Falstaff - Scottish Opera

This new production of Falstaff was Domenic Hill’s first main stage opera production, although he has directed a small scale touring Macbeth opera as a taster.    I have enjoyed Domenic Hill’s work at Dundee Rep and have big hopes for him in his new role as artistic director at The Traverse.    So, how did he do?

In short - very well, and this was a very entertaining production.   The two set piece scenes where Falstaff gets his come-uppance were especially well directed- one sees Falstaff being bundled out of a laundry basket into the Thames, and the other, being surprised by a troup of ’spirits’ in a wood at midnight.

Peter Sidom sang Falstaff well, and among the others there were no weak links, but Lucy Crowe as Nanetta was outstanding - I remember her from Rosenkavalier last year, and she is one to keep an eye on.     I did have a problem with Peter Robinson conducting in the pit who produced a particularly dull account of a score that should normally sparkle, which was a pity.

And although Theatre Royal was reasonably busy on Saturday night, it really should have been busier for what is a popular and mainstream opera.      Under 26s can get in for a bargain £10.     As they say, those who were there really enjoyed the night.

A Night at the Chinese Opera - Scottish Opera

Scottish Composer Judith Weir’s breakthrough work was A Night at The Chinese Opera, first performed at the Cheltenham festival in 1987, and now performed in Scotland for the first time, by Scottish Opera.   In 1986, a young Sian Edwards stood in for Simon Rattle and made her operatic conducting debut with Scottish Opera performing The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany, and she returns to Glasgow to conduct this opera.    Director Lee Blakeley returns to Weir, as he directed the Opera School performance of The Vanishing Bridegroom across the road at RSAMD not so long ago.

The story is a 13th century Chinese Fable about the Chao family.    In essence, Chao Lin as a baby is abandoned by his parents who are fleeing invaders.   The child is brought up by neighbours, and becomes a renowned canal builder under the new regime.    He chances upon a group of actors and sees a play performed, which for him has renonances about who he is.    He travels up a mountain to where the original exiles have since tried to eek out an existence, and comes down again, ready to take on the invaders, but is caught and returned to the city.

Musically, this is very accessible, with some intersting scoring for a pared down orchestra, particularly for the woodwind and percussion.    There is singing and spoken words as well, and often rhythmic unison is used, producing a strange effect - particularly when the counter-tenor Military Governor and his personal soldier a deep bass sing together.   

The singing was good for the most part, with Damian Thantrey as Chao Lin and Philip Salmon as the Nightwatchman and Marco Polo in excellent voice.    Special mention to Rebecca de Pont Davies, Sarah Redgwick and Stephen Chaundy for the three ‘actors’ in the play within the play for putting on a memorable and entertaining performance. 

Visually, this was immensely entertaining and director Blakeley, designer Jean Marc Puissant and  Jenny Crane on lights came together as a team.    This is the first opera in English that I have been to which had surtitles, and it did actually help.    Some of the singing was a little light and occasionally the orchestra covered the voices.    Having said that, I really enjoyed Edward’s animated conducting and the orchestra’s performance.

But all in all, this was a good night out, and short and sweet at 2 hours running time.    I am still not quite sure that I followed all the detail of the story, particularly in the second half, but this was a good example of modern opera done well.    Surprisingly enjoyable.

Your Every Move is Being Watched

We have become used to CCTV cameras everywhere these days, even although we may not be too happy about them.    Our mobile phone logs into the nearest base station every so many minutes, effectively tracking its location.    As we drive along roads, number plate recognition is used to monitor traffic flows, but increasingly to track criminals.    Our supermarket knows exactly what we buy.    How we choose to live our lives is becoming more and more in the public domain.

But now the government in its Communications Data Bill is proposing that ISPs have available all of our e-mails for the past 12 months as well as how much time we spend online and a record of where we go when online.   

This is really a step too far.    It is exactly equivalent to the government asking the Royal Mail to open, photograph and have available for examination, every piece of mail we receive (or send too).    There should be a massive fuss about this.

