Review: The Convict’s Opera
February 26, 2009
Date reviewed: 24 February 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
Few playwrights are more skilled than Stephen Jeffreys in the art of recreating a text for the contemporary stage, as in, for example, his classic adaptation of Hard Times. Similarly Out of Joint and its director, Max Stafford-Clark, have already staged one play, adapted from an existing source, about convicts in Australia performing an 18th century comedy: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s splendid Our Country’s Good, based on The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally.
Jenna Bailey on Can Any Mother Help Me?
February 20, 2009
“It was not just about being friendly,” says Jenna Bailey, “actually they encouraged the opposite. They really challenged each other on religion, education and literature – everything. It was no holds barred. It was not tea and knitting and niceness – it was a chance to challenge and be challenged.”
The intellectual vigour of the Co-operative Correspondence Club’s letters evidently left a durable mark on Bailey. Their route to fruition, however, was no less striking. In 1935 a young mother of four from a small Irish village, whose husband had abandoned her, wrote to the magazine Nursery World expressing her frustration at the limitations of her life and asking if any of its readers could “suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘thinking’ and cost nothing”. After receiving numerous responses, she founded a letter-writing community of 24 women that lasted until 1990. Bailey’s 2007 study of its correspondence takes its title, Can Any Mother Help Me?, from the original letter. Hence Foursight Theatre’s dramatisation of her account, which visits the West Yorkshire Playhouse between 3 and 7 March, likewise adopts it. The production benefited from her input at one rehearsal each week.
Review: Othello
February 19, 2009
Date reviewed: 18 February 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
For any vegetative, bed-ridden hermits who’ve nailed down the lids to their unmolested letterboxes but somehow read Whatsonstage.com: the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Northern Broadsides production of Othello stars Lenny Henry. Media reactions have formed a cauldron of confusion, scepticism and curiosity. Several explanations have been hinted at: an admirable and brave but perhaps foolish display of affection for The Bard’s work; an insult to the integrity of theatre; a parable about the decadence that ensues if a celebrity takes leave of his or her self-awareness. However, in dusting Broadsides out of the way to permit an undisturbed focus on Henry, an important point has been ignored: that Broadsides wouldn’t do a production of Shakespeare that it didn’t feel confident would be taken seriously.
SJT announces date for Monks’ arrival
February 17, 2009
Stephen Joseph Theatre has announced that Chris Monks will replace Sir Alan Ayckbourn as its artistic director on 1 April.
The Scarborough theatre has highlighted the fact that much of the Sheffield-born writer and director’s work has been with other theatres in the round to emphasise the suitability of his appointment. Monks has produced at Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic, Manchester Royal Exchange, Orange Tree Theatre in London and Bolton Octagon. Notably, his directorial debut was on Music Hall, at the Bolton Octagon, in 1990.
Ends and beginnings
February 15, 2009
Ron Simpson on the changes afoot in Hull and Scarborough
The theatre scene on Yorkshire’s east coast is certainly changing in the opening months of 2009. The modest Spring Street Theatre, home to Hull Truck ever since the eponymous truck was parked in the garage, is about to be replaced by a shiny new theatrical complex on Ferensway, whilst up the coast at Scarborough the man who oversaw the creation of the Stephen Joseph Theatre and the move into the former Odeon cinema, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, is retiring from the post of artistic director.