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Filmed at York Theatre Royal, Emma Rice’s Wise Children is streaming on BBC iPlayer

Showgirl memoirs: Katy Owen, left, Etta Murfitt and Gareth Snook in Wise Children. Pictures: Steven Tanner

YORK Theatre Royal’s co-production of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, made with Emma Rice’s company Wise Children and The Old Vic, is now available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

Adapted and directed by Rice, ever-innovative former artistic director of Cornish company Kneehigh Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the show marked the debut of her new Bristol company.

Wise Children was co-produced with The Old Vic, London, where the world premiere opened in 2018, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, Oxford Playhouse and York Theatre Royal.

In March 2019, a performance of Rice’s exuberantly impish, musical vision of Carter’s last novel was filmed live at the York theatre with support from The Space.

The 138-minute play will be streamed for free for two months on BBC iPlayer as part Culture In Quarantine, the BBC’s arts and culture service to “keep the arts alive in people’s homes”. A screening on BBC 4 in May will be confirmed at a later date.

Billed as a big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and pain, Wise Children is a celebration of show business, family, forgiveness and hope as Nora and Dora Chance, twin chorus girls born and bred south of the river, celebrate their 70th birthday in Brixton.

Wise Children artistic director Emma Rice

Across the river in Chelsea, their father and greatest actor of his generation, Melchior Hazard, turns 100, on the same day. As does his twin brother Peregrine. If, in fact, he is still alive. And if, in truth, Melchior is their real father after all.

“When I set up Wise Children, I knew I would open with an adaptation of Wise Children after calling the company that name, presenting Angela Carter’s open love letter to theatre in all its aspects, its power and glories,” said Rice.

“I was a great fan of Angela Carter in my 20s. She has had a magical impact on people’s lives; she’s breath-taking in allowing the unimaginable to happen, so we fit together well!”

To create her adaptation, Rice read Carter’s novel, then wrote down the story or “what I remember of it”, she said. “I then started working on it with the actors, using their collective imaginations, so that they can pass on their own experiences in theatre.”

Rice has a track record for picking unconventional casts, typically so for Wise Children. “The actors I’m drawn to over and over again, and the way I tell stories, reflect how I always like to open up to diversity, expanding on my own experiences of humanity, especially in these polarised times, by looking at people who have had different experiences to your own,” she reasoned.

Against the 2019 backdrop of so much drabness, division, enmity and lost hope, Rice was determined to champion showbusiness, family, forgiveness and hope. “They represent a lot of my life,” she said. “When I talk of family, I mean not only blood family, but how we connect as humans.”

Emma Rice’s company Wise Children in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers at York Theatre Royal last September

Now, Rice is delighted that Wise Children is being streamed from this week on BBC iPlayer amid the Coronavirus lockdown. “I dreamt about adapting Angela Carter’s Wise Children for years before it became a reality, and, when I finally did make it, it was the first piece I made for my new company,” she says.

“It’s a show I carry deep in my heart; a love letter to theatre, to survival, to family and family of choice. When The Space commissioned us to film it for the BBC, I almost burst with pride!

“I delight in the fact that we now get to share this glorious story with so many others, and hope that the fun, truth, love and generosity poured into it will find its way into sitting rooms across the country.”

Reflecting on Wise Children being part of the BBC’s Culture In Quarantine programming, Rice says: “What feels even more perfect is that we’re releasing it now. Today, more than ever, we need joy, resilience, hope and love of life, which runs through the veins of Wise Children. As Nora and Dora Chance tell us: ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’. Never has this been more true. We hope you enjoy.”

Last September, Rice and Wise Children returned to York Theatre Royal for a second co-production, Enid Blyton’s “original post-war Girl Power story, the naughty, nostalgic and perfect for now” Malory Towers: her “happy Lord Of The Flies”, as Rice called it.

Wise Children and the Theatre Royal are to complete a hattrick of collaborations in 2021, this time in tandem with the National Theatre for Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

The butterfly effect: Emma Rice’s Wise Children company in Angela Carter’s Wise Children

Charles Hutchinson’s review of Wise Children at York Theatre Royal, March 2019. Copyright of The Press, York.

IMAGINE a Victorian vaudeville troupe or a circus travelling across Europe picking up performers, musicians, speciality acts, en route.

It would look not unlike Emma Rice’s new Wise Children company, set up since she left the artistic directorship of Shakespeare’s Globe and more in keeping with her 20 years leading Cornish company Kneehigh.

