Going Wilde: cast members of an operatic production of The Importance Of Being Earnest. Photograph: Royal Opera House / Stephen Cummiskey
Subversive wit? A satire of Victorian morality, with a distinctly homoerotic undertone? If you haven’t guessed it I might add the name ‘Bunbury’ or, better still, the immortal line: “A handbag?”
Yes, it’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s genius farce, which this month comes to the Barbican in an operatic refashioning that promises to be inventive, exuberant and anarchic.
To recap for those who haven’t read the play since school, Jack and his friend Algernon are in love with Gwendolen and Cecily, but there is some confusion over which of the two young gentleman is called Earnest – a name both girls are very fond of, and something a romantic deal breaker. Meanwhile the fearsome Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s mother and aunt to Algernon, strongly disapproves.
This adaptation by Gerald Barry was first performed as a concert, winning a Royal Philharmonic Society Award, before being staged as modern-dress production by Ramin Gray for the Royal Opera House in 2013.
Now back for its second London season, cucumber sandwiches, smashed plates and megaphones are set to be the order of the day, all set to a hyperactive score that includes surreal variations of Beethoven and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
The Importance of Being Earnest
29 March–3 April
Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS barbican.org.uk
The Sheer Height company on-stage. Photograph: Thomas Scurr.
In a draughty pub somewhere south of the river I discuss gender inequality in theatre over a cup of tea with actors Jenny Wilford and Charlotte Couture.
The pair are the founders of Sheer Height, a feminist theatre company which this month is holding a one-day festival, Women Redressed, at the Arcola.
Showcasing new writing from UK playwrights, as well as excerpts from established plays, the festival aims presents theatre that plants female characters firmly centre stage, and which probes perceptions and expectations of gender.
Despite our shivering, the conversation was heated. A few years out of drama school, the actors are disillusioned with the roles they are consistently offered.
“It’s a saturated market, so it’s hard to get in the room to audition, for starters,” says Wilford. “But what always frustrates us are the parts we see coming up time and time again; we’re still seeing recurrent casting calls for the romantic interest, the mother, the sister – always family or romance or sex, in relation to a male lead.”
“In the 19th century, Henrik Ibsen wrote really strong, interesting female protagonists,” Couture offers. “And then at some point it kind of fell apart…” adds Wilford, wryly.
Couture and Wilford are brimming with facts about gender inequality in theatre. “Did you know 2008 was the first time the National Theatre staged a female playwright’s original work on the Olivier Stage? Or that The Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie – the longest running West End show – is frequently the only play written by a woman staged in the West End?”
Dissatisfied with the state of their industry, Couture and Wilford took matters into their own hands. In 2014 they set up Sheer Height, naming it after Shere Hite, a feminist known for her pioneering work on female sexuality.
Since forming, the company has staged a sell-out performance of Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic and November last year saw the inaugural Women Redressed festival at the Arcola. It was a sell out success, leading Couture and Wilford to bring it back for another outing this month.
The actors believe that, as women in drama, their work is inevitably politicised – though they believe it shouldn’t have to be. “It’s a difficult balance,” says Wilford. “Female playwrights and actors just want to work without labels or having to be political… but also – we want to make some progress here!”
“We have clear guidelines for script submissions,” says Wilford. “The idea is to have female characters at the core of the plot, which itself should explore gender issues and challenge perceptions.”
“We really think about what we’re presenting in terms of having a diverse programme,” says Couture. “Last time we had plays about abortion, domestic violence, sex work, the office environment, same-sex relationships… but we also put on plays about female friendship – and, you know, about women just having a good time! I think that in itself is really empowering.”
In light of cuts to the arts, Wilford and Couture believe now is a particularly troubling time for women in theatre. “Lack of funding means theatres are very reluctant to take risks. So, often, they’re going with safe options – which usually means commercial productions, established plays and the same revivals over and over again,” says Wilford.
