National Shakespeare Schools Production

Last night we went to see the three mini-Shakespeare plays presented by the SGCNZ: the National Shakespeare Schools Production for 2014. Over forty senior school pupils from around the country came together for only a week and have had workshops and various trainings, as well as managing to put on, between them, three cut-down versions of Shakespearean plays. Cut down to about 40 minutes each, so still quite substantial. And these pieces were rehearsed only in the mornings of the week the young people were together, which makes the high level of performance and direction all the more astonishing.

We went to see the three productions put on two or three years ago, and one of those, Hamlet, was very compelling. But the other two didn't quite take off as well. This year all three are top-notch, full of wonderful actors, and so well directed that even people who find Shakespeare not easy to take would be enthralled.

Henry V was the first of the three, with Henry himself being played variously by seven different actors, boys and girls. The continual swirl of the action, the large groupings coming and going and the sheer enthusiasm made this a great start to the evening. My only disappointment was that the delightful scene between the French princess and Henry was missing. But it was probably too long to include, and would have been less effective cut down. In spite of that, this was a clearly directed piece that gave the young actors plenty of scope for drama, emotion and action.

Love's Labour's Lost came next. Pared down to its bare essentials it still managed to make the most of the comedy and retain some delightful scenes. The actors got hold of the comedy style with gusto and wonderful energy, the boys in particular making the most of every movement. It was good, in fact, to see young actors in this play, which focuses on the immaturity of young people (especially young men) when they fall in love, and how a 'gap year,' as it were, might well be more effective in making love stronger for the long haul.

In this play, for the most part, the boys played the boys' parts and the girls played girls, except for girls who played the delightful constable and the pompous Boyet and academic Holofernes. But whoever was playing whoever, there was such energy (for instance when the boys realise each of them has fallen in love and kept it secret, or when they're in disguise as Russians) and sense of comedy that the whole thing was utterly enjoyable and showed how Shakespeare, even when he throws long-winded words around like a whirlwind (long words are a theme in this play), is still amusing and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. (Even in the midst of Hamlet he lets Claudius mix up Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, something that audiences have done since the play first began; this was retained in the middle of all the seriousness of the rest of the play.)

Hamlet was played by two different actors (as he was in the previous version). This gave both actors time to refresh and bring renewed energy to this intense role. And were they intense! Sean Young and William Lu were equal to each other in strength and commanded the stage. There were some wonderful moments when they somehow swapped without your noticing, particularly at the grave scene where Ophelia (beautifully played by Rachel McLean) lies dead. At other times it was as if one actor handed over the role to the other. Beautifully done.

But the other actors in this piece were uniformly good: arrogant Claudius (Peter Thomson), emotionally-torn Gertrude (Maya Wyatt), pompous Polonius (Daniel Botha) and angst-ridden Laertes (Calum Hughes), to name just a few. The direction was full of invention (though my wife and I never quite figured out what people on the scaffolding were doing), including Polonius hiding himself inside his hoodie by having it on backwards when he was supposed to be behind the arras. And the fight scene with long duelling swords was as terrifying as you're likely to get. How they managed to get this rehearsed in the time allotted is beyond me.

What a climax this play has: not only the fight scene going on in front of the stage but Gertrude drinking the poison while her husband is trying to entice Hamlet to do so, deaths at the back, deaths at the front. It's a nightmare to put together and yet how wonderfully it works.

The performance is on again tonight, at 7.30 at Otago Boys High School's auditorium. Cash sales only at the door. Take the opportunity and see the wealth of talent there is around this country.

17.10.14 I'm pleased to see all those I mentioned here have been chosen to go on the trip to the Globe in London next year. And several of the main actors in Love's Labour's Lost have also been chosen to go. Excellent.

Gender-imbalance, light fittings & Ephron

There's a awkwardly-written article on the Guardian website with the headline: Subsidised theatres have too few female roles, Equity says - Actors' union finds male roles outnumber female roles by average of two to one in publicly funded companies. 


