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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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The real history boys
Joe Pocknell, a Cupid with a golden tongue and a cheeky presence with sundry arboreals behindGalateaEdward's BoysThe Dream Factory, Warwick***** WE KNOW
virtually as a fact that in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’s time, all the
principal girls’ and women’s parts were taken by boys, or at the most,
older teens. The Lord Chamberlain’s men, later the King’s men, relied on
such young, high-voiced talent. Gertrude, Goneril, Rosalind, Katharina, Cordelia
– these were the plums in the pudding, the feathers in the caps of boy
starlets like Solomon Pavy, whose early death Jonson commemorated in an
exquisite epitaph; or Alexander Cooke, who was among the Shakespearian
marvels of the age and stage: much talked about, much gazed upon. But there were, especially late in Elizabeth I’s
reign, troupes composed of all-boy casts. The Children of Paul’s
(choristers or ex-choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral) or The Children of
the Chapel (formerly of the Chapel Royal; later of the Blackfriars) were
preeminent among boys’ companies at the turn of the 17th
century – the Elizabethan-Jacobean era. Many went on to act as grown-ups
too. Only with the demise of Cromwell and Charles II’s accession did
women come to play the fashionable and saucy roles in Restoration Comedy
and Tragedy. Several of the companies were connected with
schools – Merchant Taylors being one. But a few years into James I’s
rule the once-blossoming tradition died out. A big cheer, then, for
Edward’s Boys, scions of what was almost certainly Shakespeare’s own
school - his father being an influential worthy of the town - King
Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford (which has just admitted girls to
its Sixth Form) who with careful nursing, directing and chaperoning have
earned a name today, rightly, as one of the most striking young acting
companies in the realm. Not only are they a terrific team – an instance of very high quality, intelligent school acting at the least, but really rather more than that: tip top, one should say, more like county or England standard in a sport; but they have a gift for serving up repertoire virtually nobody else ever does. Poet John Lyly, author of the play Galatea,
which they have just paraded in Warwick and at Shakespeare’s Globe on
London’s Thames South Bank, was one of the key writers who penned for
the boys’ companies before their enforced temporary demise in the 1590s,
and briefest revival as the new century turned Jacobean. He is one of
their valuable ‘finds’. But there are others. Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of
Carthage surfaced last autumn. Middleton (A Mad World My Masters,
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) and another children’s theatre
specialist, John Marston, with Antonio’s Revenge, plus before
that part of The Dutch Courtesan), have both featured. They have Beaumont and Fletcher in their sights,
and the long-lived Homer translator George Chapman; plus from a
generation later, The City Wit (or The Woman Wears the
Breeches - was it ever otherwise?) by Richard Brome – Jonson’s
former manservant (‘I had you for a servant once, Dick Brome; / And you
perform'd a servant's faithfull parts; / Now, you are got into a nearer
room, / Of fellowship, professing my old arts’) - which sounds huge fun,
and requires a cracking boy singer for a dozen perky numbers.
The aptly (and winningly) named Edward’s Boys,
their vigorous productions planned, led and directed with inspiration
and a clever, witty dramatic sense by Perry Mills, Deputy Headmaster
with pastoral responsibilities (formerly Head of English and Expressive
Arts), and designed by artist David Troughton (whose haunted, leafy
boy-replicated poster for Galatea like a medieval Green Man
reborn, looks absolutely stunning), have been praised to bits by the
high and mighty, not least those in the RSC, who should know. The boys’ appearance at Shakespeare’s Globe says
it all – after four regional showings during March, and one in April at
The Dream Factory, Playbox Theatre’s classy venue located at Aylesford
School, Warwick, they took their terrific latest pitch, Lyly’s
Galatea, to the Sam Wanamaker Theatre which adjoins the Globe and is
named after its great benefactor. Warwick was a bit thinly attended –
some more flyer publicity might help. Let’s hope the Globe was packed. They deserve it. Word has preceded them: they
have already been asked back to stage Ben Jonson’s The Epicoene
(or The Silent Woman) in 2016 – a play in which one of the
greatest Jacobean