Drawer Boy - the Tron

Farms are interesting places.    On the face of it, we farmers all do a similar job to one another, and fields of sheep or wheat look much the same to the onlooker.    But look closer, and every farmer has their own way of doing things - customs and atttitudes which are often passed down the generations.    There are tidy farms and scruffy farms;   there are farms with gleaming new machinery and farms making do with older kit.    Farmers are rulers of their own small worlds - the family and others who may be  living on the farm and staff they employ.      The isolation of farming only adds to the impenetrability and misunderstanding from outsiders.

The vast majority of farmers get along with eachother as they are in the same business, and often work with one another helping out.    They meet at the market to catch up on news and chat.    Sometimes things do go wrong, and the effects can be felt for generations.   I have worked on a farm where one brother ran the livestock and the other brother ran the cereals - both had their own separate staff and separate machinery ……….. and the brothers talked to eachother as little as possible.    It was genuinely difficult.    I also know another farm where the son in his 50s was not entrusted to write a cheque, as his father in his 70s wanted to retain financial control.    And another farm where a son was bullied by his father way into adulthood and who eventually took his own life.      Fortunately though, most farms are happy but hard working places.

When we look at human relationships, we always say that one never knows what goes on behind the bedroom door.    For farming, the equivalent is what goes on behind the farm gate.

And this is where Drawer Boy starts.    Michael Healey has based this three hander play on a theatrical exercise in Canada in the 1970s, where urban drama students visited farms and returned to college and used their material to produce “The Farming Show”.    In Drawer Boy, Miles , a theatre student played by Brian Ferguson is visiting a farm in Ontario to get some first hand experience to take back to his college to produce a piece on what living on farms is all about.     So we are on a very isolated farm, run by friends Angus and Morgan where things are done just so.    Angus, played outstandingly by Brian Pettifer, is clearly very simple, and Morgan (Benny Young) is obviously in charge of all the day-to-day work, as well as caring for Angus.    Like quite a few farms, it is a strange, yet stable working and living relationship.     Miles’ presence slowly builds up trust between he and the two men and gradually the background to the odd living arrangements is revealed.    Angus starts to remember the past more clearly.     And we get to hear the story - the one about the tall girl and the taller girl.

For the most part, this is a gentle comedy, with much amusement as Miles, a rural ignorant, learns about farm life with much leg-pulling.    But when the real story is revealed about why the two friends find themselves running an isolated farm, it is a completely shattering and moving revelation.     It is powerful stuff, and the three top rate actors work brilliantly together against Hazel Blue’s attractive big sky and plain farmhouse kitchen set.

Drawer Boy was first performed in Toronto in 1999, and has won many awards, been translated into several languages and toured the world.    It is new to Scotland and is incoming Tron director, Andy Arnolph’s choice of first play to do.    He says that he wants to see modern challenging drama in Glasgow, and this is an auspicious start.

Drawer Boy is a strange story which takes us on a journey.    It is haunting and beautiful.     For me, this is definitely going to be a contender for best theatre of 2008.

Here is a trailer

Educating Agnes - Perth Theatre

Educating Agnes is a new play from Liz Lochhead who has adapted Moliere’s School for Wives into rhyming Scots.    It is a knockabout farce, and very well tackled by Graham MacLaren and his team from Theatre Babel.

The story is fairly simple:   Old git Arnolphe (Kevin McMonagle) has been keeping his ward, Agnes (Anneika Rose) out of harm’s way until she is old enough to marry him - so he thinks.   But of course things don’t work out that way at all, and Agnes has her eye on a suitor Horace (John Kielty).   

There is a huge amount of fun:    the language is mostly archaic Scots, but Liz Lochhead throws in modern words and phrases occasionally to great comic effect, and to underline that this story does not just belong in the age in which it is set.    The actors are on top form and the stagings are excellently timed.   Two servants, played deadpan by Maureen Carr and Lewis Howden add lots to the comedy, but it is really McMonagle’s show, and he turns out a great performance.

Well worth catching.

BBC Four - Young Musician - Woodwind

This is always a competition worth watching.    Started as a reaction to the complete absence of UK entries to the Leeds Piano Competition 30 years ago, Young Musician of the Year has produced a stream of excellent first rate players in its time.     Every night this week, BBC Four is showcasing the instrumental finals, and tonight it was the woodwind.   Four really talented musicians competing for a place in the grand final on May 11th.

