Concert Review: The Light Princess in Concert (Cadogan Hall, 1 July 2018)

There are shows that you enjoy, and then there are shows that change you. An example of the latter, for me, was Samuel Adamson and Tori Amos's musical The Light Princess, which was a case of love at first sight and first hearing when I encountered it at the NT in September 2013. That love for Marianne Elliott's production only deepened across the 10 visits I made to the show - I wrote a little about why in a piece here - and it was with a heavy heart that I and many others who had connected deeply with The Light Princess bid farewell to it at the final performance in February 2014. A heavy heart - and also the sense that the musical hadn't received anything like its due from certain mainstream critics ("Saint" Lyn Gardner among them), who'd proved themselves inadequate to the task of engaging with the show's intricate, densely patterned, classically-inflected score and the highly original ways that it serves character and narrative. 

The release of the cast recording in October 2015 was a delight; still, the hope of seeing the show revived has remained. Organised by Club 11 London and Alex Parker Theatre Company, and directed by Paul Foster (Staff Director on the original production), Sunday's concert performance at Cadogan Hall went some way to fulfilling that desire. This most physical - even balletic - of musicals, with its floating heroine, requires a bold approach to movement (such as it received at the NT thanks to Steven Hoggett's startling, surreal choreography) to fully soar. But Foster's simple and unfussy concert staging - with the terrific ensemble occupying the back of the stage, the musicians, conducted by Parker, in the centre, and the leads at the front - succeeded in placing the focus firmly on the music, which sounded rich and glorious - with a chamber intensity - throughout. With so much character and narrative detail packed into the score, the show's themes of generational conflict, patriarchal tyranny and the necessity of finding your own path emerged clearly, as did the parallel arcs of its hero and heroine: she towards gravity, he towards levity, he learning the value of rebelliousness, she becoming responsible on her own terms. 

Returning to the role that she so powerfully originated, Rosalie Craig sang with all the passion, wit and sensuality of her NT performance, delivering standouts such as the yearning "My Fairy Story," the jubilant " Better Than Good," and the wrenching "No H2O" with deep feeling. Taking on the role of the Solemn Prince Digby, husband Hadley Fraser proved an unsurprisingly great sparring partner, bringing swagger to "Sealand Supremacy" and romantic spirit and sweetness to the intoxicating love duet "Althea," as well as thrillingly partnering Louis Maskell's Llewellyn on "Bitter Fate."

Gabrielle Brooks offered a winning combination of tenderness and defiance as Piper, doing well on the very complex duet pieces "Queen Material" and "The Whistleblower," and stepping forward for Craig to touch her tears on "No H2O." Trevor Dion Nicholas - the Genie of the West End's Aladdin - proved himself every inch King material with a galvanising performance as Darius that fully conveyed both the character's arrogant authority and his wounded core. As the Sergeant-at-Arms, the stylish Anna-Jane Casey took on the hilarious "Scandal" with relish; returning to her role as Falconer, Laura Pitt-Pulford maximised her "Sealand Supremacy" cameo (aka the show's "Bonnie Tyler moment"); and an on-fire David Langham tripled up spectacularly as Messers Flowers, Crabbe and Grey in the great "suitors" sequence. 

Some judicious edits set the scene and condensed the narrative so that only the omission of Darius's aria of repentance "My Little Girl's Smile" felt like a great loss. And, in a lovely surprise, the concert also restored to the score several sequences that were cut in NT previews. The addition of "Not a Fairy-tale" and Darius's death song brought the "Althea Selma Isadora Darcy" theme to completion beautifully, while tweaks to individual lines kept things fresh and interesting throughout. ("I'd rather eat my spleen" declared Althea on her great face-off with the King at the start of "Queen Material".)

With the swell and soar of the voices on the majestic finale "Coronation" "ringing out" across the hall and inspiring a standing ovation, the love for this most loving of musicals was moving to witness. What emerged afresh was the huge ambition, originality and emotional range of the show, conveyed through music that's as thrillingly diverse as it is wonderfully cohesive. The show needs - and deserves - another full production soon. Still, this heartwarming evening proved conclusively that there's more than one way of feeling Light. 

See concert photos here: https://www.club11.london/light-princess-photos/ 

CD Review: The Light Princess Original Cast Recording (Mercury Classics/Universal, 2015)

Levity Forever! In the anniversary tribute piece that I wrote about The Light Princess, I noted that it was hard to believe that a year had passed since the show opened at the National Theatre. Well, now two years have passed since The Light Princess’s great NT debut, and the Original Cast Recording of Samuel Adamson and Tori Amos’s vibrant musical fairy-tale has, at last, been released on Mercury Classics/Universal. As dedicated followers of this show know by now, good things (or - c’mon! - “better than good” things) come to those who wait, and the chance to finally own a copy of this score is joyous indeed.

The reason for the lengthy gestation of the OCR has been down to Amos’s involvement in other projects (a new album and world tour last year) and her commitment to micro-managing this release, which she’s produced with her usual team, and Adamson's close collaboration. Not for Amos the shove-the-cast-in-a-studio-and-get-it-recorded-fast tactics of most OCRs. Rather, she’s approached this recording with all the commitment, care and attention-to-detail that she’s brought to bear on her best studio albums. Boasting full lyrics, detailed plot synopsis and exquisite photos of the NT production (many being presented for the first time), the packaging of the two-CD set is stunningly beautiful. Such elements as the synopsis and the photos are also a handy addition for those experiencing the musical for the first time, without the benefit of the memories of the superb, surreal stage pictures conjured in Marianne Elliott’s terrific production.

While many of us loved the The Light Princess’s score from first encounter, and were excited to go back and experience it many (many…) times in the theatre, the music proved to be the most divisive element of the show, with a number of commentators bemoaning the score's lack of “accessibility” and absence of - gah - “memorable tunes”. Frankly, such complaints never held much weight (pun intended) for those who’d truly paid attention to the show. Instead, such remarks revealed that Amos and Adamson had co-composed a musical too sophisticated and intricate for some tastes, and painfully exposed the lack of an adequate vocabulary to really discuss and explore new musical theatre writing on the part of many British theatre critics.  

Such criticisms can now be silenced. With enhanced strings, a more central place for Katherine Rockhill’s terrific piano work, and lush production, the beauty, depths and detail of the music emerge as clearly as a bell on the OCR. Amos and her team have ensured that the score leaps off the speakers here: fresh, supple, shimmering, chamber-intense, always expressive of the characters’ personalities and emotional states, always a motor for the unfolding narrative.

The Light Princess is, indeed (and perhaps problematically so for those who prefer their musicals po-mo ironic), a score that runs on pure emotion, encompassing delicacy, stridency, playfulness, gleeful exuberance and operatic ache in order to tell what is, at its very tender heart, a coming-of-age story of an archetypal variety presented through the contrasts, parallels and pairings of its two protagonists’ worlds. What’s striking is that the show doesn’t descend to mere camp. It’s sharp, witty and cheeky, sure, but Amos and Adamson’s emotional acuity ensure that the piece never shies away from doing justice to difficult, complex feelings. The sense of emotional ebb and flow, the meaningful transitions, the refrains and variations, the exquisite melodies that may be employed only once, the stunning build of the ambitious sustained sequences “Queen Material”  and “Nothing More Than This” can be fully explored and savoured here, along with the terrific vocal performances from the cast– all of whom reprise their roles from the original production.

