Blog posts from Bristol Old Vic
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Check this out - coming to Bristol Old Vic as part of Mayfest 2012, Kindle Theatre's drastic retelling of the ancient myth of Clytemnestra unfurls with a sexy swagger and an angry, vengeful fusion of rock, metal, soul and not a little Greek tragedy.
Hear Jo Bannon, also cropping up during Mayfest at Arnolfini (see http://bit.ly/J418gb), describe it a lot better at the foot of this page and witness the full Furies assault just below.
THE FURIES ARE AT THE STUDIO, BRISTOL OLD VIC FROM 18-19 MAY AT 9.30PM, TICKETS COST £10/7 AND CAN BE BOOKED VIA 0117 987 7877 OR WWW.BRISTOLOLDVIC.ORG.UK
Mayfester Jo Bannon looks forward to The Furies
Next week, Actors’ Touring Company presents Sarah Kane’s Crave alongside the UK premiere of Ivan Viripaev’s Illusions. We caught up with the director of both shows, Ramin Gray.
Pics: Nina Sologubenko
What made you decided to show Crave and Illusions alongside each other?
They are two plays about love, death and how to live. It’s rare to find work that talks so directly about the only really important questions that face us as human beings and which it’s often more convenient for us to shelve. Putting two apparently unrelated works side by side is always an illuminating experience as a conversation starts to develop between people who never knew each other – Sarah Kane and Ivan Viripaev – who were born in very different circumstances – Essex and Siberia – and yet who both have a driving, questing will to plumb the mysterious depths of what it is to be human in the face of an apparently meaningless universe. The plays share many similarities of theme and some overlapping formal challenges, for example, where and how does the actor situate themselves in these texts? It will be a challenging evening but I know that it’s only when I’ve really invested in anything that I’ve got anything out of it. I hope and trust that audiences in Bristol – where Sarah did her degree – will be curious enough to come and join in.
Have you staged Sarah Kane before – what are the challenges with putting on her work?
Sarah made huge waves even when she was at Bristol University and she spent her brief career tearing up the rule book, discarding form after form. Crave holds a special place in my heart for its humanity, poetry and challenge to me as a director. How do you advance when the writer has taken away the familiar crutches of narrative and character? Or rather when she has reformed and reappraised them for her own ends. We had an exhilarating journey of discovery with this play and both the actors and I feel there is a sincere and naked attempt on her part to communicate some of the difficulty of being alive and we’ve all been enriched by that.
Ivan Viripaev will be unfamiliar to many people – what makes him a playwright that people should see?
In Moscow, where Ivan now mainly lives and works, he is something of a legend, a spiritual, slightly possessed personality who creates work of great integrity and intensity. Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, stated that Ivan Viripaev is the only contemporary playwright worth paying any attention to. I find it astonishing that the words of a churchman have any validity with the trendy crowd of young Muscovites who crowd out Viripaev’s shows but also that what the churchman has labelled is what is rarely spoken of here; that is the profound link between what we attempt to create through theatre and the role that the church should fulfil in society: to channel the life of the spirit. That's what we are trying to achieve anyway…
ILLUSIONS PREMIERS AT THE WICKHAM THEATRE ON TUE 24 APRIL AND TICKETS ARE JUST £5 FOR THIS NIGHT ONLY.
CRAVE AND ILLUSIONS ARE PERFORMED IN REP THEREAFTER AT THE WICKHAM THEATRE, UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL FROM 25–28 APRIL.
TICKETS AVAILABLE ON 0117 987 7877 OR VIA BRISTOLOLDVIC.ORG.UK
We're extremely pleased with the excellent reviews of our current production (running until 12 May) A Kind of Alaska / Krapp's Last Tape by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
Take a look at some of them below.
"Alone, each of these plays is small but mighty; together, they are like rolling thunder."
* * * *
"Simon Godwin's direction is so tender and meticulous, and the acting so alive to the compassion and mournful humour of the writing, that the unbearable becomes beautiful." * * * *
"These two great plays seem even more remarkable in this inspired coupling, and I hope this exemplary production will have a life beyond Bristol." * * * *
"Two beautifully atmospheric explorations of the further reaches of human experience." * * * *
See also:
Bristol Old Vic’s Associate Director Simon Godwin talks about directing Krapp’s Last Tape and A Kind of Alaska.
What drew you to Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett and what legacy have they left?