Do not take it the wrong way when I say Rice’s Wise Children are a modern-day freak show, not in the overt manner of the Circus of Horrors, but in how Rice celebrates, liberates and embraces beauty in all forms: a message for this age of Brexit intolerance for “outsiders” and fashion magazine photo-shopped “perfection”.

Vicki Mortimer’s design echoes circus in its lighting, while the set is dominated by a caravan, again recalling travelling troupes in Rice’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s last novel: a “celebration of showbusiness, family, forgiveness and hope” that receives a big, bold, bouncy, exuberant, darkly imaginative, saucy interpretation.

Opening on the 75th birthday of The Lucky Chances, Brixton showgirl twins Nora and Dora Chance, Rice’s hyper-production jumps around in time to tell their life story.

On the way she employs puppetry; glorious live music; theatrical in-jokes; old Bob Monkhouse and Max Miller gags; Shakespeare quotes; much mischief making, scabrous scandal and mistaken identities; men playing women, women playing men, and multiple versions of the same character at different ages.

Fabulous show, fabulous performers, fabulous butterflies too.

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Honor Blackman, Bond Girl, Avengers star… and York Theatre Royal repertory player

Honor Blackman as Amanda Wingfield with Helen Grace as disabled daughter Laura in The Glass Menagerie at York Theatre Royal in November 1999

HOW did Honor Blackman come to star in a repertory play at York Theatre Royal in 1999?

As news broke on Sunday of her peaceful passing at 94, thoughts turned back to when The Avengers’ Cathy Gale and Pussy Galore, the “Bond girl” – a term she never liked – played American southern belle Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s Depression-era play The Glass Menagerie.

Seventy-four at the time, it was a role the London-born actress had long craved, as Damian Cruden, the artistic director in his second year of cutting a swathe through the Theatre Royal, discovered.

“It all came about because I knew Honor’s agent,” Damian recalled this week. “We had a conversation about the agent’s clients. Various names came up, one of them, Honor Blackman.

“I’d been thinking about doing The Glass Menagerie, and so I said, ‘What about Honor playing Amanda? Would she be interested?’.”

The answer was affirmative, whereupon arrangements were made for Damian to meet Miss Blackman at her London abode. “I can remember going to see Honor at some place in Mayfair, and her instructions were very particular.

“She said, ‘you’ll need to ring the bell, I’ll buzz you in. Then, when you get in the lift, you’ll arrive at what it says is the top floor. The doors will open…but don’t get out. They’ll close again and the lift will bring you up to my flat’.”

What happened? “Exactly that! When the doors opened, I found I was inside her flat! Getting there was just like something out of a Bond movie!” Damian said. “It was a beautiful apartment too.”

Before rehearsals started in the Theatre Royal’s old Walmgate rehearsal rooms – now home to Brew York ­– Damian had another memorable Honor experience. “I went to see her in her one-woman show, Dishonourable Ladies, in Wales on the Sunday night before we were due to begin, and the deal was I would drive her to York…as it turned out, in her sports car, me driving, while she enjoyed a bottle of champagne! Glorious!”

Damian has fond memories of Miss Blackman’s time in York in autumn 1999. “She was enormously gracious and generous. She had friends coming to her dressing room each night, and liked to have a bottle of champagne in the fridge, but that dressing room didn’t have a fridge until she bought one for it and then gifted it to the theatre. It’s still there in dressing room one, as far as I know!”

As was his custom in his 22 years as artistic director, Damian liked to host meals for his casts at his home. “I cooked a meal on a couple of evenings when The Glass Menagerie cast came round,” he said. “Honor was very straightforward. There were no airs and graces to her.

Damian Cruden: York Theatre Royal artistic director drove Honor Blackman to York in her sports car; Honor sipping champagne by his side

“I can recall her sitting by the window with my son Felix, who was only three at the time. “My neighbour was standing watching, and I remember him saying, ‘Was that Pussy Galore in your window?’. ‘Yes’, I said. ‘My god, a Bond girl next door,’ he said.”

Damian spoke highly of Miss Blackman’s working relationship with The Glass Menagerie company. “She was great fun and very supportive of young actors, and there were a lot of young cast members in that company,” he said.

“Her performance was great too. Very intelligent, sensitive, mature. There was none of that ‘being starry’ thing about her. She wasn’t aloof. Instead, she enjoyed being part of a group. That was important to her.”