In performance, Rosalie Craig did so many fresh and in-the-moment things as the gravity-free heroine that to hear her performance "fixed" by a recording may seem inevitably reductive. Yet Craig's shrewd choices here mean that her Althea remains a wonderfully complex, protean creation, and her sublime delivery of  “My Fairy-Story,” “Better Than Good,” and “Darkest Hour” retains every bit of the soaring passion and bite that it had in the theatre. Craig’s is a thrilling, generous performance; one for the ages.  The brilliant Nick Hendrix sounds beautifully sweet and strong as Digby, and his duets with Craig on “Althea” and “Amphibiava” are among the funniest, sexiest, most poignant duets in any musical, period. As the controlling Kings, Hal Fowler delivers a properly scary “Proverbs” - accompanied by seismic piano crash from Rockhill –while Clive Rowe’s Darius remains one of the finest achievements in the actor’s distinguished career, his fearsome bellow at the climax of “The Whistleblower” turning, heartbreakingly, into the vulnerability of a little boy as he begins to realise the damage that his actions have wrought. 

It’s part of the project’s embracing generosity of spirit that each cast member gets their moment to shine, though: whether it’s Laura Pitt-Pulford’s contribution to the swaggering “Sealand Supremacy” (what I think of as the show’s “Bonnie Tyler moment”), Amy Booth-Steel’s Piper fiercely challenging Darius on “The Whistleblower”, Malinda Parris’s sensational, hilarious “Scandal”, or Kane Oliver Parry, as Llewelyn, harmonising exhilaratingly with Hendrix on “Bitter Fate”.  

There are, inevitably, some losses to "just" listening to the show: the series of four “Hellos” that invariably brought the house down at the coda are absent here, for one. Still, the show’s themes emerge with perfect clarity: the seductions of escapism; the balance required in human affairs; the challenges of two teens dealing with maternal loss and paternal legacy. “I’m a d’Arcy/Heartless brutes that’s what we are,” cries Althea on the show’s startling operatic apex, “No H20”, in which she believes herself to be (literally) bolted to her fate. The sentiment is echoed on the aforementioned “Bitter Fate,” where Digby resigns himself to his belief that “I am the solemn Prince; and to be the solemn King’s my lot”.  The fact that both characters find ways to not have their identities and fates controlled by others is part of what makes The Light Princess the affirmative, empowering and cathartic experience that it is (and all-of-a-piece with Amos’s body of work, too).  

Moreover, those who know the score will note, and take delight in, some new additions, including an expanded version of the joyous “Gravity”. That song is also included as one of the "Bonus Tracks" on the OCR, alongside Amos’s piano-and-vocal versions of “Darkest Hour” and “Highness in the Sky”. Though not precisely essential to the album as an experience, both tracks are lovely additions, and “Highness in the Sky” is especially noteworthy, with Amos’s urgent, tumbling piano work and sensual, caressing delivery allowing certain details of the composition to emerge afresh, especially when she reaches the “Everything’s changing, we’re not as we were” lyric.

For those of us who were deeply changed and inspired by The Light Princess over its run at the NT listening to the OCR provides all the joy and emotion of revisiting an old friend after a long separation. For those who didn’t see the production, here - at last - is the chance to experience one of the most original, inventive and richly textured musical scores of our time. And so:  Levity. FOREVER. 

The Light Princess is released on 9th October. 

What Comes of Light: A Final Conversation with Samuel Adamson About The Light Princess

Samuel Adamson: Photo by Simon Annand

In 2008, I spoke for the first time with Samuel Adamson about The Light Princess, the musical adaptation of George MacDonald’s fairy-tale that the playwright was collaborating on with Tori Amos for the National Theatre. (That interview is here.) At that time, the show was still very much in development, with many challenging changes and revisions in store for Adamson and Amos as co-creators of the piece. Adamson and I discussed some of those changes, and much more besides, in a second interview, which took place last summer when The Light Princess was just about to open in the Lyttelton. With the show now up and running, and its leading lady already an Evening Standard Award winner, Sam and I thought it would be fun to make the set of interviews a trilogy by having a final conversation about The Light Princess, one that focuses, this time, upon the response to the show, the intricacies of its structure, staging and score, and its possible future life (including, yeah, that cast recording). So here, to quote the show’s Serjeant-at-Arms, is “what comes of Light.”

AR: Sam, at the time of our interview last summer you were in the middle of rehearsals for The Light Princess. Now the show’s opened and been running for a few months, I wonder what some of the highlights or significant moments of this post-rehearsal period have been for you. Any particular anecdotes or memories of this time to share?

SA: I think the first preview is a highlight, though it’s a bit of a blur. I’m not sure I can even remember where I was sitting. Presumably it was the back row of the stalls. We were running too long, of course. But there was a magical feeling in the theatre that night. It felt as if the audience was on our side and forgave us our imperfections. Admittedly, many first previews are like that. The audience is enjoying the fact it’s seeing something for the first time and the company is getting — or floating — from point A to point B on a wing and a prayer, so everything on stage and off feels crazily electric. We still had work to do and all of us worked hard after that, tightening the show in all departments. The ambition of the show was clear and the audience appreciated it. I’m sentimental about actors, so rehearsing with them, writing for them and watching them own the material, that’s also been a highlight. They’re a talented group and they love the musical and know they’re part of its DNA. Perhaps the real highlight for me is the survival of the show. By that I mean that it previewed, it opened — those things are out of the way — and now till 2nd February 2014 it exists, it grows, it strengthens, it finds its audience and they find it.

Almost everyone I know who’s loved the show has been to see it more than once, and one friend has seen it around fifteen times already. I know you don’t read reviews, but obviously responses and reactions are pretty much unavoidable in this game! I wonder if you had any reflections on the response/s to the piece. Or how much do you even concern yourself with this, once a show is up and running?

Well, that’s a lovely thing to hear — what writer wouldn’t be thrilled that somebody came to see their work then came again and then again? I’ve heard several stories of multiple visits and I’m delighted we’ve made something that those people like, something they want to experience, feel and investigate more than once. So that kind of reaction is loud in my head. Musicals come in different stripes, irrespective of what people who are closed off to them think. They use music differently, they tackle different subjects, they’re constantly breaking new ground. There are as many formal, tonal and narrative variations in new and existing musicals and operas, or pieces of “music theatre”, as there are in new and existing “plays” or other kinds of theatre. The form is as exciting and challenging and varied and provocative and political as any other kind of theatre. For me and for many people it’s no less valid to have a character break in to song as it is to have them speak; and how and why they break in to song can happen in any number of ways for any number of reasons. The Scottsboro Boys is nothing like The Book of Mormon is nothing like Passion is nothing like Street Scene is nothing like Lift is nothing like Spring Awakening; each should be interrogated critically on its own terms. With The Light Princess, we’re very deliberately and sincerely a fairy-tale: as I’ve said to you before, Alex, we pin our colours to the mast in the opening moments with the words “Once upon a time.” And those words are sung, and most of the following words are sung. Hopefully both musically and narratively we’re ploughing our own furrow. So to answer your question, it’s very nice when you hear that people like the work, it’s true to say that makes your heart sing a bit. Discussion and debate, when something is divisive — I also take that as a huge compliment. It’d be ridiculous of me to say that I’m deaf to all responses and reactions. With something like this, that’s impossible and in any case wouldn’t be healthy. I’m self-protective but I don’t live under a rock. To mix metaphors, the proverbial pinch of salt is a theatre-maker’s most precious asset. Without it, we’d all go mad and/or stop making theatre.