Well, this is the first time that I have worked on plays by Pinter and Beckett. In many ways, I am a virgin in my relationship with both of these extraordinary writers. They’re such major influences, that we are all affected by then, I believe, whether consciously or not. They have shaped the culture of theatre and the plays that we see – especially new plays – and today, you really feel their influence. With Pinter, this is concerned with his compression of language and the art of silence, which contains the unspoken.
With Beckett, it’s a modernism of sorts, which reverses the traditional notion of success, and replaces it with a fascination with failure. In doing that, he liberates you into pondering different kinds of characters and different stories and crucially, encourages us to break with our understanding of form – narrative, character, situation – turning each upside down so what is traditionally boring is made interesting and what is traditionally interesting, leaves us wondering whether we are in fact as interested in it as we once we thought we were.
Both Pinter and Beckett possess a meticulousness and an unwavering attention to detail in their writing. Do such writerly quirks hinder or help you as a director?
I like writerly… wrinkles, perhaps, which is where real genius lies. The more detailed, the more quirky, the more wrinkled the writing is, the better for me. Human beings are filled with texture and the marks of experience and it’s through the details of people’s behaviour that we discover who they are.
Pinter and Beckett shared a curiosity about the details. God is in the detail and these two are the finest explorers of that, I think.
But they’re far from the same writer.
They are similar in their quests to ask the fundamental questions about human beings. But they are different – I think there is a kind of containment in Pinter, a determination to see it out; with Beckett, there’s a slightly more Celtic ruggedness, an acceptance of the unknowable, which is hinted at by Pinter, and in particularly within these two plays, but I suppose Beckett goes further in opening up these spaces that are as vast and unknowable as the sea.
Pictured above: Bristol Old Vic Associate Director Simon Godwin
What came first for you, the authors, the plays or the urge to a double bill?
When I directed [the 2010 Bristol Old Vic production of] Faith Healer, flushed with its Irishness and Celtic storytelling, it was a real discovery for me. I’d never done theatre like that before. The playwright, Brian Friel, set up the pathway towards Pinter and Beckett. I was curious about both, and was curious about doing something close up and in miniature that would sit well in Bristol Old Vic’s Studio space. But it was [Bristol Old Vic’s Artistic Director] Tom Morris that first mentioned A Kind of Alaska to me after I’d mentioned I was thinking about doing Beckett, describing it as a very charged play about memory and time. So when I went back to Beckett and Krapp’s Last Tape, it had gained a new significance, especially now I was beginning to contemplate the plays as a pair.
I think, and hope, that one will elevate the other.
How would you describe the general tone of the evening?
I hope the audience will feel a yearning. I hope they’ll feel a sense of search. Our two main characters [Krapp and Deborah] are actively looking for something, so I hope the experience will also be an activating one. It’s a mistake to think the evening will be in any way nostalgic. Both characters are involved in a vivid journey to try and understand themselves through examining their past. I hope therefore that people will feel a sense of relevance and a shared project, a kind of tenderness towards their own lives because that’s what the characters themselves are feeling.
Go on…
We all experience life in terms of our outer and inner world and we move between the two – we have our outer world of relationships and conversations, and we also retreat into our inner world of feelings, imagination and memory. They’re very stark representations of course, but what Pinter and Beckett are trying to do is to dramatise the universal human condition and the universal movement between the inner and outer, and the private and the public.
Above: Richard Bremmer as Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape
How do you explore the subtext in a script written by Pinter or Beckett?
In a way, this feels like the concluding part of a trilogy of plays I’ve produced with Bristol Old Vic beginning with Caryl Churchill’s Far Away [2010] and continuing with Faith Healer. All of these writers are masters of the “iceberg play”, where you glimpse a tip but feel the weight of something much bigger. So the process has been to map the iceberg myself, before rehearsals begin, through detailed research and an exploration of the texts, and then to replicate that process with the cast. So I try to lay the ground, then set off once again on a shared voyage with them to uncover all that is not spoken and not seen. It’s a collaborative process, and my thoughts and ideas become enlarged and honed through the efforts and ideas of the company.
Tell us about the cast. You’ve worked with some of them before haven’t you?
Actually, I’ve only worked with one of them before. Marion Bailey, who’s playing Deborah (in A Kind of Alaska), is somebody who I’ve admired for a long time, she’s just been in Mike Leigh’s Grief at the National Theatre where she’s been very well received, she’s worked a lot with Mike Leigh and comes from a tradition of very detailed, truthful performance.
