Chippy

Mr Gnome and I have emerged from tonight's performance of the RSC's new production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade. 

Does this classic example of the 1960s 'theatre of cruelty' still have the power to shock?

You bet.

But it wasn't the profusion of prosthetic willies or the character with compulsive masturbation issues (I know, SO last century) that left one speechless.

It was the Act 1 stunt when cast member Lisa Hammond tried to solicit a sub from an unsuspecting audience member: 'Oh dear, I'm so tired after the performance that I haven't the energy to cook for myself - could you stand me the price of some chips?'

The kindly chump offered her a tenner. Which, naturally, she spurned, berating him for patronising her (she uses a wheelchair). A fellow cast member chipped in, calling the nice man the (in most circs) still unspeakable word. How rude!

So come on, RSC, in what rarefied world is £10 not enough for a single fish supper? Oh please.

Lisa should have asked central character the Marquis de Sade - he'd organise a whip-round before you could say 'Batter my cod piece'.

That said, cast and crew dish up a rollicking revolutionary romp, peppered with a dash of political provocation. And it's all over by 10pm. Hurrah!

Inspired by Monsieur Marat, I whizzed home for an early bath.

And, by the way, Rory is available.

Unhappy couple

'Well, it rattles along, doesn't it?' remarks an elderly audience member at intermission. 

And it does: Michael Boyd's extraordinary, compelling and iconoclastic new production of Macbeth (Shakespeare's shortest play) opens the renewed Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

But if this is an express train, Bill the Bard has us bound headlong for Hell, as Boyd and his cast take us on a harrowing journey into the darkest regions of the human heart.

Boyd's boldest stroke is to re-imagine the 'supernatural solicitings' that so famously awaken Macbeth's dormant yearnings for ever greater status and power. To do so he (shockingly?) cuts some of the most famous scenes in the play, presenting the three 'witches' as (I'm guessing) they have never been seen before. Purists may have palpitations.

Not that the original production in the early 1600s was without its dangers: a play about the murder of a Scottish king, performed before King James I, newly arrived from Scotland to succeed the childless Elizabeth I. 

And whether you're a monarch or the man or woman on the bus, 'succession' is crucial to the well-being of everyone in the kingdom - our hopes often resting on the vulnerable shoulders of a child. And Shakespeare's on-stage children rarely see a happy ending: most die. As did his only son, Hamnet, aged 11 in 1596.

This play has more children and babies (seen and unseen) than in any of the other tragedies, their experience casting a grisly light on the consequences of the Macbeths' terrible betrayals. And it's Boyd's development of this theme that makes this show so disturbing, amply fulfilling the spirit of the text - if not the letter. 

Fine work from Jonathan Slinger and Aislin Mcguckin as the Macbeths, disintegrating before our eyes. Massive hurrahs for lighting designer Jean Kalman and composer Tom Armstrong. Designer Tom Piper sets the action in a vast space reminiscent of a crumbling, desecrated cathedral. (The new auditorium triumphantly fulfils the promise of being able to combine epic with intimate.)

The vast back wall holds a silent clue to Boyd's vision for the play: between the shattered stained glass and statuary the eye picks out a shallow space that once held the sacred building's focal point: but the cross has been removed.

Here's Charles Spencer's review for the Daily Telegraph.

Bard intent

Continuing his (frankly unmethodical) attempt to identify 'his' sponsored brick-in-the-wall of the renewed Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Mr Gnome was more than a little thrilled to encounter Malika Booker, the RSC's poet in residence.


Billeted in the Victorian reading room adjacent to the Swan auditorium, Ms Booker invites visitors to recall vivid memories from their experiences of the Stratford theatres: sights, textures, scents, emotions, highs, lows, drama and tedium.

All of which will be grist to her poetic mill over the months ahead.

Of course, this was as Pavlovian Kennomeat to Mr G's human companion who lost no time in reliving his first RST show way back in August 1967: All's Well That Ends Well, with a cast that included the extremely young Helen Mirren.

Wise Ms Booker limited him to the space of a medium-sized PostIt.

Mr Gnome wishes Malika great success.

(Ms Booker was not expecting Mr G's appearance. Consequently he considers her perfect choice of hat colour as particularly auspicious.)

