12.07.08
Posted in Life, London, Theatre at 10.01 am by Caitlin
Smooth sailing for The Tempest.
We had our production of The Tempest last Tuesday and we are now adjusting to life beyond the play. Hopefully we’ll have a cast reunion for pre-Christmas drinks very soon! There’s also talk of reviving the play in January, which I would absolutely love to do because I feel that we’ve only just begun to realise the potential of this production.
The lovely Zarina Holmes filmed the performance for us so I can’t wait to see the video. In the mean time, she has put some still photographs on Facebook. The photos are from a semi-dress rehearsal so a few of us, including myself, are not in full costume and no one has full make-up. It should give you a flavour though!
We were aiming to do The Tempest in the style of Artaud, which means we were trying to create an experience for the audience rather than emphasising the separation between player and audience. This was most evident in the first scene, the shipwreck, but we brought elements of it throughout the play. The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most ‘magical’ plays so it lends itself well to this sort of thing.
It was very different performing with 35 people standing and sitting around me. (We had two performances with 35 people in each showing). It was theatre-in-the-round and though we encouraged people to move around so they could see, in reality they stayed pretty still so we had to angle ourselves accordingly.
It all went a lot better than I thought it might after the shambles of the dress rehearsal. The audience seemed really engaged and entertained, which was great. We hit some real high notes with the performance and no real low notes – everyone pretty much remembered their lines.
I was playing Miranda, the heroine. My only hairy moment was, in the second performance, after the scene where I confronted Caliban the monster, the strap of my dress popped open. Fortunately I was wearing a safety pin with a rose, so I mimed crying into Prospero’s shoulder (my fictional father) while I refixed it. I wonder if anyone noticed. My fellow thespian didn’t – he just thought it was an inspired heightening of the dramatic effect!
I’m proud to have worked with such a talented group of people and I hope we can do this again soon. It was the City Academy advanced class – but we’re calling ourselves the Kinky Fish Company, in honour of the blindfolds and anchovy paste used in the play. As we said on the night of the performance, we’re all really grateful for our wonderful teacher Cat Clancy and all the hard work she put in – she went way beyond the call of duty and gave up a lot of her own time unpaid to help us.
Afterwards, my wonderful real-life beloved and betrothed gave me a huge bunch of dark red roses. Aww.
***
Here’s the text from the programme so you can see who the actors are, refresh yourself on the plot of The Tempest, and read more about Artaud and his theories on theatre.
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Posted in Life, London, Theatre at 10.00 am by Caitlin
By William Shakespeare, abridged and directed by Cat Clancy
A Kinky Fish production in association with City Academy
Dramatis personae
Island dwellers
Prospero Adam Mattison-Ward, Ahmed Arif, Richard Kirkcaldy
Magician and Rightful Duke of Milan
Miranda Caitlin Fitzsimmons
Prospero’s daughter
Caliban Gregory Lecointe and Alberto Santangelo
Monster and Prospero’s slave
Ariel Teagan Mann and Naomi Segal
An airy sprite and Prospero’s servant
Goddess Ceres Larissa Moran
Goddess Juno Rosalind Stern
Ship crew and passengers
Alonsa Maria Annecca
Queen of Naples
Antonia Michelle McKay
Prospero’s sister and usurper Duchess of Milan
Ferdinand Tadhg O’Brien
Prince of Naples, Alonsa’s son and Miranda’s love interest
Gonzalo Gregory Lecointe
A nobleman
Sebastian Alberto Santangelo
Alonsa’s brother
The Master Larissa Moran
Ship captain
Boatswain Rosalind Stern
Trinculo Larissa Moran
A drunk shipwrecked mariner, a dull fool
Stephano Rosalind Stern
A drunk shipwrecked butler
Supporting cast Whole company
Mariners, nymphs, huntsmen, sound effects etc
Synopsis
The magician Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, are stranded on an island. Twelve years ago Prospero’s jealous sister Antonia – helped by Alonsa, the Queen of Naples – deposed him and set him adrift with the five-year-old Miranda. The nobleman Gonzalo secretly helped Prospero, upgrading his small and shoddy boat, supplying him with food and water, and books from Prospero’s library.
Possessed of magic powers due to his great learning and prodigious library, Prospero is reluctantly served by a spirit, Ariel, whom he had rescued from imprisonment in a tree. Ariel had been trapped there by the witch Sycorax, who died prior to Prospero’s arrival. Prospero also keeps the witch’s son Caliban, a deformed monster, as his slave.
