Barely a week ago, Argyll’s MSP, Jim Mather, highlighted the Continue reading
Tag Archives: Theatre
Communicado at Craignish with The Goverment Inspector
And no – this is not about state censorship of the Arts, or not yet. But… Bribes? Fiddled expenses? Panic? Sound familiar?
One of Scotland’s most respected and trailblazing theatre companies, Communicado, in a co-production with Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, presents this feisty adaptation of Gogol’s classic satire on bureaucracy and human vanity.
It will be presented at Craignish Village Hall on Sunday 7th March at 8pm, with a show at Mull Theatre in Tobermoray on 2nd March already behind it
A penniless nobody from the big city arrives in a small town, where he is mistaken for an all-powerful government inspector by its corrupt and self-serving officials. Hilarious and vicious in its expose of the corruption of (petty) power, in this age of abuses of office, banking crises and publicly subsidised duck islands, The Government Inspector is more topical and relevant than ever
In the run-up to 2010’s general election, Gogol’s acerbic, very black comedy – first published in 1836 as a stinging critique of Tsarist Russia- asks the big question ‘do politicians and politics ever change?’
‘I have wanted to stage this play for a long time’, says director, Gerry Mulgrew. ‘It is one of those brilliant and dazzling examples of a perfectly structured satire, the comedy of errors par excellence, and quite extraordinary in the ruthlessness with which it exploits the basic situation of mistaken identity for comic ends. In so doing, none of the characters is spared Gogol’s forensic scalpel as he dissects and gleefully exposes the greed and stupidity of his collection of self-serving public officials and their spouses and hangers- on.’
Communicado hits the piece with all its trademark attack and musical invention – this time with live music from the Communicado Temporary Orkestra No.27 on electric balalaikas and mouth organs.
Helensburgh marriage on stage at Glasgow Art Club
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Fame in the frame for Islay High School film-makers?
There’ll be shades, bling and darlings galore in Bowmore if this one comes off. Continue reading
Traditional music stakes out Best Achievement for Argyll – and more
Increasingly Argyll is building a name for itself as a major player Continue reading
Innovation-rich Cowalfest gets going: Friday 9th October
Argyll’s Cowalfest – an innovative event from the outset Continue reading
The Walking Theatre Company’s Hidden Jewel at Oban’s Dunollie Castle
The Hidden Jewel, a new play celebrating one of Scotland’s National Treasures Continue reading
NHS Highland introduce ‘surgical pause’ so that if you’re in theatre for a tonsilectomy they won’t take your leg off
Those undergoing surgery under the auspices of HNS Highland should be able to let some of the nightmares recede a little now. The health authority has introduced the ‘surgical pause’ – a practical and basic check list to be gone through by theatre staff before the Surgeon holds out his hand and says: ‘Scalpel’.
It’s a ‘doors to manual’ approach – ‘I say it, you do it/check it’ routine:
- Who is this patient?
- Is this the patient we’re expecting?
- What is the operation scheduled for this patient?
- Are there any medical issues or allergies we need to be aware of?
- Are we going to need blood and have we got enough of it?
This will come as a relief to some said to have secreted on their person a little card with their name and operation on it to hand to theatre staff before they got the needle.
The ‘surgical pause’ pre-operative routine is now in use at Oban’s Lorn and the Isles Hospital, Fort William’s Belford Hospital, Wick’s Caithness General Hospital and Raigmore Hospital in Inverness.
Raigmore Hospital’s theatre manager, Gavin Hookway (do they hire them for their names?), has said that he has been impressed by how the staff had taken up ‘the challenge’ of introducing the system.
All we can say is that if theatre staff regard doing this sort of basic check as ‘a challenge’, it’s no wonder the NHS has some unfortunate case histories where ingrown toenails resulted in post-operative amputees.
The Walking Theatre Company – an arts business model in the making
There are two main drivers of Argyll’s Walking Theatre Company and each of them makes the company unusual and possibly unique in Scotland:
- creating interactive outdoor performances owned alike by performers and audience and that parents can come to with young children without being ostracised
- testing the ability of a performance company to earn its keep without public subsidy
When the Dixon-Spain family came to live in Argyll, Sadie Dixon-Spain wanted to put her expertise in professional theatre to good use and she wanted to be able to go to performances as a member of the audience.
