Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
Brought to us by Fridgelight Theatre in association with DramaSoc, The Stormy Teacup follows the tale of Pierre, who dreams of escaping to a better life away from his job at The Stormy Teacup, a lonely, small family-run café that is slowly going under. Nothing sounds out of the ordinary here and you’re probably wondering: why does this mark a new, thrilling step for drama productions? But what would you think if I told you that The Stormy Teacup Café had no initial script or storyline, but was totally devised by the cast and crew through a series of instinctive reactions to masks? As the producer Mark Smith puts it, ‘we started with absolutely nothing, knowing only that we wanted to do something with masks’.
We started with absolutely nothing, knowing only that we wanted to do something with masks.
For Smith, working on this play was unusual, alien territory: ‘I’ve learnt a lot,’ he says, ‘about a technique which I didn’t know anything about before’. The director, Simon Maeder, by contrast, has been inspired and influenced by the theories and practices of Jacques Copeau and Keith Johnstone and was ‘really interested in the use of mask, not only to display character but create them.’ In order to get the masks just right, Maeder and Smith liased with Nettie Peacock, a graduate in design from York St.John University. Peacock produced drawings of different masks and Smith was ‘astounded’: the illustrations were ‘beautiful’, so much so in fact that Smith was ‘sure that the actual masks would not be as beautiful or characterful’. However, the 8 masks which were produced were the ‘real embodiments of the illustrations’, allowing the cast to ‘really get into playing with these masks’ to flesh out their future personas.
Building up the script for Smith was a ‘democratic and rowdy’ process; ‘Everybody would shout out ideas and the script would change all the time’. For Smith, this meant that the rehearsal process was ‘riotous fun’ as the all the members of the team ‘shouted out suggestions for ever-crazier situations and jokes.’ Indeed, the actors thrived off of being free from the constraints of a script.
The whole play was based on the idea of an instinctive process. Actors would wear the masks in front of a mirror and were encouraged to give an instinctive reaction. Smith tells us that this meant that the actors ‘drew on different sides of their characters that have never been seen before’ so that it as if their reactions were coming from the mask itself.’ The cast then moved into small scenes with one another to ascertain which characters were strong in each scene and how that could feed into the narrative as a whole.
As well as this unusual, innovative conception process, the play is also different in its location. The Stormy Teacup will not be held at the Drama Barn, the usual venue for most DramaSoc-aided productions, but at Monkgate Theatre in York itself, a ‘horrendously underused, but fantastic space’ according to Smith. It is pretty rare that DramaSoc productions move into Monkgate Theatre and this move is important for the play. For Smith, this location seeks to ‘build a bridge between campus and the community’: the University is ‘quite campus-focused so we wanted to take DramaSoc out into a different setting, opening the play up to a wider audience’. Monkgate Theatre ‘is nice step-up in size from the Drama Barn, but is still welcoming’.
So, what with a different setting and a innovative and unique origin, some may be inclined to think that The Stormy Teacup Café is a bit of a gamble. However, despite the fact that Smith himself acknowledges this (‘we didn’t know what the masks would like, we had no script, and we were away from the comfort of the Drama Barn’) ‘as soon as the masks were created,’ Smith beamed ‘everything began to fall into place. It became exciting and fun’.
The Stormy Teacup Café: Pierre’s Big Break will be at the studio theatre at 41 Monkgate from Friday 27 March - Sunday 1 March at 7pm, with a matinee performance 2.30pm on Saturday. Tickets are available from York Theatre Royal.
Produced by Fridgelight Theatre in association with DramasSoc.
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