Honor Blackman would return to the York stage in February 2005 in the surprise guest role in The Play What I Wrote, The Right Size comic duo Sean Foley and Hamish McColl’s celebration of Morecambe and Wise. The Press review recorded how Honor’s role was “to be subjected glamorously and good humouredly to humiliation and mockery” at the hands of both the script and comic interjections in the playful Morecambe tradition. She handled it all with elan, of course.

Miss Blackman will forever be remembered for Pussy Galore, from the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger. “It is extraordinary. The damned film goes on marching, it doesn’t go out of fashion,” she told the Northern Echo in June 2004, going on to distance her role from the Bond girl stereotype.

“I hate being a Bond girl, because Pussy Galore was a character you would like to play in anything. She was not one of those who fall on their backs straight-away.

“But it was just a part I played, and that is all it was, and it queers your pitch in lots of ways, because people think of you as some sort of femme fatale; they don’t see you as a Shakespearean actress.”

Before Pussy Galore, there was Cathy Gale in The Avengers, and there was more of her in Cathy than in many of her other roles, she suggested.

“When we started, I was the first woman who had ever dared to be equal to a man, intellectually and physically, and the guys who wrote the script were used to writing about women waiting by the kitchen sink or wicked women in black satin,” she said.

“I couldn’t help but be aware of the impact it was having from the fan mail, because women loved it – at last a woman was standing there doing it all herself ­– and men loved it from quite a different point of view.”

Raise a glass to those memories, whether of Cathy Gale, Pussy Galore or cut-glass Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie in York in 1999.

Copyright of The Press, York

WHAT DID THE PRESS, YORK REVIEW SAY OF HONOR BLACKMAN’S PERFORMANCE IN 1999?

The Glass Menagerie, York Theatre Royal, until December 4

IN the long, distinguished, purring career of Honor Blackman, Amanda Wingfield was a role she still craved. Likewise, Roger Roger star Helen Grace believed The Glass Menagerie to be the best Tennessee Williams play and she “just can’t tell you” how much she desired to be cast as Amanda’s disabled daughter, Laura.

The Glass Menagerie, a memory play as subtle as silk, absorbing as cotton wool, unexpected as a midnight phonecall, has a habit of hooking you like that, such is its sentimental enchantment: an enchantment that masks a sting as potent as a drowsy wasp in autumn. Williams called it truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

The Glass Menagerie, inspired by Williams’ own circumstances, is set in the Depression era St Louis of the 1930s, where former southern belle Amanda is the domineering matriarch, smothering as much as mothering her son Tom (Keith Merrill) and Laura.

Deserted 15 years earlier by her telephone-salesman husband, she clamps her children in the past with her suffocating memories, her fantasies, her anachronistic belief in the tradition of the gentleman caller (Douglas Cockle) and her impossibly romantic hopes of perfect marriages.

Her husband had sought his escape, so too her children – they are in their 20s – but with very different routes in mind. Tom, the narrator and effectively the mouthpiece for Williams himself, is the dreamer, the poet who goes to the movies and drinks “for adventure” and plans a Merchant Marine passage out of working at the dead-end shoe warehouse. Shy Laura, more emotionally crippled than physically disabled (she has a limp), seeks an inward path to safe, fairytale isolation, locking herself away at home with her glass menagerie to avoid the judgement of others.

Theirs is a claustrophobic, unreal world out of step with the times, a contrast emphasised in the superb jagged score of cellist Christopher Madin who juxtaposes the neon brightness of the jazz age with the dimly-lit mournful cello he plays to the side of Liam Doona’s revolving, spinning stage.

Doona’s design adds to the all pervasive presence of Amanda Wingfield, with its see-through walls of muslin drapes allowing you to see into the next room, enhancing the sense of there being no escape from her stifling ways.

Where Sonia Fraser’s Cherry Orchard dragged last month, when there should have been the sense of the sands of time tumbling ever faster, Damian Cruden’s beautifully weighted production captures slow movement, emphasising each nuance of Williams’s subtly shifting writing. He is blessed too with superlative performances: Honor Blackman, a picture of grand illusion; Helen Grace, frail, pale and shyly expressive; Keith Merrill suitably poetic yet pent-up; Douglas Cockle, charming and too worldly for their world.

The finest cut glass indeed.

Charles Hutchinson, November 16 1999

Copyright of The Press, York

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No Horizon looks for a new horizon after tour postponed in Coronavirus shutdown

Adam Martyn: partially sighted actor playing the blind scientist Nicholas Saunderson in No Horizon, pictured in rehearsal

RIGHT Hand Theatre’s No Horizon, a musical celebrating a blind Yorkshire science and maths genius, is no longer on the horizon at York Theatre Royal. Exit stage left the April 9 and 11 performances under the Coronavirus shutdown.

