Table of contents for May 2022 in Ink Pellet

I seem to spend a lot of time in pubs. And no, it isn’t because I’m succumbing to football or alcohol dependency. It’s because there are so many flourishing pub theatres across London. Within just over a mile through central Islington, for example, there are no fewer than four: The Old Red Lion, The Kings Head, The Hope and The Hen and Chickens and I’ve seen worthwhile work in all of them. Across the whole metropolis there are dozens more. But I rarely see school parties at pub theatres. Of course, you might need to get special permission to take a group of minors through the bar in an evening but that shouldn’t be an insurmountable barrier. The requirement for GCSE Drama and A Level is to see live theatre…

When Scott Graham, then a student at Swansea University, saw Volcano Theatre Company’s early 1990s production of Christopher Hampton’s Savages the scales fell from his eyes. “I had no idea that theatre could be that physical and that alive” he says. “I wanted to devour it”. That experience sowed the seed for the emergence of the Frantic Assembly which he co-founded in 1994 with Stephen Hoggett and Vicki Middleton. “We’d already taken a couple of shows to Edinburgh. Above all we wanted our work to be visceral, immediate and raw. Theatre doesn’t exist until performance meets audience” declares Scott. “Then we toured a production of Look Back in Anger which, by then, had been around for 48 years. Ours was a new take and we took risks with it but…

Les Enfants Terribles is a theatre company founded by Oliver Lansley in 2002 and named after Jean Cocteau’s famous novel. Now celebrating its 20th birthday and having played worldwide from Edinburgh to Shanghai, the company has always aimed to be experimental, playful, physical and “different” as well as immersive. No one who saw (took part in?) Alice’s Adventures in the Underground at London’s atmospheric Vaults venue in 2015 will forget sitting, literally immersed, at that long table while the characters danced and pranced among the teacups on top of it before we moved on to the next meeting and the next room. That show went to China in 2018 for a two-year run. It’s a distinctive way of working. “We love to push the boundaries of what it means to…

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Chris Passey has always written songs on piano, but it wasn't until he sat in the audience at Sister Act in London that he was so deeply moved by the music that he left the theatre thinking "If I could write just one song like that…" He recalls: "And somehow it all snowballed from there. I cheekily approached a West End star and then co-wrote a song for Chloe Hart called 'Stagey and Proud'. Then suddenly there was a call from West End Stage Awards saying that Sheridan Smith wanted to sing it at the ceremony". Chris found Sheridan "inquisitive but nervous" and therefore in need of a lot of coaching. "I think it was working with her which led me to teaching" he says. After A levels Chris had…

So what do you tell a talented, theatre-loving student who wants to be an actor? Traditionally parents and teachers simply dowsed her or him in cold water by observing that actors spend most of their time “resting” and that accountancy (or whatever) would be better. Well obviously, that won’t do. It’s much more complex than that. We owe it to these young people to take their ability and ambition seriously. First there’s the increasingly blurred difference between university and drama school. A university degree in theatre studies might be useful if you’re aiming at writing, directing or management, but it will not train you to act. Many graduates from these courses then do an MA in acting to get the training they need. That’s a very costly option. But if…

Coming to England – Birmingham Rep Floella Benjamin’s memoir about arriving in England from Trinidad is effectively Small Island from a child’s point of view. David Wood has turned the book into a pacey stage piece by flipping the story on its head and adding some good songs. Benjamin’s story is linear but Wood begins with her being honoured in adult life and then doubles back to the bullying and racism she encountered as a child newly arrived in grey London. Thereafter we’re in Trinidad until the last four children finally board ship and set sail for the Motherland. Benjamin’s colourful memories of her Trinidadian childhood mean a huge contrast between the colours, smells, flora and fauna of the Caribbean compared with 1960s England. Director and choreographer, Omar F Okai…

Kenny Wax, 54, is a very focused man. Yes, the pandemic has made his life quite difficult, but the long gap means, he tells me, that “shows are stacking up” so his organisation is now pretty busy. Coming imminently, for example, is a new nationwide tour of Bugsy Malone and that’s breaking new ground. “There have been professional productions before, of course, and hundreds of amateur ones but ours is the first professional tour” says Kenny, telling me that he has loved the show since childhood and, more recently, has fond memories of his daughter as Bugsy in her school play. “We’re co-producing with Danny Moore and Birmingham Rep and we open at Theatre Royal Bath on 02 July.” The show’s USP is, of course, that it needs a juvenile…

The Barbican’s latest landmark art exhibition – “Postwar Modern, New Art in Britain, 1945-1965” – is a magnificent and timely undertaking. Encompassing painting, sculpture, studio ceramics and installation, I am almost tempted to suggest it should remain as a permanent show, as an ongoing reminder of the effects of war. It is magnificent for its sheer scale and scope; never before can a range of such masterworks have been gathered together and shown alongside each other for comparison and context. It could not have been better scheduled, with fighting and killing happening as I write, not so far away in Ukraine, not that anyone would ever wish for war. My grandparents grew up in the era of austerity and rationing. I heard the stories and learnt about it at school.…

How did you get into acting? My sister (15 months older than my twin and me) was keen so we all did Saturday morning classes and so on – very much a trio. But it never occurred to me, that given my disability, I could do it professionally because I had never seen anyone who looks like me performing. So I went, from Liverpool where we’d lived since I was 10, to University College London to do a degree in archaeology. Because I was living in Bloomsbury, I saw a lot of theatre and gradually started to think: “Why exactly can I not do this?” Archaeology to actor is a big jump. How did you do it? At first mostly by being in the right place at the right time. A…