High School Musical

I am taking my daughter to see High School Musical tonight - not the movie, but the stage production at Edinburgh's Playhouse Theatre. Apparently all the kids dress up in HSM gear and sing/scream along to every word. I see no reason why I shouldn't share out my suffering, so:



vs.



Which is the best version?

StAnza 2009 - 'In Person' And 'Out Of His Head'

I went to the Saturday evening screening of the In Person highlights. It’s a book and DVD produced by Bloodaxe featuring the work of 30 poets. The DVD has over 6 hours of footage, but the big screen version lasts about an hour. Most of the poets are featured reading their work in their own homes. Neil Astley introduced the movie and gave us a few anecdotes on the process of filming.

I liked the big screen. I’m less sure I’d watch the DVD for any length of time in my home although I suppose I could watch a poem or two whenever I felt like it. The main impact on me was in remembering the range of poets Bloodaxe publishes from throughout the UK and all over the world. I loved some of the poems and appreciated the eclecticism. I wonder whether poets reading over short films interpreting their work (or poems interpreting contemporary silent shorts) might be an intriguing, although no doubt more expensive, use of the DVD format for the future.

From cinema to theatre: on the Sunday afternoon, I watched Kenneth Price’s one-man play, Out of his Head, on the life of W.S. Graham. For the first few minutes, I thought it was going to be overacted and annoying, but then I settled into it. In fact, it was very well done and gave an interesting overview of Graham’s life. It featured several poems, read theatrically – interesting, as it’s rare to see poems being read like that in real life, which is no doubt a good thing. However, this worked in the context of the play where the poems were woven into the biographical content.

Aurora Borealis - Edinburgh Fringe

Whenever I hear the term “experimental” applied to an art form, I’m automatically suspicious. Most experimental poetry is rubbish and the same is true, I think, in all art forms. Most people only imagine they are being experimental when, in fact, they are either

a) doing what they’ve seen other experimental artists doing – except badly

b) doing what millions of people have done before, but not realising it because they know so little about the art form they are attempting to practise.

However, now and again, there’s a real triumph and I witnessed one yesterday at the Edinburgh Festival fringe. If you get the chance to see Aurora Borealis (and the last performance is tomorrow, Saturday!), don’t miss out. It’s a terrific piece of innovative theatre. 12 noon at Dance Base, Grassmarket, Edinburgh.

There is no dialogue, only jazz piano music and movement. The venue has a glass roof (an important prop as it turns out) and a giant mirror opposite the audience, so that you can see everyone at all times. The set is minimal but everything is vital, just as every word is vital to a taut poem. The performance plays on ideas of self-image, sadness, and transformation that can come following an encounter with the unknown or numinous. If that sounds serious, let me assure you that the performance is also unpretentious, very funny, the timing is perfect (though also, I believe, improvised), and the dancing is of high quality.

It lasts 35 minutes and is entirely captivating. Humour and intensity are successfully held in tension throughout. For an audience member, it feels more like an experience than a spectacle. Not theatre you’re liable to forget in a hurry.

The Steamie

My wife, Anne, is involved in a performance of Tony Roper’s famous Glasgow social comedy, The Steamie, at Edinburgh’s Churchill Theatre. Anne isn’t acting in this, but she is the musical director. Yesterday, there was an excellent 4-star review in the Edinburgh Evening News. A quick excerpt:

“The result is a cast who work together to create ensemble theatre of a quality that would make a professional company proud. Far and away the most entertaining thing on an Edinburgh stage this week.”

Tomorrow evening (Saturday) is the final night and ticket orders are flooding in following the review. If you’re near Edinburgh, check it out. I saw it yesterday and the review is spot on.

Jack and the Beanstalk

Last night, I went to see Jack and the Beanstalk, this year’s pantomime produced by the Edinburgh People’s Theatre. Anne, my wife, plays a glittery pink fairy, making sure love wins the day against those who are determined to raise taxes and stop everyone from having a good time. Being a fairy, she speaks in rhyme – poetry not quite up to the standard of Paul Muldoon or George Szirtes, I admit – but pantomime is always enhanced by fun and doggerel, and she gives a good performance.

I was there with a group of children, who are no doubt the best judges of a pantomime, and they loved it. Unsurprising, as the baddies (the baron and his incompetent henchmen) are really bad, but not in a way liable to give kids nightmares. In fact, my lot were more than a match for the forces of evil. They booed and hissed with enthusiasm whenever the nasty threesome came near the stage, so much that in one scene the baron stared at them and said, “Go back to Broomhouse,” the area of Edinburgh where they live (he had obviously been tipped off by the fairy…), which stemmed a predictable reaction!

Jack is convincing as the naïve boy who is determined to rescue his true love (he falls in love at first sight in a hilariously over-the-top scene – never can a dialogue have contained so many romantic clichés, deliberately of course) by climbing the beanstalk and rescuing her from a ghastly dungeon. Jack’s mum, Dame Bella (brought into the production less than three weeks ago after the original dame had to pull out), was excellent – you would never have guessed he had learned all those lines and moves in so short a time.

The singing is good too and the camp soundtrack straight out of Eurovision (usually with altered words) will give the adults a good laugh. “Fly the Flag”, the UK’s Eurovision entry earlier this year, is really well done, complete with air hostess and safety demonstration. There were a few problems with the sound, the vocals being too quiet for the music during the first few songs. That was dealt with as the play went on, but the sound people might want to make sure the levels are right from the beginning in future shows.

