Theatre Review: Twelfth Night, Greenwich Park

After six years, and twelve productions, Rainbow Theatre’s summer visits to Greenwich have become a welcome regular fixture.  Always genial, witty and committed to presenting Shakespeare’s plays as uncomplicated narratives, their latest offering, Twelfth Night, in the Observatory Gardens, is no exception.

It is a feature of director Nicolas Young’s productions that he engages with the audience at the earliest possible opportunity.  On this occasion Ross Muir and Peter Goode, as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, made a beeline for the children I was with and gave a very good comedy double act explaining their roles in the story.  After that the ten year old could hardly look at the double-act on stage without giggling, and he wasn’t helped by their bawdy gesturing either.

The style of Twelfth Night was entertainingly exaggerated; with Andre James Storey’s Orsino taking the laurels for his extraordinarily energetic lovelorn duke.  His performance was big enough, and grand enough, to fill the whole of Greenwich Park with unrequited love – appropriately he was almost Olympian in the scale of his supposed adoration of Olivia.   Although this resulted in an unequal match when his real love for a wryly-witty Viola was revealed, it somehow didn’t matter.  The practical logistics of how the marriage might develop were neither here nor there; it just seemed like a good idea at the time.

The sub-plot rivalled the main action for audience interest, but Matt Salisbury’s Sebastian and twin sibling Emily Bennett’s Viola managed to hold their own against a comic tidal wave emanating from Countess Olivia’s kinsmen.  Malvolio stands and falls by the foolery that surrounds him, and Mark Lascelles produced a convincing comic reaction to the nonsense around him.  In particular his cross gartering scene was tremendously funny – and worrying, as he adopted a series of shockingly awful poses echoing the covers of men’s magazines.   Nicolas Young produced a fine comic scene in the garden that rivalled both the recent productions in the West End for comic value.

There is something consistently good-hearted about Rainbow Theatre’s productions; they are pitched to exactly the right level for the venue and the audience.  As the audience were doused with regular showers during the play I wondered how Barry Stevenson’s Feste would deal with his closing song, ‘the rain it raineth very day’.   The answer was that, spontaneously and pleasingly, the audience joined in to accompany him.

A Celebration for Stephen

The life of Greenwich Theatre’s front-of-house photographer will be celebrated on 1 August.

Barbara Windsor in Sing a Rude Song, 1970

Stephen Moreton-Prichard was the Greenwich Theatre’s front-of-house photographer for 15 years. During that time he photographed some true greats – some already well established, some, relative unknowns destined for stardom.

Now, his life is to be celebrated with a special one-off show at Greenwich Theatre. A Celebration for Stephen will bring together artists, professionals, colleagues and friends in a special performance for one night only on 1 August. Stephen died earlier this year after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s, and all the proceeds will go to the Alzheimer’s Society.

Stephen took up professional photography in 1960 after a career in the Army. He spent the next 38 years working in film for numerous clients. Buildings were a speciality, as were product shots for publications like Which?, in the days when magazines contracted professionals, instead of, as now, relying on PR digital handouts.

He worked from a studio on the top floor of a rambling four-story house on the borders of Blackheath and Lewisham, where he and his wife Celia moved to in the late 1960s.

But it was theatre, and in particular Greenwich Theatre, where Stephen’s creativity was allowed to flourish. His natural eye gave him the artistic flair, and his professionalism delivered the shot.

When Greenwich Theatre was reopened in 1969 publicity photos were needed and Stephen was asked to provide them. It was the start of a working relationship that lasted until 1984.

Over those 15 years he photographed many productions, and many rising stars. Barbara Windsor dressed as a pearly queen in 1970 stands out, a dramatic looking Mia Farrow in 1973, Glenda Jackson dressed as a maid in 1974, a young Nicholas Lyndhurst in 1974, Penelope Keith, Felicity Kendal, Kenneth Branagh, and a 21-year-old Rupert Everett – destined for Hollywood – were all captured by his lens.

The show on 1 August is being produced by Stephen’s wife Celia and a night of rare variety is to be expected – founder of the well-regarded Centenary Company, Celia is well known in local theatre circles as a minor impresario.

She has drawn together friends, professionals, colleagues and locals who have something to give by way of tribute. Expect choral music, foot-stomping music hall numbers, calypso, Gilbert and Sullivan, Welsh folk, Purcell, Mahler, William Byrd, Satie, Mozart and spoken tributes. An exhibition of Stephen’s photographs will also be on display.

Tickets are £15, with all proceeds going to the charity – the theatre has donated itself free for the evening, and many of the professional performers have waived their fee.

Many locals who knew Stephen will be there, while others are flying in from as far afield as Australia for the performance.

“Expect much laughter,” Celia told Greenwich.co.uk, “and just one or two tears.”

