Riptide's RESET: When Emotional Chaos Meets Immersive Theatrical Experience
Plus: News of my Second Substack and What's On Apr 5-11
I have been away… No, wait... I haven’t been away because the Passport Office didn’t send me my replacement passport in time — and then Heathrow Airport’s day of cancelled flights successfully nixed whatever alternative plans I might have made.
The last time I set out for Evian-les-Bains, a lovely French spa town on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, my father died whilst I was en route — and then I couldn’t get home because Storm Ciara closed British airspace. It was all a bit horrible even though subsequent video clips of passenger jets landing sideways in the gale made me secretly glad I’d been grounded in Switzerland for three days.
Five years on, I’d intended my holiday as rite of passage, fulfilling a promise to myself and an old school friend — who was with me on the original trip — that we would return to this tranquil place in happier times.
But once more, we experienced a nerve-jangling nightmare of reignited grief, disappointment and transport chaos.
So, I had a painful week — not lessened by the behaviour of my travel apps, some of which fell down the other trouser leg of time. It was not helpful to be informed about engineering works on French railways lines or that ‘Geneva Airport is busier than normal — please arrive early’ when, owing to the collapse of my plans, I was having lunch with family members in a local pub.
I enjoy eating lunch with my family, but I should have been in the Alps.
The lessons I take are:
my friendship with my intended travel partner has twice now been tested to the max — and survived,
the ‘complicated grief’ to do with my father’s death is less over than I thought it was.
Being a writer at heart, I had to write this wretched double-episode out of my system, which is why no edition of Yorkshire Theatre last week. But I’ve been brooding for a while about starting a second, occasional, Substack about my love of spas and the less ditzy forms of ‘wellness’.
My new Substack is called Spa Day and it’s for people who love spas. That’s it really, except I intend to bring my natural scepticism, and basic statistical literacy, to the project. This alone will put me into the elite category of wellness commentators — I had a media colleague who built a substantial following in the early days of beauty blogging merely by taking pictures of all the crappy products publicists sent her and regurgitating the press release. I have never prioritised audience-building over integrity, and I will also riff on life, the journey and other stuff whilst telling you truthfully about the spa.
I know some of you are here for the theatre, and that’s fine — my second Substack won’t interest you. But some of my readers are here for the parasocial relationship (hello!). If so, Spa Day might be for you. Sign up now so you won’t miss my first Spa Day newsletter edition, all about that ill-starred 2020 expedition to one of France’s most luxurious resorts. It’s a secret destination of the super-rich and very, very classy.
Another good fit with Spa Day is Riptide Theatre’s RESET programme. Riptide, you will recall, use immersive techniques to develop interactive experiences designed to address the pervasive malaise of Western life — hyper-individualism that results in stress and loneliness. They, too, are fans of British writer Johann Hari whose book Lost Connections explores the entirely well-established and evidenced real cause of depression. (Clue: It isn’t what the medical industrial complex tells you it is.)
RESET is a regenerative retreat designed to be completed in a place of your own choosing. It costs £50 and for that you get a package of “immersive theatre, coaching techniques, binaural guided meditations and wellness modalities, taking in ecological lessons and ideas from nature”. At the risk of, ahem, recycling the press release, I am a sucker for this sort of thing. Sign up for Spa Day and I’ll devote an edition to doing it!
Krapp’s Last Tape: Or A Hollywood Superstar Hits York
Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter isn’t an exercise in glamour. I’m too interested in how the sausage gets made, and will happily travel to watch an adventurous community show in a church hall or sit for 90 minutes on an uncomfortable bench watching a gang of unknowns deliver a quirky or illuminating play in a grubby black-box studio.
I have no news sense, as the Showbiz Features Editor of my former media employer made clear to me. Right enough, missus. And nor would I be happy writing endless puff pieces about EastEnders. (Though on the other hand, a paying job would be nice).
But sometimes I strike celebrity gold. British Hollywood star Gary Oldman started his acting career at York Theatre Royal. This spring, following in the footsteps of other world-famous actors including Charlton Heston (1988) and Linda Gray (2007), he graces the Theatre Royal stage for a full month (Apr 14-May 17). Samuel Beckett’s solo vehicle Krapp’s Last Tape isn’t a barrel of laughs but it’s considered a masterful exploration of disillusion in old age — the very stuff I watched my poor Dad so wretchedly fail to cope with. Tickets are returns only (well, of course they are) but I’ve been offered one for the end of the month. So I’m looking forward to telling you all about that.
