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Sunset Blvd

“GREAT stars have great pride…”

For all its bravado, Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevardbook and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, is a bitter and queasy production, and the figure of Desmond is its greatest grotesque, a former Pussycat Doll of 47 striving to be 25, surrounded by video images of herself and entranced by her own face on a screen.

First thing is first, Scherzinger cannot act – it does not matter, though: her vocals are world class. 

This is musical theatre as gothic assault and battery, and like the recent sexy Oklahoma! grabs you by the balls from the first moment and never slackens.

Lloyd’s stylish revival opens with Joe Gillis, the narrator (Tom Francis), unzipping himself from a body bag. “I believe in self-denial,” sings Francis in Let’s Have Lunch, the line both a humorous take on his financial status and an acknowledgement of his sense of frustration. 

Desmond appears in just a black slip for most of the show and Soutra Gilmore’s design is dark. 

Crucially, video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom deserve credit for the cinematography, initially distracting, it pays off in that it gives a nod to old Hollywood and the Insta-era. There are big screens and live relay cameras, while both the backstage at the Savoy and in the street. Watchers and watched.

The screen wins, every time.

Meanwhile, at 10086 Sunset Boulevard, in Desmond’s mad mansion, there is always champagne to hand, and enough money to cater to her every whim and to turn Gillis into a kept man. 

“Without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount studios,” she declares, discounting film crew on the lot: in Scherzinger’s hands she becomes a victim of her own mania.

The lyrics – bittersweet, sharp and accompanied by a fabulous orchestra – are left to speak for themselves.

David Thaxton as Max Von Mayerling (he is the only one writing her fan letters) is brilliant as Desmond’s fiercely protective servant and former husband. 

Though the musical may be 30 years old, Lloyd’s stripped-down, psychologically focused production forces us to contemplate the cost of needing to be adored – namely, the unquenchable thirst for validation that cultivates beneath a culture of self obsession.

The opening of Act 2 is pulled off to stunning effect. 

Fabian Aloise supplies incisive choreography for the lively ensemble. I really liked the tongue in cheek staging of This Time Next Year. But for traditionalists – which I would mostly class myself – it’s a curiously disengaging experience. (Just don’t expect any of them to smile at the curtain call).

Elsewhere, there is subtlety from Grace Hodgett Young as Betty. The triumph is in showing that the jauntiness is not separate from darker aspects but dependent on them.

There will be those who can’t stand it, I am normally wary of parachuting pop stars and reality stars into musicals, but this version is an almost total triumph. It works.

Every now and then there is too much mugging and self-consciousness, of working too hard on pressing a point, but the detail is unrelenting. Here, Jamie Lloyd demonstrates that he has a sense of humour, which is a relief. 

Norma Desmond still causes excitement when she enters the soundstage. After all, she is big – it’s the pictures that got small. This is a revival with razor sharp clarity and passion.

Sunset Boulevard runs at Savoy theatre, London, until 6 January 2024


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God, Lyonesse

The title of Penelope Skinner’s play refers to a mythical lost kingdom in Cornwall buried under the sea. Yet the themes are wide-ranging: #MeToo, cancel culture, the oppression of women and more.

Lily James

I’d have had a lot less room to moan, though, if it had a couple of 3D characters and just one moment of tension to fill the West End in these bleak winter months. 

The cast look like they’ve been forced into positions by a cattle prod and would welcome the sweet release of a stun gun rather than endure one more second of this.

Speaking to the Guardian, Skinner, who shot to fame in 2011 when The Village Bike opened at the Royal Court, said she began writing Lyonesse in 2019 and ended up with a first script that was four hours long and ‘a little crazy’, in her own words.

‘It was not a play that anyone would want to watch,’ she admitted, before adding she went back to the drawing board to rewrite the whole thing. The only element she retained was Scott-Thomas’s character Elaine.

It’s mostly dreadful, in fact, and lacks even enough skill and subtlety to pace itself. 

The plot? Kate (Lily James) is an ambitious film executive and high achieving north London mother sent to draw Elaine’s life story out of her to re-fashion it for a film. But she is misunderstood by her husband (James Corrigan); considered irrational for abandoning her child; and humiliated; driven to melancholia spending time in the Cornish dump. She breezes through most of this.

Kristin Scott Thomas

Early on, Kristin Scott Thomas delivers a stand-up monologue that culminates in her jumping around to Ultra Nate’s You’re Free with her lesbian poet neighbour Chris (Sara Powell).

I want to be specific about my grounds, because so many people – and male reviewers especially – have been falling back on narrow or simply savage criticisms of virtue signalling. Lyonesse is short on characters, detail, activity, proper dialogue, even music.

Alas, it would be easy to be able to say that Ian Rickson’s 3-hour production of Lyonesse is bad strictly on formal and technical grounds, but that would, I think, be fundamentally a lie. It is very poor technically but that’s not all that makes it bad.

