Tim Firth: Book writer and lyricist for Calendar Girls The Musical
TIM Firth has returned to the Stephen Joseph Theatre, where he first cut his playwriting teeth under Alan Ayckbourn’s artistic directorship.
He is opening the Scarborough theatre’s summer season in tandem with composer and friend-since-Frodsham- schooldays Gary Barlow in a ground-breaking revival of their 2015 musical, Calendar Girls The Musical (first called The Girls in its Leeds Grand Theatre premiere).
For the first time, under SJT artistic director Paul Robinson’s directorial hand, the show is being staged in the round and as an actor-musician production.
In a joint statement, Firth and Barlow enthused: “As writers, one of the most exciting things that can happen is when someone comes up with a totally new way of staging something you’ve created.
“When Paul described his vision for a new production of Calendar Girls The Musical, it was instantly clear he was talking about something we’d never seen before, never imagined and to be honest never thought possible.”
Explaining the rationale behind this co-production with Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake, the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich and the Octagon Theatre Bolton, Robinson said: “Our new in-the-round staging brings the audience into the heart of the Rylstone Women’s Institute, making this true story of friendship and determination feel more personal and immediate.
“This intimate production will create a unique, shared experience, reminiscent of gathering around a community hall or a close friend’s living room, allowing for a deeper connection to the characters and creating a collective, communal atmosphere that fully immerses everyone in the moving story of these ‘ordinary women’ doing something quite extraordinary.”
Quick refresher course: this show is the one about a group of Yorkshire women, from the Rylstone Women’s Institute, who create a nude calendar to raise money for charity after the death of a husband to a blood cancer.
News spreads fast in their community and none of them expects the emotional and personal repercussions, but gradually the making of the calendar brings each woman unexpectedly into bloom.
Recalling the roots of writing play, film and musical versions of Calendar Girls and now bringing the musical to the SJT, Tim says: “Scarborough I always feel to be my home as a writer. Not only was it the first place to give me a main stage but the plays of Alan Ayckbourn embody so much of what I love about theatre.
Sarah Groarke, left, Karen Holmes and Angela Caesar in a scene from the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s actor-musician production of Calendar Girls The Musical. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
“It was en route to a meeting with him about a new play that I called into a Wharfedale fete and bought a calendar from a WI stall. Now years later, it seems wonderfully fitting to be starting a production of a musical about that story at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.”
Paul Robinson first put the question to Firth two years ago: “Do you think this is possible: doing Calendar Girls in a theatre of this size and design? Up till then, I’d only seen professional productions in bigger venues, and yet the sheer number of amateur productions made me think we could do it in smaller theatres,” says Tim.
“I wanted this show and these songs to be robust enough to stand up to any setting, whether on a small stage with a piano, in a church hall or a theatre – but in the modern world, it’s become difficult to mount a musical on your own, so we needed three other theatre to align with the SJT to do this new production.”
Analysing the popularity of Calendar Girls, Tim says. “It’s a ‘group comedy’, and what people seem to respond to right from the start is the bonding of these women, the unity and the camaraderie, and there’s warmth in the comedy.
“We’re tribal and Calendar Girls is a tribal piece of theatre. It’s a poke in the belly of society that makes people rally round. What makes Calendar Girls work and the whole endeavour work in reality was that it was more about friendship than it was ever about nudity.
“What makes the photo-shoot work in Calendar Girls is what the other ‘girls’ are doing around the ‘girl’ being photographed to make the picture happen because the nudity is like a fan dance.”
For the SJT production, two factors came into play: how many of the cast would be playing instruments on stage at any one time in a scene and how could the teenage children’s roles be re-introduced (after being jettisoned for a touring version). “It was a shame to have lost them as they’re like a palate cleanser and a real change in tone,” says Tim, delighted by their return.
“The rest of it, I have done absolutely nothing with, because I grew up writing for this theatre, and I know that you don’t write for the Round; you let the Round tell the story. I know you can do anything in that set-up, and it’s up to the director and the designer to make it work in the Round, where it’s like a circus.
“That’s why everyone is excited by it as it brings a proximity, immediacy and vibrancy to the story. It’s also why all my plays are prop heavy rather than scenery heavy, as you can’t have any scenery more than two feet high, so it’s all about the floor and putting people together to work on that stage.
“Sometimes, the more ‘production’ you give a musical, the more you move away from its heart. You can do it just with a basket full of props.”
Calendar Girls The Musicalruns at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until July 25. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.
Christina Meehan’s Annie and Karen Holmes’s Chris in Calendar Girls The Musical. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
IT began as The Girls at Leeds Grand Theatre in 2015, when plenty of the original Calendar Girls attended the press night in trademark black dresses, pinned with sunflowers.
Roll forward 11 years, when some things have changed, some have not. Four members of the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute, who put the fun into fund-raising by making the risqué alternative calendar in 1999, were in attendance on Wednesday. Black dresses, tick. Sunflowers, tick.
Present too was book writer and lyricist Tim Firth, who cut his playwriting teeth under Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s guiding eye at the SJT – and who should be in the audience too but Sir Alan.
Penned by Firth and composer and Take That mainstay Gary Barlow, friends since childhood days in Frodsham, Cheshire, the show has long since changed its name to Calendar Girls The Musical, while celebrity casts have come and gone and a touring version once jettisoned the teenage tearaways, but thankfully they are very much restored here, as is the original down-to-earth, everyday, no-nonsense ‘Yorkshireness’ of it all
SJT artistic director Paul Robinson’s production breaks new ground as the first staging with actor-musicians and the first in a theatre-in-the-round setting, presenting new challenges in how to choreograph the strip comedy of the calendar shoot and how to evoke the other rising hills, the Yorkshire Dales.
Original designer Robert Jones first crafted a theatrical Yorkshire landscape from towering green-fronted furniture that turned into doors and prop cupboards; then later favoured a God’s Own Country verdant backdrop and a regularly opened gate.
In May, York Musical Theatre Company did likewise when using All In One Productions’ photographic scenery of the rolling dales at their most green and pleasant pastured, with a dry stone wall and gate in front. You could almost smell Yorkshire.
SJT costume and designer Helen Coyston eschews walls and landscape imagery, preferring an open-plan design with parquet village-hall flooring, on which props and furniture are moved with haste, whether chairs, benches, or the uncomfortable Skipton General waiting-room sofa that prompts Knapely Women’s Institute wild card Chris (Karen Holmes) to suggest making the outré calendar.
It makes all the more room for the actor-musicians that fill the stage with movement and energy, right from the start in the crowd-pleasing opening number Yorkshire, with company members playing all manner of instruments, from guitar and whistle to the most evocative Yorkshire sound of all: gleaming brass instruments of every shape and sound under the musical directorship of associate director Alex Weatherhill.