Nando Messias marches through East London. Photograph: Loredana Denicola
Last year, wearing a red dress and high heels, Nando Messias returned to the street in Whitechapel where he had been attacked 10 years previously.
He once again caught the attention of a group of young men, and they once again hurled homophobic and transphobic abuse at him. But this time he was not alone.
Clutching a bunch of balloons, and flanked by a marching band, he led a 70-strong audience to the site of the initial attack, and the premiere of his new show, The Sissy’s Progress.
Following his attack Messias wanted to know what it was about him that had attracted the negative attention of those young men on that particular night.
Drawing on his training as a classical ballet dancer he realised that without the accessories of make-up or jewellery, it was his walk that clearly marked him out as effeminate.
At first he attempted to iron the habit out, but it didn’t work.
“It felt like I was trying to impersonate a butch woman, not even a man – it just doesn’t fit my body”, he says.
Originally from Brazil, Messias instead began celebrating his uniqueness, leading to the creation of his carnival-esque new work.
Messias identifies as a “male-bodied, effeminate man” and says: “I want my ‘misalignment’ to remain intact.”
Acutely aware of gender norms from an early age, his mother refused to allow him to join a ballet class along with his elder sister. But being consigned to the sidelines only increased his desire to dance.
On turning 17 he paid for classes himself, choosing the female role rather than the male in a discipline with the gender binary at its very core.
“Ballet is very segregated. Girls go first then boys go second. I have always done female technique. I’m not interested in learning the codes of masculinity. I’m interested in enhancing my body, not correcting it.”
Messias came to London to study, going on to complete a PhD on the effeminate body in Western culture.
In Brazil he suffered verbal abuse on a daily basis but never the physical abuse he suffered in London. But it doesn’t taint his enthusiasm for the city. “It’s a very, very tolerant place,” he says. “It’s a place that welcomes difference and eccentricity.”
Messias says he was glad that the audience was able to experience the abuse he had suffered first hand during that first show.
“They saw what it’s like to be laughed at. This kind of thing still happens, and they saw that.”
The Sissy’s Progress is at Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, E1 6AB from 17–18 March. artsadmin.co.uk
Adlyn Ross and Haley McGee in Made Visible, a play about race and identity at the Yard Theatre. Photograph: Caleb Wissun-Bhide
In much younger, more pretentious days, I remember writing a short play as part of my A-Level coursework that was a conversation on a park bench.
Made Visible, which opens at the Yard this month, is by coincidence exactly that (although I’m sure similarities end there).
Based on a ‘real encounter’ Pearson had in Victoria Park with two women of Indian origin, it is a ‘meta play’ that aims to humorously explore issues of race and identity.
Playwright Deborah Pearson, 33, an East Londoner originally from Toronto, uses the conversation between the three women to take aim at white privilege, asking the white writer to take accountability for being white.
“At first it appears to be naturalistic, a conversation between three women of different ages and backgrounds, but it then starts to question itself and becomes more like a play about the attempt to make that play, or the ethics of making that play and whether or not one should,” she says.
Although one of the characters is a playwright called Deborah, Pearson says it is important to retain a degree of ambiguity over whether the character is actually her or not, or even whether the encounter actually happened.
“It’s clear it’s a composite of me,” she says, “but would it really be possible to really stage something that really happened anyway? There would always be something about the truth of that situation which is flawed by trying to funnel that experience through one person’s perspective.”
A former Royal Court young writer and co-director of experimental theatre outfit Forest Fringe, Pearson describes much of her work as ‘contemporary performance’, solo performances that are usually autobiographical, so writing a play for actors is a departure.
Her ambition is for the play to be part of a wider conversation about lack of diversity and a lack of representation in the theatre industry, an issue that has come to the fore in Hollywood recently with OscarsSoWhite.
“We’re all trying to see this play as an emperor’s new clothes moment of pointing out how come so many writers are white and what does it mean. Just because someone is white and in this dominant position it doesn’t make them objective.”