The play is full of bits of dialogue that have lost what they coupled with, character dynamics that have become rambling, scenes that trickle off. And I am certain it would be 20 minutes shorter if Scott Thomas had a grasp of irony and natural timing for comedy.

Despite all the activity, or perhaps because of it, the main characters are rather flat. Like many of us, it tries to be a success and unpack the implications of patriarchy and inevitably fails on both counts. This a play so obviously engineered that you can’t help seeing its form, maybe the writing accounted for the quality as much as the directing did.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James

“It is time for me to step into the light,” Elaine (Kristin Scott Thomas) announces, a former star actress who disappeared without trace three decades previously.

In the most ludicrous single sequence, James plays a scene of comic female incompetence; she’s unable to light a house fire – that would be a historical low point on the Harold Pinter stage if the character didn’t later accidentally do it in an out of pace slapstick sequence. 

For me, the real kicker arrives, though, in Act 2, which was rushed, confused, and barely raised a laugh, it is difficult to know why it is so badly structured and edited. 

Elsewhere, alpha female boss Sue (Doon Mackichan) whose company specialises in “female driven narratives”, forgot her lines (it happens) the line was “Do you know what I think?”. 

Mackichan yelled frantically off stage: “Yes, Janine?” as if we were supposed to think her office door had been knocked on. 

The off-stage prompt came “do you know what I think?” this was Doon’s line.

Unfortunately, Doon has had to withdraw from Lyonesse due to a ‘private family matter.’

Doon Mackichan and Lily James

Do you know what I think?

New writing needs development, it needs space and it needs investment. Why is it 3 hours? Why are there stuffed parrots? Why is the set so lame? Why did nobody in dramaturgy intervene? Why demonise the entire male sex? 

This could have been brilliant. 

Still, as far as bold new writing on a West End stage, though? Lyonesse makes for lousy viewing.

Lyonesse plays at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 23 December

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I Went Along To Stephen Sondheim’s Final Musical: Here We Are

A gutsy posthumous musical from the greatest musical composer of all time doesn’t imbue confidence but Here We Are is a reminder of a theatre genius.

Here We Are (originally titled Square One) -becomes the third major Sondheim production running in New York City, alongside Broadway’s Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along.

Sondheim said days before his death in 2021 that he did not know when it would be finished, he had written songs for the first act but was struggling with the second. “I’m a procrastinator… I need a collaborator who pushes me, who gets impatient.”

Here We Are – the final Sondheim Musical – is directed by Joe Mantello, and based on two films by Spanish director Luis Buñuel — The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel, this show is written with the playwright David Ives. Act 1 is Discreet Charm, while Act 2 is Angel.

As for the wider backdrop, in Sondheim’s last interview, he stated that this show had a “so-called plot” in which “the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”

Then again, it’s hard to work out what’s actually going on here. For instance, I read in January that producer Cameron Mackintosh said that the show was incomplete and only “50 or 60 per cent there.”

Cam Mack continued: “I think he wanted me to reinforce his view as to whether or not he was going to complete it. Because of the amount of energy it would have taken.”

Hm. Of course, the most difficult thing about making posthumous musicals is that the progress of the artist is frozen in time. No matter what decisions others make, they can only approximate the artist’s will.

So, is Here We Are any good?

Well, it takes aim at obvious targets, and makes a muddle of hitting them, in which self-absorbed characters are tortured by a wicked cosmos, and permission to laugh is never clearly granted. It’s the performances that make Here We Are a worthwhile, fitting postscript to Sondheim’s legacy.

In fact, everything of interest happens in the first act. The book states familiar truths in the most confrontational of ways; an Eat The Rich satire.

The plot: a group of people attempt to find a place to have dinner. Later, they do have dinner but cannot get out of the room. We are presented with American versions of the French bourgeoisie, this show is brilliantly lit by Natasha Katz: the set shimmered.

And, oh, the thrill of minimal choreography that is exact, from the reset of each attempt to have dinner, to the intimate chemistry between two angst-ridden young lovers. 

Yes, the fantastic cast including David Hyde Pierce, Tracie Bennett, and Bobby Cannavale try their best, but the book’s insistent conceptual droning overtakes them. There are no songs in Act 2.

In a memorable moment of fourth wall-breaking, a horny soldier, played by Jin Ha, sings a love song that is interrupted halfway through with a generic show-stop. 

House lights go up: 

It’s the end of the world

There is nothing but you 

I’ve been looking for love all my life 

I’ve got further to go

I want only to be with you, live with you, die with you

That much I know

Then my mother came in 

I saw that her shirt was stuffed, and the sky was cloth, and the clouds were just painted and the food was just rubber

Then a curtain went up and I realised we were all in a play, on a stage, in a theatre

Here We Are, then, grants these people their idle wishes.