Staged

Mr Gnome - to absolutely nobody's surprise - cheers lustily for the transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which opened yesterday.


Wonderful as the public areas are, the success of the transformed set-up will depend upon the new auditorium.

It couldn't be more different from what was there before.

For me, the combination joins epic and intimate.

We'll know for sure when we see King Lear and those three difficult girls having a very bad time here in February.

The vibe is good.

Meanwhile, thanks to the entire Stratford team for their welcome yesterday. Special mention to Lucy, Fiona, the video crew - and to Michael Boyd and Gregory Doran who graciously allowed a punter to interrupt their dinner to give them the benefit of his (very positive) opinions.

Tip-top Rooftop

Brick-donor, Bard boy and all-round long-term RSC booster, Mr Gnome was unable to suppress a variety of emotions yesterday on entering the transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre as its four-year closure-for-metamorphisis comes to an end.

Accompanied by two human acolytes, Mr G was privileged to enjoy a 'preview' evening at the spanking new Rooftop Restaurant, 'helping' staff to rehearse seating and service before the opening night and the arrival of the full-on pre-show dinner rush.

His verdict? Delicious food, friendly and efficient service - and surroundings with an appropriately theatrical mixture of modern glitz set against a background of distressed brickwork and cleverly recycled elements of the 'old' theatre. For example, many will instantly recognise the old auditorium's glorious art deco marquetry doors put to stylish use in the restaurant's bars.

Hurrah!

No chance to snoop farther - the new auditorium remains out of bounds until the official opening later this month.

The vibe is good. Mr Gnome and his associates are a-tremble with anticipation of all that lies ahead. He predicts that the renewed theatre will prove to be the theatrical/architectural triumph of the year, possibly the decade.

Mr Gnome will return.

Homecoming? Gnomecoming..

After three-and-a-half years of intense labour, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's transformation project is almost complete.

The hoardings that have surrounded the site are gone, enabling Mr G to pose shamelessly against a background of shimmering glass and many new bricks, one of which he is proud to have sponsored.

Later this week he's privileged to have been invited to 'test' (with others) the new Rooftop Restaurant, as staff check that systems are in order before the official opening later this month.

Bricked up

Back in 2009 Mr Gnome did his small-scale bit for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's hugely exciting Transformation Project. He sponsored a brick.


A year on BBC Radio Coventry and Warwickshire sent ace reporter Nicki Murphy to probe the motivation behind the brick.


Along the way, we revealed our 40+ years of Bard behaviour at Stratford, celebrated an inspiring teacher  and came close to revealing the age of the peerless Dame Helen Mirren.


And Mr Bowie made a supporting appearance...

This material is © BBC Radio Coventry and Warwickshire and is an excerpt from a programme to be aired shortly.

Radio daze...

Mr Gnome breezed through today's RSC-related media opportunity with BBC Radio Coventry and Warwickshire, capriciously (and predictably) leaving all the talking to his human associate.


Alerted by the Royal Shakespeare Company's press office, reporter Nicki Murphy probed the motivation behind Mr Gnome's status as (probably) the smallest and least human dedicatee of a sponsored brick, a popular element of the massive Transformation Project that is, er, transforming the Company's Stratford home to a renewed theatre space that will cause an international sensation when it opens in 2011.

Or so Mr Gnome predicts.

Broadcast goes out next week.

Nice of them to ask us. Perhaps Sir Ian and Dame Judi were busy?

Cheers?

To the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, for the very first performance of a new play by the sibling writing team of Vyacheslav and Mikhail Durnenkov.

In just under two hours, the pay follows hapless soldier Ilya's return to his hometown after service in the Chechnya war.

Ilya's head injury has left him slow of speech and movement - and with a highly dangerous intolerance for alcohol. And the authors make it plain that in this dreary Russian 'Anytown', having an intolerance to vodka is as problematic as being allergic to water.

So bleak and monochrome is the lifestyle depicted that hitting the bottle seems an entirely appropriate survival strategy.

Ilya's homecoming kicks off with the discovery that his wife has taken up with a new man, and that his little boy has no idea who he is. Then things start to go downhill.