The play opens as Prospero, having divined that his sister Antonia, is on a ship passing close by the island has raised a storm (the tempest of the title) that causes the ship to run aground. Also on the ship are Queen Alonsa, Alonsa’s brother Sebastian, Alonsa’s royal advisor Gonzalo, Alonsa’s son, Ferdinand, plus crew members. Prospero, by his spells, separates the survivors of the wreck into several groups. Alonsa and her son Ferdinand believe one another dead.
Prospero works to establish a romantic relationship between Ferdinand and Miranda; the two fall immediately in love, but Prospero worries that “too light winning [may] make the prize light”, and puts Ferdinand through a series of tests. He also decides that after his plan to exact vengeance on his betrayers has come to fruition, he will break and bury his staff, and “drown” his book of magic.
In the first of two sub-plots, Caliban falls in with Stephano and Trinculo, two drunken crew members, and attempts to raise a rebellion against Prospero (which ultimately fails). In another sub-plot, Antonia and Sebastian conspire to kill Alonsa and Gonzalo, so that Sebastian can become King. They are thwarted by Ariel, at Prospero’s command.
In the conclusion, all the main characters are brought together before Prospero, who forgives Antonia and Alonsa, pardons Caliban and uses his magic to ensure that everyone returns to Italy. Ariel, as her final task for Prospero, is charged to prepare fair sailing weather and she is then set free to the elements.
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty
In our production of The Tempest we have explored some of the ideas of French dramatist Antonin Artaud. He believed that the theatre should affect the audience as much as possible, so he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound and performance.
In his book The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualised and precise physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a “Theatre of Cruelty”. At one point, he stated that by cruelty, he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality.
He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all theatre is physical expression in space.
Imagination, to Artaud, is reality; dreams, thoughts and delusions are no less real than the “outside” world. Reality appears to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when they enter a theatre to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real.
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12.06.08
Posted in Arts & Culture, Books, Career, Life, Media & Internet, Theatre, Writing at 10.47 pm by Caitlin
Gentle readers, I need your advice.
The biggest lesson I need to learn in life is that I can do anything I want but I can’t necessarily do everything I want. I have to choose and focus. That’s hard.
Actually, maybe I can do everything I want – just not all at once. Rose Kennedy apparently once said: “You can have it all, my dear, but you can not have it all at once. Life is a journey with many different adventures and each part of it is special. Sometimes you will have to focus on the task at hand.”
It still comes down to the same thing. I need to choose what to focus on right now.
I am doing a lot of things in my life, all of which I enjoy. Yet there is an opportunity cost with anything I choose to do and right now I don’t feel that I’m concentrating on the really important things.
Here are some of the things I’m doing right now:
- Working as a freelance journalist – balancing making a living, pitching for new and interesting work and trying to figure out how my strategy to survive and thrive in a changing industry.
- General life stuff, including trying to keep fit and healthy.
- Organising our wedding in April next year.
Once of my most important goals is to finish writing my novel. To be honest, I’m not really making great progress on this goal.
I’m wondering if there is anything I should give up in order to make the time for this. I’m loath to give up the theatre given that I really love doing it and also aspire to write plays in the future – though maybe trying to do the novel writing and acting at the same time is too much. The British Museum doesn’t take up much of my time and I’ve already cut back so I’m comfortable with that. I obviously can’t give up life, or wedding organisation, or work, even if I wanted to.
The area where I feel I can cut back is social media. As I mentioned, I have three main blogs, plus also the occasional dated update on my professional site or True Wild Catches and Century of Books. All of this takes time and it’s not just a matter of writing my own posts and forgetting about them – the fun comes in being part of a blogging community, interacting with other bloggers, micro-blogging on Twitter (where I am undoubtedly spending too much time), using tools like StumbleUpon and Digg.
All this stuff is a lot of fun but it takes up a lot of time. I find it very hard to do social media in moderation – it’s the kind of thing where you have to jump in feet first, and as my frequent Twitter updates show, it’s very addictive! And really, with my industry (media) changing so quickly and so profoundly, it’s essential that I keep abreast of it. If anything, I should be doing more, not less – it would be valuable for me to try podcasting and online video production, for example.
