Old stories in the old church
There are some forms of theatre that remain immune to the passage of time and the whims of fashion. One of them is the music and poetry concert popular at literary festivals, and in village halls and empty churches.
Critics don’t often bother with such events and, when they do, invariably wish they hadn’t. But an invitation to see Love and the Gentle Heart, a medieval musical tableau recounting the stories of Dante and Beatrice and Abelard and Heloise in the St Pancras Old Church got the better of my curiosity.
Chiefly, I admit, because the church — one of the oldest Christian sites in the country, with a Saxon altar and the graves of Mary Wollstonecroft and Sir John Soane (and the great clown, Joey Grimaldi, was married here) — has intrigued me for years as I routinely sail pass it in either car or Number 46 bus en route from King’s Cross to Camden Town.
It was worth the visit. The interior is snug and pleasing, with a high-beamed ceiling and simple interior. The show was fairly good too, nimbly directed by actress Sarah Finch, and featuring some very good guitar and mandolin music and some unapologetically
naff standing scenery that turned round for each short play like a reversible jumper.
More might have been made of the plangent beauty of impossible love affairs, but the high alto tenor voice of Peter Kenny as Abelard certainly paid off big time once the old roue had been castrated.
Locals and friends turning up to pay a discretionary entrance fee and a couple of quid for a decent glass of wine certainly had no cause to complain on a foul and windy Saturday night.
The performance plays again tonight and moves on later this week to Colchester and Cambridge. News reaches me of a similarly off-beat and unsung enterprise from David Conville, formerly artistic director of the Open Air, Regent’s Park, and author of a play called Chetwode, Sandy & Co, dealing with the lives of three Second World War entertainers dabbling in escapist fantasy.
David himself is to appear in the piece which opens a new 300-seater theatre at the end of the month in his local small Dorset town of Sturminster Newton. And you can’t get more delightfully remote or recherche than that, I reckon.
His fellow actors are Toni Kanal, widow of the jazzman and broadcaster Benny Green, and Damien Thomas. And if Sturminster Newton doesn’t sound idyllically unlikely enough for you, catch them on tour in November in Shaftesbury, Lyme Regis, Ibberton, Bradford Peveril, Drimpton, Studland and Shipton Gorge. Now, that’s what I call going on the road.