David Tennant returns to the RSC to play Richard II

DT as R11
(c) RSC

At a Press Conference in London today, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced its five-year strategy and its Winter 2013 season.  The headline announcement was that David Tennant will return to the RSC to play Richard II in their 2013 Winter Season. The news, though exciting to hear officially, had been circulating for some time.   Richard II will be a short six-week  run in Stratford from 10th October until 16th November.  The production then transfers to the Barbican from 9th December until 25th January 2014.

Looking at reactions to the news on Twitter and other Social Media, the casting news has been very well received and it signals a change of direction from the Michael Boyd years. There was some relish in the announcement that David Tennant would be returning to the RSC, rather than a sense of playing down his celebrity status and attempting to focus on ensemble as a core value.  Clearly there will be anxieties around managing the booking process, the returns’ queue and managing the back stage experience again with Tennant’s return to Stratford, but that does provide the RSC with media stories that they can feed out during the run to keep themselves in the public eye.  The shift from RST to Barbican will mean a move from the thrust stage to the proscenium arch.  There seems to be no desire to want to replicate your theatre in another building here.  In addition, the return to the Barbican reminds me of previous RSC seasons at the Barbican and that the promise of a London home might be closer.  However, I am not so fixated on the London home because I have to travel a distance to both Stratford and London, though I am aware this will be good news for others.

Another announcement today was that Shakespeare’s plays won’t go on in the Swan for the immediate future.  Instead the Swan will be the home for Shakespeare’s Contemporaries.  This sounds like an exciting plan, and I look forward to future Swan productions, but as King John and Richard III were such a success last year, I was hoping for one or two Shakespeare productions in the Swan.  Indeed, I had hoped that maybe Richard II would have gone into the Swan.  It would work so well in the small intimate space.  Though the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is supposed to be an intimate space, I sometimes feel dwarfed by the height of the stage, and its size, especially when it is over busy as in the Shipwreck season.

Furthermore, Greg Doran also announced that  as part of  his five-year strategy was to do the whole canon in five years. Will I finally get to see Two Noble Kinsmen at the RSC?  It’s the last of my complete works.

Further Information RSC Press release

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The Effect (National Theatre, November 2012- January 2013)

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Poster Image for The Effect (c) National Theatre

‘Experiment begins‘.

The audience is entering the auditorium of the Cottesloe Theatre, and they are also entering the waiting room of the Raushen Pharmaceutical Company where drug  trials will take place.  We are given wristbands to add to the effect that we are also patients in the trial.  Sitting on mustard yellow seats, on the red carpet the  next a small coffee table, I felt I my seat was actually on the set.

Lucy Prebble’s play explores whether falling in love is caused by chemicals in the brain, and whether depression can be cured by drugs, or is triggered by events in people’s lives. The debates are carefully conveyed through the dialogue between the four characters – two trialists and two doctors.

The play is such a success because of the dialogue and structure and because there are some fantastic performances from the cast.  There are two doctors, Toby and Lorna, played by Tom Goodman-Hill  and Anastasia Hille  and two trialists Connie played by Billie Piper  and Tristan played by Jonjo O’Neill.  Billie Piper and JonJo O’Neill were excellent in this production and really made me feel that they had really fallen in love.  Connie who tends to analyse, but when she is falling in love there is a sense of irony that she doesn’t really understand what is happening to her. Billie Piper is able to portray the awkwardness of the early moments of the relationship, such as fiddling with her hair, and the rubbing of the back of her shin with the other foot.  Much of the dialogue is very quick and there is a rhythm to it.  Some of the scenes are overlaid to great effect, and this was a device that the director Rupert Goold also used in his RSC Romeo and Juliet production.

The production is very visual.  Data is projected onto Connie and Tristan’s body and across the floor, as if this is how they might be made up. There’s a very poignant moment towards the end of the production, where Lorna mops up blood, and a brain projected onto the stage floor.

