this month's
Ink Pellet contains
A Final Haunt
After 33 extraordinary years, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black will haunt the stage of the Fortune Theatre for the final time, as the production ends in the West End on Saturday 4th March 2023. PW Productions announce that after 33 extraordinary years in London’s West End, the theatrical sensation that is Susan Hill’s THE […]
Reaching for the Moon
Susan Elkin paid a visit to Half Moon theatre in London’s East End to chat with CEO Chris Elwell about their extensive education outreach and innovative theatre programmes. Half Moon Theatre sits in the heart of Limehouse in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, spitting distance from the DLR and mainline station. Formerly a pretty […]
National Youth Theatre Rep Company
The National Youth Theatre’s Rep Company is celebrating its first ten years and Susan Elkin paid a visit to learn more. Each year a group of fifteen or so talented NYT members, aged 18 to 25, are selected by audition to join this company. In just a few months they rehearse three shows, many of […]
Apprenticeships
An important and often overlooked route into the industry, especially for many non-performing roles. Susan Elkin has some suggestions. Theatre is like an iceberg. For every role on stage there are probably at least half a dozen technicians you can’t see. And the industry has been telling us for decades that there are skills shortages […]
School Shows
Never underestimate the power of a school production – for every single person involved. When you meet former students, sometimes from decades back in my case, it’s usually taking part in Oliver! or A Midsummer Night’s Dream that they reminisce about with shining eyes. Most importantly it’s a terrific bonding exercise. We hear a lot […]
New Perspectives
With three separate Lucian Freud exhibitions currently on, Graham Hooper took time to visit and here is his review of these contrasting shows. LLucian Freud would have been 100 this year, and that’s a good excuse to look back over his life and work, but especially his work, as the two have a rather nasty […]
Grandad Anansi – Half Moon Theatre
Predicated partly on Black History Month, Elayne Ogbeta’s muliti-layered play presents Grandad (Marcus Hercules) and his primary school age granddaughter, Abi (Jazmine Wilkinson) in his garden. Like everything else in this show, the garden designed by Sorcha Corcoran, is beautiful with lots of colour, light and plants that Grandad knows by name and talks to. […]
Theatre Review – The King of Nothing – Little Angel Theatre
Ben Glasstone’s charming, witty account of The Emperor Who Has No Clothes works well for two main reasons. First it is one of the most perceptive stories ever written, dealing as it does with vanity, self delusion, conformity and truth. It’s both topical and timeless. Second, we have a cost of living crisis and the […]
Book Review – Activist
by Louisa Reid Published by Guppy Books Cassandra, narrator of this powerful verse novel, is a reluctant sixth former in a prestigious mixed school, formerly all boys, where toxic culture simmers. Driven by her own experience, and by nature a feisty “shouter” she campaigns forcibly for acknowledgement that some of the boys at school treat […]
Book Review – A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers: Reorienting Classroom Literacy Practice
by Maya Pindyck and Ruth Vinz, with Diana Liu and Ashlynn Wittchow The thrust of this detailed, well-researched, quite academic book about the poetry in classrooms is that we shouldn’t teach students to search for meaning so that “the poem becomes a specimen for examination under the microscope of interpretative practices”. Instead we should experience […]
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The Birmingham Stage Comapany, one of the world’s leading producers of theatre for children, is celebrating its 25th anniversary and Susan Elkin met up with its founder Neal Foster We meet in his theatreland London office, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus and not much further from the Garrick Theatre where Gangsta Granny is to […]
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Susan Elkin participated in a panel discussion on the current state of education, focussing on the detriment to learning caused by the paucity of arts subjects in the curriculum. 1968 was the year I started teaching. My e-book memoir Please Miss We’re Boys, details it amusingly – I hope. By some mysterious coincidental synergy, I was […]
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Sometimes great ideas spring from the unlikeliest of places. In 1974, an actual chicken shed on the very limits of North London was the venue for one of the first inclusive theatre companies in the UK. Mark Glover uncovers the routes of the Chickenshed. Susan Jamson, Chickenshed’s Press and PR Manager, has been with the […]
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The NT Connections Festival celebrated its 21st Anniversary with a record number of participating groups. Susan Elkin looks at this year’s final performers. Our play is preferred” shouts Bottom gleefully to Peter Quince and the other rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he hears that that they’ve been picked to perform at the Theseus’s three […]
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In the last issue of Ink Pellet, Mark Glover, reviewed Lucy Kerbel’s book All Change Please, a rally cry to achieving greater equality in the theatre. The book focused, in part on the influence of young people, and the impact they can make. Here, he delves into the work of the National Youth Theatre, to […]
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GRAHAM HOOPER takes in the Cornelia Parker exhibition, combining visual and verbal allusions that trigger cultural metaphors and personal associations.
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SUSAN ELKIN visited Rose Bruford College to view first-hand the excellent classes offered to young people. Rose Bruford College is an unusual drama school. Operating without a city centre presence, it is tucked away in a quietly rural and very beautiful corner of Sidcup in the grounds of the old house (complete with lake!) which […]
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THEATRE Review: Forty Years On Alan Bennett’s first play is set in a traditional boys’ school in 1968 – forty years after the end of the Great War which the retiring change-resenting headmaster (Richard Wilson) remembers very clearly. Bennett explores the tension between that and the changes about to be introduced by the incoming head (Alan […]
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Less well known in schools maybe than Educating Rita which visits the same territory, Willy Russell’s immaculately, tenderly observed portrait of a frustrated (in every sense) 1970s Liverpool housewife is as moving as it is hilarious. And the observation of women’s experience is so acutely observed that it’s hard to believe that this is the work of […]
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Having dropped in on rehearsals prior to the tour (IP114, Feb/March), I was intrigued to see the production in full and see how the show had evolved from its Regents Park open-air run last year. Although the stage production perhaps lacked the ‘jungle’ feel offered by the open-air surroundings, this touring production more than made […]