An interval chat with sound designer and musical supervisor Simon Slater revealed how carefully those brass players needed to be placed, in order not to overpower the overall sound mix, often being posted in the “voms” (the passageways for stage entries and exits).
The actor-musicianship, especially in the natural amphitheatre of the theatre-in-the-round, brought a heightened intimacy to the already highly emotional or highly humorous songs, where Firth’s sense of pathos and observational comedy dovetail so pleasingly with Barlow’s ear for melody.
The balance of dialogue and song is just right too. After a surfeit of song-heavy shows with workmanlike tunes on reviewing duty in 2026, here is a show where emotion is filtered through conversation, confession and comic collisions, as well as through songs that capture the essence of a situation or character.
None has more potency in Scarborough than Scarborough itself, the beautiful ballad where Christina Meehan’s Annie contemplates life without John ‘Clarkey’ Clarke (Neil Moors), her rock of a husband, brought down by a blood cancer.
Barlow and Firth give plenty of characters their “big number”, from Alicia McKenzie’s Cora, the organ-playing vicar’s daughter, with her Christmas Carol pastiches in Who Wants A Silent Night?, to Chris’s Act One climax, Sunflower; from Pippa Duffy’s former air hostess Celia’s defiant So I’ve Had A Little Work Done to SJT favourite Annie Kirkman’s vodka-swilling Annie’s My Russian Friend And I, topped by her drunken arrival for her camera-flash moment.
Matt Heslop’s photographer Lawrence is even more timid than past iterations, and all the better for that, while Fenella Norman’s former school teacher, Jessie, Sarah Groarke’s stuffed-shirt new WI chair, Marie, Matt Ian Kelly’s trio of supportive husbands, Rod, Colin and Denis, and Angela Caesar and and Rachel Hammond’s tea-and-coffee double act as the Miss Wilsons all play their part to maximum impact.
In the teen trio, Will Ireland and Charlie Wright are sharing the role of easily distracted head boy-in-waiting Danny; Robyn Chambers and Annie Dunbar do likewise for the rebellious Jenny and Keane Liley and Jack Pickering will split the ever-joshing Tommo over the performances ahead. Firth writes so astutely of teen behaviour and adult influence, the young’uns so full of cheek, brio and quick retorts.
The climactic calendar shoot is choreographed by intimacy director Stephanie Dattani with imagination, originality, flair, bags of humour, plenty of surprise too, finding new ways to refresh this comedic set piece with vitality, wit and heart.
Honorary Yorkshiremen Barlow and Firth, in tandem with Robinson – a director at his best in comedy – have delivered the best version of Calendar Girls yet, not least thanks to the leading performances of Holmes’s Chris and Meehan’s Chris, Yorkshire women of such spirit and resilience.
Calendar Girls The Musical, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until July 25. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com
Cast adrift: Nothing On director Lloyd Dallas (Adam Astill), front, makes a sharp point to Selsdon Mowbray (Christopher Godwin); Garry Lejeune (Alex Phelps); Brooke Ashton (Olivia Woolhouse); Freddie Flowers (Andy Cryer); Belinda Blair (Valeria Antwi); Dotty Otley (Susan Twist) and Tim Allgood (Charlie Ryan) in Noises Off. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
IT was supposed to be Mission Impossible. No-one had ever staged Michael Frayn’s play within a play in the round in 43 years.
“Good luck!” said Frayn when told of director Paul Robinson and designer Kevin Jenkins’ meticulous but surely mad plan.
Well, the joke is now on all the naysayers – and you, dear readers, will be the ones having the last laugh if you head to the SJT.
Commotion in motion: Andy Cryer’s Freddie Fellowes and Susan Twist’s Dotty Otley in Noises Off. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
This, after all, is the Mecca for theatrical comedies, the home of myriad Alan Ayckbourn premieres, and who should be looking on from his familiar box but Sir Alan on Tuesday night (12/8/2025).
Frayn’s farce is so good that frankly it is indestructible, but Robinson and Jenkins’ thoroughly rounded production makes it even more joyous. Chaos conducted with precision and audacity.
The nature of theatre in the round is its 360-degree inclusivity. You can see everything, yet without being able to see everything (given the inevitability of actors having their back to you), and part of the pleasure is seeing the enjoyment of all around you.
Eternally exasperated: Adam Astill’s Lloyd Dallas, director of Nothing On, the farce within the farce in Noises Off. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
On top of that is the proximity of the actors: they and you are in the lion’s den; the amphitheatre on a not-so-Colosseum-sized scale. In this instance, you can see, hear and feel the fear of the play within the play going wrong, the heartbeat of Frayn’s classic farce – and the precursor to all that Mischief-making by The Play That Goes Wrong gang.
In a nutshell, in the round, your awareness of the physicality of acting is heightened and, in turn, your appreciation of the comedic skills of the likes of Ayckbourn stalwart Christopher Godwin, Andy Cryer and SJT debutant Alex Phelps, who has charmed York audiences in the recent past with both his dexterity and the way he makes words dance.
Farce is all about doors – or doors and plates of sardines in the case of Noises Off, as exasperated director Lloyd Dallas (SJT debutant Adam Astill) reminds his hapless company as they prepare for a tour of the fractious and ever increasingly fractured farce Nothing On that will close, it just so happens, in Scarborough.
Christopher Godwin’s old soak, Selsdon Mowbray, in Noises Off. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
The SJT stage has three doorways, all put to maximum use with doors placed in them, and then Jenkins adds the all-important mezzanine level, with its three doors, plus a trapdoor entry and exit in Act Two.
We join the never-still Astill’s Lloyd initially in the rehearsal room for Nothing On, a clunky, maladroit farce with a bizarre obsession with sardines.
This utterly actorly thespian, soon to give his Richard III in Aberystwyth, must somehow pull together Lloyd’s bank of has-beens (Godwin’s drunkard veteran Selsdon Mowbray and Susan Twist’s tour-backing Dotty Otley); touring plodders (Cryer’s over-thinking, physically fragile Freddie Fellowes and Valerie Antwi’s admirably unflappable Belinda Blair), and wannabes (Alex Phelps’s young buck Garry Lejeune and Olivia Woolhouse’s company ingenue Belinda Blair).
Annie Kirkman’s Poppy Norton-Taylor trying to keep Nothing On on track in Noises Off at the SJT. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
Then add the ever-harassed technical team, Charlie Ryan’s dogsbody Tim Allgood and Annie Kirkman’s equally overworked Poppy Norton-Taylor.
All the stage world is here: the luvvies and the loveless, the boozer and the philanderer, the sex, the drudgery and the rock’n’rollicking fallouts of a theatre tour, experienced in rehearsal room, then backstage mid-production run and finally on the tour’s catastrophic, calamitous last night.
