Category Archives: Theatre

Arts, Broadcasting, Culture, Opera, Theatre

Fires of the Moon

MUSICAL-THEATRE

– Fires of the Moon is powerfully imagined and atmospherically shot Credit: Channel 4

This powerfully imagined and atmospheric new piece of music-theatre, with an outstanding cast of Welsh singers, is a rare creation that blends film, opera, and drama. A screening such as this rarely makes it to television.

Originally an opera commissioned by OPRA Cymru, first shown as a film at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer, Fires of the Moon (Channel 4/S4C) is not an example of an opera setting a book, but rather a free imagining of some scenes from Un Nos Ola Leuad (1961) by Caradog Prichard – a modern classic that has become familiar in translation as One Moonlit Night. It was a novel initially criticised for its unrelenting view of Welsh life but became accepted as a realistic reflection of a changing world.

Haunting and elegiac, the visual style conjures up the bleak landscapes of Wales – slate quarries, gloomy pubs, shining lakes and distant hills, with the evocative steam engine of Blaenau Ffestiniog puffing through. In the 1950s, a son Hogyn returns by train to visit his mother who, a generation ago, was confined to an asylum. But why? The story unravels from a youthful romance between Hogyn and Jini, replayed in a cinema that he watches with Jini as the usherette, and the tale pulls no punches in its depiction of an unforgiving society.

Commencing with what sounds like a deliberate homage to the music of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (and even a nod to his unfinished Third Symphony), the beautifully judged score by Gareth Glyn nourishes the narrative. Most will not know how well the Welsh text is reflected musically, except that its subtitled vocal lines sit perfectly within the framework that Glyn creates in his idiom, at once romantic and eclectic, that draws on everything from film music to Britten and Berg.

The orchestral playing by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra is vividly textured and strongly audible under conductor Iwan Teifion Davies (who is also the co-librettist with Patrick Young). The scenario by Marc Evans, though arguably lacking in contrast, allows for a choral number in the pub, a tense tea-time scene, and an intricate quartet in the car on the way to the gloom of the asylum.

Tenor Huw Ynyr is outstanding as the grown Hogyn, as is Dylan Jones as Hogyn the child, writing the story on the old typewriter as well as living it. Annes Elwy is Jini; the tormented figure of Mam is powerfully drawn by soprano Elin Pritchard. The attack by her brother and the scene of her awkward removal to the Denbigh Asylum are the most painful parts of the story.

Chris Forster directs; the black-and-white cinematography under Ben Chads is consistently excellent, and the synchronisation of the voices – always the trickiest aspect of opera with the voices shot separately for film – is pretty good.

This is an absorbing piece of music-theatre which demonstrates the distinctiveness and best of Welsh music and film-making. It also offers a way forward for transforming the medium of staged opera into compelling film.

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Arts, Books, Culture, Literature, Society, Theatre

Wokeism has lost its grip on the arts

THE ARTS

Intro: This year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned.

From the literary world to the theatre, we have seen a pushback against identity politics

FOR many arts critics’ 2025 was the year that wokeism perished. And not before time.

Everyone, of course, is entitled to hold their own opinions, with some still representing a section of the liberal bien-pensant opinion in the arts that believes wokery to be a commendable necessity rather than an outdated and invidious ideology. Julian Clary, for instance, when interviewed recently, made his customary and screamingly inappropriate remarks that easily surpassed any definition of satire.

Nonetheless, this year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned. Unsurprisingly, it was swiftly discovered that the emperor had no clothes.

The publishing industry has been the most striking example of the upturned order. Around 2020, there was a clear edict that the profession had been taken over by white middle-class gatekeepers, and that this had to change in the interests of social justice.

If you stood against this – on the grounds that a bad book was a bad book, no matter what the skin colour, sexual orientation, or social background of its author – you were accused of being “elitist” and your career was promptly curtailed.

Scapegoats were routinely found, most egregiously the teacher and poet Kate Clanchy, who was the victim of little less than a witch hunt. Her apparent crime was that of “cultural appropriation”. Clanchy was driven to near-suicidal despair, and her publisher Pan Macmillan took ostentatious delight and glee in washing their hands of her.

