Tag Archives: Hostry Festival

Total Ensemble Theatre, “The Boy in the Lighthouse”

Norwich’s Hostry Festival 2018 play is Rebecca Chapman‘s The Boy in the Lighthouse, a Total Ensemble Theatre Company production that is inclusive in every sense of the word. From the actors it casts to all the various forms of visual and audio art forms it embraces, and to the warning to be careful that the cast don’t step on your toes if you’re in the front row!

“Our focus this year is on inclusion and diversity, and I’m more than proud to announce Total Ensemble Theatre Company’s World Premiere of Boy In The Lighthouse as our festival Central Production. With a cast of over 25 from all over Norfolk.” Stash Kirkbride, Hostry Festival founder

Some might consider an inclusive production that is mainly movement and music from a cast of all abilities and levels of experience a strange or even risky choice after a history of pedigreed plays and poems at the 8-year-long Hostry Festival. These have included the likes of Jean Cocteau’s “The Eagle Has Two Heads“, Melvyn Bragg’s “King Lear in New York“, TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets“, and “The Night Of The Iguana” by Tennessee Williams.

If the Hostry Festival is willing to experiment and take risks, then Total Ensemble embodies that in extremis.

Total Ensemble present 'The Boy in the Lighthouse' at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.
Total Ensemble present ‘The Boy in the Lighthouse’ at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.

On opening night there was a packed audience, some even standing, as the play opened to the sound of gunfire or was it fireworks?  There was intense movement and music, and several masked cast seemingly playing pass the parcel with a wrapped bundle. Already it’s a mystery wrapped in a bundle of layers just as the parcel is passed around and a layer removed becoming a garment put on by one of the actors.

Total Ensemble present 'The Boy in the Lighthouse' at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.
Total Ensemble present ‘The Boy in the Lighthouse’ at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.

If, in the opening scenes, cast and audience both seem lost, with the plot at times needing a light shone upon it, have patience, for that light is eventually shone and the parallel tales of the play knot together like twin searchlights eventually crossing over and finding their quest.

“Living in a remote lighthouse, isolated and forgotten, a young man creates a world for himself with the help of his imagination and the magic that resides in the beam of light that scans the ocean at night. There is a mystery… the solution to which lies within a secret buried deep in the past. Join him as he embarks upon an adventure into fantastic worlds, travelling to find peace in a place where he truly belongs.”

The play is mysterious, a journey, never on the rocks but sometimes in the dark. In fact, it is performed in the round so we all see it from different sides, as this round is a square!

If the performance is a little unclear in the early scenes, then so are the characters’ ideas of where they are heading. This may be in part down to the play’s piecemeal coming together over several years, multiple influences, and a creative democracy where workshops and improv have created aspects of the whole that have been weaved into its final form. Chapman, like a master carpet weaver, has, though, managed the feat of tying it all together and maintaining the story and pace in the packed 75-minute drama that effortlessly sails by.

Total Ensemble present 'The Boy in the Lighthouse' at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.
Hugh Darrah, Total Ensemble present ‘The Boy in the Lighthouse’ at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.

The seriousness with which the piece is performed is portrayed on the faces of every actor, some smiling, some grimacing, everyone giving one-hundred-per-cent. As Hugh Darrah, who plays the Boy, says “we are super focused” and he was, holding a calm consistent centre to the play whilst all around him is sometimes blowing about like a storm.

The physical set pieces of bodies entwined, contorted, at rest yet like sharp rocks surrounding the base of a lighthouse, appear uncomfortable as a dry stone wall but seemingly at ease, much as their cast do.

Timing is everything and the choreographed coordination of movement with the music is transfixing, at times it is perfect with hands in the air moving synchronously with the sounds and narration.

The soundscape is dramatic and really conjures up the slightly creepy end-of-pier atmosphere as well as the lighthouse seascape. It’s even reminiscent of Twilight Zone or Twin Peaks – a favourite of creator and director, Rebecca Chapman. Somehow Chapman, who created the complex soundtrack and voice over, wrote the play, directed, also plays three roles and clearly takes great care of her cast.

Total Ensemble present 'The Boy in the Lighthouse' at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.
Lexi Watson-Samuels, Total Ensemble present ‘The Boy in the Lighthouse’ at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.

Young actor Lexi Watson-Samuels carried off the role of a crow convincingly with a bird’s inquisitive and alert jerky head movements, akin to an indigenous shaman channelling a bird. She embodied the role very well and even when not the focus of a scene remained fully present and in role.

