Propeller presents 'Twelfth Night' and 'The Taming Of The Shrew' at The Lowry

Another ambitious double-header comes to town from Propeller Theatre Company. In hot pursuit of the twin outing (no pun intended) of 2011's 'Richard III' and 'The Comedy Of Errors', this time around the all-male players present 'Twelfth Night' and 'The Taming Of The Shrew', playing on alternate nights and a matinee at The Lowry. An all-male cast they may be, but that's the only thing remotely 'traditional' about the company. Propeller's approach to the texts is both irreverent and devoted, and their productions offer other such rewarding contradictions; slapstick yet wonderfully choreographed, raucous but impeccably musical (all the cast seem to be accomplished musicians alongside everything else). Whether any common threads or new revelations will be drawn out between two very disparate plays over two consecutive nights' performance remains to be seen, but I'll be attending with a very open mind.

'Twelfth Night' plays on the 9th and 13th of April, 'The Taming Of The Shrew' on the 10th and 13th of April.

Don't forget to check out The Shakespeare Girl next week for my reviews.

Tickets are available here.

The Shakespeare Girl : a novel

‘GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,

TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE.

BLESE BE THE MAN THAT SPARES THES STONES,

AND CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES …’

I’m writing a novel. Yes, another one. My first one is currently sitting unpublished in a  metaphorical sock drawer, as all first novels should for a time. One day I will take it out, dust it off and take another look, and possibly cringe, or maybe even re-consider and re-submit it.

In the meantime I have an MA in Creative Writing to complete. My final piece of work for the course is a novel: The Shakespeare Girl.  As part of the project I’ve set up a website to accompany the novel, which you can look at here. I will be adding various reviews, images, news items and guest posts to the site over the coming weeks, and eventually I will post an extract or two from the novel itself. 

The opening quotation above, as you might know, is taken from Shakespeare’s tombstone. If we believe, as many do, that these words are amongst the last ones written by the playwright himself, they reveal an anxiety about exhumation which also makes an appearance in sixteen of his thirty-seven surviving plays. When I first read about this peculiar obsession, I was intrigued. I began to read about the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, and discovered that the building sits right on the riverbank, hovering over the waters of the Avon, and that it is in some state of dilapidation.

Erosion, disrepair … a thought occurred to me: What would happen if you had to dig up William Shakespeare…?

That was the starting point for a story, which I decided to people with characters whose lives are somehow connected to the Bard: a professor, a student, an actress… In homage to Angela Carter’s Wise Children, I also decided to include some type of reference –obvious, oblique, or somewhere in between – to every Shakespeare play in the course of the book. Not to be clever – I’m learning about Shakespeare as I go – but to try and neatly dramatise the way in which Shakespeare infiltrates our daily lives, often without us knowing.

So, whenever time permits, I’m working away at the novel. The plot, I think, is decided. The characters, I hope, are beginning to come off the page. It’s ambitious, hopefully funny, certainly accessible, and I can’t wait to finish it.

If you’d like to get in touch about my writing, or about anything Shakespearean, or better still, if you’d like to contribute something to my website, then I’d love to hear from you, at this address here. If you’re on Twitter I also have a dedicated account to follow, here.

Thank you for reading …!

Going away, and coming up ...

Hello readers,

I am soon heading off on a fortnight of travel and adventure. This will encompass second-hand Olympics vibes down in London town, the V&A and British Museum for general edification, a touch of Shakespeare at The Globe, some avant-garde in Soho, a bit of Club Motherfucker at Elephant and Castle, some Hackney vibes, some Greenwich me-time (geddit), Vanilla Black, a day out in Margate to see Blur, a DJ gig at a film festival in Dublin, a couple of days in Prague, a train to Germany, and a few days in beautiful Berlin. It will involve a cast of hundreds, a bill of hundreds more, and I'm doing it all for you ...

On my return to Manchester you can expect ludicrous travel writing of this nature, or possibly this; some brand new 'Manchester: In Residents' action from local luminaries and salt-of-the-earth folk; a Manhattanchester re-design; some hot party news; and a special insight into my other secret life as a creative writing student ...

See you on the other side ...

Twelfth Night at The Lowry

Chaos and music are foregrounded in Filter Theatre Company’s ruthlessly abridged (ninety minutes, no interval) version of one of Shakespeare’s most fun and farcical plays. Most people on stage play at least two roles and at least one instrument. Misrule and tempo are the order of the day, rather than any musings on power, identity and love. It’s LOUD, there are FUNNY DANCES and RED NOSES. It’s ideal for the coachload of fifth formers in attendance tonight, they love it. It’s actually really good fun, if a touch Legz Akimbo on occasion. Personally, I live in fear of audience participation (with good reason, I might add), and there is plenty here: borrowed clothes, onstage games, shots of tequila, pizzas passed around the audience and more. We were two rows from the front and I was at the end of the row so my stomach was knotted with tension as I watched three ‘volunteers’ catch balls on stage with Velcro hats. An intense hour and a half with some genuine belly laughs to be had. And some of the best lines were not only saved, but sung ever so sweetly ...