While your reviewer would never dissuade anyone from partaking of a tipple in either interval, it is rewarding to watch the set changes conducted with a choreographic flourish as doors are reversed and the set turns inside out in the transition from backstage to stage. Ryan’s Tim and Kirkman’s Poppy stay in character to oversee the changes.
Thwarted by a door: Alex Phelps’s restless Garry Lejeune and Olivia Woolhouse’s Brooke Ashton in Noises Off. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
Robinson’s cast is wonderful, especially Twist’s dotty old-stager Dotty, Godwin’s scene-stealing Selsdon and, above all, Phelps’s Garry, with his stair tumbles and earnest air in never quite saying what he feels the need to express.
Simon Slater’s music is irresistibly perky, matching the desperate desire of Nothing On’s cast to prove the show must go on, no matter what befalls the warring players.
You will love the moment when Astill’s Lloyd, arriving for the final performance, is amazed to discover the staging is in the round: a soupcon of meta-theatre in a tour-de-farce masterpiece.
Noises Off, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until September 6, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com
Alex Phelps, centre, in rehearsal for Noises Off with Valerie Antwi and Charlie Ryan. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
THE first ever in-the-round production of Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off opens at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre on Saturday, fully 43 years since its Lyric Theatre, London premiere.
“I’ve wanted to direct this play for years,” says SJT artistic director Paul Robinson. “The assumption was that doing it this way was impossible. When I told Michael about our plans, his response was an amused ‘good luck’.” The director has since printed off Frayn’s message to hang on a rehearsal room wall.
“Our designer, Kevin Jenkins, and I have spent months meticulously planning and he has come up with an ingenious set, which has really been worth the wait.”
A precursor to Mischief Theatre’s canon of theatrical catastrophes kick-started by The Play That Goes Wrong, Noises Off follows the on and off-stage antics of a touring theatre company stumbling its way through the fictional farce Nothing On.
“One of the greatest British comedies ever written, Noises Off is a hilarious and heartfelt tribute to the world of theatre but also about how futile it is to try to impose our ideas on the world around us, as things will always go wrong,” says Paul. “It’s how you respond to them when they do!”
Alex Phelps in the role of the Ringmaster in Tilted Wig and York Theatre Royal’s production of Around The World In 80 Days in 2023
Among Robinson’s cast that includes Alan Ayckbourn stalwart Christopher Godwin, northern theatre luminary Andy Cryer and Brookside, Coronation Street and Doctor Who alumna Susan Twist will be Alex Phelps, a dapper chap whose adroit, graceful comedic theatre skills will be familiar to York audiences.
After the dandy buffoonery of his Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Joyce Branagh’s Jazz Age take on Twelfth Night for Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre at the Eye of York in Summer 2019, he appeared in the dual roles of Ringmaster and unscrupulous globe-trotting Phileas Fog in Tilted Wig’s touring collaboration with York Theatre Royal in the circus-themed Around The World In 80 Days in February 2023.
Next came the “selfish, hypocritical, vain, manipulative, deceptively charming” Joseph Surface in Tilted Wig’s account of Sheridan’s Georgian comedy of manners The School For Scandal at the Theatre Royal in April 2024.
From Saturday, in Noises Off, he will be playing Garry Lejeune, whose character profile on Wikipedia describes him as: “The play’s leading man, a solid actor who is completely incapable of finishing a sentence unless it is dialogue. Constantly stutters and ends sentences with ‘you know’. Dating Dotty and prone to jealousy.”
“He’s the young one, as his name suggests, which is very telling,” says Alex. “Michael Frayn’s biography for him says Gary has ‘not done much theatre’. He’s one of those actors we might all recognise from theatre companies, who feels the need to speak up for the company without thinking about what he’s going to say .
Alex Phelps’s Joseph Surface in Tilted Wig’s The School For Scandal, on tour at York Theatre Royal in 2024
“He feels things very deeply but through his great inarticulacy he lacks the capacity to express that feeling. He doesn’t know how to make his point…but you will still be able to work it out!”
Alex is delighted to be part of a cast taking on the challenge of staging Noises Off in the round, where actors have to perform to an audience seated all around them. “We’re going for it! We really are. We’ve got a lot of pride in the SJT deciding to do it.
“Given the history of the SJT, and Alan Ayckbourn’s plays here, it’s all about connecting with the audience. For this production, Paul and Kevin have been thinking about it and working on it for ages, going back and forth with Michael Frayn. If we come a cropper in rehearsals, we’ll contact Michael for advice.”
Across three acts, Noises Off charts the shambolic final rehearsals, a disastrous matinee, seen entirely from backstage, and the calamitous final performance.
“It’s a masterpiece,” says Alex. “The beauty of the writing: it’s so well observed; what actors are like; what it’s like in the rehearsal room and backstage at a performance and on a long tour.”
What’s in the box? Alex Phelps and Valerie Antwi in the Stephen Joseph Theatre rehearsal room, working on Noises Off. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
And now, not only must Robinson’s actors present the play within the play, but the set design has to accommodate showing the stage from backstage before staging the disastrous final show.
“The stage has to be back to front but inside out too,” says Alex. “So if you have to think about it, it’s madness to get your head around!”
There will, of course, be a profusion of doors. “Doors and farce are synonymous with each other because the rhythm of the banging of doors is so important to farce,” says Alex. “The more we do it, the more I think it’s like a musical, with the rhythm building to what I hope is laughter, and then it all takes flight.
“Michael Blakemore [director of the 1982 premiere], in his introduction, has said how some of the best performances of Noises Off are the first ones, where the pressures are so high to get it right, but the actors don’t know what will happen, so there’ll be that sense of danger.”
Can’t wait!
Noises Off runs amok at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, from August 9 to September 6, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.
The hen party heading for Menorca: Jo Patmore, left, Alyce Liburd, Annie Kirkman and Alice Imelda in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
A STAG do in Ibiza. A hen do in Menorca. What could go wrong?Everything…in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less) at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.
The stags have made a solemn promise to each other: this is a boys’ weekend. Don’t talk to any girls, don’t even think about any girls, and most importantly, do not contact the hens.
The hens are ready for fun in the sun when the resort calls to say they’ve had to relocate them…to a hotel in Ibiza. Both groups of revellers are stuck on the same Mediterranean island. Cue shoddy disguises, mislaid love letters and theatrical chaos.
Repeating the Hutch Award-winning formula of 2023’s co-production of The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less) with Precot’s Shakespeare North Playhouse, set in the heat of a 1980s’ clash of Yorkshire and Lancashire, Shakespeare’s riotous comedy is brought to life anew in the 1990s with belting musical numbers from the era of boy bands and Girl Power.