Real and surreal, magical and mechanical, collide in a tale that is both exterior and inner journey. The eponymous Boy ‘in the Lighthouse’ is lost and seeking something just like another character in the play, the end-of-pier broken fortune teller, who cannot remember the past or predict the future.

We are bombarded like waves upon a ship in a storm with messages of brokenness, loss, loneliness, abandonment, and a search for meaning and release. Looking for answers and needing the light.

As the play notes say, the Boy in the Lighthouse is a “dark story bathed with light” that leaves you asking questions and recognising human inconsistencies much as man-made light or magical fortune tellers.

Total Ensemble present 'The Boy in the Lighthouse' at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.
Peter Barrow, Total Ensemble present ‘The Boy in the Lighthouse’ at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.

Peter Barrow, acting for the first time with Total Ensemble, though he has been in many a Hostry festival play in past years, is transformed from curmudgeonly sea dog to sea God by costumery that reminds me of a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who and the Sea devils episode from 1972.

The commitment of the cast to telling this tale is evident in their energy, composure, connection and regard for each other’s space and place on stage. This may be about a boy, a man, a god, set in a lighthouse, or fortune teller box, but in the end, nobody steals the limelight they all share it. The cast is listed in alphabetical order not in order of importance and each get equal say and space on the programme to describe their experience of working with Total. 

“The greatest shock joining Total this year was the complete lack of hierarchy to the point that I could not discern between alumni and newcomers. Unlike any other experience of group work the atmosphere of acceptance inspires people from all walks of life to come together in confidence.” – Luke Arnup, ‘Teenage Brother/Son of Sea God’

Total Ensemble present 'The Boy in the Lighthouse' at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.
Tawa Groombridge, Total Ensemble present ‘The Boy in the Lighthouse’ at the 2018 Hostry Festival. Photo credit Simon Finlay Photography.

The finished play is an ensemble piece in every sense of the word, inclusive of all its cast, and its audience on four sides. Truly an expertly produced play that really works in the round. You should go see even if only just to read their 15-or-so words of fame that each has been allotted on the back of the programme, I defy you not to shed a tear at how Total Ensemble has made some of them feel included and more confident in themselves.

The Hostry Festival main play runs from the 22nd – 28th October – tickets here or via 01603 598676 (Theatre Royal box office). Wednesday and Saturday, like Monday, are sold out.

Jean Cocteau’s Play, The Eagle Has Two Heads, Hostry Festival Norwich

Jean Cocteau’s, The Eagle Has Two Heads, Review

Peter Barrow (actor & backer) and Stash Kirkbride (artistic director) together make up the PBSK partnership that puts on the annual Hostry Festival in Norwich. This year their main play is the L’Aigle à deux têtes by Jean Cocteau, written in 1943 and first performed in Brussels, Lyon and Paris in 1946. The French play both became a film and was ‘adapted’ by Ronald Duncan for English productions as “The Eagle Has Two Heads”. Whilst Cocteau once unfairly derided his translation as “preposterous”, the performance, staging and script, on the opening night (continues till 29/10), were superb.

Melodrama Revival or Tragicomedy?

“It’s a revival of a long lost French melodrama, a romantic play not seen in Norfolk since 1947 when it was performed at the Maddermarket Theatre.” – Stash Kirkbride

Although, Cocteau himself, would rather see it as comic tragedy uniting a “human play” and “great rôles” in “intellectual theatre” with “violent action”. Take the sarcastic bite of these lines, for example:

The Queen: “I have not shown my face to a living soul, except to my reader, Edith. It is questionable whether she has a soul. It is still more questionable whether she is alive.”

Cocteau has sections of Hamlet read during the seemingly multiple plays within a play and references a resurgent theatre in suggesting that the King was killed for building theatres and the Queen criticised for her love of the arts and actors in the family.

The Queen: “…they all wanted to become actors. that was impossible, so what could they do but turn their lives into a play, each living his own comedy. But I dreamed of making mine into a tragedy.”

There were times when I wasn’t sure whether laughter was appropriate in this tragedy, for there were great comic moments and fantastic verbal put-downs by the two leading female roles, and to a lesser extent by the resurgent Stanislas when not in cowardly assassin or fawning lover mode, as for example when he calls the Queen on her conceited notion that suicide was insufficiently dramatic a death.

“All love is a little death, and great love is suicide.”

For those with a knowledge of French, back-translating the dialogue led to some great double entendres, including le petit mort above,  perhaps unintentional, but it added to the depth of the typically French philosophical and somewhat sexy melodrama – or tragic farce, at times.