However, the No Horizon team say: “Sadly, though we will be pausing our adventure for now, our No Horizon journey is far from over. When we are back – and we truly mean when, not if – we will be bigger and better than ever.

“This has been an amazing rehearsal process and although this [situation] is a hurdle, we will overcome this. Here’s to the future of the show and we are sure that the best is yet to come.”

No Horizon’s 2020 tour was to have opened at The Civic, Barnsley, on March 20. Now, the progress towards a new horizon can be followed at nohorizonthemusical.com and on social media.

The musical tells the life story of Nicholas Saunderson, a blind scientist and mathematician from Thurlstone, West Riding, who overcame impossible odds to become a Cambridge professor and friend of royalty.

Often described as an 18th century Stephen Hawking, Saunderson was born on January 20 1682, losing his sight through smallpox when around a year old. This did not prevent him, however, from acquiring a knowledge of Latin and Greek and studying mathematics.

As a child, he learnt to read by tracing the engravings on tombstones around St John the Baptist Church in Penistone, near Barnsley, with his fingers.

No Horizon premiered at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe, going on to draw an enthusiastic response from BBC Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans, who called it a “Yorkshire Les Mis”.

Next month’s York Theatre Royal shows would have been part of a now stalled northern tour of a 2020 adaptation “with a fresh look” by Right Hand Theatre, a company passionate about diversity and inclusivity within theatre.

Consequently, the 2020 cast has a 50/50 male/female balance, with the credo of delivering the show in a gender-blind way with a female Isaac Newton, for example. Both the director and lead actor are visually impaired.

Leading the company in rehearsals, in the role of Saunderson, has been the partially sighted Adam Martyn, from Doncaster, who trained at Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA).

Alongside him have been Yorkshire born-and-bred, Rose Bruford College-trained Larissa Teale in the female lead role of Abigail; Tom Vercnocke as Joshua Dunn; Louise Willoughby as Anne Saunderson; Matthew Bugg as John Saunderson; Ruarí Kelsey as Reverend Fox; Katie Donoghue and Olivia Smith as Company.

In the production team are director Andrew Loretto; vocal coach Sally Egan; movement directors Lucy Cullingford and Maria Clarke; costume designer Lydia Denno; costume maker Sophie Roberts; lighting designer David Phillips and tour musical director David Osmond.

No Horizon’s 2020 northern tour has been co-commissioned by Cast, Doncaster and The Civic, Barnsley and supported by Sheffield Royal Society for the Blind, with funding from Arts Council England and Foyle Foundation.

York Theatre Royal box office will contact ticket holders for refunds.

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Remember Alan Bennett’s The Habit Of Art at York Theatre Royal? Now it’s online

Matthew Kelly as York-born poet W H Auden when Alan Bennett’s The Habit Of Art was rehearsed and staged at York Theatre Royal in August and September 2018. Picture: James Findlay

YORK Theatre Royal’s 2018 co-production of Alan Bennett’s The Habit Of Art has been made available to stream by OriginalTheatre Online.

Directed by Philip Franks, a second British tour was due to start this month with Matthew Kelly and David Yelland reprising their roles of poet W H Auden and composer Benjamin Britten.

However, both the tour and a trip to New York for the Brits Off Broadway have been scrapped after the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown.

In turn, this has prompted The Original Theatre Company, the Theatre Royal’s co-producers, to release the production online.

Matthew Kelly as W H Auden and David Yelland as Benjamin Britten in The Habit Of Art, now available to stream through Original Theatre Online

Leeds playwright Bennett’s The Habit Of Art imagines a 1972 meeting between friends and collaborators Auden and Britten – their first in 30 years – where they mull over life, art, sexuality and death.

What drew Matthew Kelly to playing York-born Auden? “He has a razor-sharp wit and we have a very similar outlook about work which is the habit of art. I am the same,” he says.

“I have to keep working – I’m nearly 70 [his birthday falls on May 9] – not  because I need the money, but because the theory comes into play that the longer you hang on, the longer you will hang on. Otherwise you fall off the perch.”

The Habit Of Art requires Kelly to play an actor playing an actor playing a real-life person. If this sounds confusing, “No, it actually clarifies things,” says Kelly, clarifying things.

Philip Franks, director of The Habit Of Art, who also directed Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre in The Tempest in York last summer

“It’s a very clever device because it means you can be funny about what you do, you can comment on it and you can explain stuff. You can come out of the play Caliban’s Day, which the actors are rehearsing, and then it’s a play about the fictional meeting of Auden and Britten. 

