East End Review

Tag: Wilton’s Music Hall

  • ‘It was love soup’: Britten in Brooklyn with Sadie Frost at Wilton’s Music Hall

    ‘It was love soup’: Britten in Brooklyn with Sadie Frost at Wilton’s Music Hall

    Sadie Frost
    Sadie Frost is set to play the role of Gypsy. Photograph: Rachell Smith

    A dilapidated town house in New York was once home to a diverse community of writers and artists, including exiled composer Benjamin Britten, the writers WH Auden and Carson McCullers, and stripper and burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee.

    Britten in Brooklyn, a play by Zoe Lewis, travels back to 1940 to recall the group’s lives together – the parties and affairs – and how their bohemian idyll fell apart once the reality of the Second World War took hold.

    Actress and celebrity Sadie Frost is poised to take up the role of Gypsy when the play opens this month at Wilton’s Music Hall.

    Speaking to the East End Review, Frost says the play enticed her to take time out from her film production company and burgeoning fashion label.

    “The script got sent to me, and I thought it was just so beautifully written,” explains the 51-year-old mother of four, whose previous acting credits include a leading role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the iconic music video for Pulp’s Common People.

    “There’s such diverse range of characters and you all get them vying for attention and challenging each other in their relationships.

    “It’s also very apt because it’s all about the propaganda just before the Second World War, about borders and whether to let people in or look after yourself and your own.”

    Frost starred in Zoe Lewis’s one-woman play, Touched … For the Very First Time, back in 2010, but describes this new play as “a very different type of writing”.

    “It’s political, historical, farcical, funny, and has so many elements,” she says.

    Frost was drawn to the character of Gypsy Rose Lee, a theatrical entertainer whose extraordinary life was made into a film and Stephen Sondheim musical.

    “She grew up in a poverty stricken family with her mum and sister, and they were on the road entertaining, going from village to village and trying to make ends meet,” Frost says.

    Gypsy was a pioneer of the art of striptease, reciting poetry or whilst peeling off a glove or flinging a ribbon to her howling admirers.

    “She had this amazing comedic quality, and didn’t really take her clothes off,” Frost says. “She just alluded to it but in such a funny way that people were really mesmerised.”

    In its Victorian heyday, Wilton’s Music Hall was home to hedonists of all stripes, and Frost says the venue’s “old school” authenticity is sure to add to the play.

    “It’s this love soup where they’re all living together in this crazy way, talking about Picasso and Dali,” she says.

    Frost herself is no stranger to a bohemian style of life. During her “chaotic but positive” childhood in Islington, she and her siblings were forbidden from saying “No” or “Sorry”, and, as a test of character, forced to refer to objects as the most opposite things they could think of.

    And during the 1990s Frost was part of the party-loving ‘Primrose Hill’ set, alongside model Kate Moss.

    The lives of artists, entertainers and writers have long been characterised as louche hedonists, with their ‘loose morals’ questioned by the socially conservative.

    But today’s young artists, with piles of student debt and worries about jobs, seem, anecdotally at least, a more sensible breed.

    “I can think of times when I’ve been with a few friends and we’re having a real laugh and it’s all been quite decadent,” Frost recalls.

    “But no, now we’re all quite serious and rather grown up and have far too much responsibility.

    “So this hedonistic scenario where all these people are living in this crazy way is nice to see though,” she adds as a caveat, “people do fall apart if they live it”.

    Britten in Brooklyn
    31 August – 17 September
    Wilton’s Music Hall
    1 Grace’s Alley
    E1 8JB

     

  • Pick of the bricks: Wilton’s Music Hall and Alphabeta win RIBA awards

    Wilton’s Music Hall
    Wilton’s Music Hall. Photograph: Helene Binet

    East London architecture down the ages is rich and varied, from Hawksmoor’s churches to the high modernist Balfron Tower.