Pearson realises that making a play with a basis not far removed from academic discourse could be a challenge for audiences expecting an evening’s entertainment, and she has a solution – humour.
“The thing is whenever you want to talk about something that’s a sensitive topic politically, a good way of doing that is by being entertaining and funny,” Pearson says.
“I hope the play’s quite funny but I hope that the joke’s in the right place. There’s a great term about punching up rather than punching down so I really want the jokes if anything to point towards the discomfort these things bring about and then that these are things that need to be addressed.”
Made Visible 15 March–9 April The Yard Theatre, Queens Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN theyardtheatre.co.uk
Cleo Sylvestre as Mary Seacole. Photograph: Cleo Sylvestre
Walking into the Rosemary Branch Theatre, I feel instantly welcome. At 5pm the bar is bustling with customers young and old, with artistic director Cleo Sylvestre flashing a fuchsia-lipped smile as she greets each one.
“My friend Cecilia and I have been running the Rosie for 20 years now,” Sylvestre says. “My husband had just died, and Cecil was teaching ballet upstairs. It was really a baptism of fire, neither of us knew what we were doing.”
It seems Sylvestre’s life has been marked by a series of colourful career moves, having worked in music, film and on the West End. She points at a black and white photograph in a corner. It’s her with some “faces you might recognise” – The Rolling Stones, with whom she recorded ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ in 1969. “I had a great time.
The Stones were releasing music that no one had ever heard before, but I thought that rather than just going to loads of gigs, I wanted to be the gig”.
But despite her musical credentials, theatre is her first love, she says. “I love being able to go to the theatre and forget about the outside world for an hour. I think it’s all about being able to bring something to life.”
To mark the Rosie’s 20th anniversary, Sylvestre’s acclaimed one-woman show, The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole is returning to the stage for a short run this month.
Based on the autobiography of the same name, it recounts Jamaican-born Seacole’s experiences of the Crimean War during which she set up a hospital using abandoned metal and driftwood to aid sick and wounded troops.
Whereas Florence Nightingale’s legacy has long been part of the school curriculum, Seacole’s contribution to British history has been largely overlooked.
Sylvestre admits she knew little about her until the 1980s. “I read her autobiography while my children were still very young and thought she was an amazing woman. Initially I wrote it for children. I wanted them to hear her story and get across that anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”
Sylvestre is also an ambassador for The Mary Seacole Statue Appeal, whose efforts have finally paid off, with a monument set to be unveiled this spring. It will be the first statue of a named black woman in Britain.
Portraying Seacole’s personality as well as her achievements was vital for Sylvestre. “I think she was quite a complex character; she was tough, she was intrepid. I think she had a very warm heart, but she had a lot of steel to have gone through what she did.
I also think – how can I phrase this without putting her down – that while she mixed with people from all walks of life, she didn’t suffer fools gladly. She could hold her own.”
The play promises to be an opportunity to hear the story of one remarkable woman, told by another.
The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole is at Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Road, N1 3DT from 9-11 March. www.rosemarybranch.co.uk
Vincent Regan in A Steady Rain at the Arcola. Photograph: Nick Rutter
Set in downtown Chicago in the “not too distant past”, A Steady Rain sucks you in.
Denny and Joey have been best friends since childhood and are now partners in the police force.
This pair of beat cops would do anything for each other.
“I don’t want you going back to that armpit of a place and giving it to the bottle,” Denny says when trying to keep Joey away from “the sauce”.
When a “lowlife” injures Denny’s son in an act of revenge, Denny goes off the rails and takes the law into his own hands. Joey steps in to support Denny’s family and rifts surface between the friends.
Written by Keith Huff (House of Cards and Mad Men), A Steady Rain debuted on Broadway in 2009 with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig.
In the London debute, both Vincent Regan as Denny (300, Troy, Clash of the Titans) and David Schaal as Vincent (The Office, The Inbetweeners) are also strong enough to convince that a play with just two characters can enthrall for a full two hours.
