That's The Way To Do It: Hull Urban Opera's Gothic Nightmare On Sky Arts
Plus: Santa Must Die!
If I pointed you towards a show that featured savage domestic violence, child abuse, police brutality, Satanic influence and cruelty towards animals you would be startled to learn it was for kids. Punch & Judy puppet shows, surrounded on all sides by ravening seagulls, and the smells of ice-cream, candifloss, tide-wrack, seafood and donkey poo, used to be a staple of the British seaside. They still are — though nowadays we’ve all read our Angela Carter and know that they should be taken seriously as a part of the resistant underbelly of popular British entertainment culture. Nowadays those traditional, candy-striped canvas booths are as likely to appear at a posh child’s birthday party, or at an inland arts festival, as in front of a salty wooden stall selling plastic buckets and spades.
I watched Punch & Judy shows unironically as a child in the 1970s and I loved them, never quite associating the old man who entered and left the booth (for some reason always known as The Professor) with the swazzle-voiced mayhem that unfolded from within. As a grown-up, in the early 1990s, I watched a political Punch & Judy show performed in York’s famous King’s Square at the northern end of the Shambles. I believe a puppet-shaped Margaret Thatcher made an appearance, was duly walloped, then walloped Punch back (or maybe it was vice versa), and a good time was had by all.
For Punch, whose origin lies in the 'commedia dell’arte' enthusiasm that swept Britain in the 16th century (did any other country adopt this Italian invention so whole-heartedly?), is at once an ordinary bloke, an anti-hero and a fiend from hell. He hits his wife because she scolds him, his baby because it cries, the policeman when he comes to arrest him and the dog when it steals a long, complicated string of sausages. When the Devil arrives we instinctively know that he’s claiming one of his own.
But it’s a hardcore Punch & Judy show that features the Devil nowadays. This glove-puppet character has gone the way of pantomime’s female Principal Boys. (The Hangman has also been phased out for similar namby-pamby reasons.) More often Punch confronts death in the shape of a Peter Pan-like crocodile. And it is this character, Crocodile, that gives us the title of Hull Urban Opera’s 10-minute digital opera.
Created during lockdown, and featuring Hull-born soprano Poppy Shotts, Leeds-based mezzo Joanna Gamble, tenor Alex Grainger from Beverley and Leeds-based bass-baritone Neil Balfour, it is based on an 1830’s Punch & Judy script which has been adapted by Lena Vercauteren and set to music by Lente Verelst. Very much for grown-ups, it is free to view on Sky Arts on Sunday 10 December 2023 at 11pm. I guarantee it will be the strangest thing you watch all week.
The Enormous Crocodile
There’s more sinister, crocodile-related fun at the terminally woke Leeds Playhouse. Hopefully, you can’t go far wrong with a Roald Dahl musical adaptation — I mean the Dahl-fiddlers have learned their lesson, surely? — and this one, which has been an inordinately long time under construction, was developed for the over-fours by Emily Lim, Ahmed Abdullahi Gallab, Suhayla El-Bushra, Tom Brady and the Roald Dahl Story Company, in association with Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. To Jan 6, £15-£23.
Santa Must Die
On a similarly unfestive note, Leeds-based Red Ladder Theatre Company has a long tradition of creating and producing socially-aware dramas aimed at working class audiences in community spaces. Santa Must Die! is a raucous punk theatre show for and about young people working in the gig economy. Made by emerging theatre collective Archepelago Arts in conversation with people who have experience of working on zero-hours contracts at Christmas, it was written by Rosie MacPherson with music by Sean Ryan and lyrics by Sean Ryan, Robin Ravi and Laurence Young. Venues include Queen’s Mill, Castleford, Dec 4, The Gate at BITMO, Dec 6, St John’s Parish Hall, Barnsley, Dec 8, The Grove Hall, South Kirkby, Dec 9, The Cluntergate Centre, Horbury, Dec 10 (tickets via the Red Ladder website, £5) and Leeds Playhouse Dec 12-16, £14.
New Ground 2023
A different sort of radicalism is on display at the Riley Theatre in Leeds this week. New Ground 2023 consists of three distinct new dance works made for and with the Northern School of Contemporary Dance's undergraduate students by international guest choreographers. Two are interesting but unsurprising choices — Amaury Lebrun has won many awards and here presents Left Unseen (2018) which he developed for the NSCD and Phoenix Dance Company; Fabio Liberti is a freelance choreographer based in Denmark and Artistic Director of independent company Muovi which he founded in 2020.
The third is Sattva Ninja, a female dancer of Vietnamese heritage who presents as a They/Them person. This choice of identity has facilitated a unique platform in the ‘voguing’ community where she combines Far Eastern influences with the dance hall style. She has worked for commercial clients including Louboutin and Mercedes Benz but also for contemporary music artists.
I know my readership skews older so it gives me great pleasure to imagine the expressions on the faces of people’s neices, nephews, and teenage grandchildren, when they casually drop into the conversation that they’ve enjoyed the live work of someone who has also choreographed for the notoriously hefty, porn-and-gangsta-influenced rap artist Meghan Thee Stallion. Dec 5-8, £8 & £12
Rapunzel
Meanwhile, up in the Yorkshire Dales, there’s Richmond. Not the wealthy Richmond in London but nonetheless a prosperous farming community that has always been one of the safest Conservative Parliamentary seats in the country. Richmond’s other claim to fame is the Georgian Theatre, a rare 18th-century performance space that has survived almost unchanged and which is one of the four oldest theatres in the country. It is Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s local venue, as he is is the Conservative MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, and he attends performances there most years with his family.