Tracey Catchpole & Adam Edwards - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Tracey Catchpole & Adam Edwards – Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

Historic Setting & Political Commentary

“On a wild Autumn night circa 1910, a reclusive Queen dines alone in one of her many castles mourning the loss of her late husband. An assassin appears – he has come to kill the Queen but instead he falls hopelessly in love with her. For a brief moment in time their love blossoms, but it is not long before the corridors of power begin to echo with disapproval. And so, it must all end even before it has begun… but how?…” – Synopsis, Hostry Festival

Indeed, the play has echoes of Romeo and Juliet‘s tragic romance. This 20th-century play, set in the late 19th – loosely based on the “strange death of Louis II of Bavaria” – is, in addition, interlaced with questions of anarchy, the poetic temperament, philosophy of ideas, court intrigues, and even class commentary.

Lucy Monaghan (Edith de Berg) & Christopher Neal (Duke of Willenstein) - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Lucy Monaghan (Edith de Berg) & Christopher Neal (Duke of Willenstein) – Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

The latter almost creates a play within a play as the supporting actors Lucy Monaghan (Edith de Berg) and Christopher Neal (Duke of Willenstein) carry on their own drama of love, jealousy, position and power among lower order nobility.

The Queen: “Those who are born slaves are free. Compared to us who are imprisoned in this tyranny [love, or indeed royalty].”

Meanwhile, enter the anarchic poet peasant with royalist leanings, with his uncanny resemblance to the dead king, on the anniversary of his death. The hermit Queen, not seen in public for years, has her own anarchic and heroic leanings, owning a copy of the poet’s seemingly anti-monarchy poem. She both dispenses with and asserts class and court etiquette in dialogue with Stanislas – a fact which he gains courage to take advantage of, to both the Queen’s dismay and pleasure for she hates cowardice. He, nonetheless, recognises that it is all within the Queen’s gift and that she is “the axis around which all men must move”.

“You are in the presence of your Queen. Don’t forget it.”

But then comes the distinction, is he, or indeed she, against the office of the Queen, rather than the person? For it is the crown that wields the power, not the wearer alone. Who is to be assassinated, the idea or the individual? Typically French revolutionary political ideas mixed with high philosophy.

Stanislas: “I am not hating my Queen. I fell in love with a cause and let a cold idea ravish me. So that when I broke into your room I was nothing but a mad idea.”

Adam Edwards as Stanislas - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Adam Edwards as Stanislas – Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

As with the incognito Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s assassination in 1898, the assassin was attacking the system:

“I am an anarchist by conviction…I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign, with object of giving an example to those who suffer and those who do nothing to improve their social position; it did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill…It was not a woman I struck, but an Empress; it was a crown that I had in view.” – De Burgh (1899). Elizabeth, empress of Austria: a memoir, pp326–327

Staging & Acting

Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Cellist Ivan McCready – Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

The fast-paced three-act play opens with an opulent open stage, set in the round – well a square (squircle?), with raised seating on all four sides. The backdrop is a large piece of double-headed eagle art by local Russian artist Gennadiy Ivanov.

A live cellist, the excellent Ivan McCready, sits at one corner of the stage adding real musical backing overlays and that resonant wooden tone that only a cello provides.

Tracey Catchpole as the Queen - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Tracey Catchpole as the Queen – Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

I was sat on one of the four front rows, next to the cellist and to a card table that the Queen and leading actress sat at during the play, giving the audience a rare intimacy and experience of the action. And, action it was at times, with erotic embraces,  intense thumping dialogue, and not a few near and acted deaths taking place at the audience’s feet.

The actors threw everything into their craft, faces were stretched, contorted, angry, impassioned, spitting, “acting without restraint” like a Jean Marais (Cocteau’s lover) in Les Parents Terribles. This was something Cocteau wanted to restore to modern theatre, including a reading of Hamlet within the play, “with as much violence as [Stanislas] put into [his] last insult.”

“The appearance of a comedian-tragedian is the great novelty of the theatre today. By exaggerating the comic lines he manages, without seeming ridiculous, to put on the sublime grimaces of which the screen deprives us.” – Jean Cocteau

Tawa Groombridge as Tony - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Tawa Groombridge as Tony -Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

Even the deaf and mute role of Queen’s servant was acted with strength, poise and dignity by Tawa Groombridge, despite the scripted abuse by another role.