The mother of two young daughters, she learned that this last ambition was all but impossible. Children put up with boredom less tolerantly than do adults. It takes a lot to hold their attention. Their imaginations quickly offer them other things to entertain their curiosity. They generally want to be active, not passive. These characteristics add up to what is regarded as anti-social behaviour in the hushed cathedrals of art where the greatest heresy is the rumour of clothing created by sleight of hand. Something had to be done.
Sadie Dixon-Spain was moved by Argyll’s powerful physical presence, complex cultural heritage and clan feuds and with the germ of an idea of a different form of theatre, perhaps related to promenade performance but outdoors and moving beyond that towards a new fluidity and responsiveness.
She also wanted to explore developing performances that would challenge and entertain and that people would commission, value and pay to see.
Out of this came The Walking Theatre Company (TWTC), which sees itself as ‘a mobile destination’. Now three years old, with an established repertoire, a standing pool of seven professional actors – currently auditioning for a further four, award wins and nominations and some challenging engagements with Scotland’s First Minister, it has a surprising business record.
In its first year TWTC ran on an 80% funding to 20% revenue performance. In its second year this pattern became one of 50% funding and 50% revenue. And in this, its third year, it seems set to produce a performance of 20% funding to 80% revenue.
TWTC’s winning the Best Potential for 2009 Award in the ForArgyll 2008 Awards looks like very astute judgement on the part of its massive vote.
How is this possible? What’s the business model? Are they working for nothing and on a profit share?
Well, this financial performance is possible because of an energetic commitment to earning a living through an art that breathes ogygen and doesn’t suffer from altitude sickness. This has bred a business model based on offering a stable product list for sale and with customised and bespoke options, depending on the buyer’s budget. And no, they don’t work for nothing. They work on Equity rates and their adopted payment model of using the rate-per-performance option means that where actors do three performances a week they earn more than the Equity minimum weekly rate.
How does the company pull this off? The answer again is through a strict business analysis. The overheads and the production costs of theatre are famously crippling – although again there are ways of reducing these, other than TWTC’s, that a creative business brain could find.
Anyway, TWTC’s answer has been to develop a performance form which is free of the burden of premises and many of the production costs of traditional ‘theatre’ shows. It puts its major financial commitment behind the frontline element that ensures success or failure – the actors.
It works in outdoor and public places. Each member of the audience is registered. The group is always accompanied by a qualified First-Aider. As they arrive, members of the audience are met by the actors – in character – who immediately make them, usually literally, a part of the performance and build into this the necessary safety checks on appropriate footwear and clothing.
What then happens might be a rapid-fire Macbeth in evocative surroundings of buildings and landscape. It might be one of the company’s specialisms – an original drama created from local history and played in its own place; or a performance specifically for children like The White Rabbit’s Treasure Hunt (from Alice in Wonderland). The company’s mantra for charging for children’s performances is: ‘Well behaved adults come free’.
The circumstances of such performances can create astonishing challenges and strange rewards. TWTC once played Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a gale-driven rainstorm.
The business energy of the company is perhaps best exemplified by an occasion when Forestry Commission Scotland offered the company more funding. The response was: ‘Don’t give us money. Buy our product’. They did – a lot of it and are planning to buy more.
This approach develops all partners in the enterprise. It engages Forestry Commission Scotland directly with the value of site specific performance and the added value it brings to the forest experience. It builds entirely different relationships between people and forests, bringing action, imagination, emotion, narrative, light, shade and shadow into play – and play could not be a more appropriate word.
And it develops the skills range of the performers in ways many of them could never have envisaged. These are mainly actors with backgrounds in traditional professional theatre.
- But here are no dressing rooms – the company travels light with its props literally on its back in rucksacks.
- Here are no follow spots to give you prominence – you have to create that for yourself in sheer performance power.
- Here are no obvious entrances and exits to codify your actions for the audience – in this context the actor must conjure the entirety of character and surroundings
- Here is no passive and invisible audience at a safe distance – they are present, active, in your face, even subversive.