They successfully rescue the plot when it veers too close to the good cop–bad cop dichotomy.
The simplicity of the set works well with the pace of the plot as it switches between the present, flashbacks and direct narrative. A table and two chairs double up, amongst other things, as a sofa, kitchen table and police van.
Weather as a metaphor is a familiar device. But when rain begins to fall across the back of the stage, the audience nevertheless feels the oppression. And the sense of relief when it finishes, just as the plot resolves.
Where the play treads a little too close to cliché, the production and acting sustains it.
A Steady Rain at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 5 March. www.arcolatheatre.com
Researching family history is big business, and it is easy to see why. Who wouldn’t, afterall, want to know if they were distantly related to a former president of France, or be tempted to see themselves afresh in the light of newly discovered relations?
Playwright Freddie Machin managed to trace his own ancestry back centuries to uncover a story that he has used as the basis for his new play, Don’t Waste Your Bullets on the Dead, which premieres at Vault Festival this month.
I might be related to someone who was on the Mayflower ship that went to America in 1620,” says Machin, a 30-year-old writer and actor based in Stoke Newington.
That someone is John Billington, who has the dubious honour of being the first English settler to be executed in the newly-colonised land.
Billington was aboard the Mayflower, the ship that transported the pilgrims from Plymouth, England, to the New World in 1620, a voyage that culminated in the signing of the Mayflower Compact, which established there a rudimentary form of democracy.
John and Elinor Billington decided to leave England to escape their debts, but 10 years after their arrival John was convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged.
Machin’s play is not a retelling of their story. Instead it uses their story as the backdrop for a “metatheatrical piece” about someone who is writing a play about maybe being related to someone who was on the Mayflower.
“It has an autobiographical starting point, but from there it ceases to have anything to do with me really,” says Machin.
“We spend some time in 1620s and then I pull the rug and it comes back to the modern day. So there is a relationship between the writer and her own material. And in actual fact she comes face-to-face with her own character in the rehearsal room at one point.”
Machin made his main protagonist female to distance himself from the narrative, but admits that Don’t Waste Your Bullets on the Dead could be seen as autobiographical in another way.
“The main character is trying to choose between her relationship and writing this play, because writing for her – and for me too – is an all consuming act,” he says.
“I’m writing something today about if you choose to be a creative or if you choose to take any path in life you will do so at the cost of other things.
“The play presents a person at a crossroads, who has chosen to be a writer and finds she is having to compromise whether she wants to have a child in the future.”
The character’s decision is whether to have a real life baby, or to give everything she has to the ‘baby’ that is the play.
“I certainly feel like that,” Machin confides. “I’ve got a play going on, which means I’ve got no money and time for anyone else as all my energy and focus is going into the play.”
Don’t Waste Your Bullets on the Dead is at The Vaults, Leake Street, SE1 7NN from 10–14 February. freddiemachin.com
T’Nia Miller in rehearsals for Re: Home. Photograph: Joe Twiggs
The Beaumont Estate in Leyton helped to transform the skyline of 1960s London. And for the first residents moving in, it represented the urban dream: affordable housing with stunning views and no outside toilets.
But by the beginning of this century that view had changed. Ugly, poorly-constructed and with a reputation for anti-social behaviour, high-rises fell out of favour, and many were demolished.
Among them were the Beaumont Estate towers, pulled down in 2006. This month a play at the Yard Theatre uses interviews with former and present residents of the estate to examine what our homes mean to us.
Re: Home is directed by Cressida Brown, and comes ten years after her original play about the Beaumont Estate. That play, Home, was set inside one of the condemned towers prior to its demolition, and used interviews with former residents to create an urban family drama.
“I had all these interviews so I just decided that as it’s 10 years to the month [since the demolition] that I’d revisit them. A lot of the people have moved, either into the new low-rises on the estate, or away completely. I thought I’d try to find the people I originally interviewed to see what had happened to them.”
