Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: Bumper Summer Edition! What's On Jul 30-Sep 2: Part I
Apphia Campbell and Woke! (Review). Plus Shakespeare's Sonnets, space aliens and a crime against disco.
The discovery of an unexploded Second World War bomb threatened to scupper my trip to Hull to see Apphia Campbell and Meredith Yarborough’s Woke! at Hull Truck Theatre. It was a big one, and closed the M18 near Goole for several hours before it was defused by an Army disposal team.
This is Europe — these things happen. The continent is full of ageing ordnance. I got to the theatre with 20 minutes to spare — not bad, but I could have done without the additional stress of travelling the obscure byways of Abolitionist MP William Wilberforce’s constituency on my longest drive since before lockdown.
What motivated me was curiosity. With a title like Woke! this time-shifting solo drama, set partly during the 1970s and partly during the 2014 Ferguson Riots, could have gone two ways — an irony-free journey into a certain type of political consciousness or something more distanced and critical. I was looking for insights. I wanted to know which it would be.
It was the former. Apphia Campbell wrote her play from inside the movement, so I got to learn a lot about bad law-enforcement practice in the poorer parts of the predominantly black city of Ferguson, Missouri. This is seen through the eyes of Ambrosia, a middle-class student who is not from the former slave state, and who doesn’t understand what she’s getting herself into until she’s earned herself a preposterous set of police fines for doing nothing much at all.
I learnt less about the Black Panthers, whose history during the 1960s-1980s Campbell might just as well have stitched together from Wikipedia quotes. That’s fine — the black liberation movement is a huge subject for one short play. But — and to the detriment of the piece — her portrayal of Assata Shakur, the real-life activist (some would say ‘terrorist’) was disingenuous. Shakur — who to this day lives on the run, following a jail-break, in Cuba — was (is) a tough figure. She may not have done a fraction of what the police, encouraged by Edgar Hoover’s FBI, charged her with — the piece is powerfully scathing about this — but she led the Harlem, New York, chapter and ran Black Panther welfare programmes. Then she joined the Black Liberation Army which carried out violent and illegal actions in the name of liberation struggle.
Raised partly in the still-segregated South by her grandmother following her parents' divorce, and partly by an already radicalised aunt, she was aggressively feminist too. Campbell’s portrayal made her at times difficult to distinguish from the naive (and fictional) Ambrosia of four decades later, who meekly follows the boy she fancies into a dispute she doesn’t comprehend.
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them,” Shakur says at one point. It’s a real quote, levered into the script, and its ideological power skates over the fact that it isn’t true. (I’ve been to the Slave Museum in Hull Old Town. I’ve seen the protest sugar bowls. The whole point of studying history is to explore the complex interplay of many different factors, of which a kind of moral exhaustion in the face of the indefensible certainly is one.)
For all that, it was a good play, with some boxes and a Bakelite telephone standing in for 1970s America. It was a polemical piece that achieved what it set out to do for the faithful, and had part (but no means all) of the audience rising to its feet at the end.
What’s On: Summer Edition
First, an apology to Lempen Puppet Theatre, whose Flotsam & Jetsam images disappeared into my spam filter so I didn’t use them last week. This Skipton-based company run the quirky Skipton Puppet Festival, which according to their — to me — incredibly confusing website (sort it out, people, please!) has two remaining weekends to run (Aug 7 & 8 and Sep 11 & 12). But you’ll have to dash because the Lempen show is TONIGHT (Thursday) at Helmsley Arts Centre.
And now I will pull my left-brain into gear with a week-by-week breakdown of August’s theatrical highlights. Settle down and make a cup of tea. This is going to be a long one:
Jul 30-Aug 5
At a different scale entirely from the Skipton Puppet Festival, Pam Gem’s Piaf at Leeds Playhouse is a full-cast musical production telling the story of the Little Sparrow who rose from the streets of Paris to global fame. Olivier Award-winning actress Jenna Russell stars in the title role. To Aug 7, £14-£32.
The Carriageworks has The Adventures Of Bo Peep, a delightful sensory show for pre-schoolers with woolly puppets and original music. Aug 4, £13.20
Just north of Leeds, Harewood House hosts two outdoor shows. Heartbreak’s Mr Stink is an adaptation of David Walliams’s best-selling children’s book (Jul 30, £13.50-£16.50). And Illyria Theatre present a musical show based on Hugh Lofting’s The Further Adventures Of Doctor Dolittle. Aug 3, £10-£16.
And online, the 10th Bronte Festival Of Women’s Writing, which is presented out of the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, continues to Aug 1 with webinars, workshops and LipService’s ingenious Zoom drama Chateau Ghoul. Jul 30, £15
Meanwhile, Four Quartets starring Ralph Fiennes continues at York Theatre Royal until Jul 31, with good ticket availability for Friday night (£34). And across town, at the beautiful Bar Convent, York Shakespeare Project are hosting Sonnets At The Bar in the garden. Margaret Clitherow’s Hand — a gruesome but venerated Tudor relic kept at the Convent — is not, you will be relieved to hear, scheduled to make an appearance. Jul 30-Aug 7, £9.
Also open, and with a packed summer programme, is York’s historic small venue the Joseph Rowntree Theatre. Shows this week include a concert performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, Jul 30 & 31, £8-£13, and Naxolone Theatre’s intriguing new lockdown comedy The Local Authority — which is set at a chaotic local council emergency budget-cutting meeting. Aug 5-7, £12.
Out towards Malton, at Ryedale Vineyards (the most northerly commercial vineyard in Britain), Folksy Theatre present Shakespeare’s mysterious late drama The Tempest. In a local foodie touch, pork pie with mushy peas is available by pre-order! Aug 5, £12 & £15, also at Victoria Hall, Settle, Aug 12, £12 & £15
Chapterhouse are at Pickering Castle with A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the same evening. Aug 5, £11-£18.
