Author Archives: Mark BROWN

Somewhere between Waiting for Godot and The Nutcracker – Appetite’s The Enchanted Chandelier

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Two drunken tramps discover a huge bell hanging from what appears to be an enormous chandelier. The bell’s rings summon a court of comic and grotesque fairy tale characters – a king, a queen, a troubadour, a jester, and sprite like figures who illuminate the the outdoor arena with fiery torches. After some drama to illustrate their roles, the fairy tale characters take their places on the chandelier before being hoisted way above the heads of the audience. What follows is a mesmerisingly choreographed combination of drums and bells, acrobatics and technical wizadry. The music played by the courtiers carries us through lulls and crescendos; the sprites perform on ropes, swings and trapezes way above us; and the chandelier itself changes height and shape as it is illuminated in a constantly transforming show of light, dark and shadow.

This is Appetite’s fourth major show in Hanley Central Forest Park. All four have been triumphs and this one is up there with my so-far-favourite, The Bell (a promenade performance about the futility of war with acrobats, fire, explosions and opera – oh, and a bell!).

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Appetite is an Arts Council funded body who, in collaboration with the New Vic theatre, stage accessible and and often interactive arts events for the communities of North Staffordshire. A recent city centre event celebrated the originator of the modern circus, Philip Astley, who came from Newcastle under Lyme. Staffs Uni English and Creative Writing students have volunteered and undertaken work placements with Appetite who continue to do great work across the region.

See what else is on this summer here

 

 

Powerful Civil Rights Drama

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I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything, I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.  (Dr Martin Luther King Jr, April 3, 1968)

mountaintop

Daniel Francis and Tala Gouveia as King and Camae (courtesy or the New Vic)

To what extent should we allow a man’s human failings to define his place in history? Martin Luther King’s reputation as the man who changed the course of racial politics in America is unassailable. However, close associates have described his weakness for women, he smoked, and, at the time of his assassination in 1968, he was battling factions within his own movement over the policy of non-violent resistance and his opposition to the Vietnam War. Katori Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, is an exploration of the conflicts between the man and his myth and is named after the speech given in Memphis the evening before King’s death. The play explores the humanity of King the man, while contextualising both his struggles and his achievements in a wider American history of the late 20th century. In his speech, King makes reference to his own mortality and to the need for the struggle to go on without him. After the sermon, and on the eve of his assassination, King is visited by a mysterious maid bringing him coffee and difficult questions about his faith and the direction of the struggle. Camae challenges King’s adherence to non-violent struggle, evoking Malcolm X and delivering her own oration, as passionate and compelling as King’s, exhorting American Americans to ‘kill all the white people … with our minds’. The play draws our attention to both the costs of passive resistance in the face of ruthless violence (‘walking won’t get us far’, Camae reminds King) and to the sacrifices made by poor black women under the conditions of segregation in the South and in the Civil Rights movement itself (a concern dealt with by Alice Walker in her novel, Meridian). Camae refers to women like her as the ‘mules of the world’ and challenges King to include them in his vision of the Promised Land. Hall is, I think, deeply aware that the Civil Rights movement was a patriarchal enterprise; beyond Rosa Parks, most of us would be unable to name a significant woman campaigner.

The play was first performed in London in 2009 and won numerous nominations and awards. There are some surprising twists in this drama, and plenty of humour alongside the politics and human frailties.

This production is on till Saturday June 25 at the New Vic close to Staffs Uni. It’s a shame that the production has been ignored by the national press, as the acting is superb, with British actors Daniel Francis and Tala Gouveia nailing the Southern accents and the staging allowing the power of King’s oratory and his legacy to be fully realised. It was great to hear the actors talk about the rehearsals, the emotional responses of the audience, and their own re-appraisals of the Civil Rights struggle and King’s legacy in the talk-back session after the performance. This is one of the most powerful pieces of theatre I have seen.

An evening at the pictures

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Does anybody say ‘the pictures’ anymore?

