What’s worth watching: Vault Festival 2019

A new thing for the blog. I’ve been doing recommendations for Buxton, Brighton and Edinburgh Fringes as long as I’ve been doing this blog, but the Vault Festival (not a fringe as it isn’t open-access, but the closest thing you’ll find to one until sprint comes round) I’ve always done as a footnote for my general winter/spring recommendations. That’s not because I’m giving the Vault a lesser status, but because, up to now, there were very few acts I recognised. But this time, my knowledge of what’s there is big enough to do an article in its own right.

And it’s not, I might add, based on who I’ve seen in previous Vault festivals. I’d heard of a couple of them from the Vault Festival first, but all of these artists I’ve previously seen in Buxton, Brighton or Edinburgh Fringes. Most of the artists in the Vault line-up I’ve never heard of so, as always, please treated this as a cross-section of what’s worth seeing rather than a comprehensive list. But a recommendation of something I’ve seen is not automatic – if it’s in this list, it’s in for a reason.

Safe choice:

Normally, to get into safe choice – meaning something that I’m confident anyone who likes the description will enjoy, and has a wide appeal – a play either has to be one I’ve seen before and loved, or a group doing something new with a strong track record. This time, however, we have two entries in Safe Choice from solo performers I’ve only seen once before, but they are playing to their strengths so much I’m prepared to go with a safe bet.

April

I should declare an interest here. Part of the reason I loved Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons so much was how much it appealed to my anti-censorship sentiments. A long-standing tactic of censorship is to paint the thing that offends your moral purity as harmful, and make sure there’s enough public hysteria to prevent anyone actually watching/seeing/reading/play it themselves and making up their own mind. In the 1980s, one popular target was Dungeons and Dragons. Carrie Marx played Pam, a Christian busybody who’s so obviously only done cursory research and didn’t properly understand what she was talking about. But this play appealed on many levels and if you don’t relate to being on the receiving end of these scare campaigns, you might relate instead to Pam’s quietly tragic quest to find a purpose in her life.

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The Wind in the Willows: the wildest wild woods

The Wind in the Willows is one of the longest-running family Christmas productions in regional theatre – and seeing it for myself, it’s easy to understand why.

What do moles and rats do when spring arrives? Go out for an idyllic boating ride and picnic, of course. “But wait,” I hear you say, “aren’t rowing boats a bit big for a mole and a rat?” Honestly, don’t you know anything? In the early 20th century, moles and ratties and badgers were all human-sized and did human-sized things, mixing with humans and subject to human laws of the land and all that. This, at least, was the premise of Kenneth Grahame’s book, originally meant as a bed-time story and ending up an accidental children’s classic. But the reason the book endures in so many memories is of course our hero, or rather anti-hero. Mr. Toad, the wealthy but vain owner of Toad Hall, is not arrogant as such: simply a flawed individual who is – if you will pardon the mixed metaphor – only human.

This depiction of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Mr. Toad as only human was, perhaps, a driver for Theresa Heskins’ choice of how to bring this to the stage at the New Vic. Plenty of adaptations use make-up or masks to represent the animals – here, however, they are better described as human embodiments of the animals they represent. The ensemble of eleven never have more than a pair of ears or a tail to show which animal they are – and it works. Because this adaptation is not using tweeness as its selling point, but instead, human personalities working and conflicting with each other: Mole, keen to be friends with everyone; Ratty, pragmatic and easy-going; and Badger, the one who knows Mr. Toad best. Mr. Toad, by all rights, ought to be the villain of the piece, throwing lavish parties to big up his own ego, never feel sorry for anyone but himself, always frittering money away on the latest fad – but he’s such an idiot over all this he becomes a lovable idiot, desperately needing his friend to protect him from himself and his new-found love of easily-crashable motor cars.

Chris Neville-Smith’s 2018 Awards

Here it goes. I have lost count of the number of plays I’ve seen this year, but excluding the ones I am connected to (and giving an award to yourself is of course a big no-no) it’s about ninety. As always, the great thing about end-of-year awards is that you can no longer hide behind “Didn’t they all do well?” – you have to pick a winner. What I will say is that this year it’s been very fiercely contested. Even with twenty categories up for grabs, most with a first and second place, some damned good plays didn’t make it in.

But you don’t want a lengthy preamble, do you? You want to get straight to it. Very well, happy to oblige.

Best new writing:

Second place for this award came down to a steward’s enquiry. I saw a play at the Vault Festival that I loved, but having run since 2013 does it still qualify as new writing? After careful consideration, I’ve chosen to allow it, on the grounds that allowed similar leniency last year with The Red Lion. So the runner-up for best new(ish) writing is Matt Tedford for Margaret Thatcher, Queen of Soho, of the true* story of how, on the eve of the vote on Section 28, the Prime Minister everyone loves to hate quit her job and became a gay nightclub hostess. With the show running for five years I was expecting it to be good, and I was of course expecting political commentary. But what surprised me was how intelligent it was, and instead of easy political point-scoring it looks deeper at why this happened. To camp disco tunes with a backing of hunky gay miners. As you do.

In first place, a play that is far more serious, but again one that looks past easy soundbites and asks why something happened. It’s Monica Bauer with Vivian’s Music, 1969, set in the lead-up to the North Omaha race riots, imagining a story of Vivian Strong, the 14-year-old-girl shot dead by the police that set everything off. On one level, like Queen of Soho, this is a play that asks why things were this way, very convincingly recreating a world of segregation and distrust, in a world of “us” and “them”, except it’s more complicated than that, with both racial communities subdivided into further tribes who distrust one another. And on the other level, the play never once loses the humanity of the story, with Vivian an innocent who just wants to enjoy life and her music and doesn’t care a bout race, and Luigi, an estranged father who gets by in life through a silver tongue and bullshitting, more through necessity than choice. Most surprisingly, this play came out of nowhere. Most of the time I see something this successful at the Edinburgh Fringe, I’ve already seen what they can do, or know their reputation. This play, however, was just an obscure entry in the Sweet Venues programme, at first attracting single-figure audiences – until word got round and it started selling out solidly. It is rare for anyone but the established players to have a smash hit these days – this is one of the exceptions, and there’s few plays I could wish this on more.

The Lovely Bones: down to earth

Northern Stage’s joint collaboration to bring Alice Sebold’s novel to the stage works wonders, with production values comparable to the West End, and without falling into special effects overkill that marred the film.

Skip to: Under Milk Wood

It’s rare for regional theatre to try to take on the West End for production values. Even with Royal & Derngate, Birmingham Rep and Northern Stage and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse joining forces, productions on the scale taken for granted in central London are a risky business unless you can be sure you’ll sell the tickets. So an adaptation massively successful novel of Alice Sebold is a pretty safe bet to draw in an audience – or is it?

The most well-known big-budget version of The Lovely Bones is the Peter Jackson film – and many people consider that a disappointment. The Peter Jackson film can maybe be described as a version of Ghost, but with 2009-level special effects instead of 1990-level special effects, but that arguably misses the point. Both stories involve a central character who is murdered (in Susie Salmon’s case, raped and murdered) who lives on in the afterlife, but beyond that two don’t have much in common. The driving theme in Ghost is a hero desperate to stop his killer before he harms anyone else he loves. That theme is also there in The Lovely Bones, but it’s not the main theme. And the supernatural that dominated Ghost are only incidental here, with Susie free to observe the world but near-powerless to intervene. No, the dominant narrative in the story is a family struggling to come to terms with the worst kind of bereavement in the years to come. It is this, I think, that this adaptation gets in a way that Peter Jackson’s didn’t. Peter Jackson relies on fancy effects to create Susie Salmon’s own personal heaven – in this play, her heaven is the world her family still live in, getting on with their lives the best they can.

They Don’t Pay, We Won’t Pay – but what does it say?

Northern Broadsides has a great track record in adapting classics for a modern-day audience. This re-telling of Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, however, sells the story short for laughs.

I may not make many friends with my current batch of reviews, but I’ve seen several plays with sell-out ticket sales, or overwhelming acclaim, or both – and I’ve not shared the enthusiasm. They Don’t Pay, We Won’t Pay, however, is going to be the toughest one to write, because I had the highest expectations for this. Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson have a long track record of adapting classic plays for contemporary settings, and indeed another Dario Fo play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, was my first experience of their collaboration, and that was excellent, with a masterful mix of comic timing and poignant messages. This time, however, one has come at the expense of the other, and the play is so hammed up for laughs it drowns out the serious meaning behind it.

When a play fails to live up to high expectations, it is tempting to write a review focusing entire on the negatives and ignore all the positives. So I shall begin with the positives. All of Northern Broadsides’ productions, from the darkest to the most farcial, have been produced to the highest production values, and this is no exception, with the fast-moving action executed flawlessly. The premise also gets off to a good start too. The play begins in a flat in Sheffield, where Anthea comes in with some big bags of shopping. Or rather looting. She confides to her friend Maggie that the local supermarket has pushed up prices one too many times and the impoverished customers won’t take any more and chose to help themselves. However, acting on the spur of the moment has its drawbacks, and Anthea finds herself loaded with plenty of items she doesn’t need, such as pet food. Then the two women have to hide the ill-gotten gains from the policemen looking for it, such as the anti-capitalist commie constable, or his boss, the anti-commie capitalist sergeant. Before, then, however, they must also hide things from Maggie’s husband Jack, who has never done anything illegal in his life (although some people might consider his dogmatic obsession with union rules and regulations to be a crime). And so we go from there.

Odds and sods: November 2018

And it’s another slow news month. In theatre, that is. Not such a slow news month elsewhere. But we don’t talk about that.

Here’s what’s been happening back and forth in theatre land.

Stuff that happened in November

Goodbye Empty Shop HQ

So it’s confirmed. Empty Shop really are letting Empty Shop HQ go, for a number of reasons given in their own blog post. It’s not clear how much the redevelopment of the Milburngate Centre has to do with the decision, but Empty Shop’s scope is now a lot wider than one venue: the recent addition of TESTT space above the bus station and their work bringing in Miners’ Hall in as a venue are things that were unimaginable when HQ first opened. This doesn’t come as too much of a surprise – I’d heard nothing about plans for what to do about HQ, and no news suggested no plans. Empty Shop is now being run from TESTT Space – which, somewhat paradoxically, means that TESTT Space is now Empty Shop HQ instead of Empty HQ.

This announcement does rule out on theory I had – I’d idly speculated that The Assembly Rooms would temporarily take over the space to help with the current overspill of student productions necessitated by the year-long closure of their theatre. (As far as I can tell, the student productions are managing by using the remaining performance-friendly spaces in the university more intensively.) However, this does leave a question mark hanging over the future of inclusive performance spaces in Durham. TESTT, at the moment, is heavily focusing on visual arts rather than performance arts. I can’t begin to say how valuable Empty Shop HQ was to me when I was starting off, and I don’t believe I’m the only one here.

Two by Two Pints

When you have a set of plays to review, it is often tempting to look for common themes between plays. In early autumn, as it happens, two plays came along with not only shared the theme of pubs, but were also very heavily themed around the number two. More by accident than by design, the two plays have a lot more in common besides. So let’s get right to it.

SKIP TO: Two, Two Pints, Talking Heads

Two

The Gala Theatre are continuing their in-house productions with another classic, Jim Cartwright’s famous story of a night in a working-class pub. This is a safe bet for any theatre to choose (more on this in a moment), but Two is a safe bet for a good reason. It’s lots of little stories of snippets of people’s lives, all played by the same two actors. Some are funny, some are tragic, and one or two where the bar staff really ought to intervene. But it’s a busy Saturday night, and besides, the husband and wife who run the bar have their own problems to keep them busy, and it’s not their constant bickering and put-downs throughout the evening. That is just their way of distracting themselves from something in their past they can’t ignore, however much they might want to.

All you really need for Two to be a success are two capable actors who can play all fourteen characters convincingly (although I did once see a student production who played it with fourteen different actors, somewhat missing the point of the title). Luckily, the Gala can call upon Christopher Price and Jessica Johnson, who were both naturals for this. But this isn’t quite a paint-by-numbers production. Two was originally intended as a small studio piece and it’s not a straightforward play to scale up to a bigger stage. In a fringe-scale venue it’s treated as normal that there’s no set and virtually all interaction with props are mimed, but in bigger theatres expectations are different – but a fully naturalistic production with two actors is impossible.