this month's
Ink Pellet contains
A Final Haunt
After 33 extraordinary years, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black will haunt the stage of the Fortune Theatre for the final time, as the production ends in the West End on Saturday 4th March 2023. PW Productions announce that after 33 extraordinary years in London’s West End, the theatrical sensation that is Susan Hill’s THE […]
Reaching for the Moon
Susan Elkin paid a visit to Half Moon theatre in London’s East End to chat with CEO Chris Elwell about their extensive education outreach and innovative theatre programmes. Half Moon Theatre sits in the heart of Limehouse in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, spitting distance from the DLR and mainline station. Formerly a pretty […]
National Youth Theatre Rep Company
The National Youth Theatre’s Rep Company is celebrating its first ten years and Susan Elkin paid a visit to learn more. Each year a group of fifteen or so talented NYT members, aged 18 to 25, are selected by audition to join this company. In just a few months they rehearse three shows, many of […]
Apprenticeships
An important and often overlooked route into the industry, especially for many non-performing roles. Susan Elkin has some suggestions. Theatre is like an iceberg. For every role on stage there are probably at least half a dozen technicians you can’t see. And the industry has been telling us for decades that there are skills shortages […]
School Shows
Never underestimate the power of a school production – for every single person involved. When you meet former students, sometimes from decades back in my case, it’s usually taking part in Oliver! or A Midsummer Night’s Dream that they reminisce about with shining eyes. Most importantly it’s a terrific bonding exercise. We hear a lot […]
New Perspectives
With three separate Lucian Freud exhibitions currently on, Graham Hooper took time to visit and here is his review of these contrasting shows. LLucian Freud would have been 100 this year, and that’s a good excuse to look back over his life and work, but especially his work, as the two have a rather nasty […]
Grandad Anansi – Half Moon Theatre
Predicated partly on Black History Month, Elayne Ogbeta’s muliti-layered play presents Grandad (Marcus Hercules) and his primary school age granddaughter, Abi (Jazmine Wilkinson) in his garden. Like everything else in this show, the garden designed by Sorcha Corcoran, is beautiful with lots of colour, light and plants that Grandad knows by name and talks to. […]
Theatre Review – The King of Nothing – Little Angel Theatre
Ben Glasstone’s charming, witty account of The Emperor Who Has No Clothes works well for two main reasons. First it is one of the most perceptive stories ever written, dealing as it does with vanity, self delusion, conformity and truth. It’s both topical and timeless. Second, we have a cost of living crisis and the […]
Book Review – Activist
by Louisa Reid Published by Guppy Books Cassandra, narrator of this powerful verse novel, is a reluctant sixth former in a prestigious mixed school, formerly all boys, where toxic culture simmers. Driven by her own experience, and by nature a feisty “shouter” she campaigns forcibly for acknowledgement that some of the boys at school treat […]
Book Review – A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers: Reorienting Classroom Literacy Practice
by Maya Pindyck and Ruth Vinz, with Diana Liu and Ashlynn Wittchow The thrust of this detailed, well-researched, quite academic book about the poetry in classrooms is that we shouldn’t teach students to search for meaning so that “the poem becomes a specimen for examination under the microscope of interpretative practices”. Instead we should experience […]
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Isobel McArthur wrote, appears in, and co-directs Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) which is running at the Criterion Theatre in London. Susan Elkin met her. They are rehearsing in an additional understudy. And I sit at the back of the empty stalls and watch the meticulous work until there’s a short “tea break” and Isobel […]
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Chickenshed’s new spring show, The Washing Line, opens in March and explores the world of cults, through the story of Jim Jones and The People’s Temple, its ideals and aims and, ultimately, its horrific end. “We were looking for a better world. We found a nightmare” The cast includes 150 students, studying on Chickenshed’s inclusive […]
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Forty years since its inception, Susan Elkin pays a visit to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in London to find out how this successful establishment is evolving. It’s always a pleasure to visit Sylvia Young Theatre School. Its astonishingly attractive building is a light, bright, lofty former church just off Edgware Road. Complete with stained […]
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Mark Farrelly is an actor with four solo shows under his belt. He tours them continually, sometimes concurrently. Susan Elkin talks to him about his life and career to date. There is a dark depth in Mark Farrelly’s work which has struck me each of the three times I’ve seen him on stage. And it’s […]
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A dozen not-to-be missed exhibitions around the country this coming year selected by Graham Hooper. As is traditional now for me in Ink Pellet, wishing you new year’s greetings for 2022, it gives me great pleasure to bring you the best of the year ahead in art. It’s another bumper year, back to the good […]
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Susan Elkin makes a case that cultural diversity should not be at the expense of inclusivity. I live in the London Borough of Lewisham. It is, I learned recently, London’s most diverse borough. And that is one of the many things I love about it. When, five years ago, I moved back to my native borough […]
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by Traci N. Todd Published by Scribble Nina Simone was born in North Carolina and showed musical promise from babyhood, encouraged by both parents although her preacher mother did not approve of secular music. This account – which is evocatively illustrated by Christian Robinson – traces her life through classical piano lessons and the Juilliard […]
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by Ross Montgomery Illustrated by Mark Beech Published by Barrington Stoke This neat, entertaining “chapter book” for Key Stage 2 is, effectively, a commentary on The Tempest. A class of children have been working on the play with a view to performing it at a festival in Italy. They’re full of both The Tempest and […]
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by Elif Shafak Published by Viking/Penguin We’re in Cyprus – or at least thinking back to how it has been there – from the point of view of a teenager in a London school in the late 2010s. Her parents had married across the Greek/Turkish divide which led to their arrival in England. Ada’s mother […]
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It’s often forgotten that the British Library is a repository of manuscripts not just books and this enlightening exhibition (postponed from 2020 which was the 250th anniversary of his birth) shows what a surprisingly wide range of Beethoven texts are held there. The famous 9th symphony, for example, was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society of […]