The problem with blogging, as novelist A.L. Kennedy points out, is that there’s no definable end. You can never say a blog is done and there’s always more you can do for it, whether in writing, site design or promotion. I’m beginning to feel that part of the answer for me might be to reduce my blogs. It’s very hard to put a blog to death though so the question would be how – should I consolidate everything under my real name or on this blog? Or should I merge my food and travel blogs in some way? Or just stop writing one of them?
The other thing I really like the idea of is the Secular Sabbath – one day a week where you don’t use the computer or a mobile phone. I find this really appealing – I love the internet but the truth is, my brain is sometimes filled with digital detritus. I don’t know if there’s been any research but I do wonder whether too much time online is just as stifling to creativity and deadening as watching too much television.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best use my time? If you agree with my diagnosis, how should I rationalise my blogs?
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11.29.08
Posted in Family & Friends, London, Theatre at 5.59 pm by Caitlin
Last chance for tickets to see me in The Tempest.
I’m playing Miranda in an amateur production of The Tempest on Tuesday night. Today was the first dress rehearsal and we have another run-through on Monday night.
We are performing at the Candid Arts Trust in Angel-Islington, which is an atmospheric room filled with ready-made props like red velvet thrones and melted candlesticks.
The play has been substantially cut – total running time is under an hour and a half and we will actually be doing two performances on Tuesday night since we can only accommodate an audience of 35 at one time. We are not doing a straight interpretation but in keeping with the magical essence of the play we are doing an Artaud-style interpretation where we are trying to give the audience more of an immersive experience. The main character Prospero, who is my father in the play, is played by three different people sharing a magical cloak and we also have the parts of the sprites and monsters – Ariel and Caliban – shared. Some of the scenes such as the opening shipwreck scene will be interactive – though we are trying not to go over the top because we don’t want to completely lose the audience!
I’m really looking forward to it. Don’t get me wrong – it’s amateur, we’ve officially only had two hours a week for 10 weeks to rehearse, and I’m not expecting the world of it. But I think it’s coming together really nicely and is something a bit different to the stodgy Shakespeare productions that are sadly all too common. I play a reasonably straight character but it’s fun reacting to the different characters and scenarios – I absolutely adore my fellow thespians’ creation of Caliban, not to mention my favourite scene of all where two of the shipwrecked mariners are drunk.
I’m not sure whether the 7pm or 9pm production will be better. The 9pm performance will be more rehearsed but then again, the opening night of a show is traditionally better than the second night. I have my fiancé and two other friends coming to the early performance and I have two spare tickets for the 9pm show if anyone is up for it. It’s a little experimental and interactive but in a fun way, not in a threatening, pretentious kind of way! Tickets are £8 each and I could probably get tickets to the early show instead if that’s preferred.
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11.22.08
Posted in Family & Friends, London, Skating, Theatre at 10.07 pm by Caitlin
Monkey: Journey to the West – awesome show, shame about the theatre layout.
On Wednesday night we went to see Monkey: Journey to the West with Natalie, Jess and Andrew, and Matt and Tash. It’s on at the O2 – formerly known as the Millennium Dome – in north Greenwich until 5 December.
It’s actually the second time I’ve seen it. The first time we saw it at the Royal Opera House in, I think, June. It was only on for three nights and had sold out but I was desperate to see it so we ended up spending a fortune, buying tickets on eBay. They were standing room tickets so the view wasn’t great and the dress circle above us blocked us from seeing some of the high wire work and the top of the animation screen. The tickets only had a face value of £10 each so I guess that’s to be expected. Despite the crappy tickets, the show itself absolutely blew me away. It was truly one of the best things I’ve ever seen on stage and I was on a Monkey high for days.
The story is based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West – the same book that was the basis of the 1970s television show Monkey Magic. I used to watch Monkey Magic after school on the ABC I was in primary school and like my friend Jess, I’m sure I played it once or twice as well. I might have been Tripitaka while my cousin Kim was Monkey but I’m not sure.
The story was told partly with live action acrobatics and opera and partly with animation designed by the guys from Gorillaz on a giant screen. It was a fantastic spectacle – the acrobatics with everything from plate spinning to beautifully choreographed fight scenes gave a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets the circus effect. There’s plenty of comedy with the mischief-making, crotch-scratching Monkey and the lusts and appetites of Pigsy. The music, which is available as an album, is also really cool – thankfully nothing like Chinese opera! I particularly enjoyed the Spider Woman seduction scene for visual effect and the Princess Iron-Fan scene for the music. I also liked the animation so much that I bought a limited edition print of the enlightened Monkey for £70, though I’m yet to get it framed. (They were sold out at the Opera House shop but I ordered mine directly from the Monkey website).