Five years later, Clanchy has received a long overdue apology from Pan Macmillan for the reputational damage she suffered; the publisher stated that the hounding represented “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past”. A sympathetic and thorough BBC Radio 4 documentary, Anatomy of a Cancellation, examined the controversy afresh, interviewing those involved from all sides. Few would doubt that Clanchy emerged vindicated.

There have been other indications, too, that the wind is shifting. The Booker Prize for 2025 went to David Szalay’s Flesh, an unsparing account of the sexual and social coming-of-age of a taciturn young Hungarian man.

Szalay, the Stowe and Oxford-educated novelist of some standing, is a heterosexual white man – a category of people who are no longer supposed either to write or read novels – who has written a good book, rather than some piece of woke agitprop. There is every chance that it will endure far beyond flashier, less accomplished fiction.

So, too, should Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s stunning debut Shibboleth, one of the funniest and wisest satirical narratives available on the hopeless state of contemporary academia.

Away from publishing, the National Theatre remains in thrall to modishness under its artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, but the visionary regime of the RSC’s Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey has demonstrated that classical theatre done well, with great actors, is what audiences really want to see. The arts world will be hopeful that the incoming artistic director of the Old Vic, Rupert Goold, will bring similar rigour to the South Bank next year.

Opera and classical music are following the lead, prizing clarity and intelligence above trendiness. Vanity Fair declared approvingly in recent times that “the opera is having a woke renaissance”. How things change. “Misguided wokeism” has been criticised as being the philistine impulse on part of the small-minded who believe that amateurism, with the “right” motivations, was somehow more impressive than non-ideological professionalism. Most people should agree.

The battle for good sense is not yet won, and we should be mindful of this. There are arts apparatchiks with their vested interests, wielding their pronouns and non-binary statuses like weapons of war, who will fight what they see as anti-progress for their entire lives. Yet others, who have been tired and fed up with tokenism and the oppressive rise of being told what to think – or else – may breathe a natural sigh of relief.

Most of us should be happy to end 2025 by seeing those who embrace wokeism with the same élan as they did previously [as being] behind us in time-honoured fashion.

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Arts, Books, Theatre

Book Review: The Birth Of Modern Theatre

REVIEW

Intro: 200 years ago, theatre audiences were so rowdy and menacing that bouncers were needed to keep the peace. Actors lived in fear of being pelted with fruit, and much more. That would have been real stage fright

. Read/Listen in PDF Format Book Review: The Birth Of Modern Theatre

A NIGHT out at the theatre in the 18th century was extraordinarily immersive – that’s to say, audience participation was taken to terrifying lengths.

It was a common scene for riots to break out in the stalls, with the destruction of lighting fixtures, benches and canvas scenery. Gents were forever swarming on stage, with swords drawn, to join in the action. If patrons didn’t like a performance, they were known to stand up and bellow: “This will not do!”

Once, when a magician’s act was particularly poor, the audience were so enraged they dragged the theatre’s furnishings into the street, hoisted the velvet curtains on a pole “as a kind of flag” and started a bonfire.

Such behaviour was normal. In 1755, after war had broken out between France and England, the audience decided that the dancers at Drury Lane theatre were “disguised French soldiers”. Not only that, “all foreigners are Frenchmen”, including the Swiss and Italians.

It was then remembered that David Garrick’s ancestors were Huguenots, which made the famous actor-manager French, though he was born in Hereford and raised in Lichfield.

The audience raced to his house in Southampton Street and smashed his windows. In retaliation, Garrick cancelled all concessionary tickets. They returned and smashed his windows again.

 

EVEN if they remained seated, patrons pelted each other with oranges and apple cores. When a barrel fell of the edge of the balcony and hit a lady in the stalls, “her huge fashionable headdress saved her from injury”.

Dr Johnson, accompanied to the theatre by friend and biographer James Boswell, was so cross when he was hit by flying fruit that he picked up his assailant and threw him into the orchestra pit.

Given such mayhem, it’s a wonder anybody attended to the plays, but theatres employed “hush men” to calm people down and encourage them to enjoy the acting – which generally they did. During Garrick’s career, Romeo and Juliet was performed 141 times and The Beggar’s Opera 128 times.

As Norman S. Poser says in the fascinating The Birth Of Modern Theatre, out of a metropolitan population of around 700,000, more than 12,000 people a week regularly attended Drury Lane and Covent Garden, where seat prices started at a shilling.

The theatre was also a significant employer, as in addition to actors and dancers there were ticket collectors, stage managers, prop men, bill stickers, scene painters and janitors.

It was only at the theatre that the social classes mixed at all, from the Royal Family, who attended 11 times in 1760, down to servants and labourers. Daily newspapers, which began flourishing in this Georgian period, carried reviews and gossip. Actors became celebrities whose careers were discussed in London coffee houses.

Garrick, very much the hero in Poser’s narrative, was the Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh of his era. Acting and living had become the same thing to him.

Described as being “open without frankness, polite without refinement, and sociable without friends”, Garrick was a great enigma, and dominated his profession for three decades.

In 1737, he’d walked from the Midlands to London with Dr Johnson, who later had to stop himself from paying visits backstage. “I’ll come no more behind your scenes,” he told Garrick. “The silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.”

Though in make-up and on-stage, Garrick was “alert and alive in every muscle” – and watching him as Richard III was generally said to be “like lightning passing through one’s frame” – off-stage, out of costume, the star was a bit plump and nondescript, short and squat.

Peg Woffington, Garrick’s Cordelia and Ophelia, rebuffed him adroitly after a brief affair by saying, “I desire you always to be my lover upon the stage, and my friend off of it.”

In 1749, undaunted, Garrick married the illegitimate but beloved daughter of the Earl of Burlington, who provided a useful dowry of £6,000 (or £1.3 million in modern currency). Thus, Garrick could purchase the Drury Lane lease and form his company. He was also the first actor in history to freely mix with the aristocracy, and he advised the Duke of Devonshire on the purchase of Old Masters.

He performed privately for George III at Windsor, as the King was fond of theatricals. Indeed, his father George II had hired an actor, James Quin, to teach his children how to speak English correctly. Elocution lessons are a thing of the past, aren’t they?

Garrick attempted many innovations. He tried to ban audience members from sitting on the stage. He studied and rehearsed roles diligently; and, expected his company to learn their lines. He wanted actresses to be more than adornments or models whose sole purpose was their “ability to dazzle the audience” with an array of elaborate costumes.

 

WHAT Garrick didn’t do was play Shakespeare as written: he preferred the edited versions, where King Lear had a happy ending and Hamlet lost the grave digger scene and the business about Yorick.

As Poser says, Garrick aspired to a style of acting noted for “ease, simplicity and genuine humour”, rather than anything bombastic and artificial. He got rid of the old-fashioned declamatory manner, where there was a lot of gesticulation, arm-waving and face-pulling to signify grief, anger, joy and despair.

Though there’s nothing realistic about the mechanical wig he wore as Hamlet, where the hair stood on end when he saw the Ghost.

After giving his Richard III he’d be in his dressing room, “panting, perspiring and lying prostrate” – acting the part of a man looking exhausted and spent. (There’s a dreadful editorial mistake here. Poser says Garrick was lying “prostate” – though what killed him in 1779 were kidney stones.)

One thing that was definitely invented in the 18th century was The Pinter Pause. Charles Macklin, who was 98 when he died in 1797, played Shylock hundreds of times, and inserted many dramatic pauses, the most impressive being known as the Grand Pause.

One night the silence grew and grew. Finally, the prompter whispered the next line. Macklin rushed into the wings, knocked the prompter down, and returned to inform the audience, “The fellow interrupted me in my Grand Pause.”

– The Birth Of Modern Theatre by Norman S. Poser is published by Routledge for £24.99, 200pp

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