An election is in the offing and each candidate is desperate to have an endorsement from the returning 'hero'. Cue high-definiton depictions of the boorish mayor, the loopily sadistic police chief (he has a Nazi weaponry 'thing') and the seemingly honourable editor of the the local paper.

I followed Ilya's entanglements with this unholy Trinity with a growing sense of despair and sadness, which continued to the play's predictably anguished conclusion.

By now you'll have worked out that The Drunks is not a chuckle-fest. And it was probably wise of the RSC to write to ticket-buyers to warn them of the play's scabrous language.

And yet the 'stage world' created by director Anthony Neilson, designer Tom Piper and the brilliant cast remains uncomfortably and insistently in my head.

I'd like the play to be a grotesque exaggeration of 'life now' in parts of eastern Europe. Maybe it is. Maybe not.

I guess I need to find out.

Open house

A Bard time was had by all today at the splendid RSC Open Day jamboree at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Visitors not in the know may have needed shock treatment, given the on-street prevalence of so many men, women and children suffering from hideous facial scarring - and all of them smiling contentedly. Casualties (bottom right) were all, of course, courtesy of the RSC makeup department.

In past years, the town has been awash with thespian Sirs and Dames participating in the Open Day's dizzying array of activities - everything from scholarly text sessions to revelatory exposures of the intimate ministrations of the Company's small army of backstage dressers.

But this time, canny RSC executive director Vikki Heywood (top left) managed to pull off a truly star-trumping coup de theatre.

She welcomed visitors, for the very first time, to a privileged glimpse of what's going on within the Royal Shakespeare Theatre itself, currently undergoing a massive three-year transformation project.

So today I was able to stand on what will be the Company's main stage (top right) and view the auditorium that has replaced the vast 1930s theatre where I've seen dozens of performances since my first RSC show in, ahem, 1967.

And it looks to me as if Ms Heywood and her team are well on their way to making good their promise of creating a major 'theatre space' that will be simultaneously epic and intimate. The acting area is vast, but it is encompassed on three sides by a three-level 'audience space' in which everyone is remarkably close to the action.

I'm excited.

It'll be a while before the players are able to tread the renewed boards: the contractors are due to hand over the building to the Company in July 2010.

Middle row shows friendly architect Alasdair McKenzie (right) and Tim Court (project manager) on site to answer questions.

Bottom left: Open Day ended with the company director Greg Doran ruffing up the partcipants in the annual Great Shakespeare Quiz.

Romans in the gloaming

To Stratford for the second public performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of William Shakespeare's ever-popular toga-tearer Julius Caesar.

As we enter the auditorium two mud-and-blood-encrusted actors are on stage, exhaustedly stalking each other with the occasional grunt-and-grapple engagement. Then, as the play begins, one pins his rival to the floor and despatches him - with a bite to the neck. Nice.

The show is all of a piece with this initial image. Director Lucy Bailey and her design team conjure up a far-from sunny ancient Italy, where an elegant civilisation seems constantly on the brink of bloody anarchy.

The action is accompanied by a high-volume percussive soundtrack and a series of huge projected images, sadly not clearly visible from our side of the thrust stage.

That fine actor Greg Hicks, in the title role, brilliantly suggests the blinkered self-admiration that has fuelled the seemingly so-reasonable conspiracy hatched by the cool-headed Cassius (excellent John Mackay) and his fellow plotters.

Caesar's line 'Let me have men about me that are fat ... Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much' will probably get laughs. Next to the spectral Hicks, the slender Mackay looks positively chubby.

I guess the play's most challenging role is that of the thoughtful, troubled Brutus (Sam Troughton, above), whose journey charts the terrifying consequences of a decision to do a bad thing for a good reason.

As Mark Antony, the well-fleshed Darren D'Silva, seizes his 'Friends, Romans and countrymen' opportunity with relish, the fickle populace duly u-turning in response to his rhetoric.

With luck, the director will rethink the distracting repertoire of stylised jerk-and-twitch movements assigned to the Roman citizenry.

Criticisms? Shouty moments (plenty of these) are punctuated by occasional passages where one wants to call, 'Speak up, lads.' With luck, these variations in dynamics will even out as the performers settle in to their roles.

Don John

Last night, to wintry Stratford-upon-Avon to see the Kneehigh Theatre Company's Don John in the RSC's Courtyard Theatre.

