Ghost walks are popular in the city of York. The walks combine performance and a tour guide experience. The ingenious Belt Up Theatre take this tried and tested format and added a twist to it. The performance starts from York Theatre Royal and moves onto the street of York. The night that I went is was snowing lightly and the footpaths were a little icy, so I set off with some trepidation. As the walk progressed, I found I was really enjoying walking round the streets of York on a winter evening. This wasn’t something, I’ve done very often and you do see the city in a different way. The performance consists of the usual stories told outside particular spots. However, Belt Up Theatre bring a little extra in the characterisation of the ghost walk leader. I don’t want to go into details and spoil the experience for those who haven’t been on the walk yet, but to say this is another excellent Belt Up performance, which asks the audience to work hard and participate to get the most out of it.
Men of the World (York Theatre Royal, 9th February 2010)
In Men of the World, I think John Godber has wonderfully captured the atmosphere of the coach trip, in this case to the Rhine. He manages to pick up the conversations of a set of characters who travel overland from their Yorkshire homes to Germany. What he does well is portray the humour in lovely one liners. Men of the World follows the format of Godber’s Bouncers where three actors play a range of characters. In this case the ‘men’ were actually two men and a woman, and much of the humour came from the fact that they were playing people of either sex. I think there are some wonderfully funny moments in this production. However, it is the drivers which are the most rounded characters. The problem I had with the other characters was that they were too stereotypical and even though there were comments towards the end of the play that all the passengers were lovely decent people, it didn’t really change the fact that they had been played as comic types. Personally, I found some of the characterisation was a little uncomfortable such as the landlords of the Bed and Breakfast and Martin the over mothered young man.
With Godber’s work, you know what you’re going to get. On the evening, I went to do see this production, the audience clearly loved it.
Three Sisters (Lyric Hammersmith, 30th January 2010)
The Lyric Hammersmith’s production took Checkov’s Three Sisters partly out of its original context and placed it in a modern setting, which in itself didn’t necessarily demonstrate that Chechov’s play deals with universal themes, because some of the dilemmas in the drama are particularly relevant to the period in which the play is set. I felt that the it was the relationships between characters and the emotion came across well in this production. The stage and backstage boundaries became blurred, and I felt that the stage felt cluttered in an interesting way. In the second half the second half props and scenery was brought together to create an attic room and a very claustrophobic feel, which reflected on the relationship of the sisters and those around them.
Apart from feeling that the music at the interval was rather jarring, I thought this was an enjoyable production, with some strong performances from Poppy Miller, Romola Gari and Clare Dunn.
Further Information
Beatles to Bowie (The National Portrait Gallery, 12th December 2009 and 16th January 2009)
The Sixties as a decade isn’t really my era, but I did grow up with the music, because I played my parent’s vinyls as much as I could when I was a teenager. This is why I found this exhibition so interesting and went back for a second visit. I heard of many of the artists, but didn’t always have an image of them in my mind. It just felt that as you walked into the exhibition that images capture their subjects as if they are forever young. These are the images of people who are pensioners now, such as Roger Daltrey, Cilla Black and Mick Jagger, and here they are starting out.
As you enter the exhibition, the first image that you meet is a young Elvis. Take a second look, this is actually Cliff Richard. Later in the exhibition there is also an image of Billy Fury resembling Elvis (by David Wedgbury). It shows how much Elvis has an influence on style in the early Sixties, with this stylised slicked back dark hair look.
The exhibition is set up in chronological order displaying examples from each year of the decade. There is a clear transition as you walk through the exhibition from the polished posed black and white images which consists very much of straight edges to the later more softer focused colour images. There is also a focus on the role of women and a wonderful image of the Poppets (Millon Dollar Poppets by John French) as well as a display of some of the clothes worn by female singers. Women are also portrayed in such a way that they cut across the men, such as the intriguing photograph of The Rolling Stones with Pattie Boyd, where Boyd is in white in contrast to the male members of the group, and is positioned as a diagonal at odds with them. Her feet are off the ground. This is a device used in several images in the exhibition.
Clothes and fashion are very important in the photographs, but many of the images focus on the face and bring the subject’s faces right to the front of the photograph. It is as if their face is in your face. One of the most striking images is an early Terry O’Neill image of The Rolling Stones, where it is not just Jagger’s lips which are highlighed but all the lips of every member of the band. There are lots of other images of The Rolling Stones and The Who which focus on the face, and which demonstrate how important these two groups were in the sixties.