When I heard the show was coming back to London and would be on at the O2, in a specially constructed tent, I leapt at the chance to see it again and organised a group of friends. This time I tried really hard to buy good seats – they were £45 each or £50 with the booking fee, which was not the most expensive but certainly towards the top end. Unfortunately, the seats were very disappointing.
While I knew from looking at the seat plan that we would be to the side of the stage, I was imagining a horseshoe arrangement, or that the rows would start far enough back that it wouldn’t matter. Instead they screwed up on two counts. Firstly, the front row started really close to the stage. Secondly, the rows went on for five metres either side of the stage but still facing directly forwards. Our tickets were at the very far right-hand end of the second row – we had a good view of the orchestra but could only see half the stage and then only if we craned our necks. In any other theatre, these would be restricted view tickets! The really annoying thing was that I selected the seats online and had a wide choice of seats at the time of booking but how was I to know that in this case, the seats further back would be better?
Fortunately, it was not sold out so we were all able to move back about six rows, which meant we were able to enjoy the show. It’s a relief but it does bother me that we had to do that when the tickets were so expensive. They were going pretty big on the upselling – there was a three-course Chinese banquet on offer for £28 per person as pre-show dining, and the programmes were a whopping £10. (Packs of posters were only £8 at the Royal Opera House show and on the Journey to the West website).
We all really enjoyed ourselves. I don’t think it had changed at all since last time I saw it but, since I was closer, I picked up details such as the fact that one of the warriors in Heaven was on rollerblades! Also last time, I couldn’t see Guan Yi at all because he was on a high wire and my view was blocked.
I didn’t leave on an enormous theatre high like the first time I saw it, but I would still give it four stars. It would be five stars if they had the venue situation sorted out but I thought the audience aspect of the staging was thought out very poorly. My seats were better than my standing room tickets at the Opera House and I paid a similar amount – but my expectations were justifiably higher because the face value was more than quadruple.
Read Jess’ review.
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11.19.08
Posted in BookCrossing, Books, Environment, Family & Friends, London, Media & Internet, Theatre, Travel at 3.16 pm by Caitlin
I’m feeling very excited because I’m off to see Monkey at the O2 tonight. I saw it at the Royal Opera House earlier this year and it was so good I’m going to see it again, this time with a group of friends in tow. I can’t wait!
I’ll write more about Monkey after the event. In the mean time, I have two blog posts to share with you today. Firstly, over on Roaming Tales, I’ve done some follow-up to the Travel Blog Camp in London last week. Secondly, I have a post up about how to combine being green with a love of books at EcoSalon. Enjoy!
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08.10.08
Posted in Life, Media & Internet, Theatre, Travel at 7.17 pm by Caitlin
It’s been a few months since my last blog post and to the two or three of you who are still reading my blog, I apologise. I’ve been extremely busy! Also, I now have a new computer and my log-in details were saved on my old computer so there was the added disincentive of having to retrieve them first.
Life is chugging along quite well. Here’s a quick round-up:
- I’ve had plenty of work. I went to Syria on a job, which I’ll tell you about more when the article comes out.
- We spent a weekend in Cornwall in June, hiking and art spotting around St Ives and then seeing the Raconteurs play at the Eden Project.
- We’ve been to see a few plays, including King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe, Pygmalion at the Old Vic, Monkey: Journey to the West at the Royal Opera House, and Harper Regan at the National Theatre.
- We’re moving house in September, to a two-bedroom flat in the East End.
- I’ve been playing with Twitter – my user name is Niltiac if you want to follow me there.
I’ll try to write more soon.
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03.01.08
Posted in Family & Friends, Theatre at 2.38 pm by Caitlin
On Wednesday evening I met up with Dominique to go to see Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic. Dom and I often see plays there together and we like to eat at the Hope & Anchor pub down the road afterwards. The Hope & Anchor is considered a “gastropub” and the food is certainly a cut above the average pub food, yet quite inexpensive too.
Speed-the-Plow is a David Mamet play about movie executives in Los Angeles. Mamet also wrote Glengarry Glen Ross about real estate agents and failure, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a movie starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey. Speed-the-Plow as a stageplay had a cast of just three, played by Spacey, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly. It was similarly tight on running time – just one and half hours with no interval.