The shift from the clinic to the old asylum adds a lovely contrast and undermines the rigour and routine of the trial.  This is the moment that Tristan and Connie become closer. The highlight, which was Jonjo O’Neill’s tap dance. It reminded me of the time he danced to Mr Bojangles as part of the RSC Gala in 2011.  The Saturday Review reviewer said that the tap dance represented the exhilaration of falling in love, and I thought that was a lovely way to describe it.  The lovers/trialists are interrupted by Lorna and as an audience we don’t get our moment of applause, so I felt denied of my moment of acknowledgement and felt that the trialists had as well.  This makes the frustration conveyed as Connie and Tristan are kept apart after the discovery more relevant.

Just before the interval Tristan and Connie manage to escape the restrictions placed on them and meet in Connie’s room.  There’s a very tender scene between when they eventually make love.  In the interval, someone said to me that they didn’t want their heart broken, and there was a sense then that all would not be well at the end of the play.

The doctor scenes at times seemed a distraction from the young lovers, but they offered a contrast and another angle. I felt that the brain in the bucket was a little too slapstick and even though the TED style speech given by Toby does get across his viewpoint well, it did not work  in relation to the rest of the dialogue.  I think that was because I was so interested in Connie and Tristan, I wanted to see more of their narrative. However, as Lorna’s story was revealed, I was surprised, and as she moved towards the tablets at the end, it was if she’d been dissolved into the illusion that she so much wanted to dispute.

What kept me engaged throughout was that I felt I was so close to the performance both physically and emotionally.

Connie and Tristan walk off stage at the end of the play as Ingrid Michaelson’s ‘Keep Breathing’ is playing, it made me feel that there was some hope.

The Effect runs until Feb 23rd at the National Theatre.

Reviews (all links are to external sites)

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What happened to the RSC's long ensemble?

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The RSC long ensemble gala in the Swan 2011. The gala was to raise funds for James Gale and his family.

Updated 6th January 2013. Thanks to updates from RSC long ensemble audience members.

After I saw Debbie Korley and Dharmesh Patel in the RSC’s young people’s King Lear at the Theatre Royal in York recently, I started to wonder what the rest of the RSC’s long ensemble were dong now. I had seen some of long ensemble working in the theatre over the past year, and heard about other things they’d done since the long ensemble project ended after a residency New York in the Summer of 2011. The long ensemble was made up of 44 actors and started in Stratford in the Spring of 2009 with As You Like It (dir by Michael Boyd) and The Winter’s Tale (dir by David Farr). These two plays were joined in the Summer of 2011 by Lucy Bailey’s Julius Caesar. For me the success of the long ensemble came the year after with Rupert Goold’s Romeo and Juliet and David Farr’s King Lear. Both plays played with time and space and for me the plays worked well with the transition from the Courtyard theatre to the new RST (via Newcastle and the Roundhouse). It was the long ensemble that opened the new RST and brought the RSC home – so to speak. The partnership between Jonjo O’Neill and Sam Troughton, as Mercutio and Romeo, brought an energy to the project, but also demonstrated how a partnership built up over a period of time could work so well.

I am sure that it was hoped that the actors and directors would move on to other things, and that some would return to the RSC.

There’s been a few long ensemble reunions in 2012. The first was the Duchess of Malfi reuniting Adam Burton and Tunji Kasim at the Old Vic. Another reunion was down the road from the Old Vic, at the Young Vic, where Sam Troughton, Mariah Gale and Gruffudd Glyn could be seen in Three Sisters. As well as Three Sisters it seems that Sam Troughton has been very busy since he left the long ensemble. He was in A Streetcar Named Desire in Liverpool, and Love, Love, Love at the Royal Court, as well as The Town on television. Mariah Gale is currently in Gruesome Playground Injuries at the Gate Theatre.

Later in the year, at the Old Vic, after being in Children’s Children at the Almeida, Darrell D’Silva was in the very successful Hedda Gabler. Forbes Masson will be playing Banquo alongside James McAvoy’s Macbeth Westminster studios. was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, plating Mr Tumnus, for Threesixty Theatre in Kensington Gardens. The production was directed by long ensemble director Rupert Goold. He also starred in the Belgrade Theatres Crackers. There were also glimpses of Forbes supporting Melanie Masson’s on ITV’s X Factor.

The RSC women seemed to have done well since the long ensemble project ended and I enjoyed, Noma Dumezweni, Katy Stephens and Mariah Gale’s audio performances as the three witches from Macbeth in the Staging Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum. Noma Dumezweni was also in Bola Agbaje’s play, Belong, at the Royal Court in the Spring of 2012 and will be in The Feast at the young Vic from February. I managed to see Katy Stephens, who was excellent in Calixto Bieito’s Forests, but missed her playing Laura in The Father at the Belgrade theatre in Coventry. Katy is currently playing the fairy in the Belgrade Theatre’s Sleeping Beauty. Kirsty Woodward was fantastic in Kneehigh’s Steptoe and Son, which I saw at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and at the start of 2012, I saw her in The Way of the World Sheffield Crucible.

Kathryn Hunter joined the long ensemble in the second year of the project, and made a quick exit in the middle of the Roundhouse season. She went on to revive her as Peter the Red Ape in Kafka’s Monkey, which I thought was a stunning piece of physical theatre and then returned to the RSC in A Tender Thing this autumn.

One thing that has been surprising is how few of the long ensemble returned to Stratford after the long ensemble project finished. Though Jonjo O’Neill returned to the RSC in a very successful Richard III in the summer of 2012, it has taken awhile for a group of actors to return to the RSC to work together. Indeed, it has taken over a year for four members of the long ensemble to work together again in the Swan in Stratford. Adam Burton, Paul Hamilton, Patrick Romer, and James Tucker are now back in Stratford performing in the long ensemble in the Swan and Ansu Kabia is playing Nim in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Greg Hicks will return to the RSC in 2013 to play Claudius in Hamlet. Oliver Ryan is another member of the long ensemble to return to Stratford for the 1013 Summer season, and long ensemble director, David Farr, will be directing Hamlet.

Sadly Peter Shorey and James Gale have passed away.

And what happened to the other long ensemble directors? After directing a very good Taming of the Shrew for the RSC Winter season 2012, Lucy Bailey returns to the RSC for the Winter 2013 to direct The Winter’s Tale. Greg Doran,who directed the long ensemble interlude, Morte D’Arthur, took over the RSC as Artistic Director in September 2012 and I am now awaiting the announcement of his first season. He is currently directing The Orphan of Zhao in the Swan.

And the Artistic director, Michael Boyd what’s he doing now? Well, he left the RSC in September 2012, but his final production as a director at the RSC, Boris Godunov is now in the Swan.

I think some people felt that the long ensemble was too large to work well, and that many of the actors didn’t really get chance to use to really shine. However, the long ensemble did give some actors a chance to play a range of parts. Sam Troughton showed he could play both the lead and bit parts with great skill. Indeed, he produced was exceptional as a Lord in The Winter’s Tale and entertaining as an energetic and angry Romeo in Rupert Goold’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s no surprise to see that Sam Troughton has gone on to play a range of parts since leaving the RSC, and his Mercutio, Jonjo O’Neill, has also shown his range and he is getting great reviews at the National Theatre in The Effect,

Other actors, who showed some promise in the long ensemble do not seem to have done other things. For example, Dyfan Dwyfor played a much more emotional Romeo than Troughton, when I saw him understudy Troughton early in the Straford run. I have not seen that Dwyfor has been in the theatre, since leaving the RSC and even the long ensemble has not changed the transient nature of most actors’ lives. I am hoping that Debbie Korley and Dharmesh Patel will go on to do more than the Young People’s Shakespeare. Both have demonstrated through this vehicle that they can do more than waiting women and bit parts and I look forward to seeing them in other things in the future.