Ultimately, though, this project is a ghostly reminder of Sondheim’s perfectionism. And that’s just it: however much you may enjoy this show, it’s hard to completely accept it as a true Stephen Sondheim musical without his final approval.

As a lyricist, Sondheim followed three rules: content dictates form, less is more, God is in the details. This show all sounds pleasantly like an echo of good Sondheim.

A priest – played with excellent comic timing by Hyde Pierce sings: 

Do any of you think about the meaning of life? Any of you

God. Death. Anyone for purgatory? 

In the middle of mass, all I think is my miter should be tighter

I mean, why a bishop? Why not an analyst? 

Why not a bartender, I could be anything

Don’t get me wrong

I love the church and I don’t only mean the clothes

I mean the statues and the windows

And the rows of yearning people and the special par-king

And then of course there’s God

Don’t get me wrong

I love my dog, though, I don’t always understand him

Or agree 

Do we really need the droughts and the floods

And the plagues. And the earthquakes. And the universal suff’ring?

This was funny.

It’s an ambitious musical that works hard to achieve a lean and contemporary look. But characters that we feel indifferent to turns the plot into a guessing game are not substitutes for suspense.

In the end, its existence with a handful of motifs that stand up to Sondheim’s peerless oeuvre, a satire of the super rich, a musical that attempts to illustrate the dehumanising essence of free-market capitalism, via one-liners and mystical virtues. 

Yet I kept waiting for Here We Are to get started — to get into something. I was still waiting when it was over and I was back out on the street. 

What I am describing sounds like a chore. And by Sondheim peerless standards it mostly is. But it’s a surprisingly absorbing musical, just the same.

Steve has his epitaph now. God is in the details.

 Here We Are runs at The Shed, NYC until January 7, 2024.

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We need to talk about arts education

Theatre is my life. 

I was first in the family to go to university, in receipt of free school meals. Am working class, and I have a learning disability. 

Yet here I am.

Creative subjects seemed to be the only area I thrived on as a learner.

Despite repeated warnings, access to a creative curriculum – music, art and drama  remains out of reach for the vast majority of children from less privileged backgrounds.

Indeed, the country of Shakespeare no longer recognises drama as a key subject.

Here are some comments from a few teachers that I spoke to recently about the creative subjects disappearing by stealth from our state schools: 

‘My college has cut A level dance film music and drama entirely.’

‘Our college has cut BTEC music, a combination of factors of low recruitment and knock on of low uptake GCSE.’

‘My sons homework is only ever marked on spelling, algebra and grammar – not creativity.’

‘They (the government) brought in EBACC – which excludes the arts, which all but eliminates them. The schools struggle to find the time to teach the arts. ’

“I work in a special school and have been pressured to cut drama completely from the classroom – my manager wants evidence of ‘progressive writing and worksheets’ from classes.” 

“My secondary school in Morecambe has no music in KS3 and KS4 and no music teachers employed for the first time in my 30 years teaching in this school. It’s a tragedy.” 

“My secondary school still tries to offer drama GCSE and music but due to pressure students in year 11 and 13 were banned from taking part in school productions.” 

“I’m a secondary teacher, drama lessons have reduced from 50 minutes a week to an hour a fortnight.”

So, what can arts in schools offer children and young people from widening disadvantaged backgrounds?

As Head of Creative Communities at the Dukes, Lancaster; Lancashire’s only producing theatre, I am responsible for participatory work with brilliant diverse communities of all ages and abilities. 

I see on a daily basis the impact that creative learning has on people’s lives. Transferable skills, improved confidence, better health and improved wellbeing. The tangible evidence is abundant.

All of our creative engagement work is affordable, well-resourced, sustainably funded and / or have non-means tested bursaries. It’s a rewarding challenge. 

Politically, the current education secretary – a role that has been held by 10 different people since the Conservatives assumed power in 2010 has also been held by five different people since July last year alone. And the department Culture, Media and Sport is on the eleventh culture secretary in the space of ten years.

This is something that matters a great deal to me and I will not shut up about it.

Since the introduction of the EBacc in 2010, the number of GCSEs taken in arts subjects has declined by 40 per cent. Yet, judged by any rational criteria, removing arts subjects from the national curriculum makes no sense at all.

Yet the people who have been making these policies in government have seen and felt the massive advantages that can bring.

As an example of our “viability”, in tourism surveys, ‘Theatre’ is ranked second only to ‘Heritage’ as the reason quoted for international tourists choosing to visit the UK. Theatre – worth £7 billion to the UK economy – drives inward investment, generates intellectual property that is licensed all over the world, and, as noted by the Chancellor, plays a major role Britain’s soft power.

In fact, during a recent speech, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, noted that the cultural industries had grown at twice the rate of the UK’s economy over the last decade stating they have made the UK the world’s largest exporter of unscripted TV formats and help give us a top three spot in the Portland Soft Power index.”