Well, that’s where I went on Tuesday; at the Stoke Film Theatre on the College Road campus for the independent German film, Victoria. This is not the sort of film you get down the local Odeon. Some of the film is in German with English sub-titles and some in English. But the film’s most notable characteristic is that it is one continuous 180 minute take, shot with a hand-held camera. This achieves many effects. It is extraordinarily intimate: the audience does not so much watch the action, as feel like they are part of it. Because it is one take, the film is also in real time, taking us from the depths of Berlin’s underground club scene to the grey urban dawn. The result is that, from when they meet for the first time at the beginning of the film, the actors have to reveal their characters and persuade the audience of their growing bond. Victoria is a Spanish pianist working in a Berlin coffee shop, and the group of men who take her on a roller-coaster tour of night time Berlin are marginalised petty criminals. Victoria’s experiences of unfriendly competition in the conservatoire makes her susceptible to the picaresque appeal of the group of men who are known only by their nicknames; Sonne, Boxer, Blinker and Fuss. Victoria herself is a beguiling mix of curiosity and vulnerability. The intensity of the camera gaze is at its most effective in claustrophobic spaces, and we quickly become entranced by the edgy relationships building between the characters as their personalities are revealed to each other and the audience.

The Guardian, like me, loved this film, giving it 5 stars. You can read the review here, and see the trailer here.

The Film Theatre is an authentic cinema experience. You are not cocooned in king size seats here, isolated from the rest of the audience. There’s also a nice little bar where you can get a local Titanic brewery beer, a cup of coffee or some sweets for the film. Enjoy.

Film Theatre Programme

King Lear at Manchester’s Royal Exchange

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The Royal Exchange in Manchester has a reputation for staging Shakespeare plays in a way which demonstrates the Bard’s relevance to the now. Maxine Peake’s Hamlet in 2014 was a stunning example of relevant and inspiring Shakespeare. As the programme for Lear tells us, there are 3 productions being staged, in this 400th anniversary year of the playwright’s death, which cast black actors in lead roles: Don Warrington as Lear here, Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet at the RSC and Ray Fearon as Macbeth at the Globe.

While Don Warrington is clearly the star of this show, the whole cast are impressive. Warrington is an imposing actor, who gives great presence to Lear in all his manifestations: as patriarch, deluded parent, mad man, and tragic father-king. Special mention, however, must go to Miltos Yerolemou as Lear’s wise Fool and to Fraser Ayres for his terrifying Edmund. But it is unfair, I think, to pick anybody out. This production emphasises the humanity of the three tragic characters (Lear, Cordelia and Gloucester), rather than the politics of a state divided.

The Royal Exchange is a brilliant theatre. Playing in the round, with only the most essential of props (a throne for the king, a chair each for the sisters) creates a genuinely intimate experience of the play. We booked these tickets way in advance, and since opening the production has received rave reviews (“as close to definitive as can be”, according to the Guardian). As a result, tickets are hard to come by; but if you can get one it’ll be worth the struggle.

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Staffs Uni paid for the tickets and the coach, while Manchester offered us different city experiences: some set off for a gallery, others to the shops, and some of us to the bohemian shabbiness of Affleck’s Palace. And for lunch: you cannot beat the Northern Soul grilled cheese café and their magnificent Philly cheese steak sandwich – probably the best outside of Philadelphia and one of Manchester’s coolest street food experiences.

inside

Inside the building. Is it a theatre or a spaceship?

As an added bonus, Sally bumped in to and instantly recognised 2 of the actors (who played the Fool and Oswald) at ComicCon in Stoke the next day.

Coriolanus

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Visiting Lecturer, Jonathan Day, offers his thoughts on Coriolanus

My selection comes from Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy Coriolanus. Our hero is Caius Martius, who has earned his honorific title, ‘Coriolanus’, from his actions fighting the enemies of Rome, the Volsces, in their city of Corioli. Throughout the play Coriolanus has been a singular figure, in conflict with the public of Rome. Rejected from the city, Coriolanus turns on Rome and approaches the leader of the Volsces, Tullus Aufidius, and demands that Aufidius either kill him or use him to conquer Rome. Here is Aufidius’s response to that ultimatum:
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! I tell thee,
We have a power on foot; and I had purpose
Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn,
Or lose mine arm fort: thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters ‘twixt thyself and me;
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat,
And waked half dead with nothing.

