dovegreyreader scribbles

Flare Path ~ Terence Rattigan

Well, who knew that Sienna Miller was such an accomplished actor??

I certainly didn't having only really clocked her as a rather glamorous 'it' girl who always seemed to be in the news for everything other than turning in superb stage performances. I think I was probably expecting a bit of a ditzy blond role for her, not the serious leading lady in Terence Rattigan's 1942 play Flare Path, which Bookhound and I went to see while we were in London recently. That'll teach me to curb my pre-conceived judgements won't it.

It was all very lastminutedotcom, off to London and I whizzed a quick e mail over to the Westend Whingers...we were thinking of going to see Blithe Spirit but they'd panned it so what would they recommend..kill to see Flare Path came back the instant reply (thanks Andrew) it's getting well deserved 5* reviews and comes with an unreserved recommend. We dashed onto the website and took out a mortgage on the last two tickets in the Royal Circle at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket whilst reminding ourselves to go to the right Theatre Royal (not the Drury Lane one) on the night.

Don't you just love the old London theatres. The Little Theatre in the Hay originally built on the site of an old inn, The King's Head in 1720 for the sum of £1500, and Henry Fielding's audacious satires are performed there to great acclaim. Surely the inn named in the aftermath of the execution of King Charles 1st just across the way in Whitehall in 1649?

 The current Theatre Royal  designed by renowned Regency architect John Nash and built at a cost of £20,000 in 1820. The place just oozes charm, character and history; a tiny foyer, plush little dark, flock-papered staircases and low ceilings, and to think it opened with a performance of Sheridan's The Rivals. Gaslight arrives in 1843 along with an orchestra pit, a fifteen-year old Ellen Terry performs in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1863. A string of famous actors have graced this stage since; in recent years, Lauren Bacall, Alec Guiness and a bevvy of Redgraves, Christopher Reeve, Ben Kingsley, Peter O'Toole, Jack Lemmon, the list is endless and now Sienna Miller.

I love that moment when we settle into our seats and get our bearings too. We sit and look at the stage for a while and wonder what will be revealed, and I've suddenly changed my mind and do need a packet of jelly babies and a programme, and slowly the theatre fills up around us, and we're almost at the end of the row so we stand up and sit down many times over. We wait for the preternaturally very tallest person to sit right in front of me and when that happens (which it did)  Bookhound, who always has the smallest person in front of him, swaps seats with me. We arrange the jelly babies so the packet doesn't make a noise and that's us poised ready for curtain up.

Directed by Trevor Nunn the action in Flare Path centres on the Falcon Hotel situated near to an RAF airbase in Lincolnshire. Teddy, a young bomber pilot, is meeting up with his actress wife Patricia who has arrived for a brief stay from London. When hearthrob filmstar Peter Kyle arrives unexpectedly we are the first to see his romantic involvement with Patricia, whilst Teddy seems to be the last... but in fact does the naively boyish and hapless Teddy perhaps know more than he can bear to face up to? Surrounding characters include other pilots, including a wonderful Polish Count who has married a local girl who know finds herself a Countess, a typically stern hotel keeper and others various. When the flight crew are called out on a night bombing raid those left behind  must re-examine their lives and their loyalties and when some return the appalling emotional cost on their lives starts to play out.

The special effects were minimal but spectacular when they happened. As the characters watched through the window as the Wellington bombers took off, one by one the film-footage planes appeared in the distance above the stage, loomed closer and closer and louder and louder and we almost felt obliged to duck in the Royal Circle as they seemed to fly over head.

Sienna Miller meanwhile, accomplished and divine as Patricia, it's all in the deportment, and am I allowed to show my age and say you could hear every word she said, clear as a bell...well you could hear the others too, but Sienna really held the stage along with superb performances from Harry Hadden-Paton as Teddy and Sheridan Smith as Doris, Countess Skriczevinsky...Clive Wood as Squadron Leader Swanson (better known as Gloria) had us smiling as did Mark Dexter's wonderfully funny Polish Count. Whilst James Purefoy's louchly slick filmstar is about to learn some new truths and his transformation on stage incredibly moving.

Terence Rattigan had joined the RAF in 1940 having become a celebrated playwright but one suffering from writer's block. Whilst his psychiatrist suggested he needed a dose of discipline and advised he joined the war effort, Rattigan's decision to become a tail gunner, the most dangerous seat in the plane, seemed like a fairly drastic remedy. It paid off and soon restored his ability and his willingness to write and with no shortage of subjects surrounding him from which to choose. Flare Path was written during active service and sent by Rattigan to his parents with the request that they get it noticed which they duly did and it opened in 1942. An instant success playing for 670 performances to a public well- attuned to the sorrows and stresses of war, even Winston Churchill saw it and commented thus..

'I was very moved by this play.It is a masterpiece of understatement. But we are rather good at that aren't we?'