Richard Bremmer is someone I’ve worked with twice before, once in a play for young people at the Almeida in which he had to do a lot of work with an old fashioned tape recorder – which bodes well – and of course, last year in Faith Healer, when he was able to capture that aged tenderness found in his character, Teddy.
Carolyn Backhouse I haven’t worked with before, but she’s done lots of really interesting parts in Chichester and all around the country and she’ll bring a great dignity to her character, Pauline.
Above (l-r): Marion Bailey as Deborah and Carolyn Backhouse as Pauline in A Kind of Alaska
You mentioned the encouragement Faith Healer gave you. Were you surprised at people’s reaction to it?
I was thrilled to bits in Bristol that so many people liked it and so many people came to see it, that was a huge boost to the whole theatre I think, in terms of discovering that we could put on work that’s really rigorous and thought-provoking and in Hong Kong [where the production played earlier this year as part of the renowned Hong Kong Arts Festival], I went through a similar process of initially being quite scared about how it would go down amongst a very mixed audience – some British but many, many local Chinese – there were Chinese subtitles which made the whole thing possible, but again, Brian Friel’s extraordinary way with narrative began to work its magic. You realise that if you empower an audience as much as he does, and ask them to do as much thinking as he does in terms of piecing together the jigsaw, then there’s an activating thrill that seems to transcend cultural barriers. It was a journey through fear, relief and into affirmation about Brian’s power as a writer.
Tonight, I hope it’ll be the same with Pinter and Beckett.
A KIND OF ALASKA/KRAPP’S LAST TAPE (A DOUBLE BILL) ARE AT BRISTOL LD VIC FROM 5 APRIL-12 MAY. TO BOOK TICKETS, CALL 0117 987 7877 OR SEE WWW.BRISTOLOLDVIC.ORG.UK
Inua Ellams on his forthcoming Studio show, Black T-shirt Collection
Tell me about Black T-shirt Collection
Black T-shirt Collection was written by accident. I was walking along by the Southbank Centre in London, which is one of my favourite places in the world and I saw a guy walking towards me wearing a black t-shirt and on the front it had all the captains of the Star Trek series so there was Luc Picard, Janeways, Sisco etc so I was just blown away by the t-shirt – I’m a Star Trek fan so I just thought that was the coolest t-shirt in the world. Then I considered what it might feel like having the coolest black t-shirt collection in the world and hence the title, which just stuck. I had no idea what to do with it; I didn’t know if it would become a poem, if it would become an illustration or whatever. And after a while I began to interrogate it and try to write a short story about two friends who set up a black t-shirt collection. Then, when I began to further interrogate the short story I thought about writing from things that I had lived through and that I’d experienced. I chose to set it in Jos and as I began to write it, different aspects of living in Jos, of my childhood, of my personal politics began to feed in to the story in very natural ways. And then I had something and a few characters and the story just came really. I interviewed and talked to a lot of people about what it might mean to own a black t-shirt as a metaphor – what does a black t-shirt stand for? It was almost a collaborative process writing this story as I asked a lot of people about their opinions, and ran thoughts and ideas by them, and the story came forth really. It was entirely by accident, as I said. I sat down by the hills in Scotland and began to write the story of these friends, and then they became foster brothers and one of them suddenly became gay in Nigeria and there are consequences to that, especially in the Muslim North where the story begins.
Why did you want to tell the story?
To a certain extent because I was afraid to. The story kind of came upon me, it was as if I had the pieces to a puzzle, and the only way of figuring out the puzzle was writing the story. I wasn’t sure if the pieces were right, I wasn’t sure what the puzzle might look like. I didn’t necessarily want to tell the story, I wanted to just write about two friends who started a black t-shirt business and the different aspects gave rise to the story. But I didn’t think I could, given the personal and political and social streams that run through the story, I didn’t think I could weave a story this tightly written so it was a challenge for me to do so and so the drive was to take on this challenge. As for the performance of the story. I wanted to do something that wasn’t as physical as the stuff I had done before like The 14th Tale or Untitled, my second play. I wanted just to write a really good short story and focus on the telling rather than the performance of the story, and those are a couple of things I’m experimenting with in Black T-shirt Collection.
Black T-shirt Collection combines poetic, visual/graphic and performance elements – is this the first time you’ve brought all of them together in one show? Why now?