But back to John Lyly (1553-1606). This is the Stratford company’s third stab at him, after chunks/extracts from Endymion (2009) and Mother Bombie, mounted in 2010. Galatea, acted at Greenwich Palace before Her Majesty, probably in the year of the Spanish Armada, on New Year’s Day 1588 (Prologue: ‘Your Majesty's5judgment and favor are our sun and shadow, the one coming of your deep wisdom, the other of your wonted grace’), is a most remarkable play, deemed probably his best. The story is witty: Greek myth invades rural
Lincolnshire. Two yokel fathers (Georges Ellingham and Hodson: the
latter, despite an awful beard here, has made something of a girl-boy
hit already as Princess Katherine in Henry V and Anna - Purcell’s
Belinda - in Dido, teething as Livia in an earlier Lyly), resort
to disguising their daughters as boys, since Diana (the spectacular
Daniel Wilkinson) has demanded that every quinquennium the prettiest
local teen be sacrificed – devoured by a sea-monster - in honour of her
virginal obsession. Cupid, rebuffed when trying it on with one of
them, makes all Diana’s supposedly chaste, dinky bow-wielding followers
fall in love, predictably with the girl-boys, who meanwhile (despite
being both boys playing girls playing boys) fall in love with one
another. Yum yum. It sounds like a recipe for comedy not that far
from the quick-change nightmare of Coventry’s latest Spanish Golden Age
Season (Don Gil of the Green Breeches). The acting – from all,
but especially from a chosen few, is absolutely scrumptious. Charlie
Waters as Galatea, quite a wee chappie now in his third year or more,
had some difficulty imprinting authority on his role, though not
character. ‘Blush, Galatea, that must frame thy affection fit for thy
habit, and therefore be thought immodest because thou art unfortunate!
Thy tender years cannot dissemble this deceit, nor thy sex bear it. Oh,
would the gods had made me as I seem to be, or that I might safely be
what I seem not!’ Pathos from the start. And again, ‘All the blood in my
body would be in my face, if he should ask me (as the question among men
is common), "Are you a maid?" ‘ Should ‘milk-white’ Galatea be a cheeky
chappie? Maybe not. But Waters can do boys, having played the crucial
tavern, then soldier, then corpse Boy role – no mean part - in 2012’s
thumpingly good Henry V (to judge by Gavin Birkett’s revealing
video; you can get all or most of Edward’s Boys’ productions on DVD from
www.edwardsboys.org/shop). In a way this was a play with a
Galatea-shaped hole, but when it came to the ‘boys’ falling for one
another, and mutually swearing ‘never to love a woman’, Charlie W rather
triumphed. Sex and violence is part of this school company’s sales
pitch. Well, it certainly worked.
The demure one is Pascal Vogiaridis, who pulled
off Hermes in Marlowe’s Dido play, and who brought an almost unearthly
innocence to Phillida, Galatea’s little supposed male chum (Galatea:
‘What dread riseth in my mind! I fear the boy to be as I am, a maiden.’
Phillida: ‘Tush, it cannot be; his voice shows the contrary’). Pascal
shines at verse speaking, and prose too; and my, it tells here. ‘It is a
pretty boy and a fair. He might well have been a woman, but because he
is not, I am glad I am; for now, under the color of my coat, I shall
decipher the follies of their kind.’ His moves seemed almost frozen with
terror, which if I’d expected to be sliced up, Iphigeneia-style, I might
have felt inclined to too. There were aspects to his acting and persona
which made me feel that sometime hence, in a Diana-type role, he might
possibly hold a stage rather well. Not quite yet, but soon. There’s a naughty final mix-up to cap this
production. The girls reappear not as maidens, but as ongoing lovesick
boys. Permissible? Of course. In a boys’ school. The real giggle of the production – there
has to be one – was Joe Pocknell’s Cupid. Cheeky and winsome and pert
and, now disguised as a nymph, unashamedly and eye-catchingly sexy (a
real Puck, he is a dab hand at devising knowing winks to the audience,
using the device latterly rather too much), he shone: this was a
glorious offering, a beacon of effortlessly naughty stage-hogging. Pocknell has progressed from ‘soldiers,
ambassadors, etc.’ in Henry V to playing – you guessed it – Cupid
in Dido, Queen of Carthage. So, having so spectacularly cocked
things up there and fatally wounded the Punic queen, Midsummer
Night’s Dream-style, he already has quite a fine pedigree in erotic
high jinks (‘I will make their pains my pastimes, and so confound their
loves in their own sex that they shall dote in their desires, delight in
their affections, and practice only impossibilities.’ But if Cupid’s was
a delicious performance, it was above all because Joe’s verse speaking
is of such an inordinately high quality. There’s the pedigree. He
projects. He enunciates. This quality of speech, sensitivity to the spoken
word, is a feature of Edward’s Boys as a whole, a prized one, as was
suggested just from the enticing blocked ‘Prologue’ cosying up to the
queen like Quince to Theseus and Hippolyta in the Dream, that