So if you’re looking for a panto that will engage children, but also entertain adults, Jack and the Beanstalk might be what you’re looking for. Details below:

CHURCH HILL THEATRE Morningside Road, Edinburgh
12th - 22nd December 2007 (not 16th)

Evenings at 7:00pm (not 16th or 22nd);
Matinees at 2:30pm on 15th & 22nd

Tickets: £8.00, Concessions: £7.00

Edinburgh Festival and John Hegley

Some people may be wondering at the paucity of references to this year’s Edinburgh Festival and Fringe on this blog, given that I live in Edinburgh. Well, the reason is that I’ve hardly seen anything. Last year, I saw a number of events and wrote about them. This year, my wife was in a play almost every night for three weeks (last year, her play was over only a fortnight), and going out would have meant getting babysitters. During the day, I’m too tied up with work etc to go festivaling. Last year there were several events I really wanted to go to, but this year less appealed to me, and paying around £10 for a ticket to go to something I wasn’t over-enthused by seemed pointless.

I went to Luke Wright’s Poetry Party, which was fun, and of course I went to The Holy Terror, which was very good, although I’m bound to say that.

However, yesterday, my wife and I managed to see John Hegley. He was great entertainment – warm and sharp wit, good interaction with the audience, perfect comic timing, imaginative improvisation, and a love of the absurd that drives his humorous verse. It strikes me that the same material, without his personality and performance, wouldn’t work nearly as well. It's all part of the same package. If he’s performing near you, don’t miss it.

Fringe Award

The Holy Terror, the play my wife is acting in during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was runner-up, from a shortlist of thirteen nominees, in the Evening News Drama Award, which was won by the Tempo group with Spend Spend Spend.

But coming second is pretty good and yesterday the entire audience got an invite backstage for a celebratory glass of wine with the cast.

Tonight's show was a sell-out. Only two nights to go.

Four Star Show

The Holy Terror, the play my wife is acting in during the Edinburgh Festival, got a four-star review from Thom Dibdin in the Evening News.

I’m not sure whether you have to register to read the review or not. In case you can't get to it, the best bit was:

“Her granddaughter Marianne (Anne Mackenzie) is not the brightest, but still would like her father's blessing…”

People keep saying to my wife (at risk to their lives), “Now I know you’re not the brightest, but can you help me with a wee problem?”

But getting four-stars is a big deal. They’re now in contention for a top Fringe award, and remaining tickets are selling very fast indeed.

Holy Terror Photos

I mentioned The Holy Terror a few days ago. My wife is acting in this production with the Edinburgh People’s Theatre, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Below are a few photos from it to go along with those from a production of ten years ago on Colin Will’s blog.

This is the preacher baddie, Rev. Maister Tarland















The one on the right is my wife, flirting shamelessly on the sofa, complete with false ringlets















And here's the whole cast















all photographs © Rob Fuller, 2007 (that’s a different ‘Rob’, not me)

The Holy Terror and Jack Kerouac

The Edinburgh Festival (the biggest international arts festival in the world) got officially underway today with a drizzly cavalcade through the town, the first rain at this annual procession for more than ten years. My wife has been rehearsing hard for her part in the Edinburgh People’s Theatre production of The Holy Terror, which opened yesterday – a free adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe into Scots by James Scotland. Details are at the link.

Unrelated to this, an excellent article by Sean O’Hagan to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I read On the Road in my twenties and loved it, but haven’t picked it up since. I would fear disappointment, but perhaps bits of it would still resonate? Hard to know what it would mean to young people today. Carolyn Cassady is in no doubt:

Carolyn Cassady, the last surviving member of Kerouac's closeknit coterie of friends and fellow Beats, now 84 and exiled in deepest Berkshire, is even more scathing about Noughties youth. 'It's all about money and surface now, the clothes you wear, the things you buy, and no one is the slightest bit ashamed of being superficial. I often thank God that Jack and Neal did not live long enough to see what has become of their vision'.

But the beat generation didn’t go down well with most of their elderly contemporaries either.

'Allo 'Allo - Edinburgh People's Theatre

My wife is acting in this, wearing seamed stocking and suspenders, a mini skirt, and a waitress uniform.





















But there are other reasons to go and see it too e.g. it's funny

Cymbeline

On Shakespeare’s Cymbeline:

“To remark on the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon facts too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.” (Dr. Johnson)

“The chief mark of the experimental imagination in Cymbeline is to be found in its verse. The words are packed densely; instead of flowing out in sentences, they seem to break off individually, like drips of quartz under the hammer; they reach the ear in a rhythm that is abrupt and yet elegiac, angular yet gentle.” (John Wain)

“'It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and, judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance.
There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this "immortal" pilferer of other men's stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers.
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.” (George Bernard Shaw)

Cymbeline was Lord Tennyson’s favourite Shakespeare play. When Tennyson died, a copy of Cymbeline was found on his bed beside him, and was then buried with him in his grave.

Cigarettes

I quite like the Smoking Ban in public places and venues in Scotland, although I understand why many smokers won’t agree. The atmosphere in pubs and restaurants is much better. However the ban on performers lighting up on stage is crazy, particularly when it infringes on a theatrical work of art.

I can stand on a stage, and give a speech on the benefits of smoking, and that would be OK. But if I was playing a character who smoked, lit up a cigarette, and later in the play, died of cancer, I can be fined. Even herbal substitutes aren’t allowed. What’s the point of this?

Theatre companies are finding ingenious ways round the legislation. The best one was during a performance of Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Rosencrantz attempts to roll a joint, but is told by Guildenstern that smoking is banned. Rosencrantz's response is to throw down the joint he has just rolled in disgust. He picks up his powder box and delivers the same speech as a cocaine-induced rant.

So a Class-A drug is fine for the stage, better than cannabis or nicotine!

Despite repeated requests from theatre companies to amend the legislation to make smoking on stage legal when it’s important for the performance, the Parliament have refused to budge.

Madness.