Reviews

Date reviewed: 20 December 2008
Venue: Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough

Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s final play as Stephen Joseph Theatre’s artistic director is a musically idiosyncratic piece. According to actor Ben Fox, who plays the “Pigcutter” in Awaking Beauty, the first fibres of inspiration to write a musical in which almost all the music is created by human voices came to Ayckbourn when he watched a Honda advert in which the sounds of a car are replicated by human voices. Hence the music in this playful sequel to Sleeping Beauty, written by Denis King, is for one piano and ten voices.

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Date reviewed: 17 December 2008
Venue: Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House

Christmas on the stages of Leeds has a conservative tint this year. The City Varieties is always staunchly traditional, of course, as the platform for yearly pantomimes (this year it’s Jack and the Beanstalk). The West Yorkshire Playhouse, on the other hand, is hosting its co-production of Peter Pan – admittedly a musical, but still faithful to the narrative that is one of the festive season’s vertebrae – and the debut of Mike Kenny’s adaptation of The Snow Queen, a tale whose juxtaposition of warm, resolute emotions with a chilly, forbidding backdrop imbue it with potential to achieve similar status.

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News

Eleven theatres in Yorkshire are soon to receive grants from the Arts Council to fund free tickets. This will form part of a two-year national pilot scheme, the Free Ticket Initiative, whereby theatres will try to encourage theatregoing among those aged between 18 and 26.

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The West Yorkshire Playhouse released its programme for the 2009 Spring/Summer season on Wednesday. Commenting on the approach that he and general director Sheena Wrigley took in assembling it, WYP artistic director Ian Brown stressed the need to give members of the public compelling incentives to spend their money on theatregoing in the prevailing economic circumstances. He also highlighted the fact that the programme will maintain many of the WYP’s established relationships with other companies and theatres, and its loyalty to its traditional aim of supporting theatre of especial northern interest, particularly by staging pieces by northern writers.

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Interviews

“It’s the fact of having a familiar story, where you sort of know the way it goes, with a hero and heroine who’ll come up against something that will be resolved in the end,” says Anna Francolini. “You could almost do that with many fairy tales. This one is great because he (Sir Alan Ayckbourn) uses it to look at our modern perceptions of ourselves. For example, the ugly witch tries to win the heart of the prince – she’s very jealous, so she has a massive makeover and goes through a modern, plastic surgery kind of dilemma. It makes you laugh when you see it put out of whack a bit.”

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“I love the journey that Gerda goes on,” says Pamela Okoroafor. “She starts out as a very naïve little girl and by the end of the play she’s a woman, really, because even though she hasn’t grown that much in age, mentally and emotionally she has. A lot of her journey is really sophisticated – it’s not something a little girl would normally experience, so it’s nice to play that role and to give her some of those qualities that I have.”

Okoroafor is explaining what she likes about playing Gerda in forthcoming West Yorkshire Playhouse production The Snow Queen. Its other main character, Kai, will be portrayed by Duncan Barton, whose explanation of what he likes about Kai underlines fundamental similarities beneath seeming differences. “His journey is very different, of course,” he explains, “because it begins and then he’s frozen in the Snow Queen’s palace, so it’s a much quicker one, and is more about realisation than what’s he’s done. It’s got this really nice bit where he realises that his journey is done and that he’s becoming, maybe not a fully fledged adult, but growing up and realising that he’s made a mistake and learning a lot from it. Both of the kids grow.”

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