“What’s wonderful about Bennett’s play is, not only have you got the finest composer of our time and the finest poet of our time, but you also, in my opinion, have the greatest playwright of our time.” 

Kelly continues: “So, you’ve got all those words being sewn together by our greatest playwright, who’s kind, accessible, very erudite and talks about sex in a very earthy way.

“He also gives a voice to the unregarded, who don’t usually have a voice. Generally, the great people, the stars of our time, get the final word and the people who look after them, what are commonly called ‘the little people’, really don’t get any say at all. They are the forgotten heroes who nurtured these stars.”

“He’s terribly kind and encouraging, which I love,” says Matthew Kelly of The Habit Of Art playwright Alan Bennett

Former Stars In Their Eyes presenter Kelly completed a hattrick of Bennett roles with The Habit Of Art, having appeared as unconventional teacher Hector in The History Boys in 2013 and Czech author Franz Kafka in Kafka’s Dick, opposite his son Matthew Rixon, as a younger Kafka, at York Theatre Royal in March 2001.

“We were hoping Alan Bennett would come to York because he lives in Leeds and it’s only a hop and a skip away, but he didn’t come,” recalls Kelly.

“A couple of years later, I met him at Heathrow and he came up to me and apologised for not coming to the York production. He was terribly kind about it. “Years later, I did The History Boys in Sheffield, then Kafka’s Dick again in Bath. On both those shows he sent champagne and a Good Luck postcard.

“He always knows what’s going on and he’s terribly kind and encouraging, which I love. The great thing about Alan is he’s very supportive of all productions, although he doesn’t go and see them.”

Original Theatre Online is streaming a second touring production too: Ali Milles’s The Croft, starring Gwen Taylor and again directed by Franks. Both that show and The Habit Of Art can be streamed any time until June.

“We are thrilled to be able to share these brilliant shows digitally: our own theatre without walls,” says The Original Theatre Company director Alastair Whatley.

Alastair Whatley, artistic director of The Original Theatre Company, says: “We know how disappointing it has been to our audiences, cast, creatives and Original Theatre to have to close our shows. We are thrilled to be able to share these brilliant shows digitally: our own theatre without walls. 

“However, the Original Theatre Company operates with no Arts Council support and relies almost solely on the box-office takings. With our two productions of The Habit Of Art and The Croft both out on national tours, the immediate cancellations are financially devastating for us.

“But we are determined, wherever possible, to meet our financial commitments made to our actors, stage managers and suppliers, who are all dependent on us to survive the coming months.  

“Every penny we make through this online release will go to the people who helped make this show, who now find themselves in a hugely precarious financial position.”

Both plays are free to watch although The Original Theatre suggests a minimum donation of £2.50. 

For full streaming details, visit originaltheatreonline.com.

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On World Theatre Day, York Theatre Royal looks outwards to say We Pull Together

Marketing officer Olivia Potter’s We Pull Together poster at York Theatre Royal,, pictured by events producer Zach Pierce when he left the theatre for the last time before the Coronavirus-enforced closure.

TODAY is World Theatre Day, but a day when the world of live theatre and its eye on the world are shut down by the Coronavirus pandemic.

Nevertheless, theatres are still marking the occasion, be it York Theatre Royal executive director Tom Bird’s Tweets throughout the day on his favourite theatres around the world, or reflections elsewhere on why theatre, in its myriad forms, is so important to British life.

At the Theatre Royal, show posters have been replaced by one message to the city of York, a rallying call reminiscent of wartime posters, designed in the Theatre Royal livery by marketing officer Olivia (Livy) Potter from an initial idea by development officer Maisie Pearson. 

In bold print, it reads: We Are Creative. We Are Sturdy. We Are Ambitious. We Are York. We Pull Together.

Bird’s eye view on World Theatre Day: York Theatre Royal executive director Tom Bird is marking the day with Tweets highlighting his favourite theatres in the world

Here, Olivia answers Charles Hutchinson’s questions on how the poster came to be printed.

Why and how did you choose the wording of your poster, Olivia?

“The wording was inspired by York Theatre Royal’s values:

“We are ambitious
We are sturdy
We are welcoming
We are ambassadors for York
We celebrate the city’s true diversity; it makes us bloom
We are creative in every context
We pull together
We excel in every area”.

“The idea to take some of these values and work them into a message came from our development officer, Maisie Pearson, and it was a brilliant one.” 