What emerges is a complex picture: on one hand, enhanced security makes the estate feel safer; but on the flip side, she says, fewer people seem to know who their neighbours are.
“I interviewed one person who rather horribly was talking about the ‘civilising nature of architecture’ and that one of the reasons for tearing down the towers was that you could have these crack houses as hide outs in there, but now you don’t get everyone knowing one another and a sense of people looking out for you.”
High rise and fall: All Saints’ and St Paul’s Tower from Leyton High Road. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Brown admits some anxiety about the idea of a “white middle class theatre-maker” parachuting into a community and making a play about the residents’ lives, and asks: “What right do I have?” It’s a question that makes its way into the play too.
“A lot of the play is actually turning the looking glass back on the process of making the theatre, so what’s the editing process and the responsibility of dealing with real people’s words,” Brown says.
“What we’ve done without trying to give it away is to throw the idea of being a witness or documenting other people’s lives back into the audience.”
For people of a certain generation, not having St Catherine’s Tower or St Paul’s Tower on the skyline must seem strange. But demolitions happened in many London boroughs, so why choose to focus on the Beaumont Estate in the first place, I ask.
“It’s a very notorious estate, it has lot of problems,” Brown replies. “And the towers had dominated the skyline and become almost an iconic space of the borough.”
“But the second reason was totally accidental. I was looking for an empty building to do a play in and a man at Waltham Forest Council suggested I interview all the people who lived in this building that was going to be demolished and make the play a celebration of their community.
“What’s weird about that is that using interviews has been the process for my theatre company ever since.”
Re: Home is at The Yard Theatre, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN from 9 February– 5 March theyardtheatre.co.uk
Following the success of its anarchic take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Arcola Queer Collective returns this month with an adaptation of The Little Prince.
The French novella, first published in 1943, is the most translated and one of the best-selling books in the world. Written by the French aristocrat, poet and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, it is a philosophical tale about a pilot stranded in the Sahara desert who meets a prince fallen from an asteroid.
The Arcola production will be directed by ‘queen of queerlesque’ performer and writer Rubyyy Jones. A favourite of the cabaret scene, Jones’s shows tend to be high in glamour, wit and provocation.
There is more to great burlesque than sleaze and glitter, says Jones, who is an ardent feminist and self-proclaimed ‘sex educator’. Her work has a political message at its core. “My feminism is a sex-positive feminism. I’m really looking for equality, visibility and for all voices to be heard,” she says.
In this respect, Jones is a good fit for the Arcola Queer Collective. Since its formation, the company has welcomed anyone who identifies as LGBT. The copyright to The Little Prince has recently entered the public domain, so this is not the only adaptation out there. This year will also see Mark Osborne’s stop motion film premiered at Cannes.
The story of The Little Prince is celebrated for encapsulating the experience of being an outsider, as its deserted protagonist searches for love and meaning in a world that appears hostile and bewildering.
For many, London’s rapidly-changing night life means the city risks becoming similarly alien. Over the past years, several East End LGBT venues such as the Joiners’ Arms and the George and Dragon pub have had to shut their doors permanently. Jones explains that queer spaces are vital, particularly as the relationship between gender identities and casting in theatre is still rigid.
“I had no idea how much privilege I had when I was in a straight relationship, and it’s made me realise how hard it is for other people to feel recognised. One member of the collective told me they’d never been able to find a role in theatre where they can play their gender. As a self-identifying woman, I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone to tell me that I can’t play a woman’s part.”
From chatting to Jones I’m nevertheless left with an overwhelming positively impression of the state of queer theatre today. “People are becoming accepting because there’s been a huge shift in society,” she says. “It’s an exciting time.”
