I can only be in Manchester for two of the four days this showcase runs, which is a shame as it’s always so inspiring to see such a wide range of work. It’s put together by Arts Council’s diversity team, and an opportunity to see the work of artists from a diversity of backgrounds.
I’m always excited to see as much as possible, especially as the showcase includes not just theatre but music, spoken word, dance and live art. Two years ago this is where I met Vicki Amedume, whose aerial dance expertise took the New Vic on a thrilling journey that ended in The Wicked Lady. This year nothing makes such an impact, but I’m provoked and challenged by a number of events. In a talk entitled Digital Mechanics for Performance, Tassos Stevens of Coney talks about the event, which I usually think of as the performance from lights up to lights down, but which he feels begins when people start talking about it and ends when they stop talking about it. The first bit, he says, is usually taken up by marketing. It makes me think not only of how, even in a more conventional theatre setting, we can redefine and re-evaluate what we mean by the event, and therefore how we approach it, but also explore other ways to extend the experience of the audience beyond the actual performance.
Whilst showcases such as this do much to develop a more diverse range of artists working within the sector, and goodness knows that’s needed, I leave feel slightly uncomfortable by our over-use of the comfortable word diversity. Like ‘urban’ it’s become a euphemism, and it’s one that’s in danger of meaning anything other than diverse. By using it in this context do we risk positing a norm from which certain work by certain artists departs, therefore endlessly perpetuating a perception of diverse arts as ‘Other’ rather than as both central and entirely the norm?
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After all the artistic inspiration and creativity of last week, this week it’s nose-to-the-grindstone management stuff. The first two days we have a consultancy by a group of NHS management trainees who assess and report on the effectiveness of decision making within the New Vic; later in the week I’m busy with progress reviews; in the middle of the week our senior management team meet to look at planning for forthcoming seasons. There’s preparation to do in advance of next week’s board meeting, too. I feel I’ve done nothing creative all week, so a visit to the play we have in performance (the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s How the Other Half Loves) and to the sparkling new Theatre Severn to see a new piece about Darwin, recharge me.
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A special treat: two days in London catching up with some of the productions I want to see. A Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is that rare thing: a large-scale in-the-round production. The space that’s been created in a tent has a strong resemblance to ours, and the choices it forces upon the team are similar too, both in terms of restrictions and opportunities. The big difference is in the tremendous 360 degree CGI projections, surrounding the audience and making us feel we’re swooping and flying and diving and drowning just like the characters. The much-vaunted War Horse, entirely living up to my expectations, with its extraordinary horse puppets standing out against an otherwise simple, elegant production. The Mountaintop, a new play about Martin Luther King’s last night, directed with sensitivity and confidence by James Dacre, who’s just joined us on an ITV traineeship, the same one I did at Birmingham Rep almost two decades ago.
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Classic plays about working people are rare indeed; those written from inside a working community rarer still. D H Lawrence, whose play The Daughter-in-Law we heard read aloud today, clearly knew and understood working men and women from first hand experience – their everyday life, the way they speak, their aspirations and desires. The play teems with detail and the language is riven with real life.
The play is fairly hard to encounter on the page, and perhaps that’s why such a lot of New Vic staff attended this read through. They anticipated that it would be easier to hear than to read, and so it was. A muscular, earthy dialect that springs to life when spoken aloud – no surprise: it is language made for the mouth and not for the pen. And even the words and phrases that are new to the listener are easy to understand. I’ve never heard a woman complain of being left ‘the orts and slarts’ of a man; or a young couple’s future predicted as being filled with ‘a racket ’n’ tacket of children’, but I know exactly what’s meant by those vivid phrases.
I’m thrilled to see it on the New Vic’s stage because it’s such a rarely performed piece. This is only the fifth time it’s been staged in the past decade, making this production a real must-have item in any serious theatregoer’s back catalogue. The infrequency of its outings surprises me: the play’s right up there with Shaw and Granville-Barker in my book. It’s one of those plays I find hard to gift to another director, but I was delighted to entrust it to Joanna Read, who knows the piece inside out.
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Back from a delightful three weeks’ holiday canal boating to the Peak District; visiting family; gardening; reading and relaxing. But equally delighted to be back at work, catching up on what’s been happening here, and plummeting straight into Christmas, it seems, as today’s the first day of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe summer school.
Over 40 young performers have joined us to start exploring the play, working on the physicality of some of the sequences, learning one of the songs, putting together some choreography. At the end of the week, half of these young people will be invited to join the company of the actual production.
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