The calmer role of courtly Baron, yet no less conniving, Chief of Police, was played by actor and executive producer, Peter Barrow, presenting a foil to the rollercoaster love and hate, life and death, of the other interplaying roles.

Baron & Chief of Police, Peter Barrow - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Baron & Chief of Police, Peter Barrow – Hostry Festival, Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Tracey Catchpole as the Queen - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Tracey Catchpole as the Queen – Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

To be honest, the Queen (Tracey Catchpole) rightly steals the show as both actor and author of some of the best lines, including lengthy monologues, that are far from monotonous because of her range of presentation, and constant movement to ensure that all four sides of the audience can be played to. Tracey describes the role as a “gift of a part”.

In fact, the gifted part was meant to be that of Stanislas, since: 

“The Eagle Has Two Heads was written…in part as a favor for Cocteau’s lover and favorite leading man, Jean Marais. Marais asked for a part in which he did not speak in Act One, shed tears of joy in Act Two and fell backwards down stairs in Act Three.” – The Harvard Crimson

The Harvard article goes on to compare Cocteau to David Lynch and The Eagle Has Two Heads, to Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks. Elsewhere, it has been compared to an inverted Beauty and the Beast!

Adam Edwards as Stanislas - Hostry Festival 2017, THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS by Jean Cocteau. Photo © Simon Finlay Photography
Adam Edwards as Stanislas – Photo © Simon Finlay Photography

Adam Edwards, does play Marais’ part well, but the stage presence and gravity of role mostly lie with the Queen’s lines. The to and fro of their interaction, the ebbing strength and weakness, love and morbidity, truly make the play stand up.

The Hostry play runs from the 23rd – 29th October – tickets here or via 01603 598676 (Theatre Royal box office).

TS Eliot Four Quartets, Exploration with Peter Wilson, Melvyn Bragg & more

TS Eliot’s Four Quartets

As part of the Norwich Hostry Festival, it was a privilege to both hear Peter Wilson‘s reflective rendition of the four-part poem by T S Eliot and to be on a literary panel chaired by Melvyn Bragg discussing the Four Quartets after.

“Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers…”

The full panel consisted of Peter Wilson – Chief Executive of Norwich Theatre Royal; David Banks – actor, author and director, Chris Rushby – Blackwells and Waterstones to Jarrolds bookseller and 40-year passionate explorer of Eliot; Katy Jon Went – amateur hack and commentator; and Eve StebbingEDP and Daily Telegraph theatre critic, and founder of Spin-Off Theatre.

I previously ‘paneled’ with David Banks on the Hostry Festival play discussion of his Five Marys Waiting (2012). This time I sat next to Chris Rushby, both during the poems’ reading and also during the discussion, and I think we exchanged looks after as we felt an emotional punch to the gut at the end of the recitation, which was more of a reflection and internal dialogue with self. The delivery was very personal and searching.

It’s been years since I’ve read Eliot at length – apart from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), probably the last time was at school! But recently I heard these lines:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

They draw me back to the poem and the digging out of a 1968 Folio Society edition, in search of where they were among the lines.

Indeed, I rang my father the night before the panel, asking for the potted York Notes precis of its meaning. Needless to say, he began by quoting The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915):

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;”

Before he could get stuck into The Wasteland (1922) and “April is the cruellest month”, I asked him to fast forward to 1935 and to Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets.

Just as I expected, though, it was an emotional and sensual response that my father relayed, not a critical-academic one, and rightly so, for that was the reaction of most of us on the panel. It meant any analysis of literary and religious allusions, or of George Orwell’s criticisms at its lack of deep despair, or too much reliance on god and spirituality was somewhat redundant.

It was, however, The Wasteland, that began Eliot’s poetical-theological journey into not only Anglo-Catholicism – to which he publicly converted in 1927, but also Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Greek philosophers and poets.

“I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being” – TS Eliot

Eliot was fascinated with spiritual search and one’s psychological journey, not to mention temporal and historical reflections. Time, especially, is a recurring theme in the Four Quartets, time and not-time, time past and time future, incarnate and potentate in time present, that is:

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

Unlike the New Testament call to “redeem the time”, for Eliot, time needs no redeeming because it is not lost, it is always with us, in the moment. Indeed, Eliot’s thoughts presage modern concepts of mindfulness and being in the moment, which in turn hark back to older Buddhist appreciations.

Possibility is neither abstraction or a speculation, but an ever-present power in what already is.

“What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened”

Journeying is a strong theme in the Four Quartets, but one where arrival or purpose are as intangible as time.