    But there are supreme examples of contemporary architecture in East London too, which the Royal Institute for British Architects (RIBA) acknowledged when announcing the nominees and winners of its annual awards.

    Wilton’s Music Hall

    Once a rowdy hub of Victorian popular entertainment, Wilton’s Music Hall has been named London Building of the Year, after a restoration project that saw the theatre strengthened, sound-proofed, heated and ventilated without compromising its unique character.

    “We just want to stop the clock so that it’s safe and it’s structurally secure,” Oona Patterson, the venue’s marketing director, told the East End Review in 2014, before much of the work had started.

    Tim Ronalds Architects followed a principle of “doing only what is essential”, putting an “enormous amount of care into apparently doing nothing’.

    In Victorian times, tightrope walkers, the first British can-can show, and performances by music hall greats graced Wilton’s stage.

    Everything possible from that era was preserved, from disused roofs, Georgian brickwork, fragments of plaster and ceramic electrical fittings, to an abandoned birds’ nest.

    As the restoration unfolded so traces of previous occupation and abandonment emerged.

    These found qualities of the building have also been preserved, adding to a subtle and engaging visual narrative.

    Alphabeta Building
    Alphabeta Building. Photograph: Hufton and Crow

    Alphabeta

    This large-scale office space on Finsbury Square incorporates parts of the old Triton Court building.

    The building, which has bagged a London RIBA award, has been transformed into a contemporary office space for workers in the tech and finance industries.

    Its original tower and cupola have been restored but rooftop office space and open terraces now offer panoramic views.

    Architects Studio RHE removed old extensions and alterations, stripping back the listed building to reveal riveted-steel columns and brickwork.

    But the most impressive detail is its glazed atrium, the sides of which are clad in contrasting materials. Projecting meeting rooms cantilever out into the space, and a huge cycle ramp behind a glazed screen takes cyclists straight down from street-level to a large cycle store in the basement.

    What one considers an office can range from a kitchen table to a rented shoebox to something altogether more grandiose –Alphabeta firmly belongs in the latter camp.

  • Playing a blinder – All That Fall preview

    Playing a blinder – All That Fall preview

    All That Fall, as staged by Out of Joint
    All That Fall, as staged by Out of Joint

    It would be fair to wonder what is to be gained from staging a radio play without any visuals at all. The audience watching Samuel Beckett’s one act 1956 piece, All That Fall at the legendary Wilton’s Music Hall sit blindfolded for the duration of the performance. But without pesky sight to distract from the pithy dialogue, Out of Joint’s production successfully strips the play down to its bare, nihilistic bones with brilliant effect.

    The cast wind through the space, allowing for voices to rise unexpectedly out of the darkness, while pre-recorded broken excerpts of Schubert and the screeches of incoming trains make the gloomy soundscape even more ominous.

    Set in rural Ireland, the play follows the journey of the elderly Mrs Rooney to meet her blind husband as he arrives on the 12.30 train. Consistently maudlin and self-centred, Mrs Rooney’s outlook towards the world is so morbid that you’re left feeling desperate to escape her company – if only her cynicism wasn’t quite so funny. Laughter echoed around the room as she sighed and complained through the first half of the performance. However self-indulgent Mrs Rooney’s rambling though, her pain is nonetheless real. “Love, that is all I asked… daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular,” she croakily laments.

    The simplicity of the plot does not mean that All That Fall is an easy play to grasp. The individual backgrounds of the characters are never fully known, the context of their conversations is never understood, and questions are left unanswered. Beckett’s usual themes of death and decay are everywhere, and the naturalistic script does not make it any less surreal than some of his other works.

    Despite the occasionally shaky Irish accent, the greatest strength of the production lies in the cast’s ability to deliver the script with warmth and conviction, allowing for the play’s heavier aspects to seep through without sounding forced. In the 60 minutes during which nothing very much happens, we’re left with a lot to ponder. It seems that sometimes being kept in the dark can be a good thing after all.

