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New Plays at Shakespeare's Globe
Cast 8 May 2009 The frontline is music theatre at its most gutsy, raw and relevant. Actor/writer Ché Walker and the Globe's team have managed to mythologise some lived experiences at the rough end of the social spectrum, to create a theatre piece accessible to all. The spotlight moves around two dozen or so characters coming and going, or just hanging around Camden Town Underground Station, the set dominated by an adjacent red-lit phantasy enducing sexbar. Refugees, drugs dealers and addicts, sex workers, religious fanatics, misfits and the mentally deluded collide in a shambolic maelstrom. The audience becomes part of the chaos, trying to keep track of the ever shifting events, with the half-heard, half-understood interactions and overlapping dialogues as in an Altmann film. Everyone has to work hard for a foothold on these shifting sands. Bonds of recognition, identification and sympathy are built up, not least on the side of the increasingly vociferous spectators responding to a few green shoots of Olly Fox with his colleagues has created a pulsating soundscape to underscore the speech rhythms, a multiplicity of musics to mirror those of identities and ethnicities which collide at this Frontline. Percussionist Stephen Hiscock, supported by Earle Smith on trombone (a very effective instrument in the Globe's space) and Emmanuel Waldron, piano, held the proceedings together throughout the show with a vibrant musical thread. There could be no better venue than Shakespeare's Globe for this work, but one hopes it can live on elsewhere. The Frontline is published by Faber. Catch it if you can during this month of May. Alexa Woolf
A New World - A Life of Thomas Paine Trevor Griffiths -
World Premiere Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, 3 September 2009 For readers of Musical Pointers, Benjamin Britten's doomed Billy Budd, singing about his old ship Right of Man, is most likely what the name of Thomas Paine brings to mind. Trevor Griffiths' worthy, well-meaning old/newish biography of a writer, regrettably disappointed. It Writing for the stage about a writer is difficult; Griffiths began c. 1990 and a decade later reached a 6 hrs 'definitive' draft for a Richard Attenborough film that never got made. For Shakespeare's Globe the script has been pruned down to about three hours with interval and Keith Barlett as Franklin [R] to bridge the gaps. It still felt long, and was not always audible, partly due to the efforts of Jan Rowles to coach the actors (most of whom took rapid change multiple parts) in French language and numerous dialects, for action that moved between a nascent America, France after the Revolution, and an England resistive to change. It's good, but not Shakespeare, says Thomas Paine's printer (pictured L) about one of pamphlets offered for publication. The same has to be said about Trevor Griffiths' script, which quotes Paine himself but does not enliven his writing sufficiently to make you want to read the originals; indeed, many playgoers might have s That would be a tragedy; I recently bought Paine's Rights of Man and found it a riveting, unexpectedly easy read. Fabulously good writing, which takes you from thought to thought, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph [follow my link above & you will be able to read several pages of the book, courtesy Amazon.co.uk !]. Its stature is well characterised in A C Grayling's essay in the programme book, rather than by Griffiths' interview, also there, about the protracted gestation of his play. The reviews are very mixed; my reaction is well expressed also by Peter Brown in London Theatre Guide. For appreciation without reservations, The Guardian Peter Grahame Woolf
James Garnon as Danton & Keith Bartlett as Franklin, John Light as Thomas Paine |
Preddie, Niamh Quinn, Ashley Rolfe, Patrick Godfrey, Golda Rosheuvel, John Stahl, Beru
Tessama
affection and dignity amongst all the degredation and violence. 
reminded me of long-ago BBC Third Programme historical documentaries... 
been left with the belief that they had absorbed enough.