The same creative team reunites for Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less): co-writers Nick Lane and Elizabeth Godber (daughter of playwright John Godber), director Paul Robinson and composer and sound designer Simon Slater. In the production team too are designer Jess Curtis, lighting designer Jane Lalljee, musical director Alex Weatherhill and choreographer Stephanie Dattani.
Co-writer Elizabeth Godber says: “I’m so excited to be back working with Nick, the SJT and Shakespeare North on another hilarious Shakespeare adaptation.
Unmasked: Alyce Liburd and Annie Kirkman in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
“Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, and to get the chance to play around with the language, develop the (already great) female characters, and add in plenty of 1990s’ pop classics, has been an absolute joy!
“I can’t wait for audiences to come and see the show. It’s funny, irreverent, and I’m sure Shakespeare would approve – he would have definitely been a Britpop fan!”
SJT artistic director Paul Robinson says: “We had the most enormous fun making The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less) in the spring of 2023, and our audiences did too! We couldn’t resist following it up with another of the Bard’s early comedies, this time set a decade later in the midst of the party era that was the 1990s.
“We’ll again be including some great music from the period, and just wait until you see those 90s fashions again!”
Shakespeare North Playhouse creative director Laura Collier says: “After the success of our 2023 co-production – a show so entertaining that people kept coming back for more – we knew we had to join forces again.
“We’re absolutely thrilled to be working with the Stephen Joseph Theatre again, alongside talented writers Nick Lane and Elizabeth Godber. We all share a deep love for Shakespeare and his timeless tales, and a passion for exploring and presenting fresh, exciting perspectives and reworkings – a perfect foundation for an outrageously fun Love’s Labour’s Lost. We can’t wait to see what lies in store when we’re all transported back to the ’90s.”
Co-writer Elizabeth Godber: “I don’t think of it as a rewriting of Shakespeare; I think we’re twisting it, we’re putting a northern spin on it,” she says
Here co-writers Nick Lane and Elizabeth Godber discuss everything (more or less) about Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less).
How were you first brought together for The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less)?
Nick: “I was asked by Paul [SJT artistic director Paul Robinson, the show’s commissioning director] if I’d be interested in teaming up with a writer to do a modern version of Shakespeare.
“He had this idea about making Shakespeare accessible, demystifying it, making it relevant and funny, and playing around with titles that people know but aren’t necessarily plays that people know.
“Independently of each other, we came up with Liz. I wanted to work with Liz because I’ve known her all her life, and I got my wish!”
Elizabeth: “I’d done some writing development work at Scarborough before, so Paul was aware of my work, so when they were looking for someone to team up with Nick, he called me.”
Co-writer Nick Lane: “If Shakespeare was writing now, he’d want to reflect the time and the politics,” he says. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
Do you have any qualms about rewriting Shakespeare?
Nick: “For me, initially, yes, but knowing that Liz knows lots more than I do about Shakespeare, I did feel like I was in safe hands, and it was a good partnership – we share a similar sense of humour. But we were both making it up as we went along.”
Elizabeth: “Yes, I had reservations, of course – it’s a big thing to do! But at the same time we both had this thought in our heads that we wanted to do something different, that was accessible and fresh. I don’t think of it as a rewriting of Shakespeare; I think we’re twisting it, we’re putting a northern spin on it.”
What is your process for writing – together or separately?
Elizabeth: “This time, for Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less), it’s been much more together than on Comedy Of Errors – we’ve learned and grown from that. We write some things separately, and we send emails and share, and we’ve got about a thousand voice memos on WhatsApp. Then we meet up multiple times, and we’ll spend a day going through everything we’ve written, tweaking and changing each other’s stuff.
Nick: “And enjoying some very nice meals…
Elizabeth: “And eating lots of biscuits!”
Annie Kirkman and Jo Patmore in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
What different qualities do you both bring to the writing?
Nick: “The fun thing for me is – well, the read-through is a perfect example. I sat through the read-through and laughed heartily at all the stuff Liz put in, and sort of smiled at my own bits and thought, ‘yes, that kind of works’. But I think we both find each other’s stuff funny.”
Elizabeth: “I would say that Nick brings a font of knowledge of random facts! He can pinpoint something exactly: ‘In August 1989, people weren’t doing that’.”
Nick “I do have a silly memory for things, it’s true. And Liz is cracking on all things Shakespeare – and when you have a silent third partner, that’s really, really useful.”
Why have you set Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less) in 1990s’ Ibiza?
Elizabeth: “We knew we wanted to do Love’s Labour’s Lost, and we also had this idea for a stag-and- hen thing, which, if anyone’s read the original, it does kind of fit: there’s this kind of boys versus girls thing. That, and the club scene, and the ’90s, just felt like a good fit for the story.”
David Kirkbride punching the air in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
Nick: “It helps that you’re in an era before mobile phones. It’s fascinating how quickly we’ve adopted these things – they’re so intrinsically linked with our everyday lives now, and only 25 years ago, they existed, of course, but they weren’t the all-encompassing tools that they are now.
“I guess if we’d set it a bit later, it would have been erroneous text messages instead of the misdirected letters, but there’s no romance in texts, is there?”
How difficult was it making the song choices? Any particular favourites?
Elizabeth: “I loved making the song choices! The ’90s are my childhood; it’s very, very nostalgic and takes me back to school discos and primary school and brings me great joy. My favourite is probably the Spice Girls.”
Nick: “The opening number is Girls & Boys by Blur. If the Spice Girls were the ’90s for Liz, then Blur was kind of my thing – I was in my 20s.”
Where were you in the 1990s?
Elizabeth: “I was in Hull – being born and growing up!”
Nick: “Predominantly Doncaster, but I toured a lot – with Hull Truck, for Liz’s dad [playwright John Godber]!”
Jo Patmore in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less)
Have you ever acted in Shakespeare?
Nick: “No, I never have. I’ve done verse – I was in Tony Harrison’s Passion and Doomsday, but never a Shakespeare.”
Elizabeth: “I was in a school production, a 20-minute version of Romeo and Juliet – and in that production, I met my now husband!”
Nick: “I can even quote you your one line in that. It was ‘No’.”
Elizabeth: “It was! I think I’m better on Shakespeare when I’m not acting in it.”
Will Shakespeare be spinning in his grave at the prospect of Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less) or giving it a five-star review (more or less)?
Thomas Cotran in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
Nick: “I would hope that if he is spinning, it’s to a 120 bpm dance track. He was a modernist in his day; he was satirical; he referenced things that were very of the time, and I think if he was writing now, he’d want to reflect the time and the politics. I think he’d be all right with it.”
Elizabeth: “We want to make a show that people come to see and have a great time, and I think that Shakespeare wouldn’t be against that – I think that’s what he wanted to do, too.”
Which Shakespeare play would you like to rewrite (more or less) next?
Nick: “One for Liz. I don’t know enough of them!”
