Abigail's Party, top show from talented cast

The original 1977 Abigail’s Party, starring Alison Steadman as Beverley, is so firmly rooted in our minds that it takes a brave company to re-launch it and an even braver lady to try and step into her shoes. In the current touring Theatre Royal Bath and Chocolate Factory production, Hannah Waterman throws her very heart and platform shoes into the role.

She portrays wonderfully the outrageous suburban housewife who is brash, luscious, gregarious and ‘up for it’, but who also has a vicious tongue that is particularly wicked after a few G & T’s.

The current production went down a storm on its first night at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford. Of course the audience were very much the ‘right age’ to relate to the 70’s decor, the pineapple and cheese on sticks, the novelty of olives, and music from Demis Roussos and James Galway.

Beverley’s husband Laurence was played captured by Martin Marquez. As he lovingly selected various LP’s to entertain his guests, you could see the eyes of the audience moisten with happy memories. How wonderful it was to have shelves stacked with LPs, carefully arranged in alphabetical order, the careful process of selection and the scapegoat of reading the LP cover when you couldn’t think of anything to say. There’s something about I-Tunes and Spotify that lacks that tactile satisfaction. 

But back to the play....

The cast are all all good. Beverly’s neighbour Angela is beautifully played by Katie Lightfoot, who chatters non-stop, fidgets and tries so uber-hard to please. She irritates the hell out of her smooth husband Tony, or Tone as Beverly likes to call him. Samuel James, as Tony, has very few lines but manages to draw guffaws of laughter from the crowd just by saying a long “Yeahh” or sprawling across the chair as he makes seductive advances to Beverly.

And finally, the rather nice neighbour Sue, whose daughter “Abigail’ is having a party, is brilliantly played by Emily Raymond. Very ‘proper’ in relation to her more brash neighbours, keen to remain poised and polite, she is somehow floored by downing far too many G & T’s pressed upon her by the generous but wicked Beverly.

Mike Leigh’s plays are all about the dialogue and the cast and this cast deliver their lines fast and furiously, with all the colour and characterisation that he would have expected. There’s not much of a plot, but it doesn’t seem to matter, the sheer entertainment of watching these characters move from tense beginnings, through humour and anxiety to the final climax is sharply drawn.

Hastily thrown together by Mike Leigh when another play at Hampstead Theatre was cancelled back in the 70’s, Abigail’s Party was an instant success and it is still thoroughly entertaining today. Great dialogue simply doesn’t age.

Abigail’s Party is at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre until Saturday, March 30th. Box office 01483 440000www.yvonne-arnaud.co.uk

Musicians of highest calibre perform premiere of Carnival 2 in Guildford

Excitement and anticipation was in the air at Holy Trinity Church, Guilford last week as The Royal Grammar School Chorus and Orchestra performed some classic works and also the premier of a Carnival 2, composed by the RGS Director of Music, Peter White.

Duncan Hampshire and Michael Lan

An astonishingly accomplished performance of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Cellos in G Minor set a high standard for the evening’s programme. Cellists Duncan Hampshire and Michael Lan played three contrasting movements with incredible confidence, accompanied by a tight orchestra who tackled the demanding score perfectly, resulting in an truly uplifting performance.

The strings then gave a beautiful and well judged performance of the Sarabande from the Simple Symphony. Directed by Dale Chambers, the orchestra played with effortless precision and explored fully the emotional depths of the music.

Lest the audience should feel lulled into serenity, a rumbustious performance of Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande filled the church as a full choir of parents, staff and boys sang this complex composition. Strings, brass and percussion evoked the Brazilian Carnival with tightly fused energy whilst RGS pianist Eric Foster, performed the virtuosos piano solo part, full of syncopated rhythms and passages of frightening technical complexity, with astonishing panache and bravura. 

With the arrival of a second grand piano, eight RGS boys then played Richard Rodney Bennett’s charming Four Piece Suite. They all played perfectly and with great composure, clearly enjoying the popular idioms that infuse the entire work. 

Then finally, the long-awaited premier of Carnival 2, written by Peter White last summer which began with a brisk fanfare to herald the Dawn Chorus. Taking Saint-Saens’ original Carnival of the Animals as its model, Peter White has introduced great humour to a work that introduces us to twelve new creatures. The sense of fun is reinforced by lyrics that bind the different sections together, read with great wit by RGS boy Ben Phillip.

Each section beautifully evoked the various animals. ‘Whales’ filled the church with surging violins, cellos and basses accompanying cascading arpeggios, Pigs grunted, Soldier Ants marched with military precision and Flies buzzed. Lonesome George was a simple double bass solo. In contrast, Lounge Lizards introduced a somewhat cheeky, jazzy tune whilst the bleakly beautiful  Bittern was exceptionally moving. 

Amazing that one school can produce so many fine musicians and particularly pianists, fifteen in all took solo roles. It was hard not to burst into applause after each section, but wait we did, and the thunderous applause after the finale was evidence of the huge appreciation of an amazing evening of RGS music. 

N.B. There are FREE concerts on the first Tuesday of the month at 1.15pm by the RGS musicians in Holy Trinity Church Guildford.

Influences of Luigi Russolo @ Lewis Elton Gallery

Have you heard of Luigi Russolo and The Art of Noises? I confess I hadn’t, until I visited the current exhibition at the Lewis Elton Gallery on the University of Surrey campus. Just Luigi’s name and the ambiguous title, Art of Noises, intrigued me and hence a visit to ‘The Weak Force’ seemed promising.

Assuming that the exhibition was ‘conceptual art’ I wasn’t expecting to see a room full of canvases, hung with care at one metre intervals. And as a bit of pre-prep, I had a quick phone conversation with one of the artists,  Andy Thomson, who told me that the gallery had been pretty much emptied to make way for around a dozen or so galvanised buckets suspended from the ceiling. OK, I thought, this will certainly be different.

“Check out Luigi Rossolo,” Matt advised. “That gives you some of the background to our thought process.”

So back to dear Luigi - what was his influence on the bucket scene? Luigi was an Italian Futurist painter and composer and author of the manifesto, The Art of Noises, written in 1913. (By extraordinary coincidence the press view of this exhibition was exactly 100 years to the day that the manifesto was published). Following a performance of futurist music in Rome by composer Balilla Pratella in 1913, Luigi became intrigued, almost obsessed, with the meaning of noise and how it could become an art form. Where much of Futurist painting and sculpture at that time relied on past techniques to articulate modern life, Russolo sought to radically break with the past by devising new methods of sound expression.

The installation at the Lewis Elton Gallery weaves mesmeric sound into its collaborative web and revisits Luigi’s ‘sound intoners’ or, here’s a good word, his intonarumori - meaning: 

The Intonarumori were a family of musical instruments invented in 1913 by Luigi Russolo. They were acoustic noise generators that permitted to create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noises.

But instead of the ‘intonarumori’ Samson and his fellow artists, who have travelled from New Zealand, Australia and Canada, have suspended buckets in the gallery as sound conductors. That’s all there is - buckets, wires and plenty of - well, space. Using sounds recorded in Canada, China, NZ, Uzbekistan, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Korea the artists spent a week positioning the buckets at different heights and planning how best to use the sounds to create a sound and textual composition for the Surrey quotidian.

It might sound crazy and it’s quite hard to explain but I enjoyed just sitting quietly and being in the space. The sounds are industrial, not melodic, and they come from different areas of the gallery at varying intervals, so there’s an element of anticipation and surprise. This is not an exhibition to rush in and out of, you have to go with an open mind and just - sit, listen and enjoy the moment. Just try it. Ambient sounds outside the gallery are also all part of the experience - a trolley trundling past, the brakes of a lorry, the scrape of a bike against railings.

The Weak Force is part of the Guildford International Music Festival, which intrigues me a bit. Music then, not art? I’m not sure - it is certainly about noise, but it’s in an art gallery, so does that make it art? So there is another discussion to have. Is music just noise, and is noise art? - The Art of Noises might answer some of those questions, and while you wait to read it, this exhibition will spark off many other ideas in that direction.

Weak Force is made under an umbrella project UFT which originated at AUT New Zealand. Visit uft-gravity.com

The Weak Force collaborative exhibition is at the Lewis Elton gallery until Thursday March 27th. Entrance is free.  Visit http://www.surrey.ac.uk/arts/visualarts/lewiseltongallery or phone : 01483 686641

Birdsong - on stage

The transferal of Birdsong from book to stage was worrying me long before I got to the theatre. How would it, indeed how could it, match up to the book or the TV production?

I loved Sebastian Faulk’s book which followed the character of Stephen Wraysford through the first world war, describing so well the horror of war and and the pain and passion of falling in love during turbulent times. Faulk’s writes compassionately and conveys with brutal honestly the wretchedness and mind-blowing monotony of life in the trenches and the brain-freeze horror of working as a ‘sewer-rat’ underground.

While reading the book we have time to absorb the detailed information, to picture the scenes, consider the raw emotions of the soldiers and the friends and family left behind. And we need this luxury of time because this is a book with many levels and dimensions - at 503 pages long it covers many years and 3 generations. 

Faulks says himself, “It is a very novelistic book, using many literary devices and written with no thought for dramatic or cinematic adaptation.” 

Despite his reservations as to how it would transfer to live theatre, he gave permission to Rachel Wagstaff to write the stage adaptation and it was performed in the West End under the direction of Trevor Nunn in 2010/11.

So I sat in Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud theatre and waited with baited breath for the Original Theatre Company production, trying not to concern myself too much with “how will they fit it all in?!” 

The set, designed by Victoria Spearing is effective - crumbling walls, the mouth of the dreaded tunnel and a high backdrop with silhouettes of crosses and barbed wire against a pale blue sky. Scenes in the trenches are alternated with scenes at the home of Wraysford’s lover, Isabelle, and this is where it begins to trip up. As family members from one scene leave the stage, soldiers bounce on from the other side - they all seem too interwoven when the whole point is that they are worlds apart. I had trouble at times knowing when one scene ended and another began. 

I presume this method was used because there  was just so much story to pack in. The action at times veritably raced along. Despte this, the first act was 1.5 hours long, and yet I still felt we’d only just touched the surface of the characters.

That’s not to say the actors didn’t work their socks off to do a good job. Jonathan Smith was congenial and endearing as Wraysford and Tim Treloar was fiercely stoical as Firebrace. The camaraderie through adversity of the soldiers was tenderly portrayed, and the horrors they faced together were dramatised as well as can be done on stage. 

There are some lovely musical moments, so all praise to musical director Tim Van Eyken, and the lighting is sensitive and effective. Everything runs well and to plan.

But where was the intensity of love that made the book 13th in Britain’s Favourite Read? Wraysford’s almost obsessive desire for isabelle is so well conveyed in the book, that it becomes a love story we remember for years to come. In the play, an almost balletic sequence is used to bring across the joy of Wraysford and Isabelle finally making love, and yes, there was some beauty to it, but it seemed so out of kilter in an otherwise straightforward play.

I hate to sound harsh - putting Birdsong on the stage is a massive challenge and I take my hat off to Rachel Wagstaff for tackling it. If you haven’t read and loved the book and hence don’t feel tempted to make comparisons, you'll enjoy this busy, confident production that portrays the love, courage and sacrifice of the first world war.

Birdsong is at the Yvonne Arnaud until Saturday March 3 and then touring. Visit www.Birdsongthetour.com