This is a play that has seemingly consistently triumphed traditional conservative Roman values. Coriolanus is the warrior who literally forms his identity through war (note the honorific name ‘Coriolanus’), who subjugates his own welfare to the good of Rome, the warrior who fights to honour his mother and wife and for a future for his son, and is undone by a spirit of resentment that rules amongst a faceless mob. Above all this, the play would seem to suggest the successful man is a figure of magnificent isolation.

Within thirteen remarkable lines however, Shakespeare deflates all of this. These lines demonstrate none of the martial restraint one might expect of a warrior leader; they are not end stopped, that is to say, they are examples of enjambment. Each line does not contain a single complete phrase or idea but runs on in a stream. The whole speech consists of only four sentences, one of which, ‘Why, thou Mars!’ serves to disrupt the hypnotic rhythm and prevent monotony. This speech is frankly, almost explicitly, homoerotic in the language of dancing hearts at the appearance of Coriolanus, unbuckled helms, being ‘down together’ and nocturnal ‘encounters’. Again, this stands against so much else in the play. Finally, Shakespeare’s language subverts the idea of singularity into duality and interrelationship. The final magnificent sentence has six self-references to ‘I’ or ‘me’, six references to ‘thou’ or ‘thee’ and two ‘we’s. This sheer bulk in such a short span of text, combined with the fluid lines, serves to confuse the issue; who or what is being discussed here? This is most clearly present in the final five lines, in which the subject of the sentence is Aufidius himself; due to the dream-like flow of the language, by the time we come to the conclusion, it seems as if the subject is the ‘we’ of ‘we have been down together’. It is is Aufidius’s dream, but it seems as if they are both dreamers and have somehow both ‘waked half dead with nothing’. Why half dead, and what was the ‘something’ they might have had?

At the conclusion of the play Coriolanus returns to his identity model of isolation and independence; before his death he proudly recalls his actions in Corioles and remarks ‘Alone, I did it’. In the section above however we see Shakespeare’s art. It is the characteristic ‘volta’ or turn, of the sonnet writ large; within a few trance-like lines Shakespeare challenges the seeming grounds of his whole play. In its own way, this passage is as daring as Puck’s suggestion at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that if we disliked the action, we should assume that we have been dreaming. Perhaps we ourselves might awaken half dead with nothing?

Lovers, Lunatics and Poets

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The English lecturers have been picking their favourite speeches and sonnets to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Here, Mark Brown ponders the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

When most people think about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they usually think of a tale of lovers wronged, true love realised, magical fairies and a man with the head of a donkey. And, on the whole, they would be right. Critics often focus on the carnivalesque aspects as rigid Athenian society is disrupted by a holiday to mark the Duke’s marriage and the magical effects of the countryside. They also focus on the conventions of romantic comedy, many of which still hold true for the Rom-Coms we see at the cinema. The romance is found in the characters of Hermia and Lysander, who are in love with each other. Hermia’s father, however, wants her to marry Demetrius (for reasons of wealth and power). Demetrius is loved by Helena, but he’s just not interested. If Hermia does not conform to her father’s wishes she can, according to the Athenian law of Theseus, be killed or banished. So, Hermia and Lysander flee to the forest, pursued by the jealous Demetrius and the besotted Helena. Here they encounter the fairies (with their magical royal equivalents of the Athenian elite, Oberon and Titania). After lots of misunderstandings caused by magic potions, love triumphs and all the right people marry each other for all the right reasons, and order is restored.

