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 […]
-
Kenny Wax is one of the country’s leading theatre producers with Six and The Show Goes Wrong series under his belt among many other productions. Susan Elkin meets him. Kenny Wax, 54, is a very focused man. Yes, the pandemic has made his life quite difficult, but the long gap means, he tells me, that […]
-
Exploring some of the smaller spaces offered by pub theatres, Susan Elkin suggests you keep them in mind when looking for alternative live theatre school trips. I seem to spend a lot of time in pubs. And no, it isn’t because I’m succumbing to football or alcohol dependency. It’s because there are so many flourishing pub […]
-
Composer, educator and producer, Chris Passey, 35, believes passionately in taking and making every opportunity which comes his way. Susan Elkin talks to him. Chris Passey has always written songs on piano, but it wasn’t until he sat in the audience at Sister Act in London that he was so deeply moved by the music […]
-
Featuring 48 artists working in a range of different mediums, Graham Hooper was enthralled by this collection of postwar artworks and urges you to visit. The Barbican’s latest landmark art exhibition – “Postwar Modern, New Art in Britain, 1945-1965” – is a magnificent and timely undertaking. Encompassing painting, sculpture, studio ceramics and installation, I am […]
-
Established almost 30 years ago, Frantic Assembly has launched an online subscription platform to benefit students and drama teachers. Susan Elkin investigates… When Scott Graham, then a student at Swansea University, saw Volcano Theatre Company’s early 1990s production of Christopher Hampton’s Savages the scales fell from his eyes. “I had no idea that theatre could […]
-
Susan Elkin proffers some sage advice for those exploring the options for drama training and looking for a career in the theatre. So what do you tell a talented, theatre-loving student who wants to be an actor? Traditionally parents and teachers simply dowsed her or him in cold water by observing that actors spend most […]
-
by Mark Dawson Published by Welbeck Flame Mark Dawson (who has co-written this with Allan Boroughs) lives in Southwold which is where he sets the first in his children’s adventure series. It’s clever stuff. Overtly inspired by the Famous Five the protagonists are four gloriously modern children and a feisty dog named Sherlock. Lucy is […]
-
Les Enfants Terribles is a theatre company founded by Oliver Lansley in 2002 and named after Jean Cocteau’s famous novel. Now celebrating its 20th birthday and having played worldwide from Edinburgh to Shanghai, the company has always aimed to be experimental, playful, physical and “different” as well as immersive. No one who saw (took part […]
-
We’re used to the Christopher Sergel adaptation, approved by novelist Harper Lee, which uses child actors and stresses the piece’s literary origins. Aaron Sorkin does something different. He turns the story upside down so that we start at the trial of Tom Robinson for rape, uses it as the glue that the piece keeps coming […]
-
Floella Benjamin’s memoir about arriving in England from Trinidad is effectively Small Island from a child’s point of view. David Wood has turned the book into a pacey stage piece by flipping the story on its head and adding some good songs. Benjamin’s story is linear but Wood begins with her being honoured in adult […]