Of course the images are posed, but in many there is a sense of theatricality about them, such as Angus Bean’s Johnny Kidd dressed as a pirate looking as if he is holding on to the rigging of a ship. Michael Joseph’s 1968 image of The Rolling Stones makes a comment on class, showing the Rolling Stones as tramps at a banquet in a country house. The irony for me was that The Rolling Stones themselves at this point were in a sense paving the way for a new aristocracy, the future inhabitants of the houses lived in by the landed gentry.
Photographers place their subjects in the landscape with very interesting results. There is a mixture of those in urban setting and those in the countryside. One of the most fascinating is Tom Jones Overlooking Pontypridd (Tony Frank, 1966). The photograph is very ambiguous drawing on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Wanderer. It is as if Jones was part of, and not part of, this landscape at the same time. Portrayed as a solitary figure looking back at the town, he could be going home, or leaving. Another image is The Rolling Stones in Mason’s Yard by Gered Mankowitz. Here we see a building, either half built, or half derelict. The men are posed against the diagonal lines of the building site. Buildings in decay are used a lot in the images. For example, Beatles, Euston Road portrays the group leaping in the air against vast white space and below them is the derelict landscape of the Euston Road framing the bottom of the image. In contrast to this is a country landscape, The Beatles, Perthshire by Robert Whitaker, which places the subjects right at the front of the image with umbrellas and present a strange contrast with the sublime landscape in the background.
The delight for me was the images of Adam Faith. He was enormously handsome as a young man. My parents owned many of his songs. I also remember him in the film Stardust, which was my era, the Seventies. The Sixties are presented as a progression from one image to another. We see glimpses of Bowie and T Rex who were to embody the sense of the Seventies. Will the Seventies be one of the next exhibitions?
I wanted to revisit this exhibition before it closed. I found it a really fascinating and engaging exhibition. I heard one visitor next to me, say this will be the last time we’ll be really interested in the Sixties as each generation grows up. For me it was the narratives around the images themselves and why a photographer took a creative decision to produce the image in a certain way. I felt it was really relevant, in this exhibition, to include images of the photographers who produced the images. The labels at the side of each image said a little about the subject of the photograph, rather the story behind the photographs themselves. Without these narratives in the exhibition, though the catalogue does provide this background, I found myself viewing and thinking about why and how the images were produced.
References
Pepper, Terence (2009) Beatles to Bowie. The 60s Exposed. London: The National Portrait Galley
The Misanthrope (The Comedy Theatre, 16th January 2010)
The production looked like a very traditional proscenium arch comedy with its elaborate set. The plot contained all the elements of a farce, the confusion, character types and even some entering and exiting through different doors in the set. There was a play on the fact that it was a modern-day production of a seventeenth-century text. Not so subtle devices were used to make the historical links. For example, the music transformed from seventeenth century to contemporary dance music. At the end of the play all the cast, except Alceste (Damian Lewis), were dressed in historical costumes, on the pretence that they were dressed for a fancy dress party. Characters talked in rhymes, some of which weren’t that obvious and the speech flowed along. Some rhymes were surprising and other rhymes jarred which made me listen even more to try and hear them for their amusing effect. At time, the language became strange and very theatrical and I felt I was taken into an unreal comedy world, to the point that, strangely it felt like I was watching a parody of a farce.
The plot was based around celebrity and our celebrity obsessed culture. I’m sure this was deliberately ironic in casting Keira Knighley as Jennifer, which for me added to the feel that I was watching parody of a farce, because casting was asking me to bring references from outside the play world. However, the cast was a strong cast overall and indeed Knightley’s programme biography is by far the shortest, though her film work is what has brought her to the attention of a wider audience outside the theatre. I felt that Knightley didn’t have same presence on stage as she does on film. Alongside Kelly Price (as Ellen) and Tara FitzGerald (as Marcia), the women in the play were very funny and central as a group to the success of this production. Damian Lewis was an excellent as Alceste. Standing out from the rest of the cast, he was able to rant and pronounce on moral standards and at the end of the play through his own stubbornness was left isolated from the other characters.
Previews and Reviews
between the acts 