In Britain, today, we seem to be experiencing a surge of interest in the live arts, with much exciting and innovative work occurring in unexpected places. The Old Vic company recently acquired some abandoned tunnels underneath Waterloo Station, where new and experimental work is performed. It was there I saw Scorched by the playwright Wajdi Monawad, which tells the harrowing story of a Lebanese woman and her twin children, now adult, living in London (there are echoes here of Shakespeare’s lost children).
This powerful play gained immeasurably from the damp and echoey venue in which it was presented and I cannot imagine that it would have had the same impact if presented from behind a gilded proscenium arch.
In his play Pornography, set in London during the first week of July 2005, another young playwright, Simon Stephens, has apparently given the director no stage directions, except to specify that the scenes of his play can be performed in any order, to be decided upon by cast and director, so that different threads of the narrative ‘interrupt and intersect each other.’ In this way, he has ensured that each production of the play will have a different resonance. At the performance I saw, given by acting students at the RADA, in an engrossing production directed by Trilby James, the sense of emotional isolation experienced by so many people in modern society was powerfully conveyed. Here, the character of a man who represents one of the bombers on the underground appears only at the very end of the play, thus engendering in the audience an instant recognition of the part chance plays in all our lives.
As a member of the Barrow Poets, during the 1970s I took part in a performance of poetry and music given to some of the women who were locked up in Holloway Prison. Our visit was an unforgettable, if chastening, experience and it left me with a certainty that an alternative to a prison sentence should always be considered and that locking people up in such a frighteningly hostile environment is no way to rehabilitate those whose lives have gone amiss.
Tasmin Little, the internationally acclaimed violinist, has recently taken the unusual and undoubtedly courageous step of taking her solo violin to audiences who have neither the resources nor the opportunity to hear classical music played in a concert hall environment. Audiences for her Naked Violin have included men and women living in hostels, men working on oil rigs and passers-by on Waterloo Bridge.
This summer I visited Edinburgh during the Festival and I was struck by the way that the Festival Fringe has grown out of all recognition since the early days, when conventional productions staged in traditional venues were the order of the day. Alongside the magnificence of the National Gallery of Scotland one could watch escapologists, clowns and magicians strutting their stuff, teenagers performing acts of daring and risk-taking, flying or riding bicycles down the almost vertical slopes of Princes Street Gardens. There was a buzz of excitement at almost every street corner and an atmosphere of exploration and pleasure that comes about when we are set free to release the boundless store of potential creativity within us all.
Note: Re the report on a visit I made to The Jewish Museum (June 2010) I would like to thank Sarah Aaronson for the information that the Mikveh is a ritual bath taken by women only, which would not therefore have been used by any city business man, either today or in the medieval ages. So much for the imagination!
Plenty of Spirit Cicely Herbert explores a surge of interest in the live arts in Britain today.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival Foxes have holes, the birds of the air have their nests ...
Thousands to lose their homes and their jobs under the Government’s Spending Review while, backed by a bullish cabinet of millionaires, the rich roar on regardless. ‘Homeless in the Snow’, England
Note: Re the report on a visit I made to The Jewish Museum (June 2010) I would like to thank Sarah Aaronson for the information that the Mikveh is a ritual bath taken by women only, which would not therefore have been used by any city business man, either today or in the medieval ages. So much for the imagination!