In a nod to less decorous audience behaviour in former times, the theatre regularly appeals to local crafters to produce knitted objects that might safely be thrown at the villain. The theme of this year’s pantomime, in view of the witch’s allotment patch, is ‘vegetables’. Georgian Theatre, Dec 6-Jan 7, £14-£21
Robin Hood: The Rock’n’Roll Panto
The Rock’n’Roll Panto at Leeds’ City Varieties music hall is turning into an established tradition. Written by Pete Rowe, it owes much to gig theatre as a triple-threat cast pick up their instruments to perform rock anthems and chart toppers as they tell the classic Robin Hood story. Don’t worry, all the other pantomime elements — from audience participation to corny dad jokes - are still there. To Jan 7, £22.50-£35
A Tale Of Two Selbys
Selby is a market town in the Vale Of York. I know because I live on the edge of what used to be known as Selby District but which has recently been absorbed into North Yorkshire County Council (to the great confusion of all as we don’t know where our services are coming from any more).
Selby is ancient. Whenever anyone digs a hole in the town centre they uncover something important-looking, stare at it for a while, and then fill it all back in again as quickly as possible. (We had a Roman signal station for a few years until the Council reburied it.) Nevertheless, the town has a number of old — and okay, semi-bogus — traditions not entirely unrooted in its history. For the past two decades comedian and jobbing actor Tim Fitzhigham has performed sterling service as the town’s Pittancer, a role that dates from the Middle Ages. His yearly duties are not onerous but involve inspecting the drains of Selby Abbey, and also gifting the monks with eggs and cheese. (It doesn’t matter that all the real monks were abolished during Henry VIII’s Reformation, the food ends up with a local good cause.)
Tim’s eccentric love affair with the town has deepened on the discovery that there is more than one Selby. The other is in Ontario, Canada. Thanks to his efforts, and generous funding from English Heritage, the British Council and Canada Council For The Arts, the two are now Twinned. A Tale Of Two Selbys celebrates the connection with a live link-up between Tim at Selby Town Hall and his opposite number, America’s Got Talent contestant John Hastings, in the New World. I just hope no-one tells them about the third Selby in South Dakota. Selby Town Hall, Dec 8, £4.
Hauntings
Selby’s Town Hall is a converted chapel which has also spent time as a used tyre depot. Middlesbrough’s Town Hall is a vast 19th-century pile built in the French Gothic style using steel money. It has a large Crypt underneath the main auditorium which will definitely be haunted when actor Gerard Logan performs three supernatural tales from the masterful pens of EF Benson and MR James. Hauntings, Dec 7, £13.50. Ropery Hall, Barton On Humber, Jan 12, £14 & £16
Toad On The Wolds
Dishes with names like pigs-in-blankets, devils-on-horseback and toad-in-the-hole do not enhance Britain’s global culinary reputation. But they’re all very tasty and the existence of toad-in-the-hole (which consists of pork sausages hidden inside a Yorkshire pudding and presented with lots of onion gravy) gave the production team at the East Riding Theatre in Beverley, capital of the Yorkshire Wolds, the opportunity for a clever play on words.
Toad On the Wolds, written by Gordon Meredith and directed by RSC-trained television actor Richard Avery, is inspired by Kenneth Grahame’s novel Wind in the Willows. It features a road trip to the Yorkshire Wolds, a treasure hunt, booby traps, and an epic battle to beat the Weasels before the New Year’s Eve fireworks go off. Dec 6-31, £14-£24.
Robinson Crusoe And The Pirates Of The River Ouse
Berwick Kaler’s annual York pantomime is sometimes cited by critics as one of the best in the UK. He is certainly one of the most long-running Dames, having written and starred in the show that always bears his name above the title for nearly half a century. He is now 77 years old.
But pantomime, like many aspects of British culture, is full of conventions and tradition yet has very few unbreakable rules. And Berwick Kaler is something of an outlier. His Dames are colourful but never vulgar and his show depends as much upon a familiar cast (Martin Barrass, Suzy Cooper, AJ Powell, and David Leonard) bouncing off each other and responding to his ad libs and improvisations as they do on the scripts, which sometimes have quite a shaky storyline.
They’re funny though. Hysterically funny in a way that can leave you clutching your painful abdomen. And a besotted audience of loyal fans is fully onboard with all the in-jokes and local references, and adept at catching the Waggon Wheels which are traditionally hurled from the stage at every performance. Dec 9-Jan 6, £13-£58.25
White Christmas
And finally, the big one. Sheffield Theatre’s production of White Christmas, based on the Paramount film, for the Crucible has London critics slathering in anticipation. George Blagden stars as Bob, Ewen Cummins as Waverley, Sandra Marvin as Martha, Grace Mouat as Betty, Natasha Mould as Judy and Stuart Neal as Phil. The songs, of course, are by Irving Berlin. Dec 7-Jan 13, £15-£55
See you next week!
Liz x
I grew up with Krampus because Mums Austrian. We had to put polished shoes in the window and if we had been naughty we got a lump of coal. We always got sweets and oranges. 😄
Toad on the Wolds sounds great and I always thought Punch and Judy was a bit on the aggressive side for very young children but then they seem to have banned Tom and Jerry which everyone of my generation loved.