Meanwhile, schools are handing out clothing and food to children amid the cost of living crisis, while teachers report deteriorating hygiene among pupils as families cut back on brushing teeth, showering and even flushing the toilet.

The arts isn’t draining subsidy from the state, it is the driver of all national growth, generating tax revenue far greater than the investment it receives in return. What value do we put on that?

This summer 28.4% of GCSE exams were graded 7-9 in London, compared with 18.6% in the North West. A level results showed a similar picture. While in London 30% of A-level grades were A or A* (up from 26.9% in 2019), in the North West it was 24%. It highlights a worrying attainment gap that needs urgently addressing. 

Whatever happened to Levelling Up? 

Needless to say, teacher numbers are plummeting, hours are shrinking, the percentage of uptake from students to take GSCE and A’Level arts courses are down by over a 60% since 2010 and are plummeting further still.

Artists and teachers have long railed against the English baccalaureate, the system introduced without consultation under the former education secretary Michael Gove in 2010. The Ebacc excludes all arts subjects. It is also the bedrock on which a school’s Progress 8 score is based, which determines its place in performance tables. This gives schools an incentive to focus on “core” subjects – English, maths and sciences.

Of course, funding squeezes for schools, combined with the philosophical damage of arts no longer being recognised as a core subject on the secondary school curriculum, as of 2014.
The number of drama teachers in state-funded secondary schools in England has also fallen by 22% since 2011, and there has been a 15% decline in the number of music teachers and a 12% decline in the number of art and design teachers over the same period.

All this is seriously damaging the future of many young people in this country.

In fact, there is a dangerous disparity emerging between the state and the private sector in terms of provision for cultural education.

To paraphrase actor Sir Mark Rylance who used the bio of the programme for the recent West End production of Jerusalem to criticise cuts to arts education: 

“If, in modern day England, an institution like Eton deems drama important enough to have two theatres, why are we allowing our government to cut arts education from the life of the rest of our young people and our hard-pressed teachers,”

The next Sir Mark Rylance or Dame Floella Benjamin are out in Morecambe Bay Primary, I’m sure.

Sadly, young people in the most disadvantaged areas are least likely to be able to access cultural activity through school, reinforcing cycles of exclusion and deprivation.

In a recent report by the Cultural Learning Alliance titled ‘The Arts in Schools: Foundations For The Future’ a re-evaluation of the way arts subjects are assessed in schools is among the recommendations, also recommends every child has access to a minimum of four hours of arts education per week is called for as part of a rethink of the state education sector.

There is something too about time, and the problem with the arts being ‘bell-bound’, as is illustrated by the image below which describes a high-functioning classroom, and the flexibility that the arts require in terms of timetabling. The same length of lesson does not work for every discipline.

Furthermore, it is estimated that 4.3 million children and young people in the UK are growing up in poverty.

The Children’s Society reports that there are approximately 800,000 young carers in the UK, and that 39% have said that nobody in their school is aware of their caring responsibilities. The Sutton Trust has published data on the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on university students now, and there are predictions of a drop out crisis ahead.

In schools, headteachers are reporting that this crisis is resulting in increasing numbers of vulnerable pupils becoming disengaged and being groomed by gangs to run drugs from one city to other parts of the country, with the director of Diversify, a charity based in Rotherham, reporting that with children’s families unable to afford school meals ‘they are outside, hungry and cold. And in the context of schools having to cut back on the number of staff on playground duty due to financial pressures, or struggling to recruit and retain pastoral and support staff, due to low pay, it’s bleak.

I’d also like to clear up a few things. 

Firstly, standstill funding is a real terms cut; it is a corrosive form of zero-sum vandalism.

And second, community engagement work is not a loss leader, it’s an investment in a brighter future where new conversations, new academics, new voices and new audiences can meet. 

Because you can throw money at trying to entice new or different groups to your venue, but why should they come unless they see themselves truly reflected on stage and in every aspect of a theatre’s work? 

My wish is that we wake up to the fact that diversity – in all forms – age, gender, race, class – has real value: it doesn’t just ensure survival, it can genuinely invigorate organisations and be a spur to creativity and new ways of thinking.

What are the unmet needs of our communities and audiences?

It’s only by constantly challenging those assumptions, that we will ever get to a stage when the demographics of the stories that play out on our stages, match the demographics of the country.

These policies are restricting the arts to a privileged few. It’s time for a change.

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Edinburgh Fringe: Gush / Attachment: The Leech Show / Self Raising

There is usually a moment in a Fringe show, often after the first few minutes, when you start to relax. You are sure that you have a grip on it; all fear about making sense of things disappears.

It’s not so in Abby Vicky-Russell’s knotty but moving Gush, a photo of Prince Andrew looms Stage right. Pre-show, – a pulsing soundtrack loops: GUSH – GUSH GUSH – GUSH GUSH.