I find the play fascinating for its exploration of dream and how Shakespeare relates it closely to the magic of theatre. This speech, from Theseus near the end of the play, reflects back on the moment when the lovers are discovered waking from their enchantment in the forest when Demetrius says

It seems to me
That yet we sleep, we dream. (Act IV, Scene I)

The theme of dreams here is carried from the enchantment of the fairies in the wood, to their awakening and then back to Athens, where its effects will be felt in the re-ordering of chaotic marriage arrangements into an acceptable order and the re-establishment of both Egeus’ and Theseus’ patriarchal authority. But first Theseus reflects on the nature of the stories of enchanted woods and fairies. After describing ‘these antique fables’, he considers the role of the poet (and, hence, the playwright) in fashioning stories to speak to the interests and experiences of his audience:

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (Act V Scene I)

 

The poet’s pen, then, is what makes sense of a chaotic and incomprehensible world, which sometimes can only be explained by the actions of nature and magic. The writer is able to change the ‘airy nothing[s]’ of imagination into a recognisable world that will draw us in and persuade us, for the duration of the play, of the verisimilitude of the fictional world and the characters he has conjured by his own form of magic.

Crime fiction and gender

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We borrowed the film theatre once again for an English and Creative Writing private screening and the complete cinema experience, complete with free pop-corn (my pleasure). We watched One for the Money, the 2011 adaptation of the first Stephanie Plum novel, as part of the Crime Scene America module.

I think Rotten Tomatoes’ 1 star review of this jolly crime-romcom is a bit unfair. Along with a nice afternoon at the movies, we watched the movie for the way it adapts the detective-figure role for a female central character, explored notions of gender and racial representation, and the further development of the crime genre. We used Mulvey’s discussion of the gendered cinematic gaze to consider the extent to which this film challenges Hollywood’s patriarchal attitudes (it doesn’t!).

One for the Money

Special Showing of Macbeth at the Film Theatre

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We borrowed the university’s very own film theatre for a special showing of Justin Kurzel’s new interpretation of Macbeth. English and Creative Writing students were joined by students from other degrees, friends, family and staff for a great afternoon in the dark (with apologies to Graham Greene for nearly stealing his line).

The film itself is dark and brooding, set in an atmospheric Highland landscape which is a character in its own right. This is not a landscape of castles and pomp, but of barrenness and struggle. The delivery is faithful to the original, as unadorned as the landscape and brilliantly understated, making the action even more menacing. Any moments of Shakespereian levity are edited out. Kurzel re-imagines the supernatural sequences in a new and original way, adding innovative nuances to what should be a deeply mined narrative. Macbeth (Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard) stand out in a stand-out cast.

The Telegraph gives it 5 stars and says it is ‘one of the great Shakespearean movies’.

The play is on the GCSE syllabus too, and this is a fine introduction to the text.

Click for the Stoke Film Theatre programme

 

Broadsides’ Merry Wives

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On Tuesday night, I, along with several other Staffs Uni students, saw the Northern Broadside production of The Merry Wives (of Windsor), by William Shakespeare. It was a thoroughly entertaining play, with jokes, music, singing, dancing, trickery and, of course, love (and how could Shakespeare resist the chance at making fun of the French?). I also learned that this is the origin of the popular phrase ‘what the dickens?’, which I had always assumed had come from a similarly named author. Afterwards, there was a talk-back session with all the cast, where we were able to ask questions, and were told stories (particularly by Barrie Rutter, who played Falstaff in this production), including performing in the Globe Theatre in T-shirts and jeans for the first half of A Midsummer Night’s Dream due to lost luggage problems. A thoroughly enjoyable evening and I would highly recommend this play to anyone.

(Harriet Lee, Creative Writing)

Some wives (not from Windsor, but somewhere Northern – as you would expect) being merry at The New Vic (courtesy of Northern Broadsides)

See the trailer at their website here

 

 

Matisse Exhibition, Tate Liverpool

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There is a wonderful Matisse exhibition on at the Tate Liverpool (free, till May). The centre piece is undoubtedly the surprisingly large ‘The Snail’, but there are 14 other fascinating pieces tracing his development from a figurative painter, through Impressionist and Fauvist phases, to the abstractions of colour and shape of the 1950s. ‘The Snail’ represents the development of this process to a pure experimentation with colour and shape. The orange frame contains cut-out blocks of hand-mixed colour which both contrast and balance each other, while at the same time suggesting the natural spiral of the snail’s shell.

The gallery is a wonderful day out on its own, but it is also surrounded by museums (Maritime, The Beatles and Liverpool), as well as great places to eat and shop. And, if you have the time, there’s always the ferry across the Mersey.