Elizabeth: “I think I’d quite like to do A Winter’s Tale, because I really like the Shakespeare plays that are a little less done, that people don’t know as much about. I think that’s interesting. Love’s Labour’s Lost is one that people don’t know as well, and you can bring it to more people – that’s exciting. But my favourite is As You Like It, so…”
Stephen Joseph Theatre and Shakespeare North Playhouse present Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less) at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until April 19, Monday to Saturday, 7.30pm, plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.
An ensemble scene from the Stephen Joseph Theatre and Shakespeare North Playhouse co-production of Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
Who’s in the cast for Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less)?
Thomas Cotran; Alice Imelda; Linford Johnson; David Kirkbride; Annie Kirkman; Alyce Liburd; Timothy Adam Lucas and Jo Patmore.
Four of the company have appeared at the SJT already: Linford Johnson was in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Girl Next Door in 2021, and Annie Kirkman appeared in 2023’s UK Theatre Award-winning Beauty And The Beast, returning in summer 2024 to play the title role in Dracula: The Bloody Truth. She also starred in John Godber’s Perfect Pitch, on tour.
David Kirkbride and Alyce Liburd were in the SJT’s first co-production with Shakespeare North Playhouse, the UK Theatre Award-nominated The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less) in Spring 2023. Alice appeared in in Dracula: The Bloody Truth too.
Movin’ and groovin’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
What’s on the playlist in Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less)
1. Blur: Girls & Boys
2. Britney Spears: …Baby One More Time
3. Shania Twain: Man! I Feel Like A Woman!
4. Meat Loaf: I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)
The Whitby Rebels cast on a boat trip in Scarborough’s South Bay: from left, Keith Bartlett, Duncan MacInnes, Jacky Naylor, Jacqueline King, Louise Mai Newberry and Kieran Foster. All pictures: Tony Bartholomew
THE Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, is staging the world premiere of Bea Roberts’ The Whitby Rebels, boat on stage et al, until November 2.
In Whitby Harbour, in the summer of 1991, something extraordinary happened. A humble pleasure boat set sail for the Arctic crewed by misfits, pensioners and the vicar for Egton and Grosmont, North Yorkshire.
This motley crew was assembled by Captain Jack Lammiman to complete a daring mission: to erect a plaque honouring Whitby whaling Captain William Scoresby senior on a volcanic island hundreds of miles north of Iceland.
Kieran Foster, left, Jaqcueline King, Jacky Naylor and Duncan MacInnes in the SJT rehearsal room
Their voyage is a classic story of British eccentricity and determination to rival Eddie the Eagle’s Olympic exploits, bus driver Kempton Bunton stealing the portrait of the Duke of Wellington or crane operator Maurice Flitcroft playing golf in the British Open.
Writer Bea Roberts says: “What appealed to me about this true story to begin with is that it felt like an Ealing comedy or a Carry On film – it’s got this fantastically silly edge: this group of pensioners being chased by the Royal Navy!
“But it’s also really remarkable as a story of incredible adventure, of daring, of bravery and of people doing something really rather audacious and brilliant.”
Jacqueline King, left, Duncan MacInnes, Kieran Foster and Louise Mai Newberry at sea off the Scarborough coast
Director Paul Robinson says: “I’m so excited to bring this local story to life, particularly as many people will remember it and the film which followed starring Bob Hoskins. And I can’t wait to see the audiences’ faces when they see a boat on stage!”
SJT artistic director Robinson directs a cast of Keith Bartlett, Kieran Foster, Jacqueline King, Duncan MacInnes, Jacky Naylor and Louise Mai Newberry.
The Whitby Rebels is designed by Jessica Curtis, with lighting design by Sally Ferguson; sound design by composer and sailor’s son Simon Slater; movement direction by Georgina Lamb; wardrobe supervision by Julia Perry-Mook and fight director by Kaitlin Howard. Tom Hill is the nautical consultant. Box office: 01723 370541 or at www.sjt.uk.com.
Duncan MacInnes, Keith Bartlett and Kieran Fosterin rehearsal for The Whitby Rebels
Niall Ransome, left, Olivia Onyehara, Dave Hearn and Lucy Keirl in the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s even better 2023 revival of The 39 Steps. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
THE 39 Steps has enjoyed a happy association with Yorkshire, first in North Country Theatre founder Nobby Dimon and Simon Corble’s initial stage concept of taut thriller and comic release.
Next came Patrick Barlow’s frantically fast-moving yet unflappable West Yorkshire Playhouse adventure with seeds sown in the earlier show.
Barlow’s spiffing version has since played here, there and everywhere, first given Stephen Joseph Theatre comedic top spin by artistic director Paul Robinson in June 2018.
Five summers on, Robinson revisits that slick, playful jaffa of a show, with the promise of 39 new gags, one for each step, to supplement the elegance, eloquence and elasticity of this dapper and dastardly clever whodunit.
Niall Ransome is back from 2018, in the same role (make that multiple roles) but now called Clown 1, rather than Man. Significantly, he teams up with fellow Mischief maker Dave Hearn, duly mining the hugely popular Mischief brand for dextrous feats of physical comedy rooted in a battle of wits and will against chaos and catastrophe.
York audiences have experienced Hearn’s manic craft already this year in Original Theatre’s three-hander account of HG Wells’s The Time Machine, another comedy vehicle steered by a short-handed cast in a race against time.
On that occasion, in a play within a play conceit, his assertive, egotistical Dave Wells was in such a hurry, he wore tracksuit trousers and trainers.
This time, in a play with a novel and a film within it, Hearn is playing more of an old-fashioned, cigarette-card matinee idol, Richard Hannay, side-parting in his immaculate haircut, side splitting in his comic clambering on the Forth Bridge, reminiscent of a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton. Suspense in suspension.
This is but one of a series of scenes that re-creates setpieces from The Master’s movies, complemented by pastiches and references to other Hitchcock classics, with new additions among those 39 new jokes.
The novel is John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps; the film is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 British spy thriller, based loosely on Buchan’s serialised 1915 work. Barlow and in turn Robinson marry the two together, gravely serious in replicating the tone and dramatic peaks of both against all logical odds, while finding comedy at every opportunity without turning everything into a stiff upped-lipped send-up.
This is Hearn’s skill too, serving Hannay’s dispirited mien first and foremost before the John Cleese school of alarm-bell comedy bursts through. Dashing and upright, yes, with pipe and pencil-slim moustache, but newly returned to his lonely Portland Place abode, he is tired of life and its mounting pile of problems. Feeling anything but alive in 1935. Suicidal even.
What he needs is…a night at the theatre (don’t we all, especially one like this!), only for a much bigger problem to ensue once there. Not only must he navigate his way through the hairpin bends of Buchan’s book and Hitchcock’s film, but now too he finds himself murder suspect number one when a mysterious German woman, Annabelle Schmidt (Olivia Onyehara), dies in his arms after insisting on leaving the London Palladium by his side, desperate to impart vital information.