The Light Princess: Nick Hendrix (Digby) and Rosalie Craig (Althea) during "Amphibiava"

Let’s go back to MacDonald’s story just for a moment. Obviously you and Tori have retained some key elements beyond “lightness”: the Princess’s “pleasure in the lake”, for example. But aside from fleshing out the Prince’s role and the new characters you’ve included, one place where you really depart from MacDonald is in accentuating the psychological aspect of the text: lightness not as a curse but as an escape route; Althea’s way of avoiding grief and pain. For me, one of the most powerful aspects of the show is the way it explores our escapist urges, the strategies we find to avoid confronting darkness or difficult situations. How soon in the process did you and Tori start to conceive of the Princess’s condition in these psychological and emotional terms?

Tori and I landed on this very early on, though it was refined and simplified and made dramatically operative over time as we were writing. The specifics came in the writing and workshopping we did in 2012. All of us work to avoid pain. We all need to escape. The Light Princess is in and of itself a work of escapism. It’s set in mythical kingdoms where a princess lives in a Tower and a falcon is a prince’s best friend and a populace doesn’t have the vote and two kings are at war. If you don’t go with those things, accept the archetypes then be curious as to how we’ve made them fresh-minted and relevant, you won’t like our musical, I suppose, and fair enough, not everything is for everybody. If you do go with it, leave your woes at the theatre door and enjoy! As soon as we decided we didn’t want Althea to be “cursed” there was something to explore. There’s something very simple in the idea that the girl floated because her mother died, that floating was a manifestation of grief. Grief suppressed. She didn’t want to drown in the pools of crocodile tears from the grisly adult strangers around her, and she wanted to follow her poor dead mother up to heaven. So she lifted her feet, and floated, and from that day never had gravity and never cried. That’s how fairy-tales work — they’re fables, so they can be partly ludicrous, they can be magical, but you accept the tallness of the tale because emotionally it’s truthful, metaphorically it resonates. The simplest ideas are often the most difficult to land on and we didn’t discover all this immediately — for some time Althea’s mother was alive, for instance. But once I removed her, and once everybody on the team realised that the Act One Althea didn’t want to come to ground because she was deeply fearful of what was down there, traumatised by her childhood, it all began to fall into place.

The show really holds in balance the idea of Althea’s lightness as both a damaging escape and as a transcendent state of grace. Lightness is such a rich metaphor, too. It could stand for attitudes to drugs or food (as you make explicit in the great “suitors” scene), or drink, or even Internet addiction: the various comfort zones people create, or the compulsive behaviours they indulge in, in order to avoid facing things. In the writing of the piece, did you and Tori discuss various resonances and associations of “lightness”? Is it something that came up with the cast in rehearsals?

If there’s no metaphor for the audience in this kind of tale I’m not sure what the point of it would be. We’re explicit here and there as you say — where we want to be, I suppose. Before we even met, Tori had the idea of lightness as a form of anorexia. This wouldn’t make a whole musical, and Althea is patently not anorexic, but it was a start. So, in the show, a nincompoop suitor arrives and tells the king that his daughter is anorexic (I only decided to explicitly use that word mid-rehearsals), and the king foolishly believes it, and suddenly, for the audience and for Althea, we’re not in Kansas any more.

It’s a chilling shift, isn’t it? One of the turning points in the show.

Yes, it’s meant to be a darkly arresting moment and because until that point the suitors’ song has been largely satirical and comic, I think it succeeds. We see just how misunderstood and trapped Althea is. And it comes at the very point she has discovered love and all her kind, intelligent, hopeful qualities are darting joyously out of her soul. This is suddenly and clearly a corrupt, patriarchal and prejudicial world, and she’s in real trouble. Althea’s lightness could stand for many things and Tori and I discussed so many, but they’re not necessarily there in the words; it’s over to the audience. Marianne Elliott, the director, encouraged the actors to think about what “lightness” was to them and everybody came up with different things.

So instead of an evil Aunt’s curse, the show is concerned with the maternal bond being broken, the trauma of that, and Althea and Digby’s contrasting responses to their losses and to their fathers’ demands. I’ve had discussions with friends about how political the show is, or how feminist. Opinions have differed but it’s certainly the case that the show critiques patriarchal power, in a way that I think has made some audience members uncomfortable. Obviously, your first step towards this was getting rid of the evil Aunt, but is it fair to say that you and Tori set out to make a feminist fairy-tale, and one that would resonate politically?

We never sat down and said, “Let’s write a feminist fairy-tale,” simply because it was never going to be anything other than that. If it feels to you that it touches a nerve, terrific, because that speaks to the timeless relevance, and political provocation, of fairy-tales. When we tried to be too twenty-first century with our allusions and references, the piece was safer than it is now. The fewer direct nods to things modern teenagers may recognise, the more contemporary it became. Also, in this kind of world you can make up your own rules so things can be interestingly or weirdly contradictory. For example, although Althea’s kingdom is clearly patriarchal in the hands of her father, there’s no question about her leading the army. She’s the eldest child, and that’s just a given according to the charter of the land, and her gender is irrelevant to him. Likewise, the kings’ second-in-charge in each kingdom, the Serjeant-at-Arms and the Falconer, are women, and, being smarter and more emotionally wise than the kings or indeed any of the men around them, they notice what’s awry in the world first, and do something about it. The piece is feminist in all sorts of ways. One aspect of this that may not be overtly evident but that I’m most proud of is the portrayal of the two princes. Their stories are feminist because the lack of feminine influence is manifestly their tragedy, and they feel this deeply and learn to understand it. They are their mother’s sons. In the Act Two song “Bitter Fate,” their father’s patriarchal tyranny is clearly going to ruin them unless they find ways to resist it, which they do.

There’s no doubt that King Ignacio, Digby and Llewelyn’s father, is the villain of the piece but, at the same time, the show doesn’t demonise Althea’s father, King Darius. We see what’s led him to act as he does and Clive Rowe’s wonderful performance helps to make him a sympathetic character. Was it important for both you and Tori to have a three-dimensional patriarchal figure that we can sympathise with too?

Very important. To a certain extent, a fairy-tale needs an archetypal villain and King Ignacio fits that bill. In fact in quite scarily-close-to-rehearsals drafts, we explored why he does the things he does, but we excised this because it didn’t serve the main story. It may be helpful for Hal Fowler, who brilliantly plays King Ignacio, to have more textual evidence of a broken childhood or a twisted love for the enemy or something like that. But he doesn’t, because he’s the fairy-tale baddie, with one objective: to get the enemy land and gold and make sure his son becomes king. Hal must find nuance in his performance with material that is pretty straightforward. He simply dies a horrible fairy-tale death as comeuppance for his evil. All this is necessary for the plot of a fairy-tale; because the tale is not really about the evil or the antagonist per se. Everybody knows that evil exists. The tale is about what the protagonists do in the face of that evil on their quest through the forest. Nuance in the writing can and does exist, however, with the more important patriarchal character, King Darius. We are critical of him. He does some appalling things, as a ruler and a father and a man. He is deeply flawed. But we explore those flaws, where they come from. The piece is all about parents and children, and his sins have come from his father. And we give him time to atone. The audience can forgive him, and sympathise with him. Or they may choose not to forgive him, there’s room for that as well. But his character is there, explored in three dimensions, warts and all. The uncomplicated evilness of the secondary king character allowed us to be as complex as we needed to be with King Darius.

