Monday morning
The day began with a panel discussion of the work of the Theatre Royal Haymarket's Masterclass programme which is run by a charity set up by the Theatre Royal which is committed to opening up this lovely building to inspire and empower young people: the talent and the audience of the future. Canadian Blayne George, who co-runs the Masterclass Trust, Alice Driver, its Creative Producer and Geoffrey Colman (Head of Acting at the Central School of Speech & Drama) who has been involved in the work of Masterclass for eleven years discussed the ways in which Masterclass has made a bridge between practitioners and those interest in theatre, whether or not they have aspirations to be performers.
There was no precedent for a commercial theatre with no state funding for this kind of work, claimed Blayne George, it has been funded by private donors. It has developed a strong relationship with SOLT and Mousetrap Theatre Projects. Its Careers Fair, first mounted in 2003, presents the whole range of theatre employment to people who may never have thought of acting and has grown too big for the Haymarket and gone on to be hosted at ENO and the Royal Opera House.
Geoff Coleman spoke of how at first participants came to see a name actor and how that has changed, with the ‘Masters' themselves rethinking why they are there and how they can pass on their knowledge and experience. Asked if he ever questioned encouraging participants and training yet more people for an overcrowded profession, he responded that with 11,000 people applying for acting courses at our drama schools each year and many more applying for theatre courses at universities, he could only point out that no one questioned people doing a degree in literature or other humanities subject which had no clear job prospects to follow it.
But Masterclass now has another strand in collaboration with the Royal British Legion. With 30 injured military personnel currently in recovery programmes, they formed the Bravo 22 Company and developed a play based on their experience. The Two Worlds of Charlie F was staged at the Haymarket last January and will tour this summer.
The Victoria & Albert Museum Theatre Collections presented the next part of the programme. Kate Dorney (Curator of Modern and Contemporary Performance) introduced a shortly to be released iPad app which offers a review of British theatre history through 100 plays staged between 1945 and 2010, created mainly from their own collections. The selection is limited to new writing and excludes classical and other revivals, adaptations and site-specific shows (because they did not have appropriate pictures) with an emphasis on plays that helped shape British theatre, controversial plays and those with social relevance. Its production had been made possible by the acquisition of 10,000 photographs taken over half a century by theatre photographer Douglas H Jeffrey.
"Played in Britain: Modern British Theatre in 100 Plays"—as Kate Dorney apologetically acknowledged, the V & A does seem to go in for long titles—presents photographs, reviews, cast lists and extracts from scripts, which will all be provided with images, usually of the first production. Where appropriate material is not available, as for instance Men Shall Weep where there is little to represent the original Unity staging, images from a recent revival are used (and I noticed in one image shown in the demonstration it is John Gielgud, not Alec Clunes, who is shown in The Lady's Not for Burning). For those who prefer a more traditional presentation, a glossy book presenting the same material will be forthcoming from Methuen Drama.
In his presentation, the Director of the Theatre and Performance Department at the V & A Geoffrey Marsh began by looking back to 1972-3, citing the opening of the Bush Theatre and the collapse of the ceiling at the Shaftesbury Theatre which closed Hair and led to the theatre owner using it as an excuse for demolition and a project to build an office block. That didn't happen, but then only three of London's theatres were legally protected. By his count the West End now had 62 stages available for performance (not theatres but stages), but though we have this greet concentration of theatres he wondered how much the public really understood about it.
He had recently been taking parties of V & A Friends on three-hour theatre tours and discovering participants, even though they might see 5-6 plays a year, did not know much about how theatre worked or understand, for instance, why it wasn't possible to insert lifts into our existing theatre buildings. He felt SOLT and the West End theatre should do more to explain itself to the public and that, while earlier parts of the conference had been looking back, we should really be looking forward at what we might like to achieve in the next five years.
In particular, Marsh was concerned at the absence of the fringe from the West End, citing Jermyn Street Theatre and the Tristan Bates Theatre as the only examples. He thought there was a need for more venues comparable with those he had found in New York, such as a former multiplex cinema that now provides 9 new stages and 6 small theatres, all close to 42nd Street. There are other theatres in central London that some would class as fringe but Marsh certainly has a point in suggesting that just 1% of the planned redevelopment of the Bush House site could easily provide a new 300-seat theatre.
The morning ended with actor and producer Marc Sinden talking about the making of a series of DVDs about individual London theatres. They are presented by his father Sir Donald Sinden and Marc is a chip off the old block; he launched into a succession of theatre stories such as when after they both appeared at the Haymarket in The School for Scandal, and the production went on a British Council tour. They were horrified when, opening in a new city, they reached the moment when the screen falls down revealing Lady Teazle. Instead of the usual roar of laughter it didn't raise a titter. They wondered what was wrong but were told it wasn't their fault, the audience didn't understand—in Yugoslavia, the scenery always falls down.
More seriously, he spoke of how his own interest in theatre history was sparked off in boyhood, of his regret that so few actors knew anything about it. Did they realise, for instance, how important it was when Gerald du Maurier in 1905 decided to turn and look at the other actor as he spoke instead of playing out front? You need to absorb the past before you can decide to do something else or as he put it "You can't forget what you didn't know."
Eventually he did get around to the DVDs, speaking of the pleasure of making them and the discoveries along the way: the beautiful, painted ceiling of the Lyceum when they lit the theatre for filming, the double thunder roll at Her Majesty's that he did not realise still existed and in contrast to the hard concrete of the National Theatre and its acoustic challenge to the actor, the joy of playing in a theatre like the Haymarket and his discovery that, though designers like Matcham and Sprague may not have realised it, all the ornate plasterwork did a job. As one acoustic expert told him, the decoration was, "breaking up the tsunami of sound". Eventually he did show a two-minute commercial for his videos, but colleague Philip Fisher has already written glowingly about the first of them.