Show: A Celebration for Stephen
Date and time: Sunday 1 August 2010, 7.30 pm
Box Office: www.greenwichtheatre.org.uk

Rupert Everett in Another Country, 1981

Kenneth Branagh in Francis, 1983

Nicholas Lyndhurst in Harding’s Luck, 1974

Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal in Norman Conquests, 1974

Glenda Jackson and Susannah York in The Maids, 1974

Joy Parker, Gwen Watford and Mia Farrow in Three Sisters, 1973

Review: 3rd Ring Out, Greenwich Park

“This is a test. For the next nine hundred words, this is a test of the Emergency Publishing system. This is only a review.”

If you heard those words on the telly or radio, you would be both annoyed and scared. Annoyed because of the inconvenience at missing a key scene and scared because the attention signal could mean the end of life as we know it.

In Zoë Svendsen’s play, 3rd Ring Out: Rehearsing Our Future, we act those decisions in the manner of the Choose Your Own Adventure books you might have had as a kid. It starts off as with a somewhat patronising look at the view of Greenwich and Docklands from The Observatory. While it’s patronising for someone who lives here, it literally sets the scene, which takes place in a converted freight container.

After the health and safety briefing, the play starts with an audio montage of news reports of apocalyptic environmental destruction. The play, set over a period of 22 years from 2010-2033 has its first act set the scene by having the audience vote electronically for decisions. One being that a local businessman has made a killing in the stock exchange and has decided to invest in a green business venture. These are an ecosphere, an urban beach and Greening the cities with foliage atop the buildings.

The actresses who host the play take the roles of architectural consultants, cabinet advisors and civil servants whenever a decision has to be made. The decisions are made electronically with the use of a three button keypad and you vote on each one.

A key decision is that you’ve got to decide about the flood defences for London and the coast of England and Wales. One actress asked us: “How does it feel to spend £45m?” Basically, in doing so, you have to juggle priorities. Flood defences or NHS, for instance. By Act two, this is unfinished, being over time and over budget.

Act Two is where things really get interesting. The theatre turns into a local emergency command post, where the audience has to decide what to do when there is a major incident: a heat wave in 2033.

With a map on the table, you responded toincidents by putting plastic figures on it to denote what’s happening. At this point, Augusto Boal’s theory of the spectator becoming a “spect-actor” comes in. The audience reacts to what they see by voting on the decision or moving the action by moving the plastic figures to quell riots and fight fires in a strip of land that included Greenwich, Docklands and the old East End.

Playing the role of being in charge of public order, I had to move police and army to designated areas, or where I think they could do best work. All the while, I couldn’t help notice that it had a somewhat cold war feel to it. It felt like I was the chief executive of Sheffield City Council in the Brechtian drama, Threads. Either that or Doctor Strangelove’s funniest line: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War room.”

There were lines and scenes that I felt were reminiscent of certain comedies, but denuded of humour to show the effect of climate change on our emotions. One character, Mick Fletcher, the businessman in act 1 said: “I didn’t get where I am today by refusing a challenge”, a line straight out of an apocalyptic Reggie Perrin.

One character on screen in act one, a seventeen year old girl orders an emergency kit from a home shopping channel. The dialogue of this seemed like an Unnovations skit from Charlie Brooker, but without the humour.

The best dramatic device used was the Tower of London collapsing due to subsidence, with the ravens escaping. With such bleak symbolism of London’s decline, it serves to make this play more challenging to our assumptions about permanence and what we cherish as people. In one of the news montages, certain quotes leap out: “I was wrong, says climate sceptic.”

Things go from bad to worse when the heat wave gives way to a thunderstorm that smashes its way through roofs and 20 cm pours of rain down Maze Hill. The decisions shifted form one extreme to another, as the weather changed. We even had to respond to an incident on Canvey Island from a vote on paper when the systems went down. The reaction of the spect-actors was to evacuate the command post.

Being a choose your own adventure, the plot, like the future, isn’t fixed and you influence how others act as a spect-actor yourself. The play ended, raising questions about herd conformity and group think (for me, at least). Why do decisions get made in the way they do? Why are decisions made in groups and why do people vote in the same way? Reading a leaflet given to me, it confirmed what I suspected: the play was inspired by cold war era exercises on what would happen if the Russians dropped the bomb on Greenwich. Interestingly, these container theatres were right outside the statue of James Wolfe in Greenwich Park, which is right across the road from the Old Royal Naval College (Now my alma mater, University of Greenwich) and was a possible key target in my area, along with Woolwich Barracks.

“That concludes this test of the Emergency Publishing system.”

3rd Ring Out was in Greenwich as part of the Greenwich & Docklands International Festival. Visit http://www.3rdringout.com/ for details of future performances.

“Schools united for change in Greenwich”

South London Citizens have contributed this article about the work they are doing with local schools in Greenwich.

Over the past year or so, children and parents from three Greenwich primary schools in membership of South London Citizens have been working together to address issues of street safety.

When a 10-year old child from St Joseph’s Primary School tells you that he doesn’t feel safe walking from his home to his local leisure centre (which is only five minutes away), when a child from Halstow Primary School tells you that she can’t go and visit her friend in the evening even though she only lives a few streets away from her, when a child from St Alfege with St Peter’s Primary School tells you he is worried about going to secondary school next year as waiting for the bus with lots of other children can often be intimidating, members of South London Citizens in Greenwich get together and act.