Then, a figure in a charcoal fluffy body suit and pink bob wig appears. Finally, I thought: showbiz!

Then it all stops.

Vicky-Russell re-enters playing Neil, a plumber from Yorkshire, who has been sent in to fix a leak on the set of the show that we are watching. Her physical comedy is top notch. 

Elsewhere, the resulting part stand up routine, part confessional play within a play gives the character Neil a mundane shimmer, and there are overtones of Victoria Wood in an expertly plotted visual gag involving a quiche and loads of table salt. Chaos. 

But, if anything, that overture understates the level of theatre sorcery going on here: Behind all this nonsense, a real-life, gruesomely compelling story emerges through a confessional monologue about abuse and father-daughter pain.

In any case, Gush, at Assembly packs some emotional punches and is an astonishingly unguarded piece – with a lot of potential – about the cruelties of abuse. 

Elsewhere, at Greenside I caught Attachment: The Leech Show – it’s ostensibly a slapstick piece about influential critic, Bob the Leech.

But only a very few of the gags get their laughs-and when slapstick goes flat, the effect is clunky.

This young company turn the stage into a zestful playground and give it all they have got, though the running gag makes it hard to conjure suspense – are critics really frustrated artists who never like anything? 

Yet in the final few minutes when Bob dies, the company come to the realisation that critics are just as vital to the industry as the artists that they observe.

This timely show strikes me as an enduring cult hit in the making.

Thirteen shows are deaf-led at Fringe this year, and one of those is Jenny Sealey’s lovely Self-Raising at Pleasance Dome.

“Secrets are easier to tell strangers. I work in theatre, that’s what we do.”

Well, quite.

This is an autobiographical play from disability-led company Graeae – alongside her “terp” (sign-language interpreter) where three generations of the Sealey family are unpacked.

Sealey set out to adapt Anne Fine’s book Flour Babies before real life took hold and she changed course. Opportunity and social mobility are underlying themes.

The narration is accompanied by captions, sign language and audio description, along with family pictures, video and voiceovers from Sealey’s son, Jonah. 

This show is beautifully put together, from the cunningly simple design by Anisha Field where three cupboards neatly double as the family kitchen and a darkroom and where family photos – and secrets are developed, to the simple lighting design by Emma Chapman.

There is almost too much here to be squeezed into the brief running time, but director Lee Lyford keeps things motoring.

Sealey and her co-writer Mike Kenny have delivered a charming story that is funny, graceful and fully accessible. Alas, it’s the subject rather than the staging that moves the emotions.

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Edinburgh Fringe: Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello: Body Show / Woodhill / The Boy Out The City

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello: Body Show, rip up  snippets of pop culture, lip-sync, clown around, and ultimately craft a rich interrogation of eating disorders and gender dysphoria.

It also happens to be an entertaining hour that is cool, funny, heartwarming and infectiously optimistic too.

Examining the power structures and political intrigue that have shaped man’s world, the duo deliver a dense, ambitious triumph that totally taps into the Barbenheimer zeitgeist.

There are snippets of pop music, flashes of apocalyptic explosions, TVs Come Dine With Me and Bake Off – with the pair miming expertly to the audio and visual segments.

It pincers the audience in a kind of keen, nervous imbalance—it holds our attention by throwing our incredulity at where we are as a society back in our faces.

“It’s great having a break from having a body,” they tell us.

This is a very artfully put together show. Don’t be misled by its bumbling, ditzy qualities.

At Summerhall, LUNG Theatre have created a lyrical and relentless piece of verbatim dance-theatre in Woodhill.

In June 2018, a prison report stated that, “staggeringly”, a total of 20 men had taken their lives in seven years at Woodhill, higher than at any other jail in England and Wales. Disturbingly, there have been more cases since.

Assembled from 70 interviews, Matt Woodhead’s visceral piece focuses on the deaths of three real prisoners deaths –  Stephen Farrar, Chris Carpenter and Kevin Scarlett – in HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes – and their families’ fight for justice.

One of the best things about Woodhead’s production is that it gets the details so right; not just in the relentless score with composition by Sami El-Enany, or Will Monk’s pulsing single lightbulb design, or the painful thump of the music and testimony, but in the way it interrogates so expertly the subject matter.

It is deeper, edgier, more emotionally dangerous than this groundbreaking company’s earlier work; script, design and lighting, soundtrack and choreography conjoin in one lethal embrace.

Up there with the very best of the Fringe shows that I saw, this is a terrifying and haunting 70 minutes; At times it’s like a hallucination looming out of the dark.

“We spent so long trying to keep the men safe from each other,” says one official voice, “we forgot to keep them safe from themselves.”

Powerful, essential theatre.

Declan Bennett’s rough and ready Boy Out The City at Underbelly, Cowgate, is directed efficiently by Nancy Sullivan.