TWTC is building more responsive, more flexible and more highly skilled performers for theatre and for Argyll.
The company adds to its revenue by extending its product menu into corporate media training (for which it has won significantly positive responses) and fun events for the hotel and tourist sector – like its own variety of murder mystery – Spying Tonight.
This is a grounded, eyes-open company which daily reminds itself: ‘I am a business’. ‘I am selling something’. Much of the arts and cultural sector could learn well from taking this attidude to itself and adapting it for its own circumstances.
Oh – we mentioned ‘some challenging engagements with the First Minister’. What was that about?
Well, on the first such occasion, the company was doing its Macbeth-on-speed as the entertainment at a pretty couth reception. Two guards were required to ‘arrest’ a character. Lady Macbeth approached a fellow who looked the part and required him to seize the culprit. The chosen one was holding a glass of champagne. Lady Macbeth took it from him and handed it briskly to his companion saying: ‘Here. Make yourself useful’. As a non-politicised newcomer, Lady M did not then know that her chosen ‘minder’ was the then Scottish Secretary cum Defence Minister, Des Browne – nor that the one commanded to make himself useful was Alex Salmond.
The First Minister took it in gleeful part and, present at a later performance, took on the role of Banquo himself.
The first of the three photographs above shows the founders of The Walking Theatre Company, Sadie Dixon-Spain and Liam Calgie. The second is a scene from Prospero’s Walk, on a day that produced one of the company’s tempestuous Tempests. The final shot shows Sadie Dixon-Spain with First Minister, Alex Salmond and Campbell Hughes. All photographs have been supplied by TWTC with its permission for their reproduction here.
Jim Mather’s National Conversation with Argyll’s Arts and Culture group proves revelatory
As part of the Scottish Government’s National Conversation, Argyll’s MSP, Jim Mather who is also Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism, engaged yesterday (13th February) with people working in Argyll’s arts and culture community.
There were representatives from across Argyll’s islands and from its various mainland areas, representing venues, events, Gaelic culture, theatre, traditional and classical music, ballet, and the embedding of art and creativity in education, health and therapy.
Councillors Douglas Philand (Depute Spokeman on Arts and Leisure for Argyll and Bute Council) and John Semple were there alongside Robert Livingstone, Director of Hi-Arts, Dr Helen Bennett, Head of Crafts at the Scottish Arts Council, Donald MacVicar, Argyll and Bute Council’s Head of Planning and Performance and a spectrum of Council officers from the arts and community partnerships.
It turned out to be a day of two halves. The morning session led by Jim Mather was energising and enabling and, as one delegate said for everyone, left him feeling more hopeful than he had felt before.
After lunch things fell quickly apart for very interesting reasons which revealed a cultural schism, do not reflect upon the individuals leading the session – and to which this report will return.
Jim Mather kicked off by contextualising the National Conversation – ‘ask the people who do the work’ – in the Scottish Government’s route to ‘the new North Star of economic development’. The big objective is to reach a point in 2011 where Scotland’s growth will match that of the UK as a whole. The chief instruments in achieving this are seen as innovation, adaptation, improvement and the removal of inhibitors. The driving attitude is the presumption of growth.
The Minister managed the session by asking a series of prepared questions of his audience:
- What business are we in?
- Who are our beneficiaries?
- What are people wanting from what we do?
- How do we measure progress?
- What needs to change?
- Who else is in the game?
As responses were offered on each of these questions, they were placed in an evolving and fluid structure (using mind-mapping software developed in East Kilbride) capable of including the practical and the philosophical with some harmony and common purpose.
This ‘map’ becomes the ‘minute’ of the meeting and will be circulated by the Minister to those present.
Everything emerging from this process had its value and the picture evolving before the eyes of the audience began to identify some very important issues and understandings. Subjectively, these included:
- The geographically dispersed nature of Argyll and the islands dictates the evolution of a unique infrastructure for the arts and culture, capable of marrying with the nature of the place and the practicalities of living and working in it
- The big thing that art can offer people and what they – often unconsciously – look for in it, is a sense of belonging. This covers the spectrum from the affirmation of individual identity, to social inclusion (membership for the time being), to an enlivened awareness of the human condition.