Dumb question, but what prompted you to do it?

“We had to take the show posters down outside the theatre as they were promoting productions that had been cancelled, such as Alone In Berlin mid-run.

“The empty poster sites looked very forlorn and that got us thinking about putting up a poster with a message of support and solidarity for the city to see instead – something that could stay up for however long it needed to.”

Run halted: Alone In Berlin fell silent when York Theatre Royal closed in response to the Coronavirus pandemic

What is the overall message you are seeking to put across? Is it about theatre and the arts at large being woven so vitally into the fabric of York, or is it more about that wider message of the importance of all pulling together?

“I think it’s both these messages. It’s a very uncertain time for all industries right now, but particularly the arts and entertainment industry.

“We wanted to find some way of reassuring the people of the city that the curtain will rise again and we want everyone to be there when it does.

“Also, the narrative of the nation ‘pulling together’ by staying at home to save lives has really come into force, particularly over the last few days. The wording we’ve chosen for the poster seems to be quite vital now and in keeping with this narrative.”

Where are the posters on show at York Theatre Royal?

“One can be found by our Stage Door on Duncombe Place, next to Red House Antiques. Another can be found next to our patio area to the left of the theatre building on St Leonard’s Place.”

York Theatre Royal’s logo: colour palette is replicated in the new poster

Why are posters such a powerful medium in tumultuous times?

“Poster art and design is a really interesting medium, and very difficult to get right. I suppose the key is to keep it simple, find your message and present it in a way that is striking.”

How did you choose the charcoal and old-gold colour scheme for the poster?  Echoes of wartime posters, perhaps?

“The colours are actually the brand colours of York Theatre Royal, which unintentionally seem to have connotations of those famous wartime-era posters.”

Will there be more posters to come?

“We hope that won’t be necessary and that we can replace them with show posters soon.”

How are you spending your days during the theatre shutdown?

“I’m finding ways to engage with our audiences online; yoga; a bit of dancing; chatting to family and friends online; making fancy meals and drinking a fair bit of gin.”

Livy Potter in the role of Nina in York Settlement Community Players’ production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at York Theatre Royal Studio, February 26 to March 7

On World Theatre Day, why does theatre and the arts matter so much to you, both in your work at the Theatre Royal and as an actor?

“There’s nothing quite like the arts as a means of bringing people together, not just physically but emotionally too.

“I love being part of an audience who are engaged, laughing as one and sometimes even crying together, too.

“One of the biggest joys in my life is being part of a group who come together with the purpose of creating something as one – a shared aim of telling a story for others to listen to and enjoy.

“In this difficult time, I think people are going to find really ingenious ways of achieving this and when this all does finally end, I can’t wait for us all to come together once more to experience the joys of theatre afresh.” 

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York Theatre Royal postpones Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad until 2021

Balancing act: York Theatre Royal postpones The Penelopiad until 2021 but that enables “a little more dreamtime” for the creative team

YORK Theatre Royal’s summer production of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad has been postponed.

Originally in the 2020 diary for July 10 to 25, associate director Juliet Forster’s show will be staged in 2021 instead on dates yet to be confirmed. 

Uncertainty surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic is holding up pre-production work by Forster’s creative team.

Juliet Forster: York Theatre Royal associate director, directing The Penelopiad

Juliet says: “The joy of Atwood’s work is that it doesn’t date, so although we are disappointed that we have to postpone our production of The Penelopiad, I know it will be just as relevant and exciting to stage this wonderful play in 2021.  

“And on the upside, for the creative team involved, having a little more dreamtime on this story will only make the final staging of it all the more spectacular!”

Written by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale and 2019’s The Testaments, The Penelopiad tells the story of Odysseus’ wife Penelope and the Trojan Wars from her point of view. 

Writer Margaret Atwood

Ticket holders will be contacted by the Theatre Royal box office in the coming weeks.

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CORONAVIRUS: South African company Isango Ensemble cancels York Theatre Royal season in May

Isango Ensemble: May tour to York Theatre Royal cancelled; may tour next year instead,

ISANGO Ensemble’s three-week season at York Theatre Royal in May – the “highlight of their year” – has been cancelled in light of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The South African company, whose performers are drawn mainly from the Cape Town townships, was programmed to perform three shows from its repertoire, The Mysteries, The Magic Flute and SS Mendi: Dancing the Death Drill, from May 5 to 23 in Isango’s first visit to York in their two-decade span. Now they hope to visit Yorkshire next year instead.