This confessional piece is inspired by Bennett’s experiences of pandemic isolation in Oxfordshire. At the start he tells us. “This is about gay shame and loneliness, not Covid lockdown”.

Sullivan doesn’t always negotiate the switches in mood or the fact that Bennett throws too many back stories into the mix. But the story is never dull, and he is a relatable and compelling storyteller.

It’s a simple setup, but one freighted with complexities. There’s also flourishes of some genuinely great writing here: “You bring a bit of culture into the village,” locals tell him, “but we think they mean homosexuals.” It is the kind of place “where butter forgets to melt out of the fridge”.

Later, Autumn hits “like discarded brown corduroy”.

Just lovely.

His comic timing is also spot-on, and if the reminders of the storytelling veers dangerously close to being self indulgent, overall, it also feels raw and truthful.

Bennett is quite clearly a man who has learned, sometimes the hard way, that you don’t have to put on a performance all the time.

Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello: Body Show runs at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August

Woodhill runs at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August, then Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 20 September-7 October and North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, 19–20 October.

Boy Out The City runs at Underbelly, Cowgate until 27 August.

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The Other Palace is just another example of the corporate takeover of theatre culture

To London’s Other Palace, a rolling mess. Honestly, the full catalogue of stories would take more than a book to cover.

As you may now have read, a summarily letter was sent to casual front of house workers that had the professionalism of a Bank Holiday sing-a-long matinee of We Will Rock You.

The blanket letter sent from some kind of middle-management bunker began: “Dear Staff Member,” — have these people not heard of mail merge?

“I am writing to give you notice that your current contract with The Other Palace ends on 3rd September 2023. We have some new roles as detailed below available for the new show which starts on 8th September 2023.”

In 5 days? It went on to promise that the new roles with “fixed weekly hours” would mean “more stability within the team on all positions”.

Right you are. Aware that they can do whatever they want, though, the grim letter asks employees to send a brief paragraph for the role they wish to apply for and ‘why we should re-hire you’.

Where do you even start? It’s called fire and rehire – it seems nearly all corporate West End theatre operators are currently cynically exploiting things in this way to drive down casual workers pay and conditions. Join a union, kids. 

However, The Other Palace’s behaviour exposes much more than just low pay and poor terms and conditions; it also highlighted the significant legal imbalance that exists between arts workers and their employers.

But wait! A brazen statement followed: “The Other Palace issued a letter to FOH employees on casual & fixed-term contracts due to end on 3 Sept. We were pleased to let them know that there was the opportunity to continue working with us should they wish to be considered & are delighted by the number who are interested.”

There is simply no moral failing of theirs that would not cause their employees to passionately excuse it or love them more for it. Obviously. 

In a recent profile, fresh from a spin class, Other Palace artistic director Paul Taylor Mills said that he had stopped engaging in conversation on Twitter as an act of self-preservation. “It’s too aggressive for me.”

Fair enough. Bizarrely, a go-to phrase of Mr Taylor Mills is ‘Be Kind’.

Sorry what? Far be it for me to speak for all “real people”, but as a real person I have to say my overall impression is that the only people who are not usually being kind are the people in positions of power who deploy the phrase.

And yet, everything being someone else’s fault is surely not the most appealing strategy. 

Crucially, The Other Palace allegedly has and continues to put its loyal staff under tremendous stress and pressure. Why do we assume that they will do it for love?

In the meantime, key Theatre service staff are surviving on less and less. Where’s the sense and where’s the future in that? Where is SOLT?

Last week, one prominent West End theatre operator terminated FOH contracts with 2 weeks notice – one usher who contacted me said: “We didn’t even get a letter!” 

Of course, the entire theatre industry is facing the impact of a bleak economic reality, with the real challenges of Brexit and the hangover from the pandemic. Nobody disputes that.

But maybe corporate theatres like The Other Palace should think about treating casual workers with some dignity. As the cost of living crisis bites, maybe all theatres – Nimax, LW Theatres, Delftont Mackintosh and ATG should think of the ways that poor decision making, firing and rehiring loyal staff is impacting frontline staff and their wellbeing. And how about a little more transparency from West End Theatre owners around their commitment to paying staff Living Wage – not just Minimum wage.

These small steps may just help shift a theatre culture that currently sees nothing unusual in a cheap, often young drama school students, actors in the casual workforce subsidising its success.

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Here’s Your Definitive Guide To Edinburgh Fringe 2023 (You’re Welcome)

The finest shows at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Allegedly.

Hello to you,

I’ve been very well thanks for asking.

Anyway, with over 1 million tickets issued so far and thousands of people watching street performances and free shows; the 2023 Fringe is proving as popular as ever. 

I have pulled together a list of very good shows– and others that should be good.

First up: Spooky-but-silly sketch show Party Ghost is hilarious, I hear.