“And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.”

In all of Eliot’s expressed contrasts and even contradictions in the Four Quartets, meaning, if it can found at all, is not discovered at the poles but at the intersections.

“The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.”

 

Melvyn Bragg’s King Lear in New York, off-Broadway Hostry Festival Norwich

King Lear in New York, Melvyn Bragg

The 2016 Hostry Festival production of the 1994 original play by Melvyn Bragg has been revised by Melvyn with suggestions by Stash Kirkbride, who directed this version, and one of the principal actors, Peter Barrow. The result is a play that positively zips along, in just 90 minutes without a break, with two outstanding performances from Louis Hilyer playing Robert and Rebecca Chapman as Jackie, who set the depth and drama of Shakespeare against the gossip and glamour of Hollywood.

Peter Barrow and Louis Hilyer in Melvyn Bragg's King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford
Peter Barrow and Louis Hilyer in Melvyn Bragg’s King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford

The other starring role in King Lear in New York goes to drink, for it is a dysfunctional family tragic-comedy with father, daughter, and brother, ex-wives and ex-lovers, and a prominent role for the not so on-off relationship with alcohol.

Modelled on Richard Burton’s own demons – drink and women, as Bragg admits, having also authored his biography, Richard Burton: A Life. Burton said, himself, that he turned to drink to “burn up the flatness, the stale, empty, dull deadness that one feels when one goes offstage.”

“I was fairly sloshed for five years. I was up there with John Barrymore and Robert Newton. The ghosts of them were looking over my shoulder.” – Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed, by Robert Sellers, p145 (2009)

Burton of course, never played King Lear, only King John, and whilst wanting to play Macbeth to spite Laurence Olivier, in a film version, never achieved that either. This play imagines a type of Burton before opening King Lear, albeit in off-off-Broadway.

Melvyn was in town on Wednesday to see the new version and take a Q&A on it. He was asked about the cutting and editing process, that included the removal on one character in their entirety. Personally, I don’t feel the daughter’s addiction is fully sold to us, indeed there’s enough broken family angst between father and daughter, even without her addiction to drugs paralleling her father’s to drink. Melvyn was keen to present her fragility and yet, unlike Lear, portray redemption and rescue.

There is a cracking score of music and storm effects, projected New York backdrops, vintage ‘brick’ phones and, I think I spotted a Dalwhinnie whisky centre stage, alongside the Jack Daniels and plenty more drink besides, on the permanently-on-stage cocktail mini-bar. More likely to have been cold tea or coloured water than the marvellous amber single malt nectar. Peter Barrow holds the stage alone at first, almost making one wonder if we are watching a 1980-90s Wall Street drama.

Before any chance of settling in, there was an early dramatic entrance by Robert, amidst a cacophonic clatter and clink, rather alarming the back row, and one wondered whether this was going to be a cross between Withnail and I and Waiting for Godot, or perhaps even Whisky Galore! The entry brings wine and JD to join the already well-lubricated ‘actor-playing-an-actor’ on stage who is on the knife-edge of a return to fame or floundering as a washed-up thespian wannabe.

Nina Taylor in Melvyn Bragg's King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford
Nina Taylor in Melvyn Bragg’s King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford

As if his drink and acting problems weren’t enough, he has broken relationships with his daughter Julie played with teen-twenty angst by Nina Taylor and ex-lovers to manage. Rebeccas Aldred and Chapman squared off with each other, arguing over Robert, his career, and his affections. Aldred was an excellent foil to Chapman, an in her role was equally torn between her allegiances and hopes for Robert.

All that, and King Lear too? A knowing audience would be left wondering how far the play within, or rather before, a play will ape Shakespeare’s own and be a full-on tragedy and no mere storm in a whisky glass.

Rebecca Chapman and Rebecc Aldred in Melvyn Bragg's King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford
Rebecca Chapman and Rebecc Aldred in Melvyn Bragg’s King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford

King Lear faced the challenge of dividing his realm between his three daughters, with the lion’s share going to the one who loved him most. In this play, there are more than three rival and competing loves. Dialogue and drama swing between the paternal love of his daughter, fraternal to his brother, and erotic – and there are a few good speeches about that in the play with regard to ex-lovers. Excusing his past loves as natural processes, defending the self-acknowledged Lotharian love rat that he was/is, he expounds on ‘what is love?’ Or rather, on sex – “Sex is like emptying your bladder.” Though, the full “repertoire of love [is] grander than a cathedral organ.”