Isango Ensemble in SS Mend; Dancing The Death Drill. Picture: The Other Richard

Theatre Royal executive director Tom Bird says: “We are devastated that our friends Isango Ensemble are unable to make the trip to the UK. They have been in rehearsal for a specially curated season of work that was sure to delight and inspire our audiences with their joyous productions. We hope there will be another opportunity for us to welcome the company to York in the future.”

Director Mark Dornford-May, the Yorkshireman who co-founded Isango 20 years ago, says: “The whole ensemble were so excited to be visiting York for the first time in our 20-year history. It really was the highlight of the year. To have been rehearsing the shows and then not be able to play them in that beautiful theatre is a deeply felt blow.

Isango Ensemble in The Mysteries: Noluthando Boqwana as Lucifer, left, with Devils

“Tom and all his colleagues have been so supportive throughout the last few difficult days and together we hope to create a plan to get to play in Yorkshire next year.”

Ticket holders will be contacted by the Theatre Royal box office in the coming weeks.​​

Did you know?

ISANGO Ensemble is a Cape Town theatre company led by director and co-founder Mark Dornford-May and music directors Pauline Malefane and Mandisi Dyantyis.

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CORONAVIRUS: York Theatre Royal closed to the public from today

Building closed: York Theatre Royal

THE York Theatre Royal building is closed to the public until further notice.

This morning’s full statement reads: “Following the latest Government advice about Coronavirus, the York Theatre Royal building is now closed to the public until further notice. You can still contact our box office by phone on 01904 623568.  

“All Youth Theatre, LAMDA, Crafty Tales and Adult Theatre Workshop sessions will stop running for the time being. Costume hire is also closed until further notice.”

The statement continues: “It’s with enormous sadness that we temporarily close our doors, but the safety of our audiences, staff and community is of utmost importance. We apologise for the disruption and thank you for your support during this period of great uncertainty.

“We are making contact with ticket holders for the cancelled performances. If the closure period is extended, we will be in touch with bookers for future performances in good time, and we’ll also post updates to our website and social media channels. See you soon.”

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Lights out, but what are York’s theatres doing to keep the fat lady singer at bay?

“Critical situation”: Dark nights, dark days too, at York Theatre Royal until further notice

CLOSED. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. York’s theatres have shut down en masse in response to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Monday briefing on Black Monday to avoid unnecessary social contact at pubs, clubs and theatres.

One by one came the measured official statements in response to the rising Coronavirus pandemic, announced with regret, sadness and heavy hearts.

By way of contrast, a tide of anger rose ever higher on social media from the entertainment industry, feeling shafted by the PM not legislating closure, merely advising it.

In doing so, he placed the decision in the (no doubt frequently washed) hands  of theatre managements, boards and trusts, whose sense of moral responsibility left no option but to announce closure until further notice as a precaution amid the Coronavirus crisis. When insurance effectively amounts to no insurance, hell by hand cart is the only journey in town.

Lights out: Ellen Kent Company’s La Boheme, at the Grand Opera House tomorrow is snuffed out by the Prime Minister’s Coronavirus dictum

The Grand National, the first post-Brexit Eurovision, the Chelsea Flower Show, Glastonbury Festival, the Euro 2020 football championships, are all scrapped for 2020. A tsunami of further announcements will follow, not least from theatre companies cancelling or postponing tours.

Keep Calm and Carry On may be the mantra, but the fear is that Keep Calm and Carry On may well turn to carrion on account of, well, the accounts.

York Theatre Royal, in St Leonard’s Place, Theatre @41 Monkgate, the Joseph Rowntree Theatre, in Haxby Road, and Riding Lights Theatre Company’s Friargate Theatre, in Lower Friargate, have individual boards and managements addressing urgent, previously unimaginable requirements and strictures.

Likewise, the Ambassadors Theatre Group, owners of the Grand Opera House, is co-ordinating the Coronavirus-impacted strategy throughout ATG, making statements for the Cumberland Street theatre, whose staff are now working remotely from home.

Clock stopped: PIck Me Up Theatre’s Tom’s Midnight Garden was curtailed after Monday’s performance at Theatre @ 41 Monkgate, York

These are unprecedented circumstances. Circumstances not even seen in wartime when theatres – some, not all – across the land stayed open through 1939 to 1945.

Circumstances where the new C-word has led to theatre after theatre – together with cinemas, music clubs, museums, galleries, visitor attractions, SparkYork, et al – to issue variations on: “It is with enormous sadness that we take these measures, but the safety of our audiences, staff and community is of utmost importance.”