I really like the way in which you’ve structured and characterised the show through these parallels and pairings. There’s Althea and Digby’s trajectories to gravity and levity, of course. But you also have the two father Kings; Piper and Llewelyn; the Falconer and the Serjeant-at-Arms (with those great pay-offs at the end for those latter characters). It’s quite an intricate design. I wonder if you could talk a little about how some of these pairings evolved as you and Tori developed the piece and the two kingdoms.

The symmetry was always there. I always knew where I wanted these six characters (Althea and Digby, Piper and Llewelyn, Serjeant-at-Arms and Falconer) to get to. And that was in to each other’s arms! The four “hellos” at the end of Act II (you know what I’m talking about because you’ve seen the show!) have been there in every draft. It’s nice of you to say the design is intricate but really it was about having the courage to be fairy-tale simple with things. Gravity/levity. Princess/prince. Flawed king/bad king. Gold/blue. Air/water. Piper/Llewelyn. Falconer/Serjeant-at-Arms. It means that in three key numbers, “My Own Land,” “Tinkle, Drizzle, Bubble and Gush” and “The Wedding,” we can exist musically in two places at once. It’s all reflected in Rae Smith’s design as well. Opposing countries, households divided who have to learn that their differences are not as powerful as their similarities. It’s simple architectural stuff, layered and coloured and made emotionally interesting by the complexities and beauty of Tori’s music.

Why was it important to you to have Piper and Llewelyn as narrators book-ending the piece?

I only ever wanted book-ends; there’s that old saw about narration being lazy writing, and I really think that could have been true in this musical, so I avoided it within the body of the piece. Dramatise the story, otherwise it might as well be a picture-book. But somebody has to say “Once upon a time”. We tried having Althea and Digby telling their own story but it all felt too knowing. It just seemed right to have their helpmeets doing it. Frankly, it was also an economical way to flesh Piper and Llewelyn out without spending too much time on baggy subplots for them. It’s a nice moment, at the end, when they’re a couple, and you understand why they’re sharing the story together. Piper always was, in Tori’s word, a “scribe.” It’s probable that she wrote and published the history of Lagobel and Sealand!

Adamson and Amos during rehearsals for The Light Princess

It’s nice to know that Piper’s packing a pad and pencil, as well as Mace, in that satchel! I was also interested to see how openly allusive you and Tori have made the show, with the references to Grimm, Snow White and The Little Match Girl incorporated. Was this something that you decided to do early on, to place the show directly, and self-consciously, within this fairy-tale framework?

Once we’d embraced the fairy-tale of it all, and decided to on the whole abandon irony, I in particular had a little fun with allusions, though I was tough on myself to make sure they weren’t imposed. They’re only there because our particular world and characters suggested them. I think in the last interview I mentioned that I read most of Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and Angela Carter during the writing of the show. One thing that came up in workshops was that Althea and her friend Piper survived their banishment in the Tower by reading books left to Althea by her mother. She’s well-read, self-educated. One day, I realised that one of the saddest tales ever written, Andersen’s The Little Match Girl wasn’t so far from Althea’s story. Althea is spirited and defensive in the early scenes, she gives as good as she gets, but behind her “condition” lies, of course, great sadness, profound loss. The destitute Match Girl, who conjures health and happiness in the sky by lighting her matches, suddenly seemed like the protagonist Althea would like the most, because her desires are essentially Althea’s. So to existing music of Tori’s written for Althea, I wrote lyrics for Althea’s “I Want” song, “My Fairy Story.” Referencing Piper’s music from the opening narration, we begin with “Once upon a time” and, by hearing a snippet of The Little Match Girl, we understand what it is, fundamentally, that Althea wants: a family, and for her father to love her. In the architecture of inevitability demanded by a fairy-tale, and by a well-made musical, she gets those things, but only after overcoming her obstacles on a journey through the literal and metaphorical woods. Marianne encouraged me to be explicit in the lyrics about what it is Althea wants. Also, the middle section of the song beginning “Oh, the woe,” where Althea’s nightmare takes over, so that momentarily her reality gets the better of her dream, really took shape in rehearsals.

The Light Princess: :"Sealand Supremacy"

  

Back in 2008 you noted the challenges, in terms of staging, of having a heroine who’s either in the air or underwater. Marianne Elliott and the rest of the team have certainly risen to those challenges (pardon the pun), and the show is technically astounding. Could you talk a little about any input that you and Tori have had in decisions about design or the overall “look” of the show?

It’s a truism that musicals — and all kinds of theatre — are collaborative but it’s also the case that each department, each creative team, spends much time on her or his own, exploring and fabricating. In a workshop well before the show was ready, Rae and Marianne, along with Finn Caldwell the puppetry director, Toby Olié the puppetry designer, Steven Hoggett the choreographer, and Matthew Robins the animator, were making a lot of their work in the room with actors and with Tori and me present. So Tori and I had a strong sense of the methods they were employing. I’d worked with Marianne and Rae on Pillars of the Community at the National, and as an Associate on War Horse, so I was very familiar with their working methods and with their unique takes on “poor” theatre. The puppetry of War Horse was clearly going to have a bearing on The Light Princess, because Rae designed both shows, and Toby worked on both. As we all explored the story together something more magical began to appear in the soundscape of Tori’s music. The design you see is very much Rae’s, in response to my and Tori’s story and music and the great input Marianne had in the development of every stage of the show. I spent long sessions with Rae and Marianne in which they would take me through the design scene by scene. Sometimes what they had come up would require me to rethink things, usually for the better, and I’d then convey this to Tori. Marianne was always telling me that my stage directions were impossible. Not so much that we couldn’t “Cross the Andes”, but that it would be impractical for Althea to get from Scene A to Scene B and change her costume, or get into her harness; that kind of practical stuff writers sometimes forget. At other times I would throw light on writers’ intentions that may not have been obvious when merely looking at words on a page. Occasionally, as in a sequence like “Crash in the Universe” whole chunks of music would be moved about like a jigsaw puzzle as Tori and I understood or were inspired by ideas of Marianne’s, Rae’s, Steven’s, Finn’s and Toby’s.

In terms of the staging, one of the biggest surprises for the audience has been the acrobats’ role in “floating” Althea. They make the production a ballet, of a kind. How soon in the process did they become part of the show?

