Barn dance in rural Essex
There’s a new government initiative — Shakespeare Live — that has been going on all year and nobody knows about. So to blow the lid on the enterprise I took a car ride down to Coggeshall in Essex yesterday with the producer Roger Chapman.
Our destination was a medieval monastic barn in the picture postcard village of Coggeshall where 250 schoolkids assembled — free of charge, transported by coach — to see Propellor’s six-man, seventy minutes version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
They loved it. So did I. And so would have my two maiden aunts who used to live in this village many years ago. One of them was severely handicapped with polio and used to slide down the stairs on her bottom, shouting “Wheeee.”
I used to enjoy her doing this so much that I used to do it myself. In fact, I’ve only just recently stopped doing it.
So little Aunt Molly would certainly have joined in given half a chance, as indeed did some of the schoolchildren when invited to stand in for Duke Theseus and Hippolyta because they’d run out of actors to fill all the roles.
Targetting ten local authorities around the country, the Department for Children, Schools and Families have arranged — through the Arts Council, who in turn have asked Roger to organise, who in turn has called up the participation of Northern Broadsides, the RSC, Regent’s Park Open Air and Propellor — to lay on free Shakespeare shows, and free transport, for children in Year 9 (ie, aged 13-15) who might otherwise not have any form of theatre experience. They’ve thrown a budget of £1m at it.
It’s all been, as far as I can tell, a riotous success and this pilot scheme stands a good chance of being adopted more fully, and on a bigger scale, in 2010. It should chime nicely with all the educational work and messianic outreach that already goes on at the RSC and the Globe.
The point being, though, that Shakespeare Live sets up shop in a locality the way the actors used to do in Shakespeare’s day. Some theatres have been used, but Roger and his team have gone where they can for atmospheric “found” spaces, such as the Viaduct in Halifax, or an old custard factory in Birmingham, or a pump room in Cheltenham.
His team then move in and fix the seating, the lights, the portaloos, the safety exits. The whole scheme has been monitored by a company in the Midlands called Audience Central and their findings so far are encouraging. Most of the students interviewed said they enjoyed the experience, and 85% said they would like to see another Shakespeare play.
The Coggeshall boys and girls were an extremely well-behaved, mostly white, fully school-uniformed crowd (marvellous green blazers with a great badge) from the Philip Morant School in Colchester, nine miles away. Most of them had read the play, or read about it. One or two sitting near me had even seen it before. But this was a very special treat for them, no question.
I was a bit worried about Bottom’s enormous swingeing dong in Titania’s bower, and there were one or two anachronistic expletives, but the teachers seemed not to mind and the girls went wild, nothing wrong with a bit of good honest rudery.
Ed Hall’s production, the text edited down very skilfully by Roger Warren, was simply staged with two step ladders and four banks of four small lamps.
The actors — Bob Barrett is Oberon and Bottom; Tam Williams, Puck and Flute; Alasdair Craig, Titania, Helena and a lovely Starveling, inconsolably distraught when he treads on his own invisible dog in the play scene — added costumes over a basic kit of white long-johns and corsets, and the disco-dancing style bergomask threatened to turn into a riot; in fact, at the Q and A immediately subsequent to the performance, three of the girls rushed the stage and asked if they could join in an encore of the ecstatic final fairy dance. And they did.
Grange Barn was built by the Cistercians in the 13th century as an agricultural adjunct to the nearby abbey. It proudly claims to be one of the oldest surviving timber-framed buildings in Europe. It was left derelict in the 1960s, but later restored — a new tile roof replaced the thatch — and handed over to the National Trust in 1989.
You felt that Titania’s bed of granary sacks could have been stored in the place for years. And the idea of a fit-up production in a country barn is ideal, of course, for this play.
Oh, and Coggeshall is officially announced, as you enter by road via Kelvedon, as “Coggeshall Hamlet.” Good and Bard tidings all round, then. And you can get a very decent lunch (we did) at the White Swan, where Roger and I were joined by James Sargant whose late wife Jill Fraser ran the Watermill where Propellor was launched.
Now retired and settled in Aldburgh, after many years at the RSC, twenty-five years running the Watermill with Jill and nearly as many on the board of the Oxford Playhouse, James had driven inland and across country to join us for the lunch and barn dance on a memorable afternoon. I think it’s known in the trade as a very good gig.