Well we saw it almost seventy years later and decided it was still brilliant.

 

 

The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall

I think this might be a first for dovegreyreader scribbles but it most definitely won't be the last because I have enjoyed reading it so much, a play that is. I'm not sure, apart from the odd Shakesperean reference perhaps, that I've read and shared thoughts about a play on here before.
The first inkling I had of The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall came to me via those aficianados of the London (and occasionally suburban) stage, those discerners of the proscenium arch, Andrew and Phil The West End Whingers. I'm not sure if it's still in the running but The Pitmen Painters was topping their league table of favourites last I read.

"This is the most consistently enjoyable play the Whingers have seen in a long time, possibly the most engaging on stage in London at the moment. It’s the theatrical eqivalent of Monet’s Water Lilies, a real crowd-pleaser which deserves to draw in the punters.

Andrew’s now obsessed with lines such as “Art’s about you” (Andrew always believes things are about him anyway) and “everyone has a creative gift”.

In fact Andrew was so inspired he threatened to pick up his paint brushes again, and he hasn’t done that since his days painting along with Nancy. Expect to see Andrew sporting a rakishly angled beret behind an easel in the stalls near you very soon."

Now there are pros and cons to living in splendid rural isolation and one of the cons is the absence of Shaftesbury Avenue here in the Tamar Valley. Getting to a play, forgive me, is quite a performance  and recent attempts ( egged on by The Whingers after that Observer photo-shoot, The Chalk Garden, Donmar Warehouse, complete sell-out, ninety minutes standing in returns queue, number seven in queue, six returned tickets) have not been marked with success so I've resigned myself to Drama From the Armchair.
This is new territory indeed, really 'being' the different characters as I read and in this case putting to good use all those happy hours spent watching  Auf Wiedersehen Pet because The Pitmen Painters quickly demands good solid Geordie accents to cope with lines like,

Harry   'I wasn't ganna but I had to get out of the house, man. Wor lass is driving iz crackers.'

I was soon into character and playing all parts ye knaa what ah mean leik.
This is 1934 and based on the true story of the Ashington Miners. Under the auspices of the Worker's Educational Association, the miners have organised a class in Art Appreciation for themselves, they'd wanted to do Introductory Economics but couldn't find a tutor. Robert Lyon is the hapless Southerner destined to make inroads with the working miners George, Oliver, and Jimmy, Harry, ex-miner gassed on the Somme and now a dental mechanic, and an unemployed Young Lad allowed in by special dispensation ( and apologies for the asterisks, I'm not being prudish, just denying the zillions of spam messages that those words will attract, we have barely recovered from the162 after that post I did on the book Hubbub, Fi*th and Ste*ch)

Enter a Young Lad

George What are you doing here?

Young Lad I've come for the class.

George Yer joking, aren't you - oot ye gan.

Young Lad What's wrong with me coming? I thought yer wer supposed to be encouraging people to learn things.

George Aye, Worker's Educational Association. Not Skiving Little A***holes' Association. This is a place of serious learning so bu**er off.

As the group settle down to learn it quickly becomes apparent that they have far more to offer than Mr Lyon can ever have imagined and, once the group begins to paint, a real naive and raw talent emerges and one with commercial potential. Exploitation and the temptations of wealth lurk just over the artistic horizon and as Lee Hall suggests in his introduction,

' It's both a joke and a tragedy as the working classes who are denuded of political power and spiritual succour are excluded also from the system of culture so ravenously enjoyed by their exploiters...Culture is for living, not commodification, and art should be about taking part.'

Lee Hall knows a thing or two about social inequalities having been responsible for that amazing radio play that took us by storm back in the 1990's, Spoonface Steinberg and more recently the screen play for Billy Elliot.
Reading a play versus seeing a play obviously necessitates the imaginative but essential conjuring up of a set via the stage directions, and thanks to Lee Hall's clear guidance that was all much easier than I thought it might be and definitely added to the reading experience. Looking at the pictures I'm pleasantly surprised to see how closely matched my thinking is with the actual stage production.
The play is very very funny and then rapidly serious by turns as Lee Hall's themes of art, privilege and access seep through, and locating it in the 1930's whilst removing it a step from present day of course still allows for pertinent parallels, making its central tenets still completely relevant.

Harry ...Cos we're not deing it for anybody else, we're deing it for worselves; and s*d it, it's more than that - we're doing it for all those lives in the dark, who never had the chance. For the thousands of little pit laddies without an education, the blokes with their backs bent and their hands busted open, folk who've barely got the energy to get home, never mind start deing art when they get there. We're deing it for all of those lives unrecorded. All of that creativity unfulfilled.'

The Pitmen Painters returns to The National Theatre in January 2009 and it is still possible to see the work of the original Ashington Group in a permanent exhibition at The Woodhorn Colliery Museum, just north of Newcastle, and if ah wez a canny lass I'd be gunna both.