In a moment typical of the comic invention in Hearn’s performance, he extricates himself from beneath the dead weight of the woman’s body by using the knife in her back as a lever.
Hannay must hot-foot it to Scotland by train. On his fluttering jacket tail are policemen, secret agents and assorted women, all delivered with elan by Ransome and Lucy Keirl’s Clown combo, parading accents and exaggerated characters stride by stride, sometimes side by side.
What cracking casting in Ransome making his return in tandem with Keirl, who is as delightful as she was in Nick Lane’s Cinderella at the SJT last winter.
Onyehara, a familiar name to Yorkshire credits lists from her work with Pilot Theatre, Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre, Hull Truck and York Theatre Royal, is terrific too. Not only as anguished Annabelle, but also as femme fatale Pamela and shy but far from retiring Scottish farmer’s wife Margaret, each drawn to the cut of Hannay’s jib.
Ever straight as Geoffrey Boycott’s bat at North Marine Road, Hearn’s narrator Hannay takes on whatever is thrown at him, defying the need to lead the story-telling with such limited resources, improvising emergency props and scenery, chalking up those extra gags amid the comic carnage.
Robinson’s 2023 company applies even quicker sleight of hand to Barlow’s spinning plates of verbal wit, theatrical anarchy, satirical savvy and visual panache, somehow pulling off their Hitchcock homage without a hitch.
Simon Slater’s sound design, compositions and nods to swing tunes play their part too, as do Helen Coyston’s fabulous, fun costumes and set design, stretched by Robinson’s direction beyond the SJT stage to the aisles and director’s box too.
Look out for the ushers blocking the exits at one particularly urgent moment. Even the theatre is against Hannay! Make sure you too are trapped in his breathless, befuddled world before this month is out. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.
Andy Cryer’s slimy Solinus in The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less) at the SJT, Scarborough. Picture: Patch Dolan
REVIEW: Stephen Joseph Theatre and Shakespeare North Playhouse in The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less), Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, 7.30pm tonight; 2.30pm and 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com
THIS Comedy Of Errors gets everything right. Not more or less. Just right. Full stop.
Shakespeare’s “most bonkers farce” has been entrusted to Nick Lane, madly inventive writer of the SJT’s equally bonkers pantomime, and Elizabeth Godber, a blossoming writing talent from the East Yorkshire theatrical family.
How does this new partnership work? In a nutshell, Lane has penned the men’s lines, Godber, the female ones, before the duo moulded the finale in tandem.
SJT artistic director Paul Robinson, meanwhile, selected a criminally good play list of Eighties’ guilty pleasures, from Whitesnake’s Here I Go Again to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl, Nik Kershaw’s Wouldn’t It Be Good to Toni Basil’s Mickey, Cher’s Just Like Jesse James to Kenny Loggins’ Footloose, to be sung in character or as an ensemble with Northern Chorus oomph.
Aptly, the opening number is an ensemble rendition of Dream Academy’s one-hit wonder, Life In A Northern Town, that town being 1980s’ Scarborough, just as Lane always roots his pantomimes in the Yorkshire resort.
From an original idea by Robinson, Lane and Godber’s reinvention of Shakespeare’s comedy is not too far-fetched but far enough removed to take on its own personality and, frankly, be much, much funnier as a result. To the point where one woman in the front row was in the grip of a fit of giggles. Yes, that joyous.
For Ephesus, a city on the Ionian coast with a busy port, read Scarborough, a town on the Yorkshire coast with a fishing harbour, although all the fish and chip cafés were shut without explanation on the evening of the press night. Was something fishy going on?
Ephesus was governed by Duke Solinus; Scarborough is run by Andy Cryer’s vainglorious Solinus. Still the merry-go-round action is spun around mainly outdoor public spaces on Jessica Curtis’s set, where protagonists bump into each other like dodgem cars. Just as Syracusans were subject to strict rules in the original play, now Lancastrians are given the Yorkshire cold shoulder in a new war of the roses, besmirched Eccles Cakes et al.
Sing when you’re twinning: David Kirkbride’s Antipholus of Scarborough and Oliver Mawdsley’s Dromio of Prescot in the SJT’s highly musical The Comedy Of Errors (More Or Less). Picture: Patch Dolan
So begins a tale of two rival states and two sets of mismatched twins (Antipholus and Dromio times two) on one nutty day at the seaside. Cue a mishmash of mistaken identities, mayhem agogo, and merriment to the manic max, conducted at an ever more frenetic lick.
It worked wonders for Richard Bean in One Man, Two Guvnors, his Swinging Sixties’ revamp of Goldoni’s 1743 Italian Commedia dell’arte farce, The Servant Of Two Masters, setting his gloriously chaotic caper, as chance would have it, in another English resort: Brighton. Now The Comedy Of Errors evens up the mathematical equation for two plus two to equal comedy nirvana from so much division.
One ‘guvnor’, Lancastrian comic actor Antipholus of Prescot (Peter Kirkbride) crosses the Pennine divide to perform his one-man show. Trouble is, everyone has booked tickets for the talent show across the bay, starring t’other ‘guvnor’, the twin brother he has never met, Antipholus of Scarborough (David Kirkbride, different first name, but same actor, giving licence for amusing parallel biographies in the programme).
The two ‘servants’ of the piece, Dromio of Prescot and Scarborough respectively (Oliver/Zach Mawdsley), are equally unaware of the other’s presence, compounding a trail of confusion rooted in Scarborough’s Antipholus owing money everywhere but still promising his wife a gold chain. He needs to win the contest to appease Scarborough’s more unsavoury sorts.
Kirkbride takes the acting honours in his hyperactive double act with himself, Mawdsley a deux is a picture of perplexity; Cryer, in his 40th year of SJT productions, is comedy gold as ever in chameleon roles; likewise, Claire Eden fills the stage with diverse riotous, no-nonsense character, whether from Lancashire or Yorkshire.
Valerie Antwi, Alyce Liburd and Ida Regan, each required to put up with the maelstrom of male malarkey, add so much to the comedic commotion, on song throughout too.
Under Robinson’s zesty, witty direction, everything in Scarborough must be all at sea and yet somehow emerge as comic plain sailing, breaking down theatre’s fourth wall to forewarn with a knowing wink of the need to suspend disbelief when seeing how the company will play the two sets of twins once, spoiler alert, they finally meet.
Who knew shaken-and-stirred Shakespeare could be this much fun, enjoying life in the fast Lane with Godber gumption galore too. Add the Yorkshire-Lancashire spat and those Eighties’ pop bangers, Wayne Parsons’ choreography and the fabulous costumes, and this is the best Bard comedy bar none since Joyce Branagh’s Jazz Age Twelfth Night for Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre in York in 2019.