- Art adds value to all other elements of being – business, economic development, community, visiting, heritage, education, health, mental health, communication, knowledge, aspiration and ambition.
- A major contribution of art to life is its ability to rage against the bland
A wealth of valuable insights emerged in response to the question ‘What needs to change?’ These included:
- The arts have to be recognised as partners in economic and social development, not supplicants
- The victim culture has to go
- Perceptions have to change to remove the unspoken assumption that art emerging from rural locations is inevitably poorer, less crafted and less ‘valuable’ than its siblings born in urban and metropolitan surroundings
- Collaboration across the arts and culture is the key to innovation, development and best use of resources
- To facilitate this, those involved in the spectrum of arts and culture in Argyll and the islands need to know more about each other, each other’s work and each others places and venues
- Asking for help should be seen as a strength not a weakness – by both sides of the equation
- Marketing and consciousness raising about what is actually happening in Argyll is vital
From all of this, produced democratically from an engaged audience, it’s easy to see why energies were high by lunchtime.
The Minister left after lunch. The next session was led by Robert Livingstone from Hi-Arts and Kerry Corbett from the arts wing of Argyll and Bute Council.
This was every bit as revelatory as the morning session – in very different ways and perhaps threw up the single biggest issue which sucks life from art and from those who make it.
Jim Mather’s focus on the need for the conscious management of artistic activity to strengthen its contribution to economic and social development and its own long term health was open and inclusive, evolving a fluid structure from the perceptions of those present. This was not only accepted but welcomed with an awareness of invigoration and progress.
In the afternoon session the audience was immediately faced with an imposed hierarchical organogram with long thin red and pink boxes representing umbrella bodies, square green boxes representing constituents and yellow rectangles clustered and hanging below like a hyacinth representing the big service agencies like SNH, the Forestry Commission etc
It was an imposed not an evolved structure. The hierarchies and their dependant relationships were not immediately persuasive. The diagram was badly drawn. It was barely legible even from the helpful plasma screens around the room.
Most of all it spoke the wrong language and it represented a culture of bureaucracy where pre-decided form imposes itself upon organic functions. The crashing gears as two utterly alien cultures met was, if not audible, certainly visible. Shoulders slumped. Heads sank into necks. Life and hope drained away and did not return. And nothing happened. No actions were even formulated.
The purpose was benevolent – to ‘give’ (itself a telling perspective) the arts community a seat at the table and to do so at a time which may be particularly helpful. The trouble was that, in this context, it represented the clang of the cell door closing off retreat.
The poet William Carlos Williams, in an argument about poetry and whether poets should evolve a form for an individual poem or work to fit what they wanted to say within an existing form – like an ode or a sonnet – said: ‘a crab needs a crab shaped box’. The corollary is that the only way you can fit a crab in a standard box is to crush or amputate the inconvenient parts of the crab’s sprawling and uniquely evolved body.
Here we had the crab and here we had the boxes – and even the attempt to make them fit together was somehow unthinkable. One delegate raised the Bauhaus formulation to explain the predicament: ‘form must follow function’.
Here we also had fellow human beings whose translation into bureacratic management had corrupted their langauge and their perceptions. This was the most powerful and poignant experience of all. People with intelligence, warmth and wit who were no longer intelligible and whose world has become framed by rigid and disabling structures and criteria.
The big challenge we all face – together – is how to free them and how to free a forward-facing arts community into the evolving integration with Scotland’s thrust for innovation-led economic development so hungrily welcomed in the morning.
There are solutions and For Argyll will do all it can to contribute to their evolution in a variety of ways. Argyll’s economic and social development rests upon its wealth of natural and cultural resources. The future lies in the development of renewable energy generation, of outdoor sporting activities and facilities and of artistic and cultural activities and facilities.
That is a future worth working for.
The photograph above of Jim Mather MSP is cropped from a shot issued by Argyll and Bute Council’s Communications Team, showing the Minister at Kilmartin House Museum in Argyll, launching the Registrar General’s Book of Scottish Connections.