Encompassing Geoffrey Chaucer and Michael Rosen, and taking in Ancient Greece and the shops of Oxford High Street along the way, Live Canon really impressed at the Oxford Playhouse on Friday. They performed Oxford Poets, poetry and the occasional song by men and women with some connection (however slight) to Oxford.
The initial thought of going to a poetry recital made me slightly nervous. In my mind I had images of people draped in black, a fog of cigarette smoke, maybe the odd beret and a set of bongos in the background. Live Canon are nothing like this (though I do mourn the lack of a bongo player). The three of them are young, energetic, and wonderfully engaged with each other and the poetry, and therefore with the audience.
It is an increasingly rare thing to be able to hear classic and modern poetry performed, and I am a new convert to its joys when it is done well. It does take work from the audience, but the rewards are great. Listening to poetry takes a different type of concentration, and it did take me a good ten minutes to tune my brain into the rhythms in order to understand, well, anything to be honest, but once I managed that it was a really special experience. Lines that could have seemed indecipherable on a page came to life when spoken aloud.
Massive congratulations to Live Canon for delivering a lovely performance, and managing to seamlessly move between themes of education, war, love, even existence itself, with barely a pause. I will certainly be looking out for their work in the future. Despite the lack of bongos.
[For fear that I am not obeying my terms and conditions, the original of this review is here. All of my other theatre reviews are at dailyinfo.co.uk too. I don't think there are many of you reading this that I wouldn't have directed to dailyinfo first anyway, so I can't imagine I need to worry about copywright issues. But we can pretend that this is proper, can't we?]
Thursday 18 November 2010
Sunday 14 November 2010
Journey's End - Keble College, 9-11 November
Set entirely in an officers’ dugout close to the front line towards the end of World War I, Journey’s End tells the moving story of a small group of officers as they wait to go over the top. We watch how the relationships between the men develop and shift over the course of a few days, and learn how they cope differently with the pressures of war.
The production of this play by Sinclair Productions is particularly timely, with the final performance set for Remembrance Day. And despite being a different country, a different century, and a considerably different way of fighting, the examination of the horror of war is particularly important today.
The way that themes can be applied to contemporary war is perhaps part of the reason why the play is still a GCSE set text. And this is where Sinclair Productions begin their own battle. The challenge of putting on a text read in schools is that the audience will naturally be made up of a large proportion of school children. And school children are probably the most difficult audience to please. There is much to commend in this production, with excellent set design, imaginative lighting, and decent performances, but the cast really struggled to keep the audience’s attention. The funny scenes just weren’t funny enough, whilst scenes of real poignancy fell sadly flat as the tension was broken by mistimed giggling. It is easy to blame the children for not keeping quiet, but then maybe if the diction had been a little clearer, and the connection between the cast and the audience had been a little stronger, it would have been much more difficult to become distracted.
The production of this play by Sinclair Productions is particularly timely, with the final performance set for Remembrance Day. And despite being a different country, a different century, and a considerably different way of fighting, the examination of the horror of war is particularly important today.
The way that themes can be applied to contemporary war is perhaps part of the reason why the play is still a GCSE set text. And this is where Sinclair Productions begin their own battle. The challenge of putting on a text read in schools is that the audience will naturally be made up of a large proportion of school children. And school children are probably the most difficult audience to please. There is much to commend in this production, with excellent set design, imaginative lighting, and decent performances, but the cast really struggled to keep the audience’s attention. The funny scenes just weren’t funny enough, whilst scenes of real poignancy fell sadly flat as the tension was broken by mistimed giggling. It is easy to blame the children for not keeping quiet, but then maybe if the diction had been a little clearer, and the connection between the cast and the audience had been a little stronger, it would have been much more difficult to become distracted.
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