When The Comedy Of Errors meets the 1980s, the laughs are even bigger than the shoulder pads. A case of more, not less.
Infinite possibilities, finite world: Emilio Iannucci’s Roland and Carla Harrison-Hodge’s Marianne in Constellations at the SJT. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
Nick Payne’s Constellations, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, written in the stars, until Saturday, 7.30pm nightly, 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com
White Rose Theatre in Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, in the tunnel of love until Saturday, 7.30pm nightly; 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
HERE is a brace of award-garlanded boy-meets-girl one-act two-handers, each playing with time and space with all the elan of Alan Ayckbourn’s playful works of this ilk.
First up, Constellations, University of York alumnus Nick Payne’s multiverse play already staged in York this year by Black Treacle Theatre’s Andrew Isherwood and Jess Murray at Theatre@41 in February.
Named as one of the 50 best plays of the 21st century by the London Evening Standard, now it is in the supple hands of Stephen Joseph Theatre artistic director Paul Robinson, whose cast features Emilio Iannucci, an actor whose thrilling combination of mental agility and physical alacrity has delighted York Theatre Royal and Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre audiences alike.
In Payne’s exploration of the myriad paths one love story can take from one meeting, Iannucci plays beekeeper Roland – with more than one sting in the tale – opposite Carla Harrison-Hodge’s scientist Marianne. “The action takes place (sort of) chronologically,” the programme forewarns. “A change of scene indicates a change of universe”.
“Emilio Iannucci and Carla Harrison-Hodge jump from universe to parallel universe with dazzling speed”. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
To avoid any consternation over Constellations, in a nutshell, each scene – the first meeting, the first date and – spoiler alert – the break-up – unfurls in several different ways, as Iannucci and Harrison-Hodge jump from universe to parallel universe with dazzling speed over 70 minutes in a world of What Ifs and endless possibilities, the next leap dependent on the decision each makes.
Comparisons have been made with the films Sliding Doors and Groundhog Day and, more pertinently, with York-born author Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life. Sliding Doors keeps offering two possibilities; Groundhog Day replays the same day over and over; Life After Life positsalternative possible lives for Ursula Todd after death after death.
Bolder still, yet shadowed by the finite nature of life, Constellations combines science and art, physics and chemistry, romance and alternative realities, in an otherwise simple love story.
All life is here within these Constellations: happiness and sadness; honey sweetness and ill health; devotion and cheating; certainty and uncertainty; tremors of the heart and traumas of the mind; the everyday and the extraordinary; decisions big and small; questions and more question; connection and disconnection. A day in the life and the life in a day. The roll of the dice; the truth and the lies.
On a breathtaking set by TK Hay of wooden blocks within a geometric carapace of one and a half miles of fibre-optic cable lighting, Iannucci and Harrison-Hodge talk and move equally nimbly, in response to Payne’s text, Robinson’s direction and Jennifer Kay’s movement direction alike. Sign language speaks volumes too.
Like the sky-at-night lighting’s evocation of drawing lines from star to star, the multifarious stories travel up and down lines of humour and heartbreak, light and darkness, exhilaration and loss, warmth and sudden chill, to the point where you care deeply about Roland and Marianne, whatever direction their paths take. What’s more, you ponder what alternative routes your own life could have followed.
As Robinson puts it, Constellations is “deeply human, deeply moving, genuinely tilting the world for you”. In his notes, he challenges anyone not to leave the theatre “just a bit more aware of what a fragile and remarkable thing life is”. Job done, Mr Robinson. Fragile, remarkable, and always better for a trip to the theatre to appreciate that.
Close together and drifting apart: Simon Radford’s Jamie and Claire Pulpher’s Cathy in a montage for The Last Five Years
YORK Stage director Nik Briggs has long wanted to bring Jason Robert Brown’s emotionally charged 2001 American musical The Last Five Years to York, but his ideal couplings to play Cathy and Jamie have never been in York at the same time.
The York premiere instead falls to White Rose Theatre, the city’s newest stage company, in a passion project for director Claire Pulpher and fellow actor Simon Radford, who both name it as their favourite musical.
Brown drew on the trials and tribulations of his own failed marriage to Theresa O’Neill. So much so that she sued him on the grounds of the musical’s story violating non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements within their divorce decree by representing her relationship with Brown too closely.
For Brown, read successful young novelist Jamie Wellerstein, Random House’s rising poster boy. For, well, let’s not say O’Neill, but any struggling actress, read Cathy Hiatt, from Ohio.
Brown’s sung-through musical has the novel structure of Cathy telling her side of the story from the end of the relationship backwards, while, at the other end of the stage, Jamie does so from the start forwards, as he lands a publishing deal at 23.
The songs take the form of internal monologues, alongside the occasional phone call, usually delivered with the other partner having left the stage, save for a duet where they touch for the first time, exchange marriage vows and swap ends to continue on the same trajectory. There is to be no middle ground in this relationship, no alternative paths, unlike in Constellations.
Simon Radford and Claire Pulpher in rehearsal for The Last Five Years
The singing brings to mind the work of Stephen Sondheim, melody playing second fiddle to recitative, (the form of accompanied solo song that mirrors the rhythms and accents of spoken language), whether upbeat when courting or for broken-hearted ballads.
The accompaniment, however, under the musical direction of Jon Atkin, is often beautiful as he leads a six-piece band with the strings to the fore: Marcus Bousfield on violin and Rachel Brown and Lucy McLuckie on sublime cello. Paul McArthur on guitar and Christian Topman provide the electricity.
The balance in the relationship can be played in different ways, more often with Jamie trying everything to save the relationship, to stimulate Cathy, in a gentler interpretation of the role. In song, Radford’s Jamie is intense, hyper, rising to the point of anger and shouting, uncompromising, in your face, over-confident, deceitful too.
Pulpher’s Cathy tunes into a different wavelength, more controlled, one where she experiences flights of happiness, frustration rather than embitterment with failed auditions, but moments of humour too before loss of confidence, insularity and loneliness take over.
Done this way, where Jamie is the one who is unreasonable, you wonder whether these two would ever have lasted five years or whether they were polar opposites never meant to travel in the same direction.
Nevertheless, the structure is engaging; the songs draw you in; the simple set of two chairs and one table at each end is well chosen, complemented by the regular changes of attire that match the two stories in one’s progress.
After the last two years in Covid’s shadow, seeing a new company of established York talents take its first steps in The Last Five Years is another reason to celebrate Theatre@41’s upward curve under chair Alan Park.
Review by Charles Hutchinson
Award-winning TK Hay lights up the SJT with fibre-optic design ‘unlike anything ever seen in a theatre production before’
Only connect: Cast members Carla Harrison-Hodge and Emilio Iannucci on TK Hay’s ground-breaking set design for Constellations. All pictures: Tony Bartholomew
HOTSHOT young designer TK Hay has created a dazzling and innovative set design for the multiverse story world of Nick Payne’s Constellations at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre.