Queue for returns for All Inside by fourth-wall breaking Adrian Bliss– I think he is a surreal superstar – don’t miss him at The Pleasance.

You are in safe hands with Jenny Sealey, artistic director of disabled-led theatre company Graeae, who makes her stage debut in Self-raising, a hilarious true-life story about growing up Deaf.

Cross genre Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello: Body Show is riding high after a slew of five star reviews – snap up a ticket. The Ice Hole: A Cardboard Comedy, at Pleasance Courtyard, is a physical comedy show performed using a thousand pieces of cardboard, of course.

Anyhow. Make sure you catch hilarious Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland in And Then the Rodeo Burned DownIf you missed Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera in London, catch it at the EICC; hour of knockabout fun with a spirited young cast. 

Meanwhile, I hear Dark Noon also at EICC is an extraordinary show co-directed by Denmark’s Tue Biering and South Africa’s Nhlanhla Mahlangu for Fix & Foxy.  Go and see Funeral(Ontroerend Goed does grief) at Zoo Southside.

Over at Traverse, don’t miss Isobel McArthur’s jukebox romcom The Grand Old Opera House Hotel and poignant play Heaven – both come highly recommended.

If you like musicals, God Catcher created by Cassie Muise and Tyler McKinnon, is a re-imagining of the myth of Arachne and is running at Underbelly. 

Fresh from appearing on Broadway in Moulin Rouge! Declan Bennett performs autobiographical show Boy Out in the City at Cowgate.

Magic fans, keep your morning free and catch Mario the Maker Magician at Udderbelly – a feel-good fifty minutes for families.

Elsewhere, one woman/man/plumber character-comedy spectacular GUSH, first seen at Vault Festival, is at Assembly George Square.  Canadian duo Agathe and Adrien of N.Ormes Assembly Roxy have good word of mouth. Stinging bio-drama Lena unpacks the tragedy of Lena Zavaroni.  

And 10 speakers surround the audience in Tomorrow’s Child, an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story at Assembly Checkpoint is worth catching.

At enchanting Summerhall, Lung theatre’s Matt Woodhead’s five star verbatim drama Woodhill focuses on the deaths of three prisoners and their families’ battle for justice. Just go! 

Gunter is an atmospheric retelling of a famous witch trial with beautiful music, by Julia Grogan, Rachel Lemon, and Lydia Higman. Startling show, Concerned Others by Alex Bird examines Scotland’s drug deaths with flair.

Also, Lady Dealer, performed by Peckham trailblazer Alexa Davies, stars a rhyming drug dealer. And another show I am intrigued by is Gusla, performed entirely in untranslated Polish. Why not.

Finally, Paines Plough’s pop-up venue Roundabout is hosting Miriam Battye’s lively two-hander Strategic Love Play and fun 2022 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting winner Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz by Nathan Queeley-Dennis. Both sound promising.

My wildcard show is: Mad Ron: Crime School,think Phil Mitchell doing stand up with some excerpts from his “hard man” memoir. 

So, there you have it, that’s the end of my definitive Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2023 guide. (There’s always the Free Fringe, though, if you are feeling the pinch.)

I hope you have found some use in this guide to what the Fringe world has on offer. 

Bye for now,

Carl x

If you have tips, tweet me: @mrcarl_woodward *thumbs up emoji*.

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Edinburgh Fringe Shouldn’t Exist In A Civilised Society

The 76th Edinburgh Fringe festival has begun but there is concern some parts of the event may be under threat because of the financial climate.
Organisers of the Edinburgh Fringe have declared the situation has reached a “crisis point” and also admitted the event’s long-running financial model is “no longer viable for anyone”.

The boss of one of the Fringe’s biggest venue operators, Assembly Festival has warned the company may not survive another year due to a £1.5m debt and was surviving on a short-term loan.

The Stage Awards and The Total Theatre Awards, both key opportunities where talent is discovered, won’t go ahead this year. Indeed, ministers respond to growing hardship by telling the public to just work more hours.

Meanwhile, Edinburgh International Festival director Nicola Benedetti has cautioned that the city is facing an “identity crisis”

Does it matter? This year marks the second largest programming on record, with 3,535 shows registered in 248 venues, it is the Fringe that dominates the city each year and nothing seems to stand in its way. Furthermore, according to a report from The Scotsman, local business and hotels indicate demand for accommodation suggests that the attendance rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels. 

Business as usual. 

But I would say it does matter for several reasons. My real concern, in viewing the ecology of the Fringe are for performers and audiences from low-income backgrounds – incurring debt and making huge sacrifices to be there – accessing the festival. 

What record breaking tourism ignores is that, in the complex ecology of British theatre, everything is interconnected.

In some ways, the “crisis point’ feels most emblematic of all the current systemic failings and their knock-on costs to ordinary people who simply cannot afford them.