I don’t want to give too much plot detail away but the three acts are quite distinct, from the frenetic showmanship of act 1, to the pseudo-mysticism of act 2, and then, finally, act 3 where we actually get down to the nub of who the characters are and what makes them tick. It was hard to know what people’s true desires were at the beginning of the play but they are quite exposed by the end.
It was a fun play with lots of witty one-liners (“I believe in the Yellow Pages but I don’t want to make a movie about it”). There were also striking images, particularly with the height difference between Goldblum and Spacey (Goldblum’s lanky legs accentuated by his high-waisted trousers). However, I must say that act 3 was the best because it was the first time when I truly understood the stakes and what I was watching.
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01.11.08
Posted in Life, London, Theatre at 7.32 pm by Caitlin
Pantomime is a Christmas tradition in Britain. It involves retelling well-known stories – such as Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Puss in Boots – and lots of cross-dressing and bawdy humour. The humour usually works on two levels – slapstick humour for the kiddies and knowing innuendo for their parents. Sometimes the adult jokes can be less of the innuendo and more of the downright smutty but that depends on the play.
I am sure that I must have been to a pantomime at least once as a child in Australia but it doesn’t really feature as a major part of the cultural landscape like it does here in England. I think one reason is the seasonality – Christmas in Australia is high summer and a time for backyard barbecues and frolicking on the beach rather than going to the theatre. Another thing is the fact that the whole fascination with cross-dressing is markedly different in Australian culture. Brits seem to find the sight of a man in a dress the most hilarious thing ever. Whereas in Sydney, home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, drag queens are considered a serious expression of self identity and art, and not something to be laughed at. (And the more old-school, homophobic brand of Australians probably find them troubling rather than funny).
This year I decided to satisfy my cultural curiosity and find out what it was all about. We booked tickets to see Cinderella at the Old Vic, partly because it was by Stephen Fry and I thought the writing would be good. And it was. It was also very obviously by Stephen Fry, featuring jokes such as “we love Tesco, don’t we? It keeps the riff-raff out of Waitrose”, and a reality TV contest for the fairytale ball. It was enormous fun, blending what I understand to be the pantomime traditions (the audience yelling “behind you” and “oh yes you did”, the men in skirts playing the ugly stepsisters, and so on), good songs, clever jokes and a parallel storyline where Buttons is looking for the man of his dreams.
Of course there comes a moment where some of the children in the audience get to go on stage – an eight-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy who helped Buttons make lunch. (One of the cutest moments was when the narrator asked them what they might add to a meal to make it taste better; the girl said “pepper” and the boy said “celery”! This of course prompted a joke about how they had, after all, come from the best seats in the house).
I am fine with the cross-dressing but I found it more or less passed over my head – the Ugly Stepsisters in a pantomime version of Cinderella are obviously funny characters but to me that’s because they are wearing over-the-top clothing and hamming it up and doing stupid things. I would probably find them just as funny if they were played by women, but it would lose a big part of the appeal for the British audience.
I thoroughly enjoyed myself but I’m not sure that I’ll become a regular fixture at the panto – perhaps now and then, or perhaps I’d borrow some children to take with me.
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01.01.08
Posted in Theatre at 12.33 am by Caitlin
December: Wicked, Gershwin Theatre, Broadway, New York
A spectacular with flying witches, dancing munchkins, humour and drama!
November: Avenue Q, Noël Coward Theatre, London (see my review from when I first saw this in 2006)
Macbeth, Gielgud Theatre, London
Starring Patrick Stewart as Macbeth and set in Soviet Russia with the three witches as three hospital nurses. Gloriously sinister.
All About My Mother, Old Vic Theatre, London (see my review)
October: Boeing, Boeing, Comedy Theatre, London (see my review)
Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare’s Globe, London
One of my favourite Shakespearean plays, despite the dodgy anti-Semitism. A fun production staged in the round in an Elizabethan style theatre.
September: The Burial at Thebes, Barbican Centre, London
Seamus Heaney’s translation of Antigone, with contemporary resonance.
Minangkabau dance and music performance in Bukittinggi, Sumatra
Indonesian dancing.
New Guinean Sing Sing, PKE village near Goroka, PNG
PNG tribal dance and play about the snake spirit.
June: Blue Man Group, New London Theatre, London (see my review)
Moving Africa, Barbican Centre, London
Highly physical dance performance.
April: Coriolanus (in Japanese), Barbican Centre, London (see my review)
See 2006 in theatre.
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