I will have missed many long ensemble appearances, so please let me know of any others that are not here, or about anything you’ve seen with an actor from the long ensemble in it.

Update 10th March 2013

I have recently see Noma Dumezweni in Feast at the Young Vic theatre and Sam Troughton in Bull at Sheffield Crucible. Katy Stephens and David Rubin are also returning to Stratford over the Summer to work in the Swan.

 

My Long ensemble blogs

The Winter’s Tale and As You Like It

As You Like It, Newcastle 2009

Katy Stephens’ Hair

Julius Caesar

The RSC ensemble debate

King Lear

Romeo and Juliet

RSC, South Bank Show

The RSC Comes Home

Romeo and Juliet again

Antony and Cleopatra part 1

Antony and Cleopatra part 2

RSC Revealed

New Writing at the Hampstead Theatre

Full details about the long ensemble project can be found here.

Julie Raby2 Comments

Short Review: A Christmas Carol (Flanagan Collective, Lion and Lamb York)

Last night, I went to the A Christmas Carol dining experience at the Lion and Lamb, a pub in the centre of York.  This is a show directed by Tom Bellerby for the Flanagan Collective.

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The show is a mix of theatre and a dining experience.  As we enjoyed a drink in the bar of the Lion and Lamb, we were  invited by the ghost Marley (John Holt-Roberts) to cheer miserable Scrooge  (Ed Wren) up on Christmas Eve.  We left the bar and go into the street where we are invited into Scrooge’s home, which is also the front room of the pub.  Here the show begins. The experience is a mix of drama, music, and party games, as well as eating and a drink of mulled wine.

This is the kind of show you would see at the Edinburgh festival.  It is intimate and fun, and a great way to celebrate at Christmas time.  It is an audience participation show, but no one is embarrassed and it is great to see the two actors put everyone at ease so that the audience can go along with the concept and join in when appropriate.  The show is well structured and all the elements work well together.  There are some lovely surprises, so it would be mean of me to spoil them here on my blog.

This was a Christmas present and a lovely way to spend a Thursday evening at Christmas.  I understand that tickets are selling fast, so you’ll need to book to ensure you get a place.  The ticket price includes the show, food and drink.

Reviews and Further Information

Backstage Pass

The York Press Review

Flanagan Collective Facebook Page

 

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Looking forward to Shakespeare in 2013

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2013 will be another year for celebrity Shakespeare. James McAvoy will play Macbeth early in the year. The Michael Grandage season continues with David Walliams and Sheridan Smith staring in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Jude Law in Henry V.  In autumn, at the Old Vic,  Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones will be playing Beatrice and Bendick in Much Ado About Nothing.  Yet to go on sale, but not a surprise, Adrian Lester will play Othello at the National Theatre.

In Stratford, there are lots to look forward to, particularly the Alex Waldman and Pippa Nixon reunion in As You Like It and again in Hamlet with Jonathan Slinger in the title role.  Joining As You Like It and Hamlet on the RST main stage will be All’s Well that End’s Well, and in the Swan theatre there is a Titus Andronicus.

At the Globe, I’m looking forward to The Tempest, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The RSC and the Globe are bringing their Shakespeare  to York with The Winter’s Tale and  a Henry VI season.

There has been a taste for concept Shakespeare recently. The Wyndham’s Much Ado About Nothing and Rupert Goold’s The Merchant of Venice split audiences and the critics, but were very interesting interpretations. Will 2013 bring another surprise?  It looks like the Globe will continue with its original practice approach, and there is talk that the RSC Hamlet might return to renaissance dress.

With most of the summer and autumn mapped out, I am waiting with anticipation, and excitement, for the announcement of Greg Doran’s first season as artistic director of the RSC.  What will be the RSC’s winter season be like?  I doubt we’ll see another long ensemble project, but I think we’ll see the return of the ‘celebrity’ actor to the RSC. I’m sure we’ll know soon.

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