Yes, in this play it is the first time that I have brought all of them together in a show, and why now? Because I could – because I knew I was going to fooling around with stillness and just the lone voice and the performance of the story and I thought something to bounce from, something to counteract that and add more to it would be visual and graphic elements and I’d been thinking about it a lot. The more I work in graphic design and the more I learn about poetry, I learn about things like semiotics, about imagery and the power of imagery. I just returned from Australia and I saw something that really blew me away. It was a play called Jack Charles Versus the Crown and it was an about an aboriginal man. In the play he’s addressing the audience as if they were judge and jury and he’s presenting a case to them. Towards the end of the play, it’s one of the most incredible images I’ve ever seen presented in a play, he writes his prison number on a table, he lifts the table up so that it becomes a gravestone, and he stands behind it, his thin arms slowly swaying from side to side, and then there’s a crown, which comes and rises above him. And before all of this he spits on a British flag and uses it to wipe down the table. So the sequence just meant deeply vast, political and brave things to make in Australia. This was performed by an aboriginal man and firstly to spit on a British flag is quite a statement if you think of the history. To use this to wipe his own gravestone is an incredible statement. Then to lift this up, to stand behind the gravestone with the crown above him which was a symbol of her majesty’s prison service was to crown himself over his own death and to recognise that what has tormented him his whole life will carry him into death. It was just quite incredible. So I’ve been thinking critically about imagery and how to use it to tell a sub story and give a deeper understanding of the work that I create. And it just felt right to do it here, because of the stillness and fooling around within the play, just to lift things up.
How would you describe the general tenor of your writing? What leads you to write?
I’m influenced a lot by philosophy but in an every day and grounded sense. When I begin to contemplate stuff like that I try to relate it to an everyday sense of belonging and life, and generally these are the things that give rise to my writing. I’m influenced a lot by wonder, by happenstances , by a vague order to things, and also by things that move me. I don’t really write political poems, I used to when I was young but these days I write when I’m moved to write solely. When I read my writings I make sure that the emotions that give rise to that sing out, which is when the poems that I create become very performative. Questions about humanity and questions where the mind crosses matter and how I could give rise to both things in a piece of text and make them reflect each other and seem like it would be impossible to disentangle one from the other.
How did your experience with Bristol Ferment help to develop the show?
It was great. It was great to test out the story, which was so raw then – I hadn’t even memorised the end and I just read it from my ipad. It was great to test it our there and hear what it sounds like to other people, to gauge their reactions and the fact that no one fell asleep meant a lot because it proved that the story was gripping enough and alive enough to them to sit with it. Because it was just a pure performance, there was no music, no sound, my director sat and read the stage directions out as I was reading. It was just very raw and it was great, it gave me so much more confidence in the writing and perfecting the text and the rhythm of it. It was gorgeous.
How do you hope people will react?
Well, I have no idea. Absolutely none whatsoever. I set out to write, I guess, a tragedy (I don’t know if I should give that away right now). But I set out to write something that didn’t have a happy resolution as did The 14th Tale and Untitled. My challenge to myself was to see if I could do that and be at peace with myself, which I think I am. But one of the beautiful things of working in the performance of literature, in performance poetry, in the performance of short stories or live literature is the instant reaction of the audience – to see that what you have created has really settled within them and moved them to a certain degree, even if it’s just one inch to the left – you just moved your heart one inch to the left. And just to see an understanding and an appreciation of what you have shared is one of the rushes, one of the things that keeps me returning to the stage. I think eventually that might wane because people age and require different things but for Black T-shirt Collection I don’t know, I don’t want to think about how they might react in case it isn’t what I really want and then I might walk away feeling disappointed. I just hope they like the story, that’s all. I hope they walk away and think ‘that’s a good story’ – that is good enough for me.
Anything more?
Just come and expect the world to be suspended for a little bit, and come willing to suspend reality.
What aspects of the production are you most looking forward to personally?
I used to work at Bristol Old Vic, and during my time there Coram Boy’s Director Melly Still worked on a spellbinding production of Beasts and Beauties, a selection of grisly fairytales written by poet Carol Ann Duffy. The show was imaginatively staged and managed to really balance the scary and gruesome elements of the story while not being too much for younger audiences to take. In fact it was this sensitive handling of the more scary elements head on that made the play so special. It was one of the best shows I saw at the Old Vic and to see Melly’s work again on Colston Hall’s main stage will be a real treat.