Then there’s the titanic struggle between the allure of Hollywood and the age-old stage actor’s dream of Shakespearian challenge. A challenge, that the role of Robert is simultaneously tempted and tortured by, not to mention taunting by his ex-lovers. Whether an actor will ‘die’ on stage is part of the attraction he says. But one day and one death on stage would also kill his Hollywood resurrection, the others counter with. In the play’s first outing in 1994, one reviewer described Kate O’Mara in Jackie’s role as “horny for disaster”, Chapman, instead, seems to desire either his success or failure, but nothing in-between.

Life is an act. “He is him when he is most someone else”, the actor’s brother says, even the agent has to ‘act’ on his behalf. We are all the great pretenders, performing our ‘lie-dentities’. Whether in life or on the stage, we are actors in our own dramas.

Louis Hilyer in Melvyn Bragg's King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford
Louis Hilyer in Melvyn Bragg’s King Lear in New York for Hostry Festival 2016. Photo by Matt Dartford

This drama is part sitcom, part tragedy, but fully engaging. Torn between multiple loves, do we love it? In the context of the play, it might be pushing it to say addictive, but the editors seem to have got the revision just about right. Quitting Shakespeare is as hard as quitting drink, it is as much a drug to its proponents as the skin-deep glamour and glitz of Hollywood celebrity. The play expertly channels King Lear through the funnel of boozy dysfunctionality of its players. Louis Hilyer is Shakespearean and Rebecca Chapman revels in exuding the worst of Hollywood and TV chat shows, even reeling in the excellent Rebecca Aldred as Bett. The play is certainly worth a second visit after 20 years and maybe even a second visit this week. Norwich’s Hostry Festival event is certainly off-off-off Broadway, and deserves greater visibility.

Hostry Festival’s 2016 Norfolk Arts Awards – EDP People’s Choice Award

Norfolk EDP People’s Choice Awards

Today, Tuesday 23 August, is the last day to “nominate your stars of Norfolk‘s arts scene” for a special EDP People’s Choice Arts Award. The deadline for submission is midnight to put forward your favourite community or corporate arts organisation, artist, or event.

Nominate EDP People’s Choice Norfolk Arts Awards NOW

2015’s Norfolk Arts Awards saw 6,000 votes and winners included artist Matt Reeve, Norwich Arts Centre and GoGoDragons!

Over the last year have you loved an art exhibition at St Margaret’s Church of Art – e.g., Pride Without Prejudice, or Asylum at the Undercroft Gallery, or the Sainsbury’s Centre? Did you enjoy Paint Out‘s artists roaming the streets of Norwich and Wells-next-the-Sea? What about the 2015/16 programme of plays at the Maddermarket Theatre? Nominate your favourite Norfolk arts event.

Hostry Festival Innovation

The Norfolk Arts Awards is the Hostry Festival‘s red carpet gala event celebrating the arts. It’s really an opportunity to celebrate people who make a difference. The EDP People’s Choice Awards is a chance for people to have their say and nominate their own stars for the award. The top 10 in each category will be revealed and then there will be an online vote to find three winners. Winners will be announced at the Norfolk Arts Awards ceremony at Norwich Cathedral’s Hostry on Friday 21st October.

Norfolk Arts Awards 2016

Hostry Festival Norfolk Arts Awards EDP 2016
Hostry Festival Norfolk Arts Awards EDP 2016

The Arts Awards consist of 15 awards, with 30 nominations and celebrate the rich and diverse world of arts and culture in Norfolk. The EDP People’s Choice Award features 3 categories and nominating arts groups or individuals for the public vote closes Tuesday 23rd August – it is your chance to have your say by recommending an arts project, organiser or artist for their creative work in Norfolk.

Check out the interview with the event’s co-founder, Stash Kirkbride, on BBC Radio Norfolk (from 3h34m).

“Nominations have already been flooding in for this year’s awards, and people have until Tuesday, August 23 to send in their entries. Once again there are three EDP People’s Choice Awards categories – individual, small organisation and large organisation.” – Emma Knights, EDP

This year the awards are returning to the Hostry building at Norwich Cathedral, held on Friday October 21st 2016, 7-9.30pm with after show canapes and champagne reception.

Nominate EDP People’s Choice Norfolk Arts Awards NOW

Full List of 2015 Arts Awards Nominees

Individual Artists who went through to the public vote:

Small Venue, Organisation, Festival who made the public vote:

Large Venue, Organisation, Festival reaching a large number of people who went to the public vote: