Wodwo - at Bristol Old Vic

Photo credit - Jack Offord

Bristol Old Vic’s subterranean Studio space has been overtaken by it’s Young Company and transformed into a peaty woodland kingdom. Less a paradise than a waking nightmare, this reinterpretation of Ted Hughes’ 1967 poem Wodwo breathes new life into the age-old angst of being afraid of the dark.

The poem for Hughes marked a departure in his signature style – moving away from formal constraints and into a more fluid exploration of mythology. Which makes it a fitting choice for the Young Company to develop Wodwo when they also break away from their previous, more traditional theatre style. And what better time to make a bold statement than on their twentieth anniversary?

Performed in the round, Wodwo sets the scene with a raised bed of soil as the stage floor, an overhanging canopy of litter as the forest roof, and neon light tubes planted in the forest floor. As always with the Old Vic, nothing is what is seems.

A girl is wandering the forest searching for her father, and on her journey she encounters all kinds of creatures – frogs, bees, wolves and many more that are less easy to identify! The malleable cast transform into these beings through an array of neon sports clothing, bright lights and well placed Adidas for ears as they crouch, creep and pounce through the scenery. The neon light tubes become essential props, most effectively to create a mini wind tunnel as the drama heightens to become a storm.

The plot itself is sometimes rather hard to follow, consisting of scant speech, many made up words and sounds and a lot of physical performance, but the effect is no less impressive for it. Coming in at a tight 50 minutes, Wodwo is a whirlwind of a show that explores issues surrounding loss, identity and approval, and is a brave and interesting departure for the Young Company.

Wodwo is performed at Bristol Old Vic until August 16. For more information and to buy tickets, click here.

Bristol Proms: Bach In The Dark

Bach In The Dark – that sounds good whatever way you look at it. It’s nice alliteration, it’s a pleasing pun and it’s extremely intelligent music. Bingo.

For the launch night of the second annual Bristol Proms, held at the prestigious Bristol Old Vic, there are just four rules. Firstly, you may clap when you want. Secondly, you should take photos and tweet them during the performance. Thirdly, bring your drinks in to the theatre. And fourthly, do not shush those around you. So if you follow those rules, all will be well.

Having heard tales from last year’s inaugural Bristol Proms of academics being booted out for crowd surfing, I had high hopes that merry hell would break out in the cavernous – and devilishly warm – underground Studio at the King Street theatre. No such luck! Instead, the packed out audience was beautifully well behaved, with narry a cough or a sneeze to disrupt the peace.

After wowing the Bristol Proms audiences last year, conductor Tom Williams returned to Bristol this evening for Bach In The Dark, which, as the name suggests, was a performance of acoustic choral pieces sung almost entirely in pitch black – although, as Tom Morris indicated in his introduction, Williams has begun experimenting with the radical idea of low levels of lighting.

Joined by the Erebus Ensemble, Williams took the audience on a journey that flitted between heavily muted lighting to pitch darkness throughout the hour or so that we were under his spell. And with a walking choir of ten singers moving throughout the Studio, Williams led them – and us – through 12^th Century choral pieces culminating in Bach’s Jesu Meine Freude, which lent a whole new meaning to the term ‘surround sound’.

The experience of listing to music in the absolute darkness is to take the music out of its original context and place the focus purely on the sound produced by the performers, and the result is a truly extra sensory experience. Initially, the darkness seemed disorientating and in a way distracting – I found myself wondering what was that, was that a movement, was that an infamous Old Vic ghost? And then I relaxed into it. 

I forgot I was sitting in a hot underground room mostly surrounded by strangers, and became truly enveloped in the beautiful and ethereal sound being created just metres in front of me. My attention became focused and my mind stopped wandering, and I became completely absorbed in the music. So much so that when the lights were slightly raised for subsequent pieces, I actually found it much more difficult to concentrate than I had in the darkness.

Bach In The Dark was just one of a string of performances on the opening night of the Bristol Proms 2014, and it’s safe to assume that if all subsequent performances follow the same pattern then Bristol is set for a sterling week of musical adventures.

For more information, please click here. 

'Wild Men' – at Bristol Old Vic

Photo: Matt Collins

Having previously seen shows called Wild Oats and The Wild Bride at Bristol Old Vic, I certainly had to see Wild Men to complete the triptych.

Directed by Samuel Bailey, Wild Men is delivered by the new Hotel Echo theatre group and is a part of Bristol Old Vic’s Made In Bristol project: a training scheme for young theatre makers.

An inventive project, Wild Men ties into the centenary events marking the anniversary of the start of the First World War, and successfully links the innocence of young Bristol men – many still teenagers – drafted up for the fight with their bewilderment and naivety as they face tough decisions in France.

Having previously stood united as choristers in Bristol Cathedral, the small group of young Bristol men find themselves reunited on a reconnaissance mission in the church of a small French village while war rages all around them. The village is largely deserted, save for the elderly and infirm… and the shadow of approaching German soldiers is looming close over their heads.

Combining careful choreography with choral music, Wild Men engages some imaginative physical theatre to show the unity and discordance that quickly begins to seep through the small group of Bristolians, bewildered by a situation they never thought they’d find themselves in.

What is also striking is the harsh reality for their wives left behind. As Edith, Kat Stokes is convincing when she struggles to put on a brave face while facing gruelling manual labour on the farm, and pining for her new baby who she barely sees from one week to the next and is cared for by her parents-in-law. The pain of the scarcity of letters and news from her husband Frank, Chanelle Bernard, is something Edith struggles to hide from those around her, who are all juggling their own strung out emotions.

As a debut show from Hotel Echo, Wild Men is a strong example of our younger theatre makers embracing and marking important historical events, and not being afraid to take bold steps while doing so. The play was inspired by a plaque in the corner of Bristol Cathedral commemorating the choristers who fought in the war, and Wild Men is a fitting tribute to their bravery.

Wild Men is performed at Bristol Old Vic until July 28, before touring in Scotland. For more information or to buy tickets, please click here. 

'London Road: A Musical' - Bristol Old Vic

Photo: Graham Burke

When it opened at London’s National Theatre in 2011, London Road: A Musical was met with rapturous reviews, critical acclaim and a sold-out run. So quite what happened in transition to Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre I’m not sure.

Directed by Nicholas Bone, London Road is a brave attempt to combine verbatim theatre with musical theatre to retell the true story of a series of brutal murders using the speech and inflections of those who were there.

Verbatim theatre uses exactly the same words as were spoken by a person as part of the performance – so in this case, Alecky Blythe interviewed the real-life residents of Ipswich’s London Road to gain their perspectives of the notorious killings of five local sex workers in 2006. Complete with repetitions, fillers, malapropisms and unfinished sentences, those interviews are repeated here on the stage by actors. And following the natural rhythm of the Ipswich accent, composer Adam Cork has set this to music, performed by a live band.

It just doesn’t work. The actual narrative of London Road and the stories of those affected by the murders becomes secondary to the self-conscious and all-consuming performance style of tedious repetition and overly intrusive live music. With one or two lines repeated over and over during a three or four minute song, it takes a very long time for the narrative to move forwards, and essentially very little happens in what should have been a fascinating story.

The effects on neighbours of living next door to serial killer should be gripping. The paranoia, the suspicion, the change of habits, the curtain twitching, the press intrusion, the propulsion onto the nation’s TV screens… But this production of London Road allows none of this.

With a cast of 12 actors playing 66 characters, there is no empathy or development for any character, meaning there’s no room for the audience to build a connection of identification with any one person. So it is impossible to single out any one actor for their performance. Couple this with the patronising portrayal of these characters – who, let’s not forget, are real people. The murders happened in 2006, meaning this is recent history. So why the inhabitants of London Road are dressed like stereotyped characters from a 1970s sitcom set in a community centre I do not know. Why are they dressed in socks and Birkenstocks? Why are the men wearing zip-up cardigans? Why does their furniture look like it was found on a skip in the 1970s? This is patronising and it is not realistic.

Unfortunately London Road: A Musical does not sit comfortably. What could have been a fascinating and imaginative narrative, putting a new spin on existing genres, ended up as a frustrating and tedious performance that fell short of the mark.

For more information or to buy tickets, please click here.