Crowned Best Designer in the Stage Debut Awards 2022, Hay has used over one-and-a-half miles of glowing fibre optic cable to create a web of light that surrounds actors Carla Harrison-Hodge and Emilio Iannucci.
Payne’s play looks at the ‘What Ifs’ that arise from a single meeting, following the crazy paving of the couple’s path through a multitude of possibilities depending on the decisions they make.
Shining light: Designer TK Hay
Hay was inspired by two installation artists to create a set “that is believed to be unlike anything ever seen in a theatre production before”: Chiharu Shiota from Japan, who makes huge and intricate networks of thread and yarn, and Italian “artist of pure light” Carlo Bernardini, who uses fibre optics, prisms and sculptural elements to form laser-like geometric installations.
“What we wanted was a design that responded to the action of the play, so the direction from the start was very visually focused,” says Hay.
“I was thinking about the connection between the two protagonists and how across all these different realities they are somehow managing to connect with one another.
Illuminating: TK Hay’s fibre-optic design for the SJT’s production of Constellations
“I pitched to Paul Robinson, the director, that we took Shiota’s and Bernadini’s work and fused it together – I thought it would look incredible!”
Robinson says: “TK’s design is absolutely remarkable: we’re pushing at not just what this play can do, but also what theatre form can do with what he’s come up with.”
The set design has created its own challenges for SJT’s production manager Denzil Hebditch, and technical manager Tigger Johnson.
Denzil says: “Working with fibre optics in this way wasn’t something we had done before, and we were concerned that we would struggle to achieve TK’s vision, but the results have been pretty spectacular!”
A floor-level view of TK Hay’s design in the Round at the SJT
Anne-Marie Piazza’s Laura and Pete Ashmore’s Alec take time out from rehearsals for the SJT’s Brief Encounter to encounter LMS Royal Scot Class 46115 Scots Guardsman, the locomotive that featured in the 1936 film Night Mail. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
THE Stephen Joseph Theatre’s stage version of Noël Coward’s buttoned-up story of forbidden love, Brief Encounter, opens tomorrow in Scarborough.
Adapted for the stage by Emma Rice, of pioneering Kneehigh Theatre and Wise Children acclaim, SJT artistic director Paul Robinson’s actor-musician production is being staged in collaboration with Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, and the Octagon Theatre, Bolton.
Rice herself had staged the premiere in 2007, her script drawing on both Coward’s 1945 film, Brief Encounter, and Still Life, his short play in five scenes from 1936, for a comedy drama that combined actors with a live band and film sequences.
“I contacted Emma and didn’t have to persuade her very much to let us do it,” says Paul. “She first said she’d worked on it for so long, she was just delighted to see it being done again, and then she contacted me again to say the only thing she would still like to have done was to do it in the round. I said, ‘please don’t come!’.” Relax, Paul was joking! “Emma was so generous,” he says.
He did not see her production but was drawn to her version of Brief Encounter by reading the script. “I think I might have felt daunted if I’d seen it,” he says, revelling in being able to bring a fresh perspective both to Rice’s play and Coward’s story of Laura and Alec, both married but not to each other, whose chance meeting at a railway station hurls them headlong into a whirlwind romance that threatens to blow their worlds apart.
“The Round requires you to do it differently, like when we did The 39 Steps, where we knew Patrick Barlow’s end-on production couldn’t be bettered, so why do it that way again?” Paul asks.
“We’ve decided to take an actor-muso approach to Brief Encounter,” says Stephen Joseph Theatre artistic director Paul Robinson. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
“We’ve decided to take an actor-muso approach with Brief Encounter. Emma had used actors and a band, and we’ll be showing off our company’s musicality too. This is a great way to see musicianship in a show, where they’re not only great actors but between them they can play 11 instruments at a drop of a hat – and often a hat really does have to be dropped to let them do that!”
As for the storytelling side of Brief Encounter, Paul says: “What Emma has encouraged us to do is to go back to Coward’s work in his Chekhovian portrayal of relationships and matters of class, and how he looks at first-time love, the couple who’ve been around the block, and then the illicit love of Alec and Laura.
“What we’d done is really explode all those emotions of being in love, making it not only visually explosive but tonally too. What Emma achieved that Coward didn’t was the ‘ridiculousness’ of being in love, though Alec and Laura’s love is more naturally shaped.
“Unlike the world Patrick Barlow created in The 39 Steps, their relationship is sacrosanct and needs to stay in a true place, which gives the play a core.”
Emma drew on Coward’s own songs and poems to highlight his own situation, where he never came out of “the closet”. “There were obviously a lot of parallels with what he could or could not say about love and his own relationships,” says Paul. “Society has still not moved to being polyamorous. We still have that push and pull of being attracted to people ‘we shouldn’t be’. ‘Thank goodness for that,’ says Emma. ‘It means we’re still alive’.”
Composer Simon Slater has given jazz arrangements to such Coward numbers as Mad About The Boy and set various Coward poems to new music. “They’re poems that Emma had picked out to go with the Coward script that she’d totally stripped back,” says Paul.
Forbidden love: Pete Ashmore’s Alec and Anne-Marie Piazza’s Laura in a Brief Encounter clench. Picture: Tony Bartholomew
“She also used impressive, newly created film scenes to move characters seamlessly from stage to screen, but we can’t do that in the Round, which has given us added challenges, like how do we make Laura swim, how do we make waves, and how do we bring a train on stage without actually using film?
“That allows us to explore the wonderful expressionism of David Lean’s 1945 film without being too literal. They weren’t concerned with what a train sounded like, more with the cinematography, which was so extraordinary, as the story of Alec and Laura is told in such a heightened way, where they’re in rapture but also a high state of fear when they think of what they’re about to lose.”
Paul was adamant he would not undermine Brief Encounter’s truthfulness by sending up the clipped accents. “Yes, the film is very mannered and of its time, but I want the story to still feel resonant and I don’t want to take anything away from that, because the play is like Chekhov, where the subtext is vital. The accents will be RP (Received Pronunciation), but they won’t sound affected.
“I’ve also hinted at setting it in York. The film was filmed in wartime in the Lake District [at Carnforth station], because London was in blackout, but it was probably set in the Home Counties. I wanted to put more northern accents in it, implying it’s set at York station.
“We’re taking the production to the New Vic [Newcastle-under-Lyme], Bolton and Keswick, so we have north western and north eastern accents in the cast, because it’s fun to have a diversity of accents.”
Emma Rice’s Brief Encounter goes full steam ahead at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, from tomorrow (22/7/2022) to August 27. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com