Turning to the week ahead, springtime is officially here when outdoor touring company Mikron hits the road. Every year, at the height of summer, cast and crew travel by narrowboat through Britain’s glorious network of canals to find audiences in pub gardens and at the side of locks. During the corner seasons, Spring and Autumn, they act a bit more normal and visit indoor venues via the road system. Operation Beach Hut, a celebration of the traditional British seaside holiday, opens tonight (Apr 4) at Marsden Mechanics, then travels to Otley Courthouse, Apr 5 (both returns only), then Halifax Playhouse, Apr 7, £14 & 16, Meltham Complex, Holmfirth, Apr 10, £14 & £16 and Winsford Academy Theatre, Apr 11, (£13 & £15), family tickets also available.
Mikron travel to hundreds of increasingly bucolic, outdoor locations as the weather warms so check here to see if there’s a show near you.
He kissed my stretch marks!
When playwright Willy Russell wrote about a disaffected Liverpool housewife in 1986, the idea of scooting off without your husband to visit the sunny Mediterranean seemed very daring. Forty years later, I belong to a vast Facebook site for older women travellers. They are all too ready to shriek: “Divorce him!” the moment anyone confesses that their partner doesn’t like foreign food.
Possibly things have gone too far. Nowadays, older female sex tourism is even a thing. Not guilty — but Tom Conti, the romantic star of the 1989 British film, once left a very civil message on my answering machine.
This 2005 touring production has been slightly rewritten to reference actress Mina Anwar’s Lancastrian rather than Liverpudlian upbringing, but wisely the author has left the iconic 1980s references intact. And the message about seizing the day will never grow old. Leeds Playhouse, Apr 8-26, £15-£47.50.
Shakespeare’s Off-Day
Less successful, if the reviews are anything to go by, is Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane’s updating of Shakespeare’s early comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost. It was never one of his most popular — and for the same reason contemporary critics have given their version, Love’s Labour’s Lost (More Or Less), a lukewarm reception. A less-than-compelling plot.
Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro theorises that the play was originally written on commission to entertain privileged, young scholars at London’s Inns of Court. This would account for the clever word-play and mockery of intellectual pretension. The messy ending may have been an unsuccessful experiment with undermining narrative convention to reflect the unstable times (perhaps after the manner of Sondheim’s Into The Woods).
The Godber-Lane version relocates the action to 1990s Ibiza — cue banging club tunes etc. But the hilarious premise — that a group of young noblemen take an oath to foreswear distractions and devote themselves singlemindedly to their studies, only to have a gaggle of princesses turn up — still works beautifully today. I wish someone would go all-out and make a Clueless or 10-Things-I-Hate-About-You-style movie version, dumping the bits that never worked.
For Shakespeare completists, of whom there are many, and ‘90s Ibiza nostalgists. Stephen Joseph Theatre, to Apr 19, £10-£32.
Let The Right One In
As well as being a brilliantly creepy film, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel has also been a stage play since 2013. There’s a national tour of Jack Thorne’s adaptation scheduled for later in the year, but if you can’t wait until then, the students of Leeds Conservatoire will doubtless do a passable job for a fraction of the price. City Varieties Music Hall, Leeds, Apr 9-11, £9 & £14.
The Other Snow White
Disney’s handling of European fairy tales is less sure-footed than it used to be when the West had cultural confidence. BalletLorent’s Snow White, in the capable hands of choreographer Liv Lorent MBE, dispenses altogether with those troublesome dwarfs, replacing them with what they always symbolically represented — the labouring classes. It sounds terrible but reshaped by former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and narrated by actress Lindsay Duncan, this is a family-friendly tale of hard work and opulence, beauty and darkness. Hull New Theatre, Apr 5, £11-£24, CAST, Doncaster, May 31, £14-£27.
Includes Samosas!
And in celebration of the lovely multiculturalism we might have had, as opposed to the brain-rotted one we’ve actually got, I can’t neglect Parampara: Family Variety Show. Cute kids performing South Asian classical music and dance, with Indian savoury snacks distributed before the show. Carriageworks, Leeds, Apr 5, £10
That’s it for this week. I do hope I’ll see you on Spa Day. Don’t forget to sign up!
Liz x