Tabla de contenidos para June 2022 en Ink Pellet

John and Katy Plews had always wanted to run a theatre of their own. So, once they felt they had sufficient experience they started to look at possibilities all over north London. When the opportunity came up at The Gatehouse, close to their home in Highgate Village they knew they’d found what they were looking for. Their production company, Ovation, acquired the lease for the upstairs space in 1987. Although there has been a licensed building on the site since 1670 and probably for three hundred years before that, the current Victorian building has had various owners including Wetherspoons who sold it to Urban Pubs and Bars Ltd., who now run it as a gastropub. “It took four years for us to get through the paperwork, planning permission and many…

Speak Up is the NT’s new national programme which sees young people, who have been most affected by the pandemic, working in collaboration with local artists and teachers to co-create artistic responses to issues that are most important to them. Responding to the current challenges in schools, the programme aims to develop young people’s self-expression, wellbeing and personal skills, with an open-ended offer to make creative projects in their local area. Speak Up is taking place in selected schools across Greater Manchester in partnership with the Lowry as part of the national programme, which is also being delivered in Doncaster, Hornchurch, Sunderland, Wakefield and Wolverhampton with the project extending into additional areas in 2023. As part of the pilot Greater Manchester students have taken part in a variety of creative…

Legally Blonde – Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre Legally Blonde is the story of a young woman with frothy interests driven to apply to Harvard Law School in pursuit of the man who has just jilted her. Finding talent and brains she didn’t know she had, she excels at Harvard while remaining true to herself. And then there’s a happy ending – on her own terms. So you smile all the way back to the Tube. Music by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin is superbly directed by Katharine Woolley. The 15 piece band – framed upstage by Laura Hopkins’s set, which is based on oaty, vertical strip curtains through which characters dive on and off–plays the wide variety of styles required by this show score with real flair. There is,…

As Barney Norris writes in two genres, I thought a bookshop would be the right place to meet. So we’re sitting congenially over coffee (him) and tea (me) in the basement café at Waterstones in Piccadilly. I was keen to meet this warm, friendly man because I’d seen his play, We Started to Sing, a couple of weeks before and felt that I’d already learned quite a lot about him and his family. “It’s all about telling the truth and working out what plays are for”, he says as soon as we’ve settled, and I have my notebook out. “I think it’s important to show people what it was like there and then as accurately as possible although of course We Started to Sing is not the unmitigated truth about…

Isee an average of four to five shows a week. And I review them – as keen readers of Ink Pellet will be aware – here and elsewhere. They range from one person shows in fringe theatres to big musicals. I also see pantomime at Christmas, a lot of children’s shows and I’m happy to include some amateur work. Classical music concerts and opera are all part of the mix. It tends to be London and the Southeast because that’s where I live, although I do get to Nottingham Playhouse, Cambridge Arts and Birmingham Rep occasionally. I’ve been doing this for decades, so I like to think my reviews are, at least, informed. When I see Macbeth, The Cherry Orchard, HMS Pinafore or The Importance of Being Earnest, for example,…

What first drew you to acting? Well, I grew up in South Cambridgeshire, where my parents still live, and was inspired by my aunty who’s a very keen amateur. So I did lots of youth theatre, but the real turning point was joining National Youth Theatre when I was 16. I did four seasons with them and learned a huge amount. When I left school, I did a foundation course at East 15 and then eventually – it took me three years to get into a BA course – I trained at Guildford School of Acting and graduated in 2014. You must have picked up lots of skills doing other jobs along the way? Yes! I’ve done front of house, pubs, call centres and, until a year ago, shifts at…

Roddy Williams is a very busy man. One of the best-known baritones of his generation, he’s on Radio 3 almost daily either because his many recordings are played or sometimes his own compositions are aired. He’s also often there talking to interviewers – always warm and affable. He’s pretty ubiquitous on live concert programmes too. When I catch up with him, he’s been working in Amsterdam the previous week and Singapore the week before. “Yes”, he chuckles, “there’s a huge amount going on. When everything was cancelled in 2020, like everyone else in the performing arts, I was worried I’d never work again. Then at the beginning of this year offers started to flood in. My agents and I said ‘yes’ to everything because we assumed that a lot of…

I’m going to begin by saying that I think Cornelia Parker, whose work is surveyed at Tate Britain in London until October this year, is, in my opinion, the nation’s greatest living artist. That’s a big thing to say, but if the work I saw is anything to go by I am confident in making that statement. As I walked around the displays – looking, thinking, listening, watching – I found myself looking for errors or shortcomings and not only found none, but only discovered really clever, profoundly fascinating, humorous, inventive and challenging art. Tate Britain doesn’t describe her as a sculptor, film-maker or print-maker, or even an artist actually. The exhibition guide describes her as ‘widely celebrated’ and she is well known, but not like David Hockney is. I’m…

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