So, where does each of these York theatres stand now, in a city where, like the rest, the theatre focus is turning to those of the medical variety? The best advice is to visit the theatre websites for information on the present closures, ticket refunds, and, in light of the harsh financial reality, Donate Today requests. “Your support is vital to our survival,” pleads York Theatre Royal bluntly.

A spokesman for the Theatre Royal – take it as read that it was executive director Tom Bird – said: “The closure of theatres in the UK puts York Theatre Royal, along with hundreds of other theatres, into a critical situation.”

Road closed: Riding Lights Theatre Company have had give up The Narrow Road tour for Lent

Does that make it theatre’s version of the intensive care unit? Time will tell, but the arts have a way of defying the last rites, always have, always will, keeping the fat lady singer waiting, the final curtain up in the flies. What they will make of Richmond Rishi’s £330 billion loan scheme is another discussion point for the in-tray, however.

In a nutshell, York Theatre Royal’s shows and public events initially are cancelled until April 11, but there surely will be no miraculous resurrection on Easter Sunday. The York Theatre Royal building, box office and café remained open initially, but the building closed to the public today (March 19). The box office is still taking phone calls on 01904 623568; ticket refunds are underway.

Shows at the Grand Opera House, in common with all Ambassadors Theatre Group theatres, are “temporarily suspended with immediate effect”, with a policy of postponement and future re-arranged dates to be confirmed, rather than cancellations, at this stage.

“We are following government guidance which is currently ambiguous,” say ATG. “It is unclear how long theatres are to remain closed. We will reopen them once the government and medical authorities confirm that there is no risk to our audiences, performers and staff. 

The Missing Peace: one of the now missing pieces at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre, but with plans for re-arranged dates later

“We are working hard with our producers and performers to understand how this will play out, so we can’t confirm that at this time. We will try, wherever possible, to re-programme shows that have been suspended.”

The Joseph Rowntree Theatre will remain closed “until we receive further instruction that it is safe to reopen”. “We will be issuing further advice in the coming days on how we are going to manage ticket refunds and exchanges,” says trust chairman Dan Shrimpton. “We would ask that you please bear with us and wait for us to contact you.”

The Theatre @41 Monkgate website is yet to be updated following Monday’s Coronavirus ultimatum – the About Us section has Covid-19 Guidance from before – but Pick Me Up Theatre artistic director Robert Readman announced performances would cease after Tom’s Midnight Garden that evening.

He also cancelled Pick Me Up’s Sondheim 90 birthday concert this Sunday and the April 17 to 25 run of The Pirates Of Penzance. Be assured that Coronavirus has been the death of York Shakespeare Project’s Macbeth from March 31 to April 4 too.

Riding Lights, York’s Christian theatre company based at Friargate Theatre, have cancelled their March 16 to April 11 tour of The Narrow Road. “We are very sorry not to be performing this Lent but wish you a happy and safe Easter,” their website says.

Meanwhile, prayers and thoughts go to all those working in the theatres at York Hospital and elsewhere, preparing for whatever is to come.

Copyright of The Press, York

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York Theatre Royal cancels shows until April 11. Donations sought

York Theatre Royal executive director Tom Bird

YORK Theatre Royal is cancelling all public performances and events until April 11 after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Coronavirus briefing on avoiding unnecessary social contact.

Ticket holders are being asked to consider donating the price of their tickets to the theatre, Britain’s oldest playhouse outside London.

Shows at theatres nationwide have been cancelled in response to yesterday’s Government advice on the Coronavirus pandemic, asking the public not to go to theatres, pubs and clubs.

The Theatre Royal box office will be in touch with ticket holders for the next four weeks of performances, covering March 17 to April 11, and they are being requested not to contact the box office directly but wait to be called.

Executive director Tom Bird said: “The closure of theatres in the UK puts York Theatre Royal, along with hundreds of other theatres, into a critical situation. We are asking that people consider donating their ticket purchase to the theatre at this time. As a charity, their support is crucial to our survival.

“If they cannot do this, we’d ask that they consider a credit to their account. If none of this is satisfactory, they can choose a refund.”

York Theatre Royal further advises: “If the closure period is extended, we will be in touch with bookers for future performances in good time, and we’ll also post updates to our website and social media channels.

“It’s with enormous sadness that we take these measures, but the safety of our audiences, staff and community is of utmost importance. 

“We are looking at ways we can be of use to the wider York community during this time. More details regarding these plans will follow.”

The theatre building, in St Leonard’s Place, is remaining open at present, including the café and box office.