But someone should remind BBC Four that this is about performances.   What we got tonight was 45 minutes of biographies, 10 minutes of performance, and 5 of judging.      The biography parts included footage of the contestants writing to eachother on their facebook wall pages - hardly groundbreaking stuff, and about as interesting as watching paint dry.   

The 10 minutes of performance were interspersed with judges comments.   It would have been better for BBC Four to give some credit to the viewer - give us a chance to make up our own minds about what we saw, and not be spoon-fed.

BBC Four will say that you can see everything on the internet, but that is hardly the point for a TV program.   It is a shame to dumb down the coverage  of Young Musician, because the talented players put so much serious work into their playing.

I am not alone in this view.    Put on your hard hats and visit  this Radio 3 messageboard.

 

Our Evil Children; our Useless Police.

We have a community owned woodland walk in our village.    It is a pleasant and much used circular walk with a stream running through it.     Members of our community give up their time freely to maintain and enhance this space.

We had an in-service training day this week - a day where school pupils do not go to school, but their teachers do.     This leaves children with a free day on their hands, and a day where supervision by parents may be stretched due to work commitments.

So a group of these free-ranging kids got hold of some extra strength bleach - the really heavy duty stuff, and went down to the community walk.   They poured this concentrated chemical over bridge handrails, on the ground and over a memorial stone.    This was simple premeditated badness.

Our walk is used by walkers, by children and by dogs.    Imagine a young child holding onto a handrail and then putting their hand to their mouth - as children do.     Imagine dogs walking through concentrated bleach and then trying to clean their paws.    Imagine the bleach falling off the bridges into the stream and killing the fish.

We called the police and tried to keep walkers away meantime.    We gave up waiting for the police after an hour and a half, and it was dark.    A car might have taken a turn round the car park later on - but that is all that it was.     And we have heard nothing more.    The police clearly are not interested, which is appalling.    We obviously have wait until we have a child with blisters down her throat requiring hospital treatment before anything gets done.

As a farmer, I have to monitor and record all my chemical use.   There are very strict rules about the distance between spraying activity and watercourses.    I have to record and have available for inspection the minute detail of all spraying activity.   We are talking about dilute chemical here.     If I pollute a waterway, I will (rightly) be taken to court.    And, yes, I have had a randomised snap inspection by the authorities.

But it seems that if children pollute a waterway with concentrated chemical, then nobody cares, including the police.    The children in question should be found;   the people who are supposed to looking after them should be hanging their heads in shame.    It is similar to the situation where children set fire to a healthy beech tree last summer.

 

 

Nova Scotia - Slab Boys 4

I never know if it is fair to comment on a preview performance, but as long as it is clear that it is a preview, then I think it is probably OK.

This was the first preview - the first time the long-awaited new part of the Slab Boys Trilogy had ever been seen in public.    The Traverse was absolutely jam packed.    Outgoing Traverse Director Philip Howard and new incoming director Domenic Hill were both there in the audience - a good sign.  

And, yes, even in preview, there was a real sense of an event.    The Slab Boys is a much-loved modern classic of the Scottish Theatre, all three plays starting off in the Traverse from 1978.      The theatre put on the whole trilogy in 2003, when we went to see all three in one very enjoyable and exhausting day.    I did not see any of the original productions, but Dundee Rep put them on in the 1980s, where Cuttin a Rug memorably starred Robert Carlisle, Forbes Masson and Alan Cumming.

So, Nova Scotia brings back Phil, Spanky and Lucille all these years on.    The action is set in a house in rural north-east of Scotland - not a million miles from  where Byrne lives now.    Phil is still painting away quietly and has a rocky marriage to the younger Deidre, a video artist shortlisted for the Turner Prize.     Spanky  (now past-it but still performing rock star) rolls up with  Lucille.    I am not going to spoil the story, because there are fantastic unexpected twists and turns.   But throw in a hippy Radio Scotland Arts reporter, a video technican who is covering Spanky’s band - and clearly involved with Deidre, and the mixture really ignites.     Great performances all round - the boys:  Paul Morrow as Phil and Gerry Mulgrew as Spanky and the girls:   Gerda Stevenson as a glamorous Lucille, Meg Fraser as Deidre and Cara Kelly as the Radio Arts person.

