! And we both sing.”

Green Matthews: Return to the NCEM in the pipeline

How, when, where and why did you start performing with Chris?

“At a medieval banquet in Nottingham. One of us was Maid Marion, one was a court minstrel (we’ll leave it to you to work out which was which!), and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Do you have a favourite musical age?

“The 18th century. It’s a really interesting time where folk music and art music come together. The tunes are lively and vibrant and the songs are varied and interesting.”

Any early news on whether you will be returning to the National Centre for Early Music in York for another Christmas performance in 2024 after A Christmas Carol In Concert in 2023?

“Yes! We’ll be back there with our expanded Christmas line-up, Gaudete!, on December 11, when we’ll be joined by Richard Heacock on violin and Emily Baines on early woodwind to play new arrangements of winter songs and folk carols.”

Do you have album release plans for this year?

“There’ll be a live Gaudete! album out in time for the December tour.”

Green Matthews: A Brief History Of Music, Pocklington Arts Centre, February 23, 8pm. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.

Green Matthews’ poster for A Brief History Of Music
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REVIEW: Charles Hutchinson’s verdict on Guy Fawkes, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday ***

The Gunpowder Plotters: Jamie Zubarai’s Kit Wright, left, David Reed’s Guy Fawkes, Robin Simpson’s Robert Catesby, Greg Haiste’s Thomas Percy and Andrew Pollard’s Thomas Winter. Picture: Sam Taylor

Guy Fawkes, Rumours and Rebels season, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday, 7.30pm nightly plus 2pm, Thursday and 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

FOR all the teeth-breaking toffee apples, pumpkin soup, fizzing fireworks and sausages – two forms of bangers, if you will – we take Guy Fawkes very seriously in York, more so than that scoundrel Dick Turpin. Born in this city, Christened at St Michael le Belfrey, no effigy burns on Bonfire Night at his old school, St Peter’s (likewise in Scotton, where Fawkes lived in his teenage years).

Yet just as he was mocked for his affected moniker Guido Fawkes, he is ridiculed for the ultimate incompetence of the Gunpowder Plot that ended with the treasonous traitor’s execution in January 1606, along with the hanging, drawing and quartering of his fellow conspirators. Cue comedic stereotyping of Popish knave Fawkes down the centuries.

Like the bungling incompetents in Guy Ritchie’s 1998 crime thriller Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, Fawkes’s story lends itself to black comedy, but like Vinnie Jones’s notorious line, “it’s been personal” for York-born writer and actor David Reed.

He first wrote a radio drama of Guy Fawkes for The Penny Dreadfuls, his troupe of purveyors of historical comedy spoofs, aired in 2009 on BBC Radio 4. Director Gemma Fairlie thought it should transfer to the stage, and rather later than first planned, it now forms Reed’s first stage play, billed as “an explosive new comedy”, one that takes the form of interlocking sketches more than a play in full flow, on Carla Goodman’s revolve set (to signify revolution).

Reed and Fairlie decided it should seek to weave together the two faces of theatre – comedy and tragedy – by combining high farce in the manner of Blackadder, Upstart Crow and Monty Python with the pathos of the futility-of-war finale to Blackadder Goes Forth, forever entrenched in the memory, like the poems of Owen and Sassoon. Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder? Seriously serious. One barrel of home brew among them. Comedy! The play seeks a more even balance, but ultimately to the detriment of both, never becoming a tragicomedy.

Lace in brief, witty bursts of metatheatre, referencing Shakespeare’s King Lear, the audience’s changing standards of theatre attire and a nod to Covid naysayers, dismissing the Plague as “a hoax”. Apply Horrible Histories’ flair for debunking history. Toss in a sword fight with The Three Musketeers panache. Crumbs, so much to play with, to squeeze in, so many elements to rub against each other, like sticks to start a fire. More of which later.

A pre-show chat with York actress Florence Poskitt, of musical comedy duo Fladam, and her father revealed he had once written a comedic musical version of Guy Fawkes. So many possibilities, and yes, this Guy Fawkes has music, of the incidental variety in the Jacobean style, by composer and sound designer Eamonn O’Dwyer.

Comic aside: Cassie Vallance’s Martha Percy in her farthingale that requires her to enter sideways. Picture: Sam Taylor

The way it plays out, Reed’s Fawkes treacherous trigger man is the grave one, driven by the detremination to return Roman Catholicism to the throne by blowing up Westminster, haunted by seeing the pregnant Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow compressed to death in York, struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder from years of fighting in Spain, and now hell-bent on death and destruction back home.

Whereas Rowan Atkinson’s Edmund Blackadder is a cynic, full of putdowns, Reed’s Fawkes is already too damaged to be a clown with a frown. Darkness to the light around him, let others do the historical mockery; he is a man on a mission, and Reed wants us to better understand his motives, to tell his side of the story, to highlight his tragic flaws, rather than merely decry him as a pantomime villain, just as the Richard III Society seeks to paint a fuller picture of another derided son of York, Richard III, to counter the slings and arrows of Shakespeare’s play.

Fawkes is the northern late arriviste to a bunch of southern-softie amateurs: revolutionary fops who gather regularly at their local to discuss and plot James I’s overthrow, keener on the snacks and the gossip than getting the job done under stressed-out, coffee bean-chewing ringleader Robert Catesby (a delightfully nuanced, dyspeptic comedic turn from Robin Simpson, continuing his run of superb autumn performances after a trio of roles in Harrogate Theatre’s H2 Rep season).

Broader comedy is to be mined in Greg Haiste’s blustering, preening Thomas Percy, aping Rik Mayall’s Lord Flashheart with chutzpah; Northern Broadsides favourite Andrew Pollard’s more melancholic, thwarted idealistThomas Winter (of discontent), donning a bear’s costume as a forlorn distraction, and Jamie Zubairi’s camp Kit Wright, still in thrall to Fawkes from York schooldays.

Guy Fawkes is two clashing plays within one, matched by the theatricality of Goodman’s costumes, with the gap being bridged by Cassie Vallance’s Martha Percy, Fawkes’s rekindled love from yore, who begins as a riff on Blackadder’s Queenie, but grows to match Fawkes’s political zeal. Their showdown is Reed’s best scene, one that shows the alternative direction that this play could have taken from the start, potentially far more combustible, more dramatic too, for being more troubled, like Fawkes himself.

Ironically, both in Reed’s script and Fairlie’s direction, the comedy is the play’s stronger suit, but as the plot thickens, the gunpowder never catches fire. Or rather, when it briefly does, symbolically it is stamped out.

Maybe the truth is Guy Fawkes could never be a tragic hero, such were his intentions, but when Reed’s Fawkes says at the close “God, I’m weird”, no-one laughs. In an out-and-out comedy, you would, but the line belongs in a wholly darker drama.

Review by Charles Hutchinson