The return of Ella Grey

Apart from an unresolved puzzle over who or what Orpheus is, Pilot Theatre’s decision to focus A Song for Ella Grey on a group of close-knit friends does justice to David Almond’s book that his own solo play script never could.

It’s time for Ella Grey at Northern Stage. Or, for those of us with long enough memories, Ella Grey round two. For those of us with long enough memories, this is in fact the second time Northern Stage has produced an adaptation of David Almond’s young adult novel for the stage. Seven years ago they did a solo play, written by David Almond himself and directed by then artistic director Lorne Campbell. That came hot off the heels of the publication and acclaim of the original book (not to mention a successful adaptation of another David Almond story over at Live Theatre), but wasn’t one of the most memorable ones. In retrospect, I think this vision was what I call “over-conceptualised” – an abstract staging of what’s already an abstract story, which ended up confusing everybody.

But … Pilot Theatre aren’t giving up that easily, and now they’re having a go. And if anyone’s going to do this right, it’s Pilot Theatre, who’s discovered they’re very good at doing adaptations of young adult novels. This time, it’s Zoe Cooper doing the adaptation – her biggest success to date is probably Jess and Joe Forever. The most obvious change from the original play? It’s gone from a solo play to an ensemble of five. This, I think, goes a long way to addressing two weaknesses of the original play.

What’s worth watching: winter/spring 2024

Skip to: Oh What a Lovely War, The 39 Steps, A Song for Ella Grey, Limelight, Behold Ye Ramblers, Jarman, Thresholds, The Importance of Being … Earnest?, Morgan and West, The Mystery of Dracula, Dune the Musical, Disco Pigs, Modern Times

January is mostly a quiet month for theatre, but with February almost upon is it’s time to have a look at what’s coming up. Might be worth a reminder at this point that this is not a comprehensive guide to the best things coming up in the north east – much of this is steered by what I’ve seen before, and that largely comes down to luck. If you want to see the full rules, you can check out my Recommendations policy.

Before we begin, one small but notable absence from this list is a production from Live Theatre. For some reason, they’re not doing a mainstream production until May. I’m not sure what decide how many productions an NPO Theatre can support in a year, but what’s unusual is choosing May over March. The conventional wisdom is that you wind down theatre in the summer months, as business drops and more attention goes to the fringe season, and put your big productions in the colder months where you get more sales. Live Theatre, however, seems to think otherwise. Make of that what you will.

But apart from that curiosity, here’s what’s caught my eye.

Safe choice:

The top category. Nothing in my list is recommended for everyone – even the best play in the world appeals to a target audience. But if this sounds like your sort of thing, I’m confident you’ll enjoy this.Most are plays I’ve seen before, all of them have wide appeal. We have:

Oh What a Lovely War!

I don’t normally send a play straight to Safe Choice without me having seen it before, but Blackeyed Theatre gets a bye to the top spot because the standard of their back catalogue is excellent. Previous hits have included Dracula and Frankenstein with all sound done acoustic and on-stage, a series of adaptation by Nick Lane including the outstanding Jekyll and Hyde writing in a new female character (and making it look like she was part of the story all along), and straightforward productions of classic scripts including their touring version of Teechers not far behind those from John Godber himself. The writers and directors vary, but the one thing that ties these all together is Victoria Spearing, whose set designs over most of the plays gives Blackeyed Productions their own stamp.

This musical is set at the time of World War One – and in case you haven’t already guessed, the title is being sarcastic. No wars are particularly reputed for loveliness, but the war particularly so. However, unlike most World War One plays going straight into a trenches-based gloomfest, this is set in a music hall with a cast in Pierrot costimes. Such a concept would normally put this straight in the Bold Choice list, but with this musical having endured for decades combined with Blackeyed’s flawless track record it’s much more of a safe bet. It tours nationally, with the local stops being the Stephen Joseph Theatre on the 6th – 9th March, Leeds Playhouse on the 26th & 27th March and – most notably – Darlington Hippodrome on the 28th & 30th March. Big milestone for Blackeyed Theatre to have taken to one of the biggest theatres in the region.

Run, Rebel: runaway hit

Pilot Theatre have a track record of strength in so many areas. Their collaboration with Manjeet Mann in the latest of their young adult adaptations has once more pushed their achievements to perfection.

In all of my theatre blog coverage, few groups have had such a long and consistently good run as Pilot Theatre. My equivalent to five stars is the Ike Award, which I first gave for an adaptation of The Season Ticket (co-produced with Northern Stage). The second one went to Noughts and Crosses, and that was the first in a series of adaptations of young adult novels that has been doing well. We are now on the the fourth. Run, Rebel is a book by Manjeet Mann. It is about Amber Rai, who dreams of being a runner, but her conservative father thinks it time she was married off. It is Mann herself who has adapted the play – and what do you know, Pilot Theatre has done it yet again. For the first time ever, a theatre company has scooped a third one of these:

There are two things I’ve noted Pilot Theatre for: firstly, their innovative approach to staging, and secondly, their ethos for super-diverse casting which, in my opinion, gets it right. Now I’ve noticed a third thing they’re good at: openings. You can read so much into the characters before they’ve spoken a single word. In The Bone Sparrow, for instance, we saw from Jimmie’s first brief appearance she’s lonely and a misfit. Here (thanks to director Tessa Walker), the first glance shows us the family dynamics of the Rai family, with Amber’s headstrong optimism contrasted by her meeker and passive mother Surinder. Amber only has to say about her sister Ruby “She doesn’t live with us any more” to know there’s a lot more to this. As for her father Harbans, we know there’s going to a problem here – but it doesn’t exactly scream “snarling wife-beater” to you. We will learn more about this later.

However, blink and you’ll miss it. The next few scenes depicts life at school that is … perfectly normal. There are two things that currently concern teenage Amber. The first is whether she should listen to her PE teacher who thinks she’s got what it takes to become a professional runner. The second is whether the boy she likes feels the same way about her – but David and his family spent most of the summer with Tara and her family, Tara being her other best friend. As far as they’re all concerned, the only thing out of the ordinary is that she has a dad who’s “a bit strict”. But this is no ordinary tale of a teenage girl trying to persuade her dad to let her stay out later. Harbans is saying people will talk if she’s not married soon. And – more frighteningly, he reminds Amber of the girl over the road who came to a bad end because she brought shame on her family.

The Bone Sparrow: suddenly in the spotlight

Pilot Theatre’s latest adaptation, with a subject suddenly thrown in to national attention, is strong all rounder carried in particular by their ever-innovative staging and one of the best individual performances I’ve seen.

One thing virtually every theatre company aspires to be is “current”, “urgent”, or one of the many other synonyms for topical. But, for all the lofty aspirations, this is surprisingly difficult to achieve. Most main stage productions are at least a year in planning. The issue that prompted you to commission a play is probably going to be long-since forgotten by the time it makes it to an audience. And in the event it is still being talked about, you are probably going to find yourself jostling for attention with another ten groups all saying the same thing as you. Nine times out of ten, you’re better off forgetting about trying to tap into trends and just do something that stands up in its own right. Unless, of course, you end up topical by accident, as happened here. When Pilot Theatre announced The Bone Sparrow (another back adaptation, this time with the original from Zena Fraillon and adapted by S.Shakthidharan), the topic of refugees was an ongoing issue but there was no particular thing bringing the matter to the fore. Now, however … well, I don’t need to tell you what changed.

The setting of The Bone Sparrow is quite far from home though. Priti Patel hasn’t exactly endeared herself to a suddenly refugee-sympathetic public, but few things are more notorious than the immigrant detention camps in Australia. Supporters of these camps will probably argue that Australia cannot be expected to single-handedly house half the world’s refugees, but a less charitable interpretation, as explored in this play, is that it’s a game of buck-passing. By trying to make your conditions for immigrants more infamous than the rest of Asia and Oceania, refugees will opt to go somewhere else instead, were it not for the fact that all other would-be safe countries are doing the same, and you get a race to the bottom. But this is not a comment piece on the merits of immigration policies, this is the place for a theatre review.

Crongton Knights: nice but niche

Pilot Theatre’s latest adaptation of a young adult book is has a narrower appeal than their usual productions, but it deserves to finish the job with the audience this play is aimed at.

The final play on my pre-lurgi catch-up list is a Pilot Theatre production. Pilot Theatre have earned my respect over successive productions for many reasons, but the biggest stand-out is the staging. It varies from play to play, but whatever they do always impresses in a way they’ve never impressed before. The subject material varies as well; last year’s Noughts and Crosses was packaged as an ordinary story of forbidden love but was in fact set an alternate world where Jim Crow laws exist in reverse. Crongton Knights, it turns out, is almost the opposite, packaged as a story of adventure and friendship akin to The Magnificent Seven (with the friends here self-styled as “The Magnificent Six”), but with the setting being a gritty housing estate in South London.

Adapted from the second of Alex Wheatle’s young adult books, five young friends embark on a mission to confront the ex-boyfriend of one of the gang to demand the return of some compromising photos. In an unfortunate twist of timing, this is the day the London riots are destined to break out, but this doesn’t actually feature much in the story. This is because although they live in the notoriously rough South Crong, they must journey to Notre Dame estate,and a typical night there makes the London Riots look like a picnic in the park. Can they make it with nothing but friendship and loyalty on their side.

Crongton Knights is a heavily character-driven story. One of the strongest themes is Bushkid. You see, this is the origin story of the Magnificent Six. Whilst the rest of the gang come from families struggling on the breadline, she lives comfortably with wealthy parents – but what she want more than anything is to fit in with friends. One character I would liked to have known more about was Saira. She is a Syrian refugee whose father is still missing, and one suspects she’s witnessed far worse horrors than anything a sink estate can muster. It would have been interesting to see how she’d react in a situation she’s desensitised to, but that doesn’t really feature in this story. Maybe the next book.

The Ike Award Hall of Fame: 2016

Skip to: Jurassic Park, Of Mice and Men, The Bookbinder, Dancing in the Dark, The Jungle Book, Le Bossu, Consuming Passions, The Season Ticket, Frankenstein, How Did We Get To This Point?

And so, we come up to the final year of the list for now. When first set off doing this, I had planned to do these articles all the way to the present day, but I found as I went along it was more fun doing this as a retrospective, in particular wondering what these artists who impressed me are doing now. So I’m going to stop here for now and continue in real time. The Ike Award Hall of Fame 2017 will be done next year, 2018 the year after, so that there will always be a 3-4 period to reflect and see what happens next.

But before that, the outstanding plays of 2016, and this is a long list. It was probably chance more than anything, but amongst the plays I saw in 2016, the standard was exceptional. As a result, there are ten of you who’ve kept me busy writing this up:

Jurassic Park / Dinosaur Park / The Jurassic Parks

What is the best thing you can hope to get from the Edinburgh Fringe. Some might say a Fringe First, some might say wall-to-wall five-star reviews, but there is surely no greater honour than everybody at the fringe saying how great you were. At the 2015 fringe, I lost count of the number of times people saying how good Jurassic Park was. So I took the opportunity to work this into my visit I checked it out for myself (now called Dinosaur Park), and found out it is indeed as good as everyone said, and more.

Noughts and Crosses: the other Jim Crow

Sabrina Mahfouz’s adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel is an intricate yet accessible depiction of a racially divided world that might have been.

I don’t normally start a review with a spoiler warning, but if you’ve already decided to see this play and you don’t know about the Noughts and Crosses series, I advise you to stop reading now. Pilot Theatre advertised this play as tale of forbidden love in a world of racial tension, but they deliberately omitted one important bit of information about what sort of world this is. The revelation comes in the opening scene – it won’t spoil the scene, let alone the rest of the play, if you know what it is, but it’s better if you don’t.

However, a review of Noughts and Crosses that doesn’t tell you what the Noughts and Crosses are is like a review of The Matrix that doesn’t tell you what the Matrix is. I would not be possible to talk about the many merits of both the story and the adaptation without telling you what Pilot Theatre isn’t telling you; so, in the style of the news just before match of the day, if you want to find out in the play, look away now.

Brighton Rock: Pilot Theatre shines again

The one thing that sticks in my mind about Pilot Theatre more than anything is their striking sets. Directors and writers change, but the projections and running treadmill in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and the concrete flats in The Season Ticket have always stuck in my mind. So I was expecting something striking for Brighton Rock, but the choice, in retrospect, was the obvious one: Brighton Pier – or, more accurately the West Pier, back in the days when it was still a pier. The girder-themed West Pier is the better choice here, because, as Pilot Theatre plays always do, this set will be representing a lot of different locations around gang-ridden 1930s Brighton.

An early example of the set put to use is the chase. Fred, having fallen out of favour with his own gang, keeps moving, trying to stay where people are watching, and even attempts an impromptu courting of Ida. Alas, Ida is too slow to twig what’s really happening, and the minute she spends away from Fred to powder her nose is the minute his gang move in for the kill. With young Pinkie installing himself as the new leader, he then covers his tracks, but a careless mistake make by Spicer leaves a witness, a waitress called Rose. Pinkie opts to court her, and if necessary, marry her so she legally cannot testify against him.* By now, however, Pinkie is up against Ida, determined to make it up to Fred, and determined to protect innocent Rose. But does anyone know what Rose really wants?

The Season Ticket: a prize above all prizes

Sometimes touching, sometimes brutal, The Season Ticket is a great four-way collaboration portraying lives on the fringe of society.

Could you assemble a better team? Lee Mattinson has already shown how skilled his writing is with Donna Disco and Chalet Lines.  Pilot Theatre wowed us with one of the best staged plays ever with The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Northern Stage, of course, as an excellent track record of mainstream productions. And Purely Belter, the film adaptation already made of the book this is based on, is a cult classic in Newcastle. And yet seemingly surefire collaborations don’t always work out. Such high expectation can set up such bitter disappointments. But not here. The Season Ticket is every bit as good as I hoped it would be, and more.

Gary and Sewell are two young lads at the very bottom of the pile. Gary has a sister who is desperate to get her A-levels so that – it is quietly understated – she can get out and move on to a better life – Gary has given up on going to school, and best friend Sewell has seemingly given up in general ever since his father died. The two of them begin in the middle of an inept petty crime, looking for suitable luxury household appliances to burgle from their headmaster’s house. Perhaps, it’s suggested early on, it’s got something to do with Gary having a half-inattentive alcoholic mother. But it emerges that she, too, has her own reasons to give up, once it emerges what sort of person Gary’s father was and what he did to them.

The Lavishness of the Long-Distance Projector

Pilot Theatre’s adaptation of Alan Stillitoe’s 1959 classic is a fine example of both writing and directing, but the biggest achievement of all is the stunning technical presentation.

When an earth-shattering news story shakes the entire nation, the whole nation reacts to it. Journalists fill up pages of newspaper, politicians work it into Conference speeches, and not wanting to be left out, play writers respond by writing gazillions of similar plays about it. Ever since August last year, the London Riots are all the rage, and so far we’ve probably had hits such as the modern gritty urban drama This is your Big Society Cameron, the modern gritty urban drama We Wuz Tired of Being Hassled by da Pigs Innit, and the modern gritty urban drama Concrete and Piss (okay, that last one is a fictitious title coined by Charlie Brooker, but I’m sure we’ll find a play with that name if we look hard enough). Now Pilot Theatre are weighing in with their stage adaptation of Alan Stillitoe’s classic short story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, transformed into a modern gritty urban drama about the London Riots. But don’t let this put you off – it’s good.

Roy Williams transplants this story from its original setting of a 1950s borstal to the present day. There is one overriding observation: you wouldn’t guess you were watching an adaptation if you didn’t know. It makes it look like the contemporary post-riot setting was how the story was written all along. But whilst many so-called adaptations butcher the originals, in this script the key events are the same. Colin Smith (Elliot Barnes-Worrell) is a young petty criminal doing time, discovered to be an extraordinary runner. The story takes place over the course of the run, flashing back to his time behind bars and the events that led him behind bars: his only caring relative, his father, dead from a terminal illness; a mother splashing out this insurance money on a new fancy man; choosing boring unemployment over boring menial jobs; and eventually arrest following a stupid attempt to rob a bakery. If he wins the race, the Governor will look good, and Colin will be set up for a glittering sports career when he gets out. Everybody wins, huh?