The piece itself is amusing, knock-about yet wistful, and Byrne has a large amount of fun with it.   It is a study of friendships over the years and has lots to say about art, ambition and relationships.     There are some genuinely passionate arguments - ones that stay with you after you have left the theatre.    The world around Phil McCann has moved on -  everyone uses mobile phones, yet McCann firmly relies on the wall mounted landline phone in his house.    He has to learn to embrace the New Scotland, Nova Scotia, as all the others in the play have done.   The writing is sharp as ever, and although the pace flagged at points in the longer 2nd half, it held together well, and is a very worthwhile addition to the original Trilogy.    It does stand alone as a play, but those who have seen the others will get most out of it.   

Michael Taylor has come up with an atmospheric set, and like his design for All my Sons at the Lyceum, has real grass - except this time it comes with more foliage, and kids toys, including a spacehopper.  

As with all new writing at the Traverse, the script is on sale, but it is also worthwhile buying a programme too which has stuff from the original Slab Boys, as well as artwork from Byrne and a comprehensive piece from theatre critic and Byrne enthusiast Joyce McMillan.      

Recommended, and may be hard to get tickets for.    Runs to 24th May.    And don’t forget, Lucille was once ‘every Slab Boy’s dream’.    Is she still?    You have to wait until the very end to find out.     Sparky stuff.

Essential Ensemble - Scottish Ensemble

The Scottish Ensemble played the last concert of the season in Perth, and it was the last date of the current tour.    At 3pm on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April, it was actually a big ask to get people to come along, and I could not have bought a ticket in advance confidently.    But there was a gap in the farm work, and I was really glad that I went.

The concert started with Handel’s Concerto Grosso in B flat major in five short movements.     I actually don’t think I have heard the Ensemble play Handel before, and the approach was really different to what one would expect.

Next, Raphael Wallfisch joined the group to play a CPE Bach Cello Concerto.    I was a little disappointed with his playing, which although technically very good, lacked something.     His cello had a massively long spike - roughly three quarters of the length of the body of the instrument.   This resulted in the cello being held almost between the kneecaps and at an angle of about 45 degrees to his body.    It also meant that the instrument remained almost locked static, and perhaps it was this that made for a rather dry performance.    In contrast, Alison Lawrence of the Ensemble had a shorter spike, and a cello angle of more like 60 degrees:   the result was that she and the cello moved as the music took them.   

But the meat of the concert was in the second half with Jonathan Morton’s arrangement of the Brahms String Quintet No 2 taking the Ensemble into full-on romantic mode.    It was teriffic music, and as always with these concerts, so entertaining to watch the chemistry between the players.    Jonathan Morton, leading the group did not just stand there and keep time - he was often up on the balls of his feet in the exciting bits urging on the players with great dramatic flourishes of his own playing.

And they are coming back next season with a really exciting programme - Alison Balsom (seen playing in Soldier’s Tale) among the soloists, and for me, a really exciting concert of modern American music  with Adam’s Shaker Loops, and Reich’s Clapping.    Can’t wait for that one.

 

Megabus

I have had to travel to Edinburgh for each of the past two days, and luckily, what I was doing fitted in with the Megabus service timetable.     Perth is a Megabus hub where busses cross over and meet, providing express bus services to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness.    The busses are large single deckers, and are comfortable.     If I have a grumble, the drivers don’t always get the ventilation setting right, and it can get a bit stuffy at times.

I have to say though that I continue to be impressed.   Although it is trickier to get the rock bottom fares, even booking the day before produces a fare which is cheaper than the cost of my fuel - and my car gets 42 miles per gallon.     And it is pretty expensive to park in Edinburgh these days.    But the Megabus staff are well trained, and there are plenty of them.    On the four busses I took, all the drivers were cheerful and helpful, as were the other Megabus staff.    It is interesting that everyone getting off the busses thanked the driver as they left.