Quite late, actually. Steven, Finn and Marianne had a three- or four-day workshop with acrobats and something astounding happened. Tori and I always knew that the means to float Althea would be discovered. I mean, it’s not radical, really, to put someone on a wire; that was always an option. As a stage technique it’s been around for centuries, audiences have seen it a thousand times. It requires great skill and it can be enchanting, but it isn’t exactly new. If anything it’s limiting as you need to have tracks in the rig, and at the National you have to design bearing in mind that other shows will be in the rep with you. As Tori and I wrote the musical we simply presumed that Althea would be able to float; and in the main workshops the rest of the team seemed to presume it too; they barely seemed to even bother to investigate it, assuming, I think, that it would all be on wires. Then, in this specific “acrobat” week, Steven, Finn and Marianne found a genuinely new way of “floating.” I came in for one afternoon and I was amazed, absolutely amazed.

Despite the production’s scale, and all the different elements included, I’m struck by just how intimate the show still manages to feel. Essentially, it’s the story of two families, a love story, and a coming-of-age story. The emotions come through very, very clearly. Was it important for you and Tori to retain this kind of intimacy in the piece? Is that something that you found yourselves watching out for as the project developed, ensuring that the various elements contributed to, rather than swamped, the story?

Yes. I’ve always said that in outline it’s a simple story: Romeo and Juliet, two kids from opposite sides of the tracks, a rite-of-passage, a coming-of-age. Hopefully, how we tell it gives it depth. Moment-to-moment straightforwardness, dramaturgical and aesthetic, is something Marianne is very strong on. She likes things clear, direct and truthful in writing and acting. So she’s a help if things start to get a bit baroque. We all place great value in intimate moments. They’re particularly important in big musicals. There I go, generalising about “musical theatre” but hopefully you get my point. Falling chandeliers are great but they mean nothing without simple, personal scenes in which writers, designers, choreographers and directors have the courage to bring the scale of the production right down to the tensions and needs of one or two individuals in everyday situations. Years ago when I first saw The Phantom of the Opera I was struck by a lovely moment when the corps de ballet is rehearsing backstage at the Palais Garnier, a Degas painting brought to life, very elegant, no fireworks, and far more impressive to me than the plunging chandelier. Also, Marianne is hot on focus. I’m very proud of the wedding sequence in The Light Princess as a piece of writing. It tells simultaneous stories, plays with time and geography, employs magical realism and economically brings about the turning points of the protagonists to take us roaring into the eleven o’clock number. These almost filmic devices are excitingly possible when you have music at your disposal. Marianne was careful to refine the visual picture in this sequence and thus place emphasis exactly where it needed to be.

The Light Princess: Rosalie Craig during "No H20"

Rosalie Craig’s performance as Althea is staggering, not only in the way it negotiates the physical demands of the role but also in the way it communicates all the different facets of the character and her journey. In interview, Rosalie mentioned that it was you who really spotted her “in the corner” during those early workshops and thought she’d be right for Althea. Any regrets about that decision at all? ;)

God, isn’t she rubbish!? Did she say that? Typically kind of her but not really true. I mean, I did champion her as Althea, and quite early on too, but it’s sweetly ridiculous of her to say she was sitting in the corner. The corner is not Rosalie Craig’s natural habitat. She was playing another character, one we cut. Rosalie has the most incredible chest voice, her “break” is very high. Gradually everybody realised our Althea was staring us in the face. There were some changes to the keys in arias like “Darkest Hour” but in Rosalie’s range, with that beautiful belt of hers, they took on such a plaintive, yearning quality. (It should be noted that she’s got an incredible soprano, too.) Then once she was cast, we fashioned new things around her specifically. I wrote a couple of bolshie teenage lines for Althea one day. Rosie perked up and said she was good at playing that kind of thing, and that got me thinking and led me towards the “Yes, I know, yes, I know” section of “Queen Material”. There was a very moving day when Tori, Marianne, Tim Levy our producer, Steven and I were in a room together at the National Theatre Studio and, pretty much having decided that Althea was Rosie’s, had Rosie sing “Darkest Hour” and “Better Than Good” for us just to make sure. She broke our hearts and we were choking back tears, and we all slightly reprimanded ourselves for taking so long to give her the role. Thank God she stuck with us!

But it’s in no way a one-woman show, is it? Aside from the great work by Nick Hendrix, Clive Rowe and Amy Booth-Steel I’m struck by how vivid the supporting cast is: Laura Pitt-Pulford as the Falconer, Kane Oliver Parry as Llewelyn, even a silent character like Delphine, or a near-silent one, like Mr. Grey, makes an impression. And Malinda Parris’s awesome “Scandal” moment is something I look forward to every single time.

Nick walked into the room and I wanted him as Digby immediately. He looks like a warrior, but he can play vulnerability and sadness with great delicacy. I believed him as a solemn prince, so it was a good thing that when he opened his mouth he could sing. All of us wanted Kane, but Tori and Marianne in particular spotted his unique talent. Around the time we secured him, I was refining Llewelyn’s story, and I found “Bitter Fate” for him and Digby in Act II. The Act I opener “My Own Land” suggested itself as a reprise, with the princes no longer swaggering patriotically, but instead lamenting the prison that their kingdom has become for them. In the week before we started rehearsals Tori wrote those electrifying high tenor lines for Kane, knowing that he could sing the shit out of the notes in sweet harmony with Nick. The legendary Clive was with us over several workshops: likewise we wrote for him. Amy Booth-Steel is, with Rosie and our male swing Luke Johnson, one of the original members of The Light Princess team; she’s family. For various reasons, I’d made some cuts to the Falconer’s role and on the first day of rehearsal I wondered if I’d gone too far. When you’ve got Laura Pitt-Pulford in the room, you’re inspired, and her role ballooned back to its correct size. Malinda Parris has many qualities aside from her powerhouse voice, including a gift for comedy, which is just right for “Scandal.”

Let’s talk about the score. Critics have struggled to find analogies and comparisons (it’s like Sondheim; it’s not like Sondheim; it’s like Lloyd Webber; it’s not like Lloyd Webber…). But it seems to me that the more appropriate reference points are in classical music and opera, in many ways. That’s evident in the instrumentation (strings, woodwind, piano) which gives the piece a very timeless quality that suits the fairy-tale form you’re working with. As you noted in the last interview, the orchestrations recall, on occasion, Tori’s work with classical pieces on Night of Hunters. Did you and Tori experiment with poppier or rockier approaches before settling on this more classically-orientated style? What did you both feel were the advantages of this particular approach?

If people are struggling to find analogies and comparisons, then it’s its own thing, right? Look closer, listen harder. I can’t hear the Lloyd Webber in Tori’s work at all, except perhaps in “Darkest Hour,” the Act I closer — and I think Tori herself would acknowledge that. And she’s done something a bit Sondheimesque to words of mine in two short verses in “Nothing More Than This.” Generally I’d have thought Bernstein would be a closer comparison, as well as other classical composers it’s not for me to reference. What I really want to say is that it’s unique to her. It’s complex. If I had the score with me you’d see that most songs change time signatures about every five bars and keys about every twenty. And you don’t always hear things more than once. Or you do, but in variation, sometimes very subtle variation. In “Better than Good,” in response to some staging, Tori and I wrote and added in previews a little section where the muckraking Servants sing of heavy shoes to weight Althea down: “Here are shoes/Well, they’re more like cumbersome rocks.” The melody here is an extension of a sprightly Mozartian instrumental phrase that existed already in the song. I find the music delightful: listen to it a few times and it’ll become an earworm. But it’s only there once, because it’s only needed once by the plot. Tori has the courage to do that — and yet the song as a whole has a pattern that enables it to land.