Come away, come away, death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid;

Fly away, fly away breath;

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

O, prepare it!

My part of death, no one so true

Did share it.

Not a flower, not a flower sweet

On my black coffin let there be strown;

Not a friend, not a friend greet

My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:

A thousand thousand sighs to save,

Lay me, O, where

Sad true lover never find my grave,

To weep there!

Egypt, Liverpool

Antony and Cleopatra at the Liverpool Playhouse is my Hamlet experience inverted. I’ve never read or seen the play, but I’ve seen every episode of Sex And The City a thousand times so there are expectations aplenty for Kim Cattrall’s Cleo. She’s wonderful. So is Jeffery Kissoon as Antony and, my favourite, Ian Hogg as Enobarbus. It’s played how I imagine Victorian Shakespeare was played, histrionic, full of exclamation marks, straight to the audience, with arms! Kim, in her toned-down Theda Bara-esque get-up, channels Joan Crawford a little. She brings out any and all possible comedy, she endearingly wears glasses for signing the official documents, she is sulky and petulant, then regal, kind to her women, then controlling, not afraid to pull rank as the situation dictates. I guess it’s all there in the lines but she’s a powerhouse, with a British accent to boot. When Antony dies she pulls her handmaids to her saying, ‘My noble girls! Ah, women, women, look, Our lamp is spent, it’s out!’ And it really is her play, Cleopatra is on stage a long time after Antony dies, and it’s the humiliation of Egypt under Rome that prompts her suicide as much as her despair at losing him. It’s no hissy-fit suicide like in Romeo and Juliet, part of the charm of the play is that it’s about mature love. When Cleo looks back with some bemusement on her ‘salad days’ you can feel the experience behind her, and Antony too. Oh but Enorbarbus! He is so ashamed at betraying Antony he literally lies down in a ditch to die, saying:

Throw my heart

Against the flint and hardness of my fault:

Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder,

And finish all foul thoughts. O Antony,

Nobler than my revolt is infamous,

Forgive me in thine own particular;

But let the world rank me in register

A master-leaver and a fugitive:

O Antony! O Antony!

Then he sinks down into the stage and disappears.

An interesting thing this production does is to have Octavius Caesar’s sister, Octavia, played by a man. Not unusual for Shakespeare in one sense, but there are three real women playing too. My theory is this. The Egyptian court is peopled with women and feminised eunuchs, the Roman court is entirely masculine, they are always in uniform, it is the great unsullied patriarchy. Aside from Antony, who is spoken of as being feminised by his association with Egypt, it is Octavia who bridges these two worlds, albeit briefly, and in that context her transgendered status seems less gimmicky. The actor played it beautifully, understated and demure, the initial titters soon fell away. The best unintentional laugh is still funny though, even on the page. Antony falls dramatically onto his sword to take his life, then after a moment’s silence, lifts up his head and says ‘How! Not dead?’ The audience roared. Oops.

Denmark, Sheffield

The novel I’m working on (11,600 words and counting), the one I will submit as my final piece of coursework at the end of my Creative Writing MA, is about Shakespeare. Well, it’s about ‘Shakespeare’ actually, the idea, rather than the man, and about the difference between the two. So I’m seeing and reading as much of the Bard as I can. John Simm acted in The Lakes, Dr Who and Life On Mars. I’ve never seen those programmes but I liked his discrete role as Bernard Sumner in 24 Hour Party People. Aside from that I’m able to appreciate his role as Hamlet at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre with few preconceptions. He’s good. It takes him a little while to warm up, and lying sulkily on the ground while the grown-ups are talking cannot be done lightly post-David Tennant’s Hamlet. But he’s good. His strengths are actually the ensemble scenes over the ‘woe is me’ soliloquies, and there’s always too much pressure put on those pieces anyway. After all, this play is twice the length of Macbeth and, despite how it might sometimes seem, Hamlet isn’t talking all the time. It has one of the best Shakespearean women’s roles in Gertrude (and one of the most overrated in Ophelia) and some tremendous speeches you might have forgotten about. This is part of the ‘my thoughts be bloody’ speech when Hamlet is on his way to the ship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, about to be sent to England, or so they think:

What is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and godlike reason

To fust in us unus’d. Now, whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on the event,

A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward - I do not know

Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'

Sith I have cause and will and strength and means

To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:

Witness this army of such mass and charge

Led by a delicate and tender prince,

Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd

Makes mouths at the invisible event,

Exposing what is mortal and unsure

To all that fortune, death and danger dare,

Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour's at the stake.

My Hamlet yardstick is still Michael Maloney in Yukio Ninagawa’s production at The Lowry, all Samurai overtones and sinister uplighting and Maloney’s sad eyes making a little boy of him when you least expected it. By the time ‘good night sweet prince’ hit I was a mess. Wonderful stuff. In February it’s the turn of Rory Kinnear to bring the Dane to The Lowry. I can’t wait.