Tag: Emily Lim

As You Like It at the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch review ***

As You Like It

Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch, 26th August 2019

I don’t think I was alone in praising the first initiative in the collaboration between Public Acts and the National Theatre last year which brought amateur and professional creatives together to produce a piece of large scale community theatre. That was Shakespeare’s (and George Wilkins’s) Pericles. Just marvellous.

Well this was the second effort. Shakespeare again. This time in collaboration with East London’s finest the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch, masterminded by Emily Lim (who now heads up Public Arts and who directed Pericles), directed by QTH’s AD Douglas Rintoul, different amateur actors and partner groups drawn from the local community and across London, and with an adaptation, music and lyrics courtesy of Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery who created the work for the Public Theater in New York.

Just five professional actors, and more importantly singers, Beth Hinton-Lever as a mildly sardonic, rather than full on depressive, Jaques, Rohan Reckford as the overweening Duke Senior, Linford Johnson as less heroic man’s man and more perplexed metrosexual, Orlando, especially in the presence of Ebony Jonelle’s plucky Rosalind, and Vedi Roy as the impish Touchstone (who has a lot less to say than normal). Which handed plenty of opportunity to the community players. Too numerous to mention I am afraid as, apart from hacking away at big Will’s plot and verse and adding in copious song, music, dance and performance, the named cast list and chorus was expanded well beyond standard dimensions. A good thing too. Having said that I would draw attention to the contributions of Kayode Ajayi as Oliver, Malunga Yese as Silvia, Harleigh Stenning as Andy and, especially, Marjorie Agwang as Celia. If they were nervous they didn’t show it and they, as everyone on stage did, put their all into the performances.

Now you Shakespeare buffs will probably have worked out that the characters above do not all accord with the usual dramatis personae. As You Like It is ripe for gender switching, after all that is pretty much the point of the play, and the creative team didn’t hold back here. Indeed inclusivity, as well as love and forgiveness, was the name of the game and the reason why As You Like It was chosen for the project. And, having alighted on these themes, no-one involved held back. Moving and uplifting for sure but it rather left poor Shakespeare behind. This may not be big Will’s greatest play, or even comedy, or pastoral, or whatever you want to call it, but, in their subtracting and adding, basically ending up with a musical, the adapting team left very little of the Bard remaining. And, to be polite, the prose that is added to simplify and move the plot on was, shall we say, workmanlike. A shame in some ways because AYLI is a crowd pleaser even when left alone. Still, in most cases the songs that Ms Taub has created to amplify the key moments really did work, lyrically and, more often than not, musically.

Which meant that I, and the audience, had a great time. Especially with the giant chorus pieces. It’s just that the spectacle wasn’t quite as successful as Pericles as a piece of theatre, independent of its worthy purpose. Even so I look forward to where Public Arts goes next. If Shakespeare again I guess a Dream, or R&J, though a Merry Wives might be fun.

Pericles at the National Theatre review *****

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Pericles

National Theatre Olivier, 26th August 2018

So how do you like your theatre? Or more particularly how do your like your Shakespeare? Utterly faithful to the First Folio? Set in the time and place that big Will intended (however baffling)? All blokes in tights? Performed by elite, public school grandees plummily sing-songing the verse?

Of course not. He’s for all time, not just his time, so there’s a million ways to show him off. Yet it seems from some of the reaction to Emily Lim’s three night production of Pericles at the National, the first in the planned large scale, annual, Public Acts initiatives, that some misanthropic types, (who probably weren’t there), have got the right hump with this. “It’s not “proper” Shakespeare”. Well neither is the mangled, reconstructed Pericles text that has been handed down to us with half of it penned by George Wilkins. “Very little of the precious Shakespeare lines make it through the production”. Fair enough but I defy anyone to sit through the whole bonkers story of Pericles without thinking this is a cracking tale that needs fearless pruning to properly emerge. “Adding music and dance scenes cheapens the entertainment”. Who says so. Will Shakespeare was all about entertaining the punters and making money. Chris Bush’s adaptation, with music by Jim Fortune, succeeds admirably in the first aim and, if it were possible, would, I guarantee, deliver on the second. “It is all well and good having these “amateur” types making their family in the audience proud but it gets in the way of the “professionals””. Bollocks. That is not what was intended here and if you can’t grasp that then I respectfully suggest you p*ss off to wherever you think you might find a “correct” performance of this messy play.

So ditch the moaners and pay attention to most of the proper reviewers and, I humbly suggest, me. For this was one of the most uplifting nights I have spent in a theatre. It was a very. very long way from the last Pericles I saw, the Cheek by Jowl production at the Barbican, (in French, heavily chopped, with our Prince of Tyre in a hospital bed, tut, tut, what were they thinking). (Pericles, Prince de Tyr at Silk Street Theatre review *****). But it was just wonderful.

OK so, at first, realising just how far Ms Bush and Ms Lim have deviated from the “original” is a bit of a shock. But once I saw how this allows them, and everyone involved, to incorporate the community performers, whether in dance, in song, in walk-, or wheel-, ons and memorably, in named parts, I just started smiling, and then grinning, so that by the end, (after manfully holding back the tears and trying not to audibly gulp), I was overwhelmed with joy. I know how daft that sounds but I can only offer up my genuine reaction.

The professional cast, led by Ashley Zhangazha as Pericles himself  and Audrey Brisson as daughter Marina, were superb. Mr Zhangazha was as natural as you like, (insofar as you can be natural in such a daft plot), in shifting from the retained verse to the sharper rewrites. This momentum ensured the ensemble set pieces didn’t really get in the way of the story. Not that it would have mattered anyway if they had. Whether it be the marriage scene of Pericles and Thaisa, (here interrupted by a recalcitrant maypole set malfunction which, if anything, made the production even more communal), or transforming the Mytilene brothel into something a bit more family friendly thanks to the ministrations of the effervescently camp Kevin Harvey as Boult, these tableaux were marvellous. All the performances were terrific though, though, and I feel guilty for saying it, the London Bulgarian Choir simply blew me away.

Maybe some of Jm Fortune’s songs were a bit cheesy but who cares when you can clap along within seconds. Maybe the sheer amount of stuff that was thrown at the Oliver stage sometimes bewildered, as one reviewer said, like the biggest am-dram production of all time. Maybe the sheer number of bodies on stage, the cast in total is over 200, occasionally threatened to topple even Robby Graham’s masterly choreography. Yet this was what made it so much shared fun.

If this is what the Public Acts enterprise has kicked off with then I say bring on next year’s. The idea, taken from New York, is to involve an array of community and theatre partners, (here the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch who will host the next instalment), from the outset in creating a mass participation slice of theatre around the country. Time, patience and, yes all you misery-guts, money will be involved but the benefit to participants, communities and audience surely justify the investment based on this production.

Immense credit must go to NT resident director Emily Lim who has decided in specialise in community productions. To co-ordinate a work of this scale is mind-boggling. To impose a resonant vision, the idea of “finding one’s home”, upon Pericles’s journey, even more so. And to create this much love, (you soppy old git Tourist) deserves our eternal gratitude. I really hope everyone involved gets another opportunity to put this on. If they do please go.