I also think that Melly’s experience of striking the balance between the scary and not too scary in Beasts and Beauties is something that she managed well in the first production of Coram Boy at the National Theatre and will hopefully bring to our production. There’s no getting away from the fact that the story is dark in places, but we see that ultimately good conquers evil which is a fantastic lesson for younger audiences to learn. However we do recommend that the show is suitable for children 12 and above as there are some disturbing scenes.
What does the staging of Coram Boy mean for Colston Hall? Will audiences be seeing more theatre there in the future?
We are so proud to be hosting Coram Boy at Colston Hall. As two of the major venues in the city we haven’t worked as closely together in the past as perhaps we should, so this is the perfect opportunity to join forces to present this special show. We will be working with BOV in the future to make sure our working relationship doesn’t stop here.
We also haven’t had a proper run of a Christmas show at the Hall in living memory, so it’s a chance for Colston Hall’s audiences and staff to really get into the Christmas spirit and enjoy the fun and atmosphere that having a play in the festive season brings. Personally, I loved working at Bristol Old Vic at Christmas and I’m really looking forward to being part of something so magical again at the Hall.
Coram Boy has brought Colston Hall together with Bristol Old Vic for the first time. What do think are the benefits of such collaborations for the city? Would you like to see more of them?
The benefits of venues collaborating in the city are huge. Bristol as a whole doesn’t shout loudly enough about its culture and fantastic artistic work, so by working together venues can make a louder noise about what we’re doing and hopefully get the city and its venues more publicity locally and nationally. It also makes funding sense in this tough climate for venues to work together to create really special shows that wouldn’t happen if we didn’t work together.
Colston Hall is now run by the Bristol Music Trust, and as working in collaboration with other artists and venues in Bristol is part of the organisations remit, I’m sure we’ll be working with Bristol Old Vic and other venues again soon.
Coram Boy is set to be a Christmas show that Bristol will never forget. What do you think people will remember most?
It’s so special that Bristol audiences will be able to see an award winning and critically acclaimed show in their own city, so firstly I think that audiences will remember the thrill of seeing such an artistically amazing show at the Hall. For Colston Hall audiences in particular they’ll be able to see the venue in a different light – for those used to seeing hot and sweaty rock gigs the staging and soaring music of Handel’s Messiah will be a really different experience. Ultimately I think what audiences will remember is the show itself – the wonderful script, talented cast, a director at the top of her game and a heart-stirring musical score.
What are people saying about Coram Boy? Is there a buzz happening?
Colston Hall staff are really excited about it – staff from Bristol Old Vic have been to see us regularly to keep us updated about the show and members of the Box Office have even read the script so they can advise the audience about the content of the show. The reviews of the National Theatre’s production were phenomenal (‘As moving and thrilling as one could ever hope to experience in the theatre’ – Time Out) and our audiences are really getting behind the show as they understand how special and one-off it is. We can’t wait for it to begin!
Photo: Miss Charity on Flickr
This is our first large-scale collaboration with Colston Hall, and their first ever Christmas theatre show. And so while we use our current refurbishment to unearth stories and memories from the past, let's have a look at the history of another Bristol institution.
The site has been occupied by four buildings named Colston Hall since the 1860s. In the thirteenth century, the site was occupied by a friary, known as Whitefriars. It was replaced by a large Tudor mansion used by Queen Elizabeth I in 1574 on a visit to the city. In 1707, Edward Colston established the Colston Boys' School in this building, which was acquired by the Colston Hall Company in 1861. Colston Hall opened as a concert venue on September 20, 1867.
In December 1936, the third hall was opened. This survived the Luftwaffe air raids of the Second World War, but was burned down in 1945 after a discarded cigarette started a fire. The hall was rebuilt once more, and the fourth reopened in 1951 to mark the Festival of Britain.
From 2007 to 2009, the Colston Hall underwent extensive refurbishment with the construction of a new foyer alongside the present building, topped by a wind turbine.
Colston Hall have an excellent history section on their website, which you can view here.
We've partnered with Heart FM this year to support the Have a Heart campaign, which is raising money for Childline - the free phone and online service, offering support and advice for any child who has nowhere left to turn.
You can find out more about the campaign here and you can donate here
And here's a video about the work that the rather amazing Childline do:
Blog posts from Bristol Old Vic
Blog posts from Bristol Old Vic
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