Since a first meeting in May 2009 where twenty-five parents and children got together to think about safety in their local area, a lot has happened. Discussions between schools have taken place, research has been carried out to identify problems which have then been refined into specific issues, and actions have developed to make things better. The CitySafe campaign – a community-led campaign that addresses issues of street safety and which builds positive relationships between schools, the police, and local neighbours – has been involving scores of like-minded citizens who believe in a world where people work together.

If you look at what you can find between St Alfege with St Peter’s, St Joseph’s, and Halstow primary schools, what do you find? Lots of shops is the answer!

Groups of children and parents decided, therefore, to approach the hundred or so shopkeepers that work on Trafalgar Road and the portion of Woolwich Road that goes to the East Greenwich Library and asked them to work with South London Citizens to make the area safer. But what do you ask shopkeepers in order to make the area safer? Two main things:

1. You get them to pledge to report 100% of crime and anti-social behaviour
2. You get them to offer their premises as a place of haven for anyone in danger

Out of the hundred or so shops approached, about sixty agreed to join the CitySafe campaign. The local schools are building teams of children and parents who will visit the shops on a regular basis to review if and how the campaign is making things better.

In the past few days, sixty parents and children, joined by police officers, went to visit shops and got some great feedback. Some shopkeepers on Trafalgar Road, for instance, are pleased to report that police officers have been visiting the shops more regularly. Some young people have also been using the shops when they have not been feeling too safe. As the shops were visited, flowers were given to the shopkeepers by children as a sign of gratitude.

It is clear that things are not going to change overnight, but all the members of South London Citizens involved in this work in Greenwich agree that if you know you know and are ready to support your neighbours, your street becomes safer. This is the simple message the CitySafe campaign is spreading in the streets of Greenwich!

See a couple of videos about the CitySafe campaign across London and in Greenwich: www.southlondoncitizens.org.uk/citysafe and www.southlondoncitizens.org.uk/greenwich.

For more details on London Citizens and community organising, see a video on the Citizens UK blog: www.citizensukblog.org.

Theatre Review: The Tempest, Greenwich Park

If you’ll forgive the pun, ‘The Tempest’ takes the Observatory Gardens, in Greenwich Park, by storm. The Oxford Shakespeare Company use the space more creatively than other groups that have visited the gardens in the past and they tell the story with admirable clarity. The text is cut down to an hour and a half, which may seem over hasty, and certainly there is little room for fully rounded characters to emerge, but the shortened version allows for a constantly energetic and captivating telling of the story – and all before the park gates are locked.

In director Mick Gordon’s production the audience is set in a circle, ringed by flaming torches. The idea that that we form the boundary of the island is a strong one, and is emphasised when Miranda appears in a huge wedding dress with a flowing train that circles the stage, forming a pink beach.

The ensemble is small for a play with such a vast range of parts, but the doubling is handled with considerable ingenuity and wit. Caliban doubles with Ferdinand, which makes for a very interesting dynamic, allowing the animal side of Ferdinand to emerge and creating a more human portrayal of Caliban.

Michael Hadley and Sophie Franklin in The Tempest

At the heart of the production is a fine performance by Michael Hadley as Prospero. The proximity of the seating allows the audience to get exceptionally close to the action, and that helps us see the tension that flows through Prospero when, for instance, he confronts his errant brother at the end of the play. The clarity of Hadley’s verse speaking sets a high standard for the rest of the cast and, for the most part, they match him in all aspects.

Miranda, played by Sophie Franklin, is of particular note; she conveys an excellent urchin-like quality, full of mischief and wonder. The moment when the scales fall from her eyes and she discovers that the world is populated by men is very effective.

The costumes, created by Adrian Lillie, are colourful and creative evoking a sense of faded Edwardian grandeur. The actors jump in and out of them throughout the play fully within the audience’s sight – often with seconds to spare before they emerge on stage, a formidable technical challenge. Nicholas Lloyd Webber (yes he is a relation) has composed an exciting score. His percussive musical accompaniment to the tempest itself, hammered out on a vast copper cone dominating the stage, is as arresting a sound as it is a visual image.

There are elements of the play that seem unnecessarily complicated, including accents that I think were meant to clarify the doubling, but didn’t. There are also some arguable decisions regarding moments of clowning, it might just be me but I felt the gag of having Sebastian in snorkel and flippers outlived its comic potential pretty quickly and introduced an awkwardly contemporary feel to the costumes.

If you are looking for a highly nuanced production that fully explores ‘The Tempest’ I would head for the Bridge Project at the Old Vic. If, however, you are prepared for a high velocity telling of the story in a fantastic setting, possibly with a child or two in tow, then Greenwich Park is the place to be.

The play runs in the Observatory Garden, Greenwich Royal Park, Monday 21st– Friday 25th June, Tuesday 29th June – Friday 2nd July, 7pm, and Sat 3rd at 6pm. Booking through the Pleasance Theatre box office www.pleasance.co.uk 020 7609 1800.

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