    All That Fall
    Until 9 April
    Wilton’s Music Hall
    1 Graces Alley, E1 8JB
    wiltons.org.uk

  • Inside Wilton’s Music Hall

    The Mahogany Bar, Wilton's Music Hall. Photograph: James Perry
    The Mahogany Bar, Wilton’s Music Hall. Photograph: James Perry

    To visit Wilton’s Music Hall for the first time is to discover something new about London. 

    Hidden down an alley way in the heart of London’s East End, Wilton’s at first glance is just a wooden doorway surrounded by a facade of peeled paint and worn stone. 

    But inside lies a gymnasium-sized mid-nineteenth century auditorium, once a rowdy hub of Victorian popular entertainment, where sailors and their sweethearts would carouse to the leading Music Hall acts of the day. During the 1860s and 1870s, the theatre saw tightrope walkers, the first British can-can show, and performances by artistes such as Champagne Charlie, one of the first music hall acts to play to royalty, now a resident of Abney Park cemetery.  

    In the main hall the sense of past is palpable. You can imagine dock workers standing by the cast iron barley-twist columns, or canoodling up in the gallery. The original stage is vertigo-inducing, made to accommodate an audience of top hat wearers, and on the ceiling you can see where a crystal chandelier with 300 gas jets once hung, ventilating the hall from the rising plumes of tobacco smoke. 

    The hall has recently undergone substantial repair work, though you wouldn’t realise it by the bare brick walls and furnishings. “The hall is finished and is exactly how we want it to be,”  Wilton’s Oona Patterson insists. “We may still have holes in the roof but whereas they once were real they are now preserved. It’s typical East London shabbiness – but I’d like to think we were there first.” 

    Although a significant period, the 30 years Wilton’s spent as a music hall was relatively short. In 1888 the building was bought by the East London Methodist Mission, and became a focus for efforts to alleviate extreme poverty and improve living conditions. During the Great Dock Strike of 1889, a soup kitchen was set up that provided a thousand meals a day to the starving families of dockers.

    The Methodist Mission stayed open for nearly 70 years, surviving the Blitz and witnessing the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. But after the Second World War the building fell derelict and was scheduled for demolition before a campaign supported Sir John Betjeman, Peter Sellars and Spike Milligan managed to save it from the wrecking ball.  

    The next turning point in fortune came in 1997 when a newly reopened Wilton’s staged a one-woman performance by Fiona Shaw of T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland. The faded grandeur of Wilton’s provided a perfect setting for the poem and put the venue on people’s radar once more.  

    The threats of closure and demolition now in the past, Wilton’s is in the midst of addressing the long term structural problems with the building. Back in 1850, founder John Wilton had a vision for a ‘Magnificent Music Hall’ which consisted of buying five terraced properties, knocking them through, and building a music hall in what was essentially their back gardens. 

    The result was a unique structure – few theatres have the main entrance to the auditorium behind a staircase. But it also created some unique structural problems: namely, the auditorium and the houses it backs onto are not a perfect fit. From one of the office rooms you can see clear space between the back wall of the houses and the hall. 

    “It looks pretty cool, the way the light comes through, but in the long term it’s not ideal – there are a lot of leaks. What we’ve previously been able to do is to make it as strong as we’ve needed to continue using it, but it was never going to be sustainable,” says Patterson. 

    From this summer until autumn next year Wilton’s, while remaining open with a full programme of events, will be undergoing repairs to fix the structural irregularities once and for all. “We just want to stop the clock so that it’s safe and it’s structurally secure,” says Patterson. 

    But when the curtain rises on the new and improved Wilton’s Music Hall in 2015, don’t expect it to look much different from how it is now. “We’re not going to replaster everywhere and we’re not going to put in shiny floors,” Patterson adds.  

    “But we are going to make it safe and we’re going to get things like some proper electricity and maybe even some plumbing!” 

    Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, E1 8JB.