The Little Prince is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street,E8 3DL from 8–13 February arcolatheatre.com
Trials and tribulations… Hannah Hutch (Ann) and Amanda Bellamy (Jane) in Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern. Photograph: Richard Davenport
The fascinating story of one of the last witch trials in England is the inspiration for a play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, opening this month at the Arcola.
Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern is based on the true story of an old woman who narrowly avoided execution after being accused and convicted of witchcraft in the Hertfordshire village of Walkern in 1712.
Jane Wenham was a ‘cunning woman’, a type of healer who used herbs to ward off illnesses. But after crossing certain members of the village she was accused of witchcraft and arrested. The trial caused a sensation in London, provoking a pamphlet war, while the village itself was caught between those wanting to save her life and those claiming to want to save her soul.
Lenkiewicz, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning film Ida, and whose play The Naked Skin was the first by a living female to be performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, was approached by Max Clifford-Clark from theatre company Out of Joint and asked if she wanted to write about Jane Wenham.
“I looked into it and thought it was fascinating and said yes,” says Lenkiewicz, a former Hackney resident who now lives in Leyton. “Although I’ve taken a few events and let it spring from that really because what interested me more is how it still resonates today.”
Arthur Miller famously used the Salem witch trials to comment on McCarthyism in The Crucible, and Lenkiewicz similarly uses the story of Jane Wenham to draw parallels to the present day.
“She was an outsider Jane Wenham, she lived on the edge of the village and I just think that fear of the outsider is very much still present. You see it with immigration, people terrified of anything or anyone coming into their territory. It’s not just modern it’s historical, and crippling in many ways.”
Wenham’s outsider status Lenkiewicz believes can be attributed to her age and gender. Part of it, she says, was economics – the idea of communities not wanting people who weren’t contributing anymore.
“But also it was mainly women who were prosecuted,” she says, “so I suppose my question would be what terrifies men about women that at that time they would put them into torture corsets and gag them?”
Lenkiewicz’s plays often – though not exclusively – focus on women’s stories, from her debut play Soho: A Tale of Table Dancers (the first production to be staged at the Arcola, back in 2001) to 2008’s Her Naked Skin, a tale of the struggles facing two suffragettes before World War One.
Lenkiewicz feels keenly that women are hugely underrepresented in film and theatre, and tries to redress that balance. Her most recent film script is about the Second World War allied spy Noor Inayat Khan, a radio-operator in Nazi-occupied Paris who was sent to Dachau and murdered. “She was an incredibly brave young woman, and you just want to bring out the story lest we forget,” Lenkiewicz explains.
This desire to give women who have been silenced a voice explains Lenkiewicz’s anger at the cancellation of a performance of Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern at a girls’ school in Ipswich last October, where it was due to be staged as part of regional tour prior to the London run.
Ipswich High School for Girls cancelled the performance after learning of the play’s “references to child abuse”, something Lenkiewicz dismisses as censorious and evidence of a “nanny state mentality”.
“I just thought it was a sign of our bleak nanny state times that they were forbidding 15- or 16-year-old girls to watch something that was incredibly pertinent to them,” she says.
“One of the main characters is only 16 and a very confused female. I just think it’s an apt piece to see for anyone who’s going through that maelstrom of change really of profound change.”
Lenkiewicz, who is now in her mid-40s, explains that her intention was always to tell Jane Wenham’s story, but that the writing process brought to light more instances of silencing and oppression towards women, the most terrifying of which being child abuse. “Kids are told they shouldn’t tell, and we should be addressing that – we shouldn’t be shutting these conversations down,” she told The Stage.
The irony that a play dealing with the hysteria and the oppression of women should be deemed inappropriate was underlined when Lenkiewicz received a letter from a 15-year-old girl who had seen the play in Watford.
“It was a very heartfelt letter saying how it had helped her in many ways and that she thought it was essential viewing for young women and that it was about empowerment,” Lenkiewicz recalls.
“If I was directing this play towards anyone it would be a young female contingent because it’s all about having a voice really.”
Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 30 January arcolatheatre.com