This was a re-telling of the storyline treated so memorably in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni - with the characters transported to the dingy streets of London at the end of the 1970s.

During the course of the first half, a frail old man was senselessly murdered, an unhappy vicar ranted to the audience of his loss of faith and numerous brief couplings took place. And we had sight of possibly the most unappealing selection of underwear ever to grace the Stratford stage.

Those Seventies styles were, indeed, pants.

Characterization was minimal and the writing, to my ear, was stilted and unengaging.

In short, the whole mise en scene conjured up an atmosphere of such sordid despair that my companion and I were of one mind when the interval arrived. We went home.

Of course, things may have changed entirely in the second half, so, please, dear reader, this is simply a diary entry - it's not a review.

Er, for a review - try the excellent Charles Spencer of the Telegraph.

Mr G gets on bard - er, on board....

Mr Gnome muses that summer's lease (2008) has definitely had all too short a date.

In fact the stage seemed set for melancholy musings and a Winter's Tale of considerable discontent.

But, ever the optimist, Mr G has shaken off dull care and is enthused, energised and excited by the arrival of a bulky envelope from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Hurrah!

It contains a torrent of information about the 2009 season of plays to be staged in the 'rusty shed', aka The Courtyard Theatre, the RSC's temporary home during the three years of its massive transformation project.

Mr G is salivating at the prospect of:

• As You Like It (currently his fave among the comedies)
• The Winter's Tale (he apologises in advance for blubbing in the climactic 'statue scene')
• Julius Caesar (which usually comes across as if written yesterday)

In addition, he's intrigued by the inclusion of three Russian-themed plays to be given alongside the Shakey shows.

What's more, the season will be performed by a single troupe of actors who will continue working together until 2011.

This means that they will be the first enesmble to perform in the renewed RST when it opens in 2010.

As an extra treat, the mailing included a spelndid DVD report on the amazing Transformation Project.

Canny people at Bard HQ.

So exciting was the DVD that Mr G is signing up to make a small (he's a Gnome, OK?) regular donation to the funds.

Of course, with the Appeal's poster boy and girl being Sir Patrick Stewart and Dame Judi Dench, how could a Gnome not respond....?

(Message to Appeal Central - looking for a poster gnome...?)

Leave not a rack behind....

Mr Gnome recently made a brief site inspection of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's massive 'transformation' project.

As can be seen (below), the big house by the Avon is undergoing radical surgery. Between the front facade and the fly tower is a vast empty space, formerly filled by the auditorium.

Two years and two months remain until the scheduled re-opening.

Mr G and the HB admit to feelings of nostalgia for the old theatre.

But they applaud the bold vision of company boss Michael Boyd and his team - and wish them all the Bard luck in the world....

Where there's a Will....

Bill the Bard does it again. The Shakespeare novice relished yesterday's performance of Henry V at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Michael Boyd's vibrant production of Shakespeare's best-known history play hits all the right notes, with a tip-top performance by Geoffrey Streatfield in the title role.

Boyd's actors make the most of every square inch of the temporary Courtyard Theatre with thrilling use of ladders, ropes and trapezes (at whiich the foppish French excel).

And, best of all, the cast speak with clarity and confidence. Not always a given these days.

Mr Gnome concurs with almost every word of Charles Spencer's excellent review. (Mr G, unlike Mr Spencer, loved the trapeze aspect.)

And while I'm here....
The seats in the back row of the Courtyard's gallery are not separated by arm rests and are designed to accommodate the slenderest of slim-hipped persons. They are also raised from the floor in the manner of bar stools, with built-in foot rests.
The HB's seat neighbours yesterday were the Novice (slim) and an overseas visitor (not at all slim, but no Pavarotti, either). The HB is an average-sized person.

The problem? Overspill. The large gentleman, seated before the arrival fo the HB and the Novice, had colonised a considerable proportion of the HB's seat, obliging the HB to spend the first half of the show perched on one buttock.

Mono-cheek stress, he finds, is not conducive to Bard-appreciation.

The interval brought an opportunity to move to better seats. For this relief, much thanks.

The HB will be writing to the architects of the new RST, urging them to address some fundamental issues before it's too late.