Those swift, surprising shifts and transitions in tempo and mood are so "Tori," aren’t they? The whole range of human emotion seems to be in there.

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Yes, Tori is just incapable of a predictable chord progression. I think I’ve said to you before that Tori lives in a minor key world, with glorious flourishes of major key optimism that can take you by such surprise you can be alarmed by them on a first listen. In Tori’s work, there’s often ambiguity, a feeling of melancholy or uneasiness that underlies the hope. This quality makes her a great musical dramatist. And yes, there’s a timelessness to this score, matching the fairy-tale feel, that comes from the orchestration. There is a little percussion on track for some of the military sections but otherwise it’s crafted particularly for woodwinds and strings with piano. It’s intricate stuff. In Tori, Martin Lowe and John Philip Shenale’s orchestrations, there are some glorious arpeggiated sections in songs like “Better Than Good” and “Amphibiava” that are positively gymnastic for the players. There’s a lot for audiences and listeners to discover, and talking about the score reduces it. I’d prefer to let it speak for itself. There were some rockier and poppier songs early on but the story and characters demanded something more operatic. It’s an unfashionable word, and not really how I want the piece described, but I suppose it’s an operetta. That makes it sound like Offenbach or Gilbert and Sullivan, and it couldn’t be further from those guys. But, really, with its lightly classical textures, its almost through-composed structure, its chamber orchestration, and its challenging solo arias, “operetta” is sort of what The Light Princess is.

In our previous conversations you’ve stressed the character-based approach that you and Tori have taken to writing and composing the show and of “music as the engine for story.” Let’s talk a bit about those wonderful sustained sequences that the show features. It took me a couple of viewings to realise just how intricate “Queen Material” and “Nothing More Than This Is” are in the way they build, and just how much happens in story and character terms. You’ve mentioned that you encouraged Tori to musicalise a lot of the material. Did earlier drafts of the piece convey much of this information in the book rather than through song?

It’s not so much that earlier drafts conveyed the story through lots of book, rather that they hadn’t found the means to tell the story properly at all because the form was at that point still just outside of our reach as a team. I didn’t want to write a play, because I was working with a composer, and time and time again if I had an idea it felt like a musical idea and I didn’t see much point in crafting a well-made scene when I’d rather be crafting with Tori a well-made song or musical sequence. All of us learned to make sure that everything was married and integrated. That’s what I like, that’s my taste, and that’s what I think musicals can and must do. Eventually we all understood each other and soon Marianne, who’d only directed plays till The Light Princess, was brilliantly exacting about the lyrics and music of the songs, investigating them as rigorously as if they were dialogue. “Queen Material” and “Nothing More Than This” are key sequences in the show. In “Queen Material” Althea leaves the palace and enters the woods. In “Nothing More Than This” Althea and Digby’s relationship cools, and Digby leaves her. These are massive plot moments, all musicalised. Tori and I mapped the sequences out in advance. She began to work in a new way here, setting music to words already written, which enabled her to concentrate on weaving themes. Then we would both challenge each other to reshape and rework.

The structure of the duets also feels highly original to me. In a confrontation scene between two characters (such as Althea’s face-off with her Father at the opening of “Queen Material” and with Digby at the beginning of “Althea” and Piper’s great challenge to the King in “The Whistleblower”) you have one character singing one melody while the other character responds with a contrasting melody that expresses their point of view. Then in “Amphibiava” you have a playful, harmonious duet for Althea and Digby which illustrates just how connected they are at this moment. How did this approach evolve?

In “Althea,” from the first draft, Althea was always at lyrical odds with Digby, until she is seduced. Tori was convinced to musicalise Althea’s responses to Digby in a different way from the lush legato of his verse and chorus. Althea is in a resistant, teenage, Althea-type place; she is at loggerheads with both Digby and herself. One day in rehearsal Tori suddenly came up with that vivid “Who do you think?” melody. It’s appropriately jagged, breathless, hot, Spanish. I went straight home and wrote the words and it was in the next day. King Darius’s interruptions to Althea’s teenage tirade in “Queen Material” came in rehearsal. King Darius had been objecting to Althea’s truculence and trying to make his point between her verses in dialogue, but then we expanded the moment and worked it so that there are two contrasting melodies. The king’s melody is actually a variation of the verse of his aria in Act II “My Little Girl’s Smile,” so happily it’s all as one. With his theme he exhorts Althea to be responsible in Act I, then this theme turns on itself as, in Act II, he regrets the brutal means by which he exhorted her. The point here — and there are other examples in the score including “The Whistleblower” — is that the structure of a song always came from the demands of the story.

The Light Princess: Nick Hendrix and Rosalie Craig during "Althea"

And may I say that, in “Althea,” you and Tori have written one of the sexiest-ever duets for a musical. The combination of Althea’s resistance to Digby and her gradually opening up to his tenderness towards her is incredibly seductive, and funny and moving too, and the staging is stunningly beautiful. Could you talk a little further about how this pivotal sequence evolved?

Isn’t it a beautiful piece of music? When Tori delivered it I was ecstatic. What she essentially achieved when she first wrote it was wonderfully exciting. I’d given her some notes about what the scene entailed and she went off and wrote what in essence amounts to a one Act play in song. As you suggest, by the end of it, Althea is in a completely different place from where she was at the beginning; she opens up to Digby, the actions of an apparent antagonist change her in the moment. Yet it’s a fairly simple AB/AB song with a luscious, romantic chorus, and, in the verses, a gorgeously sexy Latin-flavoured riff. Yes, there is new detail in the number since Tori first shared it with me, both lyrical and musical. But this moment is Tori at her most spontaneous and honest and romantic, and the heart of the song has never changed. Tori and I envisaged the number very early in the writing. Althea and Digby would meet. She would be in the sky. Her ribbons, emblems of restraint up until this moment, would fall on him gloriously and he would dance with her. Suddenly the ribbons are beautiful. He would be the first person who had no confusion or doubt about her lightness. He would fall in love with her, and she with him. Even as, with drafts, the story altered around Althea and Digby, and as characters and songs came and went, this sequence remained in tact. We knew it would be difficult to stage; it took a long time to rehearse. But it’s one of the most straightforward things in the libretto. A purely romantic scene: Juliet meeting Romeo.

The four songs released online have had a tremendously positive response. I have to ask the inevitable question about the cast recording and if and when that might be happening…

I know this is a frustrating answer but watch this space. A recording of the complete score will happen.

As an audience member, it’s been fascinating to see the show develop, and the various cuts and tweaks that have been made. I wonder if there are any cuts that you regret?

None. Kill your babies and so forth.

It’s also been interesting to see just how diverse the audiences for the show have been. Some friends overheard one little boy – age six or seven - saying: “If I was the Prince I would do anything for the Princess.” Quite a number of kids have really engaged with the show. Is that something that’s surprised you? I know you weren’t really aiming for this audience.

There was a 13+ age limit to begin with. That came from the NT. There is drug-taking, there is mutilation, there is sex in a lake. You can’t have all that and market it as your family Christmas show, so the National was perfectly justified to say, “teenagers and above.” Of course we can go younger and the NT has, actually: it’s 10+ now, and it’s fine for a six-year-old, who will miss the more adult themes but enjoy the obvious facts that the princess floats and that she learns to slay dragons deep in the wilderness. What a beautiful thing that boy said! I’m not surprised at all that young kids like it and I’m happy about that, not least because it means they’re being exposed to some challenging, classically-flecked music.

Can you reveal anything about the future life of the show? Is a transfer/tour something that’s being discussed?

It finishes on 2nd February and there are no immediate plans for more life for this production; there were never specific plans for a transfer, that’s not the way the National operates. I think it would be a shame if Marianne’s beautiful work on this show wasn’t seen again, but in theatre you always keep your expectations low!

Do you foresee co-writing another musical in future?

Yes. In Gabriel, a play I wrote for Shakespeare’s Globe last year, I worked with a classical musician and put her and a small orchestra on stage with actors to help tell the story. I’d like to take this idea further, but with an original score.

How about another collaboration with Tori? It’s clearly been a really rewarding experience for you both.

I’ve loved every second of my collaboration with Tori. We’ve made a commitment to each other to look after The Light Princess, always. But she has to write another musical or opera. Or possibly a ballet. I know everyone wants albums and tours from her, but she shouldn’t stop at The Light Princess. It was challenging; she says it was the hardest thing she’s ever done. But honestly, I think she was born to do this. I hope she sees it like that, and I hope I can do at least one more with her.

I’m always intrigued by how it feels for a playwright to watch a show they’ve written. When you see The Light Princess now, what are some of your impressions? Are there surprises for you? Are there moments where you think: “That’s exactly how we imagined it!” Or are there moments that go beyond what you envisaged when writing?

God knows what’s wrong with me, but on the whole I get more nervous about a show and my work in it the longer it goes on. During previews you’re working so hard that there’s no time to let nerves get the better of you. It’s all adrenaline. Once it’s up and running, the nerves are just nerves. But by then the show is bigger than its creators: it belongs to the actors, the crew, the orchestra, the conductor, and the audience. And on this show I have loved watching it get stronger. Rae’s design is more beautiful than I could have hoped for. I admire the performances. Rosalie surprises me each time I see it with all the new discoveries and choices she makes; she seems constantly to be reinventing herself and the role. I’m astounded by the work of the acrobats: their strength and grace and some of the beautiful shapes they create, often when they’re not lifting Rosie but waiting to do so, is something I never could have anticipated. One of the most moving moments in the show is right at the end when they’re no longer lifting her. “Althea” is not so far from how I envisaged it, as I’ve said. The girl in the sky, ribbons falling, the boy singing up to her. The one scene that is exactly as I always imagined it, even though the focus of the lyrics to the song changed as the musical developed, is “No H2O.” Everything about the staging and Paule Constable’s lighting and Rae’s setting and the performances in that number is close to how I pictured it … I’m grateful that Marianne Elliott directed the show and that it’s at the National — the people there always believed in it. I appreciate the work of Paul Foster, the staff director, who keeps the show shipshape. I’m very self-critical of tiny things I’d like to improve, but I allow myself to acknowledge the ambition up there. We flipping never gave up, not once, and we made a musical.

The Light Princess is at the National Theatre until 2nd February. Further details here. Adamson also takes part in a Platform event, In Context: Adapting Children’s Novels to the Stage, on 16th January.

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Theatre Review: The Light Princess (National Theatre, Lyttelton)

Jerry Springer: The Opera, London Road, the sublime Caroline, or Change: the musicals staged at the National Theatre during the reign of Sir Nicholas of Hytner have all been, in different ways, radical, challenging affairs that have stretched the form in new directions - a deliberate attempt, it would seem, to get away from the cosier, Broadway-leaning inclinations of Trevor Nunn’s tenure as artistic director of the theatre. The Light Princess, Tori Amos and Samuel Adamson’s swooningly ambitious adaptation of George MacDonald’s 1864 fairy-tale, demonstrates once again Hytner’s commitment to creative, non-conservative musical theatre programming. This much-anticipated show – the first foray for both writers into the musical genre – has been long in development, as my two interviews with Adamson (here and here) attest. But, on the evidence of last night’s staggeringly confident and rapturously received first preview, it’s been worth every single second of the wait.

Taking MacDonald’s story about a young girl cursed to have no gravity merely as their starting point, Amos, Adamson and director Marianne Elliott – herself flying high after War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – have fashioned a fantastically fierce, fresh, frank and funny feminist fable. You won’t find an evil spinster Aunt dispensing a curse in this version; instead, this story is – true to form for Amos – more concerned with the damage Daddies do.

The action unfolds in two warring kingdoms, Lagobel and Sealand (gorgeously rendered in Rae Smith’s sumptuous design), where the teenage heirs to the respective thrones, Princess Althea and Prince Digby, have reacted to the deaths of their mothers in contrasting ways. The response of the Princess - played and sung with breathtaking passion, biting wit and luscious sensuality by the stunning Rosalie Craig - is weightlessness, which is presented here as a psychologically-motivated escape route for the avoidance of pain. In contrast, Digby (excellent Nick Hendrix: as sweet of voice as he’s buff of bicep) has become heavy-hearted and solemn in his grief. When the two meet in the Wilderness that separates their territories, a love affair ensues – one that certainly doesn’t win the approval of their fathers or the populace.

Aided and abetted by many of her collaborators on her previous NT-originated successes (including Smith, choreographer Steven Hoggett and puppetry director Finn Caldwell), Elliott makes the production another thrilling “total theatre” experience: one that’s equal parts cutting-edge and traditional. A lovely animated prelude outlines the histories of the kingdoms, but a simple sheet serves initially as a lake for our two lovers to liaise in. As per War Horse, the creatures of the kingdoms are puppets, designed this time by Toby Olié. The most graceful of these is Digby’s majestic falcon companion Zephryus (Ben Thompson); the funniest a little pink mouse who gets a mighty gross-out moment. And the Princess’s lightness is conveyed by two means, with the undulating Craig sometimes borne aloft by wires, at others by the bodies of black-clad acrobats.

You might fear (as I did) that all this activity will swamp the story. But no. The narrative feels very intricately worked out by Amos and Adamson in terms of theme, imagery and metaphor, and all the elements enlisted by Elliott contribute to its lucid, expressive telling. There are some brilliantly surreal stage pictures which I won’t reveal, but suffice it to say that the director and her team find wonderful ways to bring the story’s revision of fairy-tale tropes to life and into a contemporary teen context that still feels timeless enough, not least in a sublime scene in which Althea’s father King Darius (Clive Rowe) enlists the help of a series of suitors to bring his daughter down to earth. (As in Wicked - a spiritual sister to this show in its revisionist attitude, near-homophonous heroines and firm female-focus - a song called “Defying Gravity” could easily find a home here.)

Then there’s the music. Supple and robust, delicate, playful and strident by turns, Amos’s score is a glorious thing, intricate, demanding and complex at times, instantly hummable at others, and Adamson’s book matches it for beauty, cheek and charm. Amos’s emotional range as an artist has always astounded, and she brings that to bear here in a quirkily structured, diverse score that can move fluidly from wild humour to melancholy, from swaggering aggression to the most tender of laments, in an instant. With her regular collaborator John Philip Shenale overseeing the orchestrations, liberal use of strings and woodwind, and - yeah! - a Bosendorfer in the pit (where dynamic Music Director/Supervisor Martin Lowe can be seen displaying his customary infectious exuberance), it’s perhaps no surprise that The Light Princess is closest to Amos’s classically-inspired Night of Hunters project musically. And yet it’s totally fresh and distinctive too: Amos is in no way resting on her laurels or repeating herself. There’s a stirring soul and gospel moment here, a pop/rock flourish there, but everything feels cohesive and organic, the music emerging from the protagonists and their ever-shifting emotional states.

There are some jaw-dropping duets, not only for Althea and Digby but for other characters too: a stunning sustained sequence finds the Princess’s loyal companion Piper (brilliant Amy Booth-Steel) fiercely challenging the King for his belligerence. Disgracefully wasted in The Hothouse, the great Clive Rowe does not go to waste here as the patriarch made tyrannous by loss. At one point scarily bellowing his belief in his own authority, he later gets a standout aria that’s one of the production’s most intensely moving moments. And the contributions of an exceptionally well-drilled ensemble are also very fine.

Meanwhile, Amos’s lyrical dexterity – her delight in word play, allusion, assonance and alliteration – is also on display. Book and lyrics allow genuinely complicated emotions into them, and when Digby speaks about being indoctrinated by his father’s beliefs, one hears the voice of many Amos characters, challenging themselves to overcome their reliance upon others’ opinions and judgements. There’s a gorgeously rebellious spirit to this musical, and a clear political dimension too: here the “duties” of marriage and monarchy – as expressions of patriarchal power – weigh a girl (and a boy) down. (Which makes the conclusion, for all its cheeky twists, look a tad too conventional, it must be said.)

For those of us to whom Amos’s music has meant so very much over the years, it’s especially exciting and moving to see her venturing into this new form and thriving there. But I think it’s fair to say that even those who aren’t dedicated Toriphiles will find plenty to engage and beguile them here. “I don’t fly; I float,” Althea is given to reminding those around her. This show flies and floats. It’s an awesome achievement for all concerned and deserves to run and run.

The Light Princess is currently booking until January 2014. Further information at the National Theatre website.

Friday, 16 August 2013

Another Sorta Fairytale: A Second Conversation with Samuel Adamson About The Light Princess

Samuel Adamson: Photo by Simon Annand

Back in summer 2008 I had the opportunity to talk with Samuel Adamson about The Light Princess, the musical adaptation of George MacDonald’s 1864 fairy-tale that the playwright was collaborating on with Tori Amos for the National Theatre. (You can read that interview here.) At the time Adamson confirmed that there was still “a lot of work” to be done on the show, and, a full five years on, The Light Princess will be making its much-anticipated debut at the NT’s Lyttleton in September. In the interim, Amos and Adamson have worked on refashioning and redrafting the piece, while not slacking on their other individual projects. The ever-industrious Amos has released four major studio albums in the intervening five years, while continuing to tour extensively everywhere from Anaheim to Zabrze. Adamson, meanwhile, has had his plays Mrs. Affleck and Frank & Ferdinand produced at the National, contributed to Headlong’s 9/11-themed Decade project, and adapted Alexander Ostrovsky’s Larisa and the Merchants for the Arcola. His latest work, Gabriel, is currently at Shakespeare’s Globe. Adamson kindly took some time out from a busy rehearsal schedule to talk frankly and insightfully about the evolution of The Light Princess, the pleasures and challenges involved in the show’s development - and how “music is it.” Here’s our conversation.

AR: Sam, it’s been five years (!) since we first spoke about The Light Princess. Musicals famously take a long time to develop and you said back in 2008 that there was “a lot of work” still to be done on the show: that you and Tori were “still discovering it.” I’m sure that you won’t want to give too much away at this stage, but could you talk a little about some of the ways in which The Light Princess has evolved in these last few years, in terms of its characterisation, structure, themes, tone? In what ways has it become, as Tori said in an interview, “a different show” from that which you had five years ago?

SA: Both Tori and I have been working on lots of other things in that time, and yes, all musicals have a long gestation. Most take at least this long. What I really think is this: Tori and I didn’t know each other that well when we started. We thought we did, but we were too reverential with each other back then. Tori’s a tough cookie, but we’re both quite polite people. She did her work, I did mine, we tiptoed around the fact that often we were not writing with one voice. I suppose I was a bit awed by the enormity of her talent. She’s an astoundingly original composer. I don’t think she’s written one melody I haven’t been moved or surprised by in some way, often because of its harmonic complexity, those wild chord structures that come deep from her gut.

And yet reading back over the interview, I can see why Tori and I are still together. We have a mutual respect for each other’s work and the different demands on us. There was hope for us as a writing team, back then. Hope that given time we would be rigorous with each other, that we would have the courage to really analyse whether we were speaking as one. It’s a cliché, but it’s like a marriage. I needed to spend a lot of time with Tori, really get to know her as a writer and person. She needed to do the same with me. We needed to become friends and sparring partners, and leave the project to then come back to it. We needed to really ask ourselves how writing a musical was different from our other work, even when that other work was collaborative. At first, I spent a lot of time fitting in with Tori’s schedule and travelling to work with her in Cornwall. That’s changed over time: she’s worked a lot with me in London, as well. We’re not afraid to be honest with each other, to question each other. So the piece has evolved because Tori and I have evolved. Whatever happens to our musical, we are a proper team. I haven’t really answered your question, but regarding all four of those things you mention, we have been on journeys related to our own lives and our relationship to each other. So big changes! Honestly, when I gave the interview last time, we were nowhere near finishing, and I knew that, I bloody knew it, Alex, which is why I said “there’s still a lot to do”!

What have been some of the main challenges that you and Tori have had in redrafting and rewriting the piece? How has the process of reworking the text compared to some of the other adaptations you’ve worked on: All About My Mother, for example?

Although The Light Princess started with an existing story, we have departed from that source in all sorts of ways. It’s not an adaptation in the sense All About My Mother was. The form of the play of Mother is unlike the original film, because film and stage are completely different. But the content didn’t differ, so much. This really has been about building everything from the ground up: characters, story, themes, music, lyrics, dialogue. And most of the story is conveyed by music, by song; it’s unlike a “straight” play in every way imaginable, so the process has been unlike any play I’ve worked on. It’s a musical, and a music-dominant one: it’s nearly through-sung. The challenges? Being patient, I think. With each other and with our collaborators and with our characters, who have often needed wrangling. Also, the challenge of making songs truly dramatic. In a musical, or at least in the integrated musical Tori and I found ourselves wanting to write, at the end of 90% of the songs or musical sequences, the character must be in a different place from the place where he or she started. And in 100% of them, the story must have moved on, and moved on engagingly. Songs are dramatic scenes, in the theatre. This isn’t necessarily true of other kinds of song-writing, where you can swirl around an emotion or an event but the character (if there is one) or the narrative (if there is one) can remain unchanging. You can have a song about a break-up in a relationship and the emotion of the song can be extremely powerful because everything except the music is essentially in stasis. You broke my