And the youthful Handlebards, who travel the country by bicycle, present a Covid-deranged comedy Macbeth up at Settle on Aug 1, £10-£19, also at Bolton Castle in Wensleydale. Aug 5, and Kiplin Hall, Richmond, Aug 6, both £0-£18
Turning to South Yorkshire: Only Lucky Dogs Theatre, in residence at the Makerspace, Portland Works, in Sheffield, present Gary Owens’ seminal play Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco, which was originally developed by Paines Plough and Welsh new-writing development agency Sgript Cymru in 2001. This small-town story of masculinity in crisis is presented both live and streamed, with dark content that isn’t suitable for under-16s. Definitely this week’s Star Choice. To Jul 31, £4
Finally, in Hull, Dragons & Mythical Beasts is on at the New Theatre. It’s by the same people who created Dinosaur World Live, but this time the beasts and monsters depicted by the giant puppets live not in pre-history but on that fascinating line between reality and imagination. Jul 30-Aug 1, £12.50-£14, full capacity performance
Booking Ahead:
Aug 6-12
The big opening this week is York Theatre Royal’s Around The World In 80 Days. From the Mystery Plays to The Railway Children (created when the theatre was closed for renovations in 2008) this venue has a history of imaginative stagings at alternative sites around the city which has served it well during the pandemic.
The circus-based show adapted from Jules Verne’s adventure story for children is directed by Juliet Forster and travels to four different playing fields over the school holidays for outdoor performance: Carr Junior School (6-8 Aug), Copmanthorpe Primary School (10-12 Aug), Archbishop Holgate’s School (14-16 Aug) and Joseph Rowntree School (18-21 Aug). It ends the tour indoors at York Theatre Royal (25-28 Aug), £15 & £20
This week Sheffield’s experimental Third Angel company re-enter the public area with their science-based show 600 People written and performed by Alexander Kelly, inspired by conversations, and in collaboration, with astrophysicist Dr Simon Goodwin. All the really big questions are there — from Femi’s Paradox to murderous dolphins… It’s being performed as part of the Newcastle Fringe (Jul 27-Aug 7) but can be livestreamed. Aug 6, pay what you can, adv booking essential
Here’s a promise: Nothing theatre-based which happens in Yorkshire is potentially beneath or outside my critical attention. Theatre practitioners can be as partial, as blinkered and as silo-ed as members of any other discipline, and it’s my ambition to break down those information barriers with as wide a weekly survey as possible. It’s great that I can juxtapose Third Angel’s reputation for radical work with — The All England Theatre Festival Final 2021.
This six-month long competition for one-act plays “provides an opportunity for amateur groups across England to benefit from both the fellowship of competition and the analysis of their performance by professional drama adjudicators.”
The afternoon session features the Progressive Players, with The Signalman by Charles Dickens adapted by Matthew Harper; and Total Arts Community Theatre with Five Kinds Of Silence by Shelagh Stephenson. The evening session sees Ilminster Entertainments Society perform Tone Clusters by Joyce Carol Oates; and Maidenhead Drama Guild, winners of the Eastern Area perform Blood On Canvas by Richard James.
Whether or not the competition format serves an artform well is an argument for another time. (Marxist comedian and dance enthusiast Alexie Sayle has some surprisingly trenchant views on this subject.) But they are all cracking plays by respected writers, and the participants are regional winners. So I think we’re looking at a day’s solid entertainment at Bridlington Spa. Aug 7, £8 per session.
More good value is to be found at Slung Low’s Paddington Day: The Story Of A Bear in Holbeck. How I loved Paddington as a child. He’s not so much a hero as a role model. Even today you will find me, when some piece of hypocritical grown-up nonsense intervenes, perfecting my Hard Stare. This family day is presented in association with the British Library and includes children’s theatre company Wrongsemble presenting the Lost Property Library, inspired by Paddington’s arrival to London and storyteller Richard O’Neill imagining what would happen if Paddington came to Leeds. Aug 7, free (adv booking required)
Other honorable mentions for those desperate to entertain their children go to:
The Snail And The Whale, Tall Stories’ adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s picture book at The Carriageworks, Leeds. Aug 7 & 8, £12.10-£14.30
Goldilocks And The Three Bears presented by Doncaster-based Talegate Theatre Productions at Parkway Beverley, Aug 10, free, Pocklington Arts Centre. Aug 12, £7.50 & £10
Fireman Sam Saves The Circus — a frenetic and upbeat show with a hefty price tag. But don’t the kids just love their TV tie-ins… CAST, Doncaster, Aug 12, £16.50 & £17.50
And finally (because the Bumper Summer Edition, like Shakespeare’s Henry IV, will be delivered in two Parts) here is an outdoor theatre round-up for Aug 6-12:
Heartbreak Productions present The Great Gatsby, an adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel which sees bond salesman narrator Nick Carraway usefully reimagined as a band leader, at Middlesbrough Town Hall Courtyard. Aug 6, £16
Quantum Theatre are doing another version of the Dream (cf Chapterhouse) in the stunning setting of Bolton Castle, near Leyburn. Aug 8, £8 & £12.50
Illyria Theatre have enormous fun with Gilbert & Sullivan’s naval romp HMS Pinafore at Harewood House on Aug 10, £10 & £16.
And the Three Inch Fools return to Middleton Lodge Estate near Richmond with a musical version of Robin Hood. Aug 12, £11-£18.
I’m nearing my Substack word limit now. So that’s all for Part I. See you soon (or maybe tomorrow — I’m knackered) with Part II.
Liz x
Giving Yorkshire arts and culture a Paddington bear hard (but principled) stare is indeed this newsletters unique and distinctive selling point... :-)