opens Galatea, with boys interacting to form shapely, perhaps
grieving, trees, in multiform imaginative poses. The ultimate
auditioning test,
Tragic Dido was played in 2013 by Daniel
Wilkinson. If Wilkinson’s striding Diana was a model for all around of
restrained, incredibly powerful acting, the eyes have it all. ‘What news
have we here, ladies? Are all in love? Are Diana’s nymphs becomes
Venus’s wantons?’, she snarls, and goes on, in a superbly modulated
speech, mercilessly to crucify the very idea of love of boys/men. Talk
about terrifying school prefect. Or doth the lady protest too much? Watching his exquisitely Greek- or Minoan-
dressed ‘girl’ acolytes scuttling silently after him, a flurry of
chastened looks and swishing purple-white attire (for Diana alone this
was tweaked to crimson), was simply hilarious – while Jeremy Franklin’s
artfully prepared parody of a white-bearded Neptune (the sort of
bombastic role Peter O’Toole relished: sea-monsters a speciality, he’d
have wanted fangs as well as a trident; and ranting to the last (‘I will
be here at the hour, and show as great cruelty as they have done craft,
and well shall they know that Neptune should have been entreated, not
cozened’), and David Fairbairn’s late-introduced Venus (again, the same
part Fairbairn depicted in Marlowe’s Dido); true to form, the two
antithetical goddesses have a stand-up row, à la Euripides
Hippolytus) gave evidence of what Edward’s older and maturer actors
could – and surely will – achieve. The early training beams through. However some of the younger, stag-chasing virgins
were really rather excellent. Take And most of all the littl’un (I think the only
Year 8), Tristan Barford as Larissa. He has Pocknell’s problem –
overdoing a flick of the head or (here) knowing look without really
varying it. But I thought him – potentially – yet another pretty useful
find on the part of the producer. Worth moulding.
There were worthy astronomers (Ed Beighton in
pompous, terrific Brummie mode: ‘Dost thou not know that I was
calculating the nativity of Alexander’s great horse’?) and alchemists
(Jasper Durbin), mariners (a rather witty Lawrence Barber) and gloomy
pontificating augurs (Hamish de Nett) with whom Lyly fills out the cast
or tarts up the tale. But the solo ‘boy’ role I would pick out was
Peter (Oliver Lloyd), the absconding Alchemist’s boy, who like
Vogiaridis has a rather special presence – not utilised quite as fully
as he might - and speaks lines as they should be spoken. I never quite
worked out what Peter’s function was (apart from to lament in a style
that brings Lyly close to Jonson: ‘What a life do I lead with my master!
Nothing but blowing of bellows, beating of spirits, and scraping of
crosslets. It is a very secret science, for none almost can understand
the language of it: sublimation, almigation, calcination, rubification,
incorporation, circination, cementation, albification, and
fermentation…’), but he brought with him a pathos and a feeling of
patent honesty that I guiltily found disconcerting. Great stuff. But where were the Touchstone, the Dogberry, the
Stephano and Trinculo of this three-level bucolic comedy? Enter a
deliciously crazy trio – triad, I might call them, for they seemed an
honest, happy-go-lucky rustic lot, yet seeking the main chance and up to
no good. You could not but fall for them. Though it’s tempting to praise to the skies the
insuppressible Robin (‘Ah, Robin, gentle Robin’) of young Jack Hawkins –
a veteran of Dido, whether as ‘Trojan sailor, Carthaginian lord,
attendant, waiter, choirboy, gymnast or P.E. teacher (you see how
Edward’s Boys packs them in) I’m not quite sure. He can sing fabulously,
in Black Country accent or no, would be a sure-fire cert for the City
Wit if nature were not such a cruel sea to boys’ voices, and
as a cocky wee chap would outdo any Ariel or Biondello. But while James
Williams furnished an aptly rural Dick (‘…and Dick the shepherd blows
his nail’), the accolades should really go to Finlay Hatch’s raffish
Rafe. An hilarious character, blissfully earthy, commanding the stage,
and to my mind thumpingly well played. Robin and Rafe in duet was one of
the highlights of the evening. Galatea’s music was composed by one of the
boys – Sam Bridges, a jump upwards maybe from Britten (Dido) and
Vaughan Williams (Henry): this was a super, imaginative,
incredibly sensitive score, tinged by traditional folk (some deft pipe
solos) and a range of shrewd influences, strummed or tweeted by a
musicians’ quartet that delivered with a like empathy: alongside
Bridges, Ben Dennes,
Edward’s Boys’ production team is obviously
utterly professional. True, a school play is a school play, and one
shouldn’t overstate things. But managing and manipulating and putting
onto the stage a substantial and unfamiliar text like this is a massive
undertaking. In terms of smooth running, something a staging (and
audiences) absolutely rely on, Galatea hit the jackpot every
time.