I say awkwardly-written not because of its content but because there's one sentence that appears to be unfinished: "But despite contacting the theatres twice, the union received a "disappointing" response, with only eight ." Note the gap between 'eight' and the full stop.  Seems like something's missing there.  And further down we have a paragraph that tells us about various plays currently showing that are dominated by male casts; in the next paragraph we have the same information all over again in a barely rearranged fashion.  Curious. And most unusual for The Guardian, whose online website is one of the best, I find. Or at least one of the best that I actually read.  


The subject of gender inequality in theatre productions intrigues me.  For one thing you can't necessarily blame the production companies, especially those committed to producing classic plays.  If you're going to do Shakespeare, for instance (and two of his plays are among those noted) then you're bound to have a gender imbalance, since the parts for women in these plays are severely restricted.  I went to an evening a while ago in which a group of young people, male and female presented much truncated versions of three Shakespeare plays.  Depending on the director and the casts these worked - the version of Hamlet, in particular was very well done, but the version of Cymbeline was a bit of a mess.  In these the casts were pretty evenly mixed between male and female, with many of the original male parts being played by girls.  However this isn't something you can readily do in a professional theatre production, I don't believe.  


And here in Dunedin, when we were trying to find men for Grimhilda! back at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, we struggled because two other musical societies in the town were producing two very heavily male-dominated productions: Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.  So we had a problem with gender imbalance from a different perspective altogether.  


Two other productions the Guardian writer, Alexandra Topping, mentions are Billy Budd and Chariots of Fire.  Hmm, you'd be hard-pressed to add any women to the roles in those productions.  Billy Budd is set aboard a ship where women weren't present anyway, and Chariots of Fire is about a race in which only men appeared.  It's probably coincidence that so many of these pieces are on at the moment.  


What are production companies to do?  Certainly there are plays in which there are plenty of women's roles, and good ones, but theatre has tended to reflect a society where men have the active roles and women don't.  That society has changed is certainly true, but it seems that playwrights aren't yet reflecting that enough.  I can't think of any play, off the top of my head, that's female-dominated in terms of roles, and certainly there aren't that many plays that have only females in the cast.  


Perhaps it's an issue as to what producers will put on.  Although playwright Stella Duffy [at right] says that women make up the majority of the audiences - 70% according to her - producers still produce plays in which men take the leading roles, or, if the women have leading roles, there are also plenty of males roles as well.   It may also be indicative of a society in which men take the leading 'active' role in stories, like it or not.  There are female superheroes, but not as many as there are males.  And if you really want to check out inequality in gender, look at the movies that are made.  Males dominate there too.  Except perhaps in so-called 'chick flicks'.  But are chick flicks addressing gender imbalance, primarily?  And what is the theatrical equivalent of a chick flick?  


Looking a totally different question altogether, I'm intrigued to see metal switch plate covers being advertised.  These are things that you put over light-switch fittings to stop the children playing with the wires - or to prevent adults inadvertently plugging themselves in instead of the electrical device.  Metal seems an odd choice for this.  I haven't seen metal fittings for years (we used to have old-style round ones in the house) - plastic seems to be the norm.  I guess metal is less likely to go on fire if anything goes wrong, but equally isn't it likely to pick up an electrical charge more readily than a plastic cover?


Just a thought - it made me go and check out a couple of the round switch plate covers in our bedrooms.  It just occurred to me that we might have metal ones after all.  Nope, they're some other material, but they aren't metal.


And one final thing.  Nora Ephron, a screenwriter whose movies balanced out male and female roles with ease and delight, has died - this is already 'old' news, I'm sure.   The Guardian wrote an article about her too, but it linked to a list of things Ephron said she wouldn't miss, and things she would miss. The two lists are a great deal of fun, and warmth and humanity.  Just like Ephron's stories.