Since right now, civilised long weekend accommodation would set you back £1,300-2,000 for four nights – flats are being listed at around £10,000 for the month – that is before travel, food, and theatre tickets.

In a sobering read, The Guardian ran a piece recently that featured performers considering the financial risks. 

As one act puts it: “If you break even that’s a bonus… It’s not just about bums on seats, the more important thing is using the fringe to generate relationships with people interested in the work. We should end up with tour dates for 2024. That’s why you go. It’s an investment.”

Anyhow. Times critic Clive Davis, meanwhile, summed it up in his column: “For the past couple of days I’ve been staying in a run-down student block near Holyrood. My room is cell-like and the soundproofing so flimsy that I can hear the woman in the next room clearing her throat. Four of us are sharing a shower and toilets; on the first day I was here there was no hot water.”

Oh dear.

If all this wasn’t implausible enough, I can only congratulate a group of performers who travelled from the US staying in a disused Cold War bunker after being quoted £30,000 for accommodation in the city centre of Edinburgh for the month of August.

For that you can blame the greed of Edinburgh City Council who, by disobeying the simple rules of supply and demand, have reduced the market value of the Fringe to the point that, sooner or later, it will inevitably collapse.

Too little too late. Sigh.

Anyway, I will be in Edinburgh for 4 nights (17-21 Aug). If you have show tips, email mrcarlwoodward@gmail.com – I’ll be updating this blog daily. 

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Rufus Norris is stepping down in 2025 as artistic director of the National Theatre

What will his legacy be?

As you may by now have read, The National Theatre’s artistic director, Rufus Norris, announced his departure this week; he had been an associate director at the NT since 2011.

When Norris took over the NT in 2015, it felt like an institution at the height of its powers. It was also the heady days pre-Brexit, social media was not such a cesspool and there was plenty of cash in the reserves.

This week, low-key Norris, who has also served as chief executive of the NT since 2015, described his time in charge as the “greatest privilege” of his career but also “the most challenging in our history”.

Having steered the NT through the pandemic and Brexit, Norris, has been dealing more recently with an £850,000 DCMS budget cut by Arts Council England.

Norris made his feeling known that Levelling-up in the arts should “not be at the expense of London.”

He added: “What London contributes to our economy and creative status in the world is enormous and outweighs the small amount of money we are talking about”.

Point of fact, the six artistic directors in the theatre’s history have all been white men: Sir Laurence Olivier (1963-73), Sir Peter Hall (1973-88), Sir Richard Eyre (1988-97), Sir Trevor Nunn (1997-2003), Sir Nicholas Hytner (2003-15) and Norris.

You wonder, then, if the NT may explore dual leadership, like the recent appointment of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey as co-artistic directors at the RSC. Perhaps the first person of colour will take the reins.

Indeed, Norris also made a handful of structural changes that will have a legacy.

First up? Norris has actively championed environmental sustainability (the NTs energy bill has gone up from £800,000 a year to £3.5 million per year) and a green agenda.

During the pandemic and at a time of great uncertainty, Norris appointed brilliant Clint Dyer as deputy artistic director to oversee the theatre’s creative output.

The absolute highlight of Norris’s entire tenure for me, though, saw him oversee The National Theatre Collection, set up in 2019, that is now streamed in 85% of secondary state schools, for free.

Let’s not forget National Theatre at Home, too.

Furthermore, on stage the NT has had success on the increased diversity, and gender equality front.

And over the next 12 months, 19 out of the NT’s 21 productions will be by living writers and 60% of the directors at the NT over the past eight years have made their debut. 

Of course, hits included Small Island, Jack Absolute Flies Again, The Lehman Trilogy, Mosquitoes, and current play The Motive and the Cue.

But did we get a mega hit like War Horse? No, sadly. 

Personally speaking, I found a lot of the artistic commissioning during his tenure indifferent. Norris regularly failed to introduce a basic level of quality control. See: wonder.land, Macbeth, SaloméSaint George and the Dragon, Manor, Common, Cleansed, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, and Kerry Jackson.

In fact, a journalist I was sat next to at a First Night summed up his tenure perfectly: “It’s not that Rufus has bad taste, it’s that he has no taste.”

Recently, he was also accused of “blatant nepotism” by employing his wife Tanya Ronder as book writer on baffling musical Hex

Yup, what it needed, of course, was a decent producer to tell him: “Do not remount this (again), or employ your wife at a time when creative freelancers are struggling, you’re ruining Christmas.”

Opinions, I understand, will differ on that one, as they do on nearly all matters in the theatre. It’s a tough gig.

But look, in terms of Norris’s opening mission statement, his mission to make the NT for everyone has served its purpose and more if we judge him by these words: “I think it is very important that we reflect the city and the country we are in. We have to be national in terms of what we are debating, the subjects we are looking at, and particularly the people and stories we are representing.”

Mission accomplished. Mostly.