A musical spectacle
Mentioned in Despatches:
A Lesson! I was never hugely enamoured of Mr Philip Glass’s compositions, despite the persuasive blandishments of a friend who rates him highly. Last night I inadvertently took the bait of a recording of Knee Play 5 from his opera, Einstein on the Beach. I had been employing the risible practice of learning psalm chants by counting backwards and forwards – 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 etc. Knee Play 5 began with exactly that style of counting, went on to have recited poetry illuminating music , and a lovely, eccentric, hilarious, unpredictable sound collection played with utter irreverence and total discipline. It was, dear friend(s), a strangely compelling numerical epiphany.
My Glass in now half full.
The art of the angler is legend. And the appurtenances of the art are arcanely interesting. But, dear sympathiser, beware. The algorithm stalks its prey and and there is no mercy in its fearsome figures. Since I first could read, nay, enjoy pictorial images, I diligently perused catalogues from purveyors of fine fishing flies and rippingly good rods and I reeled from the promised delights conveyed in those images. I have just thrown the latest in a long line of said catalogues against the concrete block wall with enough force to dislodge most of its three handred pages. Among its three hundred odd pages five were devoted to the angle. Of those five, two dealt with clothing, from silly hats to waders and the other three to things they called combos, ready-to-fish rod, reel, line setups. Why? Account-ants use their loathsomely deceptive statistical data to compose formulae to target sales to gullible spenders – and have decided that angling with a fly is no longer profitable, Edwards is no longer worth a dedicated catalogue like the old Tisdall’s treasures, and the value of angling should be measured with an abacus. The perfidious, mendacious algorithm possesses neither art nor heart. A pox on all who use them for any purpose, and a lingering, unscratchable itch on those who pay them heed. Seeing is believing, grinds the old saw, and we believe it too often. Remember Constable? No, not the copper one, the canvas one – the painter of landscapes in which you see sheep safely grazing at a distance, and when you move in to close-up, one finds the sheep are simply woolly daubs of white paint. A white thing in a meadow should be a sheep, therefore it is, even when, in Constable’s case, it is only a speck of paint. We see all right, but it is so often what we want to see, and sometimes that is just make-believe. Art is as much about learning to see and hear as it is about providing intellectual knowledge and emotional experience. Upper echelons of artists understand the significance of absence, of suggestion rather than photograph, as much as musicians understand the effect of silence, of the absence of sound, and that understanding is essential to the viewer, or listener, seeking artistic truth. We so often forget to look consciously, to think through the eyes, that we are taken in by tricksters and miss so much in real art.
By the time you read this, the show will have finished. Do not be too concerned.
You have missed something quite extraordinary, but more will come from the superb initiative taken by Riverlea to train young thespians.
This performance is driven by the energy and leadership of the four adults listed in the credits, above, and the discipline and commitment of a group of performers in the unbelievable age range of 10 to 17.
As she did in
Aladdin Jr,
choreographer Tess Bensemann turned the musical into gripping spectacle, drawing up to 30 cast members into an integrated unit which had feet tapping and smiles breaking out alongside constant applause. An apparently simple singing dancing trio – Amelia Liedig’s Miss Hannigan, her stage brother Rooster, and his girlfriend Lily – the latter two played by the Eyeington brother and sister Paris and Jessica – was priceless.
The Hannigan character could have so easily been a spikey, play-for-laughs, OTT pastiche, but Liedig gave it a dramatic life to which adults could respond with a real emotional depth, kids with appropriate horror, and some of us with a scary sense of the familiar.
At the other end of the age spectrum, the diminutive ten year old Isabella Goff had the audience in the palm of her diminutive hand with pace, sensitivity, a true sense of the comedic, and even a singing voice to note. Director Garson drove the movement, roles, and tensions on the set with pace and narrative connectivity, and Musical Director Knapper produced some lovely harmonies in balanced and responsive choral numbers which were the perfect balance for well pitched and accurately interpreted solo singing.
The audience, from elegantly dressed fashionistas aged five or six, to grumpy in and grinning out gramps of both kinds, and more proud Mums than one could meet at a Royal christening, had a ball, and so did this writer . . .