The costumes (Amanda Wood and team), or most of
them, looked exceptionally good. I liked the hats; and the rather natty
jodhpurs worn by some. Wigs were kept to a minimum (Neptune’s, like his
cardboard-looking three prongs, was either a comic hit or a disaster),
props - notably the afore mentioned bows, and some twee little lanterns
- were generally delightful, and Troughton’s triple-door set was both
serviceable and comely, though given a choice, I might have splashed out
a little more on décor. There were no hitches, items and paraphernalia
were seemingly in the right place, so Joe Woodman’s Stage
Management team must have done its stuff too. But sometimes at the end of a play – particularly
a Greek play’s dénouement – there is a humdinger of an
appearance, or apparition. In Lear it is the revelation – and
deaths – of Lear and Cordelia; in Sophocles’ Oedipus, the
discovery of the dead Jocasta preceding the self-blinding of her
exposed-as-a-murderer son/husband (Lyly knew his Thebes: ‘I am no
Oedipus, to expound riddles, and I muse how thou canst be Sphinx to
utter them’, as Sergeant’s Eurota, another Wilkinson acolyte, reminds
Clarke’s Telusa); in Elektra, the revelation, on the wheeled-out
ekkuklema, of the slain Clytemnaestra and Aegisthus. In Wagner’s
Ring, less bloodily, it is the appearance of Erda, the goddess
with all-seeing wisdom and earthen knowledge. Well, there was one here. Frontrunner for the
best performance of the evening was Dominic Howden, who delivered the
poignant, self-sacrificial and effectively reconciliatory peroration of
the goddess Hebe, a Ganymede-like nectar-pouring cupbearer, daughter of
Zeus and Hera: the deity of youth (‘prime of life’, ‘impending
sexuality’, ‘burgeoning adolescence’; so, in a sense, of Edward’s Boys
too. Armed with Lyly’s sensational, Aeschylus- or
Euripides-quality writing, Howden’s was a single-handed performance that
absolutely mesmerised. It spoke reams. And what a massive mouthful it
is. ‘Die, Hebe! Hebe die! Woeful Hebe…
accursed Hebe! Farewell the sweet delights… Farewell life, vain
life, wretched life, whose sorrows are long, whose end
doubtful, whose miseries certain, whose hopes innumerable, whose fears
intolerable.… Come Agar, thou insatiable monster of maidens’
blood and devourer of beauty’s bowels…’ (bang on cue, two trees lie on
the floor to enfold, as if protect her); ‘and farewell world, thou viler
monster’. Hebe doesn’t say things by halves. It’s a monster
of a speech, and one could have asked no finer utterer than Dominic
Howden. Like Peter’s, this was an on the verge of breaking voice; and
like an older boy treble assaying a particularly vulnerable solo, that
invariably moves an audience of itself. Howden spoke almost
Prospero-length lines – almost a textbook of modern-day diagnosed
depression - not just beautifully, but with a bewildering courage,
confidence and assurance for a young performer. If anything put the
icing on the cake, he did. She did.
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boy actors, Nathan Field, made his name. ‘The actors,’ says the website
blurb, ‘display a high degree of initiative and ownership of their
work.’ I think that puts it rather well. It’s exactly what comes across
in these productions. Talent. Collaboration. Support. Understanding. A
desire to adopt it, cosset it and make it their own. 
you might think. Later these weeping willows even sing. You knew from
then on – and from every subsequent impeccably managed exit and entrance
– that Mills’s direction was going to be hot, vital stuff.
Maninder
Dhami (a cherishably lute-like guitar, used sparingly) and Joe Woodman.
With insight and originality Bridges imported – an inspired touch – an
unusual, miraculous plucked or twirled percussion instrument, whose name
I’ve ashamedly failed to track down despite scouring the web for it. I
couldn’t find a single illustration. But it made strange sounds that
might have bewitched Caliban.