The company are off to East Kilbride Arts Centre today for the fourth performance of their 2012 tour. Hope some of you are planning to catch them there. Come back and let me know how you found it.
East Kilbride Arts Centre 7.30 today Friday 25th May
Tickets 01355 261000
Puccini wrote sublime music for unsavoury stories.
As last night’s performance of Tosca progressed in Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, I began to be uncomfortable with the dramatic rendition of Scarpia. He is an evil, manipulative, sexually predatory individual of the kind that absolute power creates all too easily. It did no one any favours to have the acting lean towards pantomime.
At the curtain calls, which deservedly for everyone’s singing went on for ages, the performer was booed as the villain is at the end of popular panto.
The storyline of Tosca is stripped back to make it one of the clearest opera plots; a drama of the purest kind. This audience member doesn’t need gimmicky renditions to keep her buying the ticket.
Lovely reactions from writing friends and other audience members who’ve caught the play. Particularly pleasing to introduce folk to M’Connachie who has been a passion of Carol Metcalf’s for some time. (Hope you don’t mind me revealing that, Carol)
An alter ego as the catch-all escape from responsibility isn’t a new thing – think of Jekyll and Hyde – but it is an interesting one. There was so much going on in Barrie’s head, maybe he would have enjoyed the luxury I did when I separated them.
Arbroath next Friday at The Webster Memorial Theatre, 01241 435 800. Really not too far from Barrie’s home at Kirriemuir.
Saturday 28th April 2012
I took my seat for the final subscription date of 2011-12 at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre on Thursday night, in some degree of nervousness. There had been a lot of hype over the violent nature of Martin McDonagh’s play, the Lieutenant of Inishmore, which is about the disintegration of terrorist groups in Ireland. However, on the positive side, folk were saying, it’s very funny.
Well, there’s plenty of violence, both mindless and coldly calculating, to chill the blood and give the lie to any romantic idea of the fight for ‘freedom’. ‘Freedom’ is different things to different people and, in this play, cats. Not all ‘freedoms’ are respectable or justifiable. As for the humour, my husband, and lots of other audience members found it funny, but I was struggling to laugh. It’s not my kind of humour. I wonder if I ever get satire.
For those of you who do, the run continues until 12/05/12.
It does feature a wonderful set – really, really wonderful.
Puppet theatre is very popular in Sicily and I took the banner photograph above while visiting one in Palermo. The puppets are large and several folk are needed to operate a cast of them.
In my play, M’Connachie & JMB, Jamie Barrie takes issue with M’Connachie for suggesting he can get enough romance from his characters. ‘They’re puppets, M’Connachie. Haven’t you noticed?’ he asks.
It seemed appropriate to set this blog up under the eyes of one or two.
Drama is a collaborative art and on Sunday evening I joined in a great example of this when Citadel Arts Group held a rehearsed reading of Act One of their Work-in-Progress: Leith’s Hidden Treasure. The venue was upstairs in The Granary Bar on The shore – where their production will air in June.
Leith Hospital
The local hospital is way up there with the store, the school and the big employers as a source of long-held and deeply felt memories. Playwright, Laure C Paterson and Citadel Artistic Director, Liz Hare have taken these memories and woven an affecting tale of the early 1960s.
Janey is on the verge of being a big girl, eleven, and she shares with us the stories of her struggling family whose penury, if not poverty, is ever-present. We also meet young nurse, Nurse Williams, who is training in Leith hospital and fighting her youthful instincts to accept the strictures of the training regime. The play brings the two worlds together and human drama, comic and tragic, flows naturally from the collision.
The excellent cast of Citadel regular players held the audience entranced and at the end we were asked to give the company feedback. A really worthwhile evening, encouraging all of us to return to Leith Festival in June to see the finished work performed. Besides wanting to know how the hook at the end of Act one is resolved, there’s the prospect of your comment having being accepted. What more could an audience ask?
Children love performing their little dramas, sketches and puppet shows for the family. They enjoy the chance to show off to the most important people in their lives and the most important people in their lives love watching.
When does that change? Maybe when the cute factor stops overriding bad theatre. Maybe when only some of the cast have their heart in it. Maybe when the performers stop being performers and begin to be audience.
In my own case, it was when I realised I wanted to create the words for others to use. I wanted to see what movement they inspired in the actors, what subtext they suggested to the director and what questions they aroused in the audience member.
When anyone asks why do you write plays, (as opposed to novels, short stories etc) I used to find it difficult to answer. I still do because creating a play has so many more imponderables than a piece that will become hard copy. In the end, I think it has to be drama because I think mainly in conversations. Over and over they turn as I edit and trim till the right words are spoken by the right person.