Category Archives: Theatre

Drawing: Samantha Spiro and Simon Paisley Day in The Taming of the Shrew

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Samantha Spiro Simon Paisley Day The Taming of the Shrew

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW is Shakespeare’s most outrageous comedy. One of theatre’s great screwball double-acts with a couple hell-bent on confusing and out-witting each other. First performed in London in the 1590’s, it was farcical and probably hilarious to Elizabethans, but it’s message of ‘taming’ a woman  with a fiery personality and making her subservient to her husband does not always sit well with modern audiences.

Toby Frow’s  production for The Globe in the summer of 2012 featured double-Olivier Award-winning actress Samantha Spiro as Katherina and Simon Paisley Day as Petruchio. It Included  the ‘induction’ by the character, Christopher Sly who takes to the stage as Petruchio, so the ‘play-within-a-play’ is more a fantasy, wishful thinking rather than reality, tempering the misogynistic theme. The Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote as “both actors go at it hammer and tongs” throughout the entire play that this is a “…knockout Shrew that doesn’t go in for much psychological depth and presents Katherina’s final speech of submission without irony.”

Jane Shilling in The Telegraph describes Samantha’s Kath as “a compact, muscular spitfire whose gentlewoman’s education has evidently included self-defence classes”, as she drops her suitor to the ground on their first encounter.

I ‘drew the Shrew’ with this in mind, but never got it signed… until… as per chance, both actors were on the London stage over this Christmas period past But alas, not on the same stage. Samantha was in A CHRISTMAS CAROL at the Noel Coward and Simon in THE LORAX across the Thames at the Old Vic. Still that’s why there’s seven days and nights in a week and it took two of them to complete the mission.

Drawing: Matthew Perry in ‘The End of Longing’

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matthew-perry

Matthew Perry’s debut play as a writer, THE END OF LONGING starts its run at London’s Playhouse Theatre early next month. It marks Matthew’s first return to the West End since 2003 when he appeared in the acclaimed SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO, directed by Lindsay Posner, who returns to helm this production.

While that’s very good news for London theatre-goers, it’s not so good for fans of FRIENDS, ending speculation of getting all six cast members of the hit series together in person for next month’s reunion in the planned NBC tribute to veteran director James Burrows.

Matthew is joined on stage by Lloyd Owen, Christina Cole and Jennifer Mudge in this ‘hilarious dark comedy’ about four people searching for meaning as they enter their forties during one crazy night in an LA bar.

I managed to catch up with Matthew as he popped out for a ciggy break from rehearsals this week ahead of the 2 February opening and my siggy break to get this sketch signed.

Drawing: Dominic West, Janet McTeer and Elaine Cassidy in Les Liaisons Dangereuses

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Les Liasions Dangereuses

Two hundred years after Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ sizzling and scandalous epistolary novel LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES slipped into pre-Revolutionary France, Christopher Hamption’s lauded and awarded adaption for both stage and screen appeared, collecting an Oscar, BAFTA and an Olivier Award in the process.  It’s the tale of sex, intrigue and betrayal between two jealously-fuelled aristocrats (and ex-lovers), the Marquisede Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont use of seduction to degrade and humiliate others, in this case  the virtuous and beautiful Madame de Tourvel. Critic, Dominic Cavendish summed -up the plot in The Telegraph “The destruction of purity and innocence, the cynical pursuit of pleasure at the expense of others’ pain, vice unbounded, yet kept within the impressive mask of civilised decorum.”

A  ‘heady and intoxicating’ 30th Anniversary revival, directed by Josie Rourke is currently playing at London’s Donmar Warehouse featuring Janet McTeer, Dominic West and Elaine Cassidy in their respective leads roles.

The Independent’s veteran critic Paul Taylor wrote Dominic’s Valmont is a “seductive sociopath and erotomane who uses strategy as foreplay with a hotline between increasingly active brain and insatiable genitals” He describes Janet as  “drop-dead striking …(who)  insinuates and machinates in a  breathy, mocking manner, her eyes a-glare with sinisterly circumspection and latent with injury”, and Elaine “superbly communicates a state of growing feverish chastity.”

 

Drawing: Hangmen

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Hangmen 2

After a 12-year hiatus writing for the stage, London-born Irish playwright Martin
McDonagh returns to theatre, which he described in The Observer as the ‘worst of all artforms’. If that’s the case, he’s doing his best to mock that  statement with his latest dark comical  offering, HANGMEN, a savage satire on the justice and punishment system – ‘the grimmer side of the swinging sixties’.

Described by one reviewer as a cross between Harold Pinter’s ‘linguistic gamesmanship’ and Joe Orton’s ‘gallows humour’, it’s the Olivier, Oscar and BAFTA winner’s first play set in England, in a small pub in Oldham in 1965 to be precise. Receiving rave reviews and a cluster of five-stars after it’s sell-out run at the Royal Court earlier last year, the production transferred to the West End’s Wyndham’s Theatre and is scheduled to finish in March this year.

What’s Harry Wade, the second-best hangman in England to do on the day they’ve abolished hanging? A reporter and the regular tavern sycophants want to know his reaction, as a peculiar stranger lurks amongst them with a very different motive. Led by David Morrissey as Wade, the outstanding cast includes Andy Nyman, Johnny Flynn, Sally Rogers, Bronwyn James, Ryan Pope, Simon Rouse, Craig Parkinson, Tony Hirst, John Hodgkinson,James Dryden and Josef Davis.
With such a large  ensemble, it took more than one sketch to fit them all in and more than one attempt to get it graphed. At this point I thought of resisting the term ‘hanging around stage doors’. But I didn’t. If it’s good enough for distinguished critics like Dominic Cavendish to write “doesn’t loosen it’s grip from start to finish,” and Paul Taylor to say “drop-dead hilarious… perfectly executed,” then I’m in good company. And speaking of good company, the HANGMEN cast were excellent on and off the stage.

Hangmen

Drawing: Ben Jones as Messala in Ben Hur

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Ben Jones Ben Hur

As promised in my previous BEN HUR post I have now put the Ben into BEN HUR. As you will recall the other three members – John Hopkins, Alix Dunmore and Richard Durden signed my sketch at the North London’s Tricycle Theatre last week. I threatened to return with a sketch of the missing fourth member of the quartet who are currently enthralling sell-out audiences in Patrick Barlow’s follow-up to his West End hit adaption of THE 39 STEPS with this pocket-sized interpretation of the 50’s biblical film hit. Ben plays Messala (yes… and as one reviewer put it, the wait for the ‘Messala chicken’ line is rapidly rewarded), a pouting Roman soldier who betrays Ben Hur, among others characters including a ‘particularly nice turn as Jesus with a bad black wig’. Messala and Messiah- sounds like an ancient pop duo.

Anyway, here’s Ben on his own as Messala which he signed for me last night so that completes my BEN HUR set. Ben there, done that. Ouch.

Drawing: Geoffrey Rush in King Lear

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Geoffrey Rush

One of my favourite films is SHINE in which Geoffrey Rush won a truck-load of awards, including the Academy Award for his portrayal of pianist David Helfgott in 1997. He’s one of the few people to have collected the ‘Triple Crown of Acting’ – an Oscar, Emmy and a Tony – covering the big screen, small screen and the stage’s highest accolades. But, Geoffrey was in no rush (sorry) to take to the big screen. A ‘late bloomer’ who was 44 before embarking on his movie career. He’s has made up for it since. “I’m a stage actor, I was rolling along in theatre and having a good time. Movies was not where I was heading”.  Then his career turned a sudden corner with SHINE and, as he put it, “over indulged in cinema” and dropped out of theatre for a decade.

That all changed after a chance meeting with celebrated British director Stephen Daldry, who rekindled his theatrical roots. Having played the Fool twice in a 30 year journey with  Shakespeare’s KING LEAR, Geoffrey finally takes on the title role in the Sydney Theatre  Company’s production directed by long-time friend and collaborator Neil Armfield. It is “the greatest play in the English language, certainly Shakespeare’s greatest achievement,” Geoffrey said.

“Capturing characters whose estimation of themselves is completely out of step with reality is Rush’s metier. He does good self-delusion, particularly because he has within his Arsenal the vulnerability and anguish of someone when their delusions are punctured,” wrote Dee Jefferson in TimeOut.

I did this montage of Geoffrey expressing Lear’s pathos as the ‘wonderfully pathetic ex-King,” and mailed it to him in Australia. I noticed that there is my namesake, another ‘Mark Winter’ in the cast. Mark Leonard Winter plays Edgar, described in Dee’s four-star review as ” thrillingly on the verge… who appears to have gone mad in the process of going mad,” – a state I am familiar with, collecting signed sketches has its drawbacks. Maybe Geoffrey thought it was his fellow thespian, taking up his 4B pencil in a moment of admiration and gladly complied with the signing request, before realising that it was the ‘other’ Mark Winter. Returning it to the UK may have been a giveaway. Maybe not.

KING LEAR finishes tomorrow at the Roslyn Packer Theatre in Sydney.

Drawing: John Hopkins in Holy Warriors

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John Hopkins Holy Warriors

I am an unashamed fan of the British TV series MIDSOMER MURDERS. John Hopkins featured in 14 episodes as DS Daniel Scott, sidekick to John Nettles’ DCI Tom Barnaby. After leaving the show he returned to the stage. One of his recent theatrical appearances was in the critically acclaimed HOLY WARRIORS at Shakespeare’s Globe last year.

The David Eldridge play centres on Richard I’s Third Crusade against Saladin over the possession of Jerusalem, the medieval clash between Christianity and Islam that has lead to a direct line to the violence still engulfing the Middle East today. Richard is one of the few English Kings that is still known by his epithet – Richard the Lionheart, rather than his Regnal number. He had an ignominious ending, killed while laughing at a defender of a castle he was besieging who was using a frying pan as a makeshift shield.

John played the ‘Coeur de Lion’, receiving excellent reviews.

I drew this sketch of John as Richard, which gave me the chance to meet him last Saturday at London’s Tricycle Theatre where he is currently featuring in the hilarious spoof BEN HUR. He happily signed this drawing, while we discussed the general state of the world and… MIDSOMER MURDERS.

Drawing: Ben Forster and Kimberley Walsh in ‘Elf The Musical’

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Elf

A sense of deja vu prevailled as I waited for Ben Forster to emerge from the Dominion Theatre’s stage door after a matinee performance as Buddy in ELF THE MUSICAL. Based on the popular 2003 film. The production premiered on Broadway during the festive season of 2010-11 before it’s 2014 UK debut in Plymouth with Ben in the lead role, reprising it for the west end transfer.

One of theatre’s genuinely nice guys, Ben has been the subject of a number of my sketches. Last year I was standing in the same spot for him to emerge from another matinee, this time playing Magaldi in EVITA. The usual band of admirers were waiting, probably the same people on both occasions. After the ritual selfies with them, or in this case ‘elfie’ (sorry) Ben signed the drawing with his usual kind compliments. I asked him what he was doing next and he said “Phantom.” “The masked man himself?” I quipped  and he confirmed he will  take on the title role across town at Her Majesty’s from early February.

Playing opposite Ben as Jovie was pop star Kimberley Walsh from ‘Girl’s Aloud” fame, who was also included in my sketch. I had to return another day to get her to sign it because, as Ben explained, with a young baby she needed all the rest she can get so didn’t come out between shows. However the night returned it rained and my untrustworthy umbrella lived up to it’s status. That didn’t deter Kimberly, who signed through the drops with the spirit-based sharpie which slipped over the damp paper without a smudge.

Drawing: Janet McTeer in The Taming of the Shrew

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The Taming of the Shrew

I was very pleased to hear that Olivier and Tony Award winner Janet McTeer has returned to the London stage and is in currently appearing in LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES at the Donmar Warehouse. Not only is it a chance to see this wonderful British actress perform, but an opportunity to meet her and, naturally the possibility of having a sketch or two signed crossed my mind ( and yes, before you think it… not a long journey). This particular drawing is based on her role in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW at the Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003.  She played Petruchio, a young man, intent on taming the ‘shrew’. Blurring the fringes between genders has been a rewarding theme in Janet’s career. Her Oscar-nominated role as Hubert Page in ALBERT HOBBS is another recent example. Actually I read that after hearing of her nod for that role, she and her husband had a low-key celebration, drank some champagne, ate cheesecake and watched DOWNTON ABBEY. “It doesn’t get better than that”, she said. With that type of down-to-earth philosophy I thought she wouldn’t mind signing my sketch. I was right.