Tag: Clare Halliday

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REVIEW: York Actors Collective, Tiger Country, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York ****

Medical matters: Mick Liversidge, left, and Chris Pomfrett in discussion in York Actors Collective’s Tiger Country

TIGER Country is drama on the cutting edge, taking its title from the term used by a surgeon when conducting an operation near a major blood vessel.

Hospital dramas are two a penny on TV, whether made in the UK or imported from the USA and beyond. They are, however, a lesser spotted breed of theatre: York Actors Collective director Angie Millard could recall Peter Nicholls’s 1969 black comedy The National Health, but nothing since.

It would be too much of a stretch to include the 1997 musical version of Jekyll & Hyde or Dr Frank N Furter in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Director Angie Millard and stage manager Em Peattie

What’s more, Nina Raine’s focus falls on the doctors and nurses, rather than the patients, whose stories tend to be front and centre in the TV shows.

Premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in 2011, and last performed at the same London theatre in 2014, Tiger Country receives its belated York premiere this week, reaffirming Millard’s knack for reactivating works that may otherwise have escaped our attention,  in her desire to bring more political, thought-provoking theatre to the York stage.

After Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, Alexander Zeldin’s slice of agitprop Beyond Caring and Millard’s adaptation of J M Barrie’s rediscovered 1920 supernatural drama Mary Rose, now Millard matches Raine’s meticulous research in her theatrical representation of operations and procedures.

Sri Lanka-born actor and nursing care assistant Madusha Fernando in Tiger Country

She calls them “mimes”, but they have the feel of authenticity, albeit making allowance for being in a theatre, not a hospital theatre.

Millard has drilled into her cast the need for speed at all times, on entries and exits, to match the hectic day in a life of a hospital for her “most challenging production” to date.

Drawing on her extensive research observing daily practice in hospitals in London, West Sussex, Staffordshire and Oxford,  and her interviews with candid doctors, Raine favours quick scenes, in keeping with TV and film editing.

Glove story: Victoria Delaney, left, and Clare Halliday in Tiger Country

In turn, Millard uses hospital signs, and sometimes video footage, to denote a change from  A & E to the Doctors’ Mess to the Consultant’s Room with the minimum fuss on an open-plan set where beds, a desk, mess chairs, a wheelchair and a CPR dummy are whizzed on and off.

All human life (and death) is here amid the badinage and the bandages. As Millard observes in her programme note, “what shines through is the humanity needed to be an NHS worker in today’s world”, one she she updated to post-Covid times. Humanity is shown in both a good and a bad light, not least in the machinations of the NHS, where medics and surgeons argue over procedure and protocol, to the detriment of patients.

Victoria Delaney’s consultant, uncompromising and demanding in a male-dominated  environment, stands out. Friction sparks in the mess, especially between Laurence O’Reilly’s cynical medic and Xandra Logan’s restless trainee doctor, whereas Chris Pomfrett’s unflappable consultant always suggests a good night’s sleep is the solution to any problem.

The impatience of being earnest: Xandra Logan’s trainee doctor, anxious to learn on the job in Tiger Country

Lucinda Rennison, Mick Liversidge and Clare Halliday multi-role play with impressive diversity, and Madusha Fernando brings humour when most needed.

Teamwork is everything in the play and performance alike, but with individual will having a huge impact too, both positive and negative. When Delaney’s consultant has to inform Liversidge’s cancer patient that he is dying, a chill stillness takes over Theatre@41. Theatre at its most powerful, when even medicine is powerless to change life’s path.

York Actors Collective in Tiger Country, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, until May 31. 7.30pm tonight, Thursday and Friday; 2.30pm and 6pm, Saturday. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

York artist Karen Winship’s painting from the Tiger Country programme cover, painted for her series of Covid portraits in 2020

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REVIEW: York Actors Collective in J M Barrie’s Mary Rose, York Theatre Royal Studio ****

Xandra Logan’s Mary Rose and Laurence O’Reilly’s Simon, her husband, in the island picnic scene in York Actors Collective’s Mary Rose. Picture: Clive Millard

ALFRED Hitchcock wanted to turn “the strangeness” of J M Barrie’s supernatural drama Mary Rose into a film with Tippi Hedren in the title role (but Universal Studios thwarted him).

The 1920 drama featured in the Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington’s list of Forgotten Plays. “I still think the play is due for rediscovery,” he wrote in August 2020, having seen the Hebridean ghost story 48 years earlier starring Mia Farrow in Manchester.

Now York Actors Collective grant him his wish in their third production, adapted and directed by artistic director Angie Millard for their York Theatre Royal Studio debut.

Angie’s mother called it one of her favourite plays, drawn to the “beautiful, charming story” at a long-gone performance in Sheffield. In turn, Angie wanted to explore why.

Here is the result, wherein she has, in her words, “severely adapted” Barrie’s text. “I have adapted the piece to suit contemporary audiences and offer a little more explanation than JM Barrie provided,” she explains in her programme note.

CharlesHutchPress is delighted to report that every decision was right, starting with the haunted manor house being relocated to Yorkshire, from Sussex, to bring it uncomfortably close to home for York audiences.

Millard has changed the structure too, from three acts with two intervals to three scenes pre-interval, then two more after the break, tightening the running time to increase the dramatic tension of a ghost story timed to coincide with Halloween. [On that theme, the lighting designer could not have a more apt name than Peter Howl!]

Spanning 41 years, taking in two World Wars and major changes in British society, Millard’s dramatisation opens in the Yorkshire house in 1950, where the furniture is covered in dust sheets and Beryl Nairn’s Mrs Ottery looks as white as one of those sheets as she leads Chris Pomfrett’s grizzled former soldier, Harry, into the drawing room.

He is the “lost boy” of the piece, needing to settle matters in his troubled mind from his past before returning to Australia (the ever-detailed Pomfrett giving him Aussie inflexions to acknowledge his time spent there), but Mrs Ottery is reluctant to let him into the next room. Is she in there, he asks. The aforementioned ghost.

The ashen Mrs Ottery departs, Harry falls asleep in the corner chair, whereupon the past comes alive, opening in 1909 as pipe-smoking Tony Froud and Victoria Delaney’s ever-so Edwardian Mr and Mrs Morland are discussing daughter Mary Rose (Xandra Logan), who has taken to her regular hiding place, the apple tree.

We shall learn that Mary Rose is young for her age, always wanting to play games. Her behaviour would now be called autistic, suggested Millard in her CharlesHutchPress interview, and when Simon (Laurence O’Reilly), a man in his 40s, seeks her hand in marriage at 18, the Morlands feel the need to reveal her past. Namely her childhood disappearance on an Hebridean island, returning out of thin air a month later with no recollection or explanation.

She will vanish again on a visit with her husband, only to turn up at the Morland house years later. Everyone else has aged, but she looks the same. (Whereas Barrie’s Peter Pan refuses to grow up, his Mary Rose simply doesn’t.)  

Your reviewer last saw Xandra Logan (or ‘Alexandra’ as she was credited in the cast list) as un uppity fledgling actress, Lily, in York Shakespeare Project’s Summer Sonnets in August, and here she comes on leaps and bounds as Mary Rose, outwardly young in physical appearance and manner but internally damaged by the loss of her young son in Barrie’s intense study of mother-love (drawing on his own experience as a neglected child).

 Millard has cast well throughout, from Nairn’s haunted figure in black to Joy Warner’s ever-concerned, philosophical Scottish gillie, Cameron; O’Reilly’s stern, earnest Simon to Clare Halliday’s Molly, the Morland’s supportive friend.

As much through what is not said as is said, Froud and Delaney capture the frictions and schisms of a couple struggling with parenting skills behind their Edwardian airs.

Pomfrett, delightfully irascible as a shamelessly corrupt police chief in Black Treacle Theatre’s Accidental Death Of An Anarchist only a fortnight ago, is a darker soul here, restless and questing as he bookends Barrie’s disturbed time play.

His closing scene of reconciliation with Logan’s Mary Rose is beautifully judged in tone by both players, bringing to a close this classy production of Barrie’s intriguing, strange, beguiling tale of liminal mystery, mother-and-son bonds, the burdens of loss and laying ghosts to rest.

What a shame that Hitchcock’s film plans hit a hitch but thankfully York Actors Collective have brought this Mary Rose back to the surface, revealing anew its  hidden treasures.

York Actors Collective in Mary Rose, York Theatre Royal Studio, today at 2pm and 7.45pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

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York Actors Collective delves into zero-hour contracts in Alexander Zeldin’s modern-day tragedy Beyond Caring at Theatre@41

Clare Halliday, left, Chris Pomfrett, Victoria Delaney and Mick Liversidge in rehearsal for York Actors Collective’s Beyond Caring

YORK Actors Collective is following up March 2023’s debut production of Joe Orton’s risqué Sixties’ farce Entertaining Mr Sloane with Beyond Caring, a topical exposé of the social damage inflicted by zero hours contracts. 

Running at Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, from February 6 to 9, this “modern-day tragedy” was devised by Alexander Zeldin and the original Yard Theatre cast in East London in 2014, later transferring to the National Theatre.

Its story of agency cleaners at a meat-packing factory is being directed in York by former teacher Angie Millard, working with a cast of Victoria Delaney, Clare Halliday, Mick Liversidge, Chris Pomfrett and Neil Vincent.

Over 90 unbroken minutes, Beyond Caring follows two women, Becky and Grace, and one man, Sam (replacing Sarah from past productions in a directorial decision), as they confront the reality of minimum wage, zero-hour contract employment, never sure of how many hours they have to work, when they will be paid and whether their ‘job’ will continue.

“This play is remarkable in its structure and power,” says Angie. “It totally represents 2024 where many workers are on the breadline, trapped in employment with no guarantee of further work and no way to improve their position. 

“What drew me to the play, however, is the message it conveys about people surviving and keeping a sense of humour. I loved the intensity of the piece with its silences, its disappointments and its determination to determination to get pleasure out of the smallest things. It gave me hope.”

Beyond Caring was brought to Angie’s attention by fellow company co-founder Chris Pomfrett, who had played the self-aggrandising Ed in Entertaining Mr Sloane. “Following that debut show, our brief was to find something that would appeal to audiences as entertaining but also have an edge to it,” he says.

“I had a look at a lot of play synopses around particular subject matters, came across this one, bought a copy and was completely blown away by it. When it was first done in London, then at the National, it was described as ‘comically devastating’ and that’s absolutely right.”

Beyond Caring forms part of a series of Alexander Zeldin plays entitled The Inequality Triptych, addressing the theme of the impact of austerity. “This one deals with a group of people meeting for the first time to work the night shift cleaning a meat factory on zero-hours contracts, all employed through a temp agency with different arrangements for pay for each of them,” says Chris, who plays scarred, taciturn worker Phil.

“So they’re all strangers, and as happens when strangers meet, there are silences and awkward pauses, like in Harold Pinter’s plays, but they’re all full of meaning.

“Gradually, you see glimpses of their lives and their insecurities, and how that affects them and those around them, mostly adversely.”

Clare Halliday’s factory cleaner Becky and Neil Vincent’s manager Ian in a scene from the darkly humorous Beyond Caring

Chris continues: “I think it’s important for us to do plays that deal with these issues, as they’re still occurring. One of the things that has struck me, after Mr Bates vs. The Post Office is how a TV drama can have a massive impact on the Government’s actions, and that’s because people are confronted with real characters, and there’s an emotional response that you don’t get with news bulletins.

“The same goes for a play like this, and the great thing about all the characters is that in some ways you can see yourself in them.”

In Chris’s case, he can draw on his own experiences working in the community for the NHS (National Health Service) as part of the combined therapy multi-disciplinary team. “You can see the effects of the care system being shot to pieces,” he says.

Clare Halliday will be making her York Actors Collective debut after more than a decade of involvement in York community productions, such as the 2012 York Mystery Plays, when she first met Angie.

“I learned that Angie had created York Actors Collective and went to see Entertaining Mr Sloane, then heard they were doing Beyond Caring and auditioned for the role of Becky [one of the cleaners] after reading about the play and watching extracts from when it was at the National,” she says.

“Becky is a very resilient character, very tough on the exterior. I see her as a born survivor with ways and means of surviving, using her sexuality to get what she wants, in the only way she knows how. We assume she’s had very little education, and we know she’s a single mum, whose daughter is not living with her – she’s probably in care – but she’s trying to see her.

“I can relate to that, as I’ve had work insecurity and been on benefits, so at some points in my life I’ve walked similar steps.”

Clare now runs the Clare’s Kitchen mobile cookery school in York, being involved with schools since 2015.  “Before that, I was living in France, training as a chef, and I wanted to work with children, having been involved in cooking in the kitchen with my mum since the age of two or three,” she says.

“I work with Year One to Six children at Knavesmire Primary, Ralph Butterfield Primary, Haxby, Rufforth, Dringhouses and Lord Deramore’s. I’ve just taken on another lady to help as I’m so busy.”

York Actors Collective in Beyond Caring, Theatre@41, Monkgte, York, February 6 to 9, 7.30pm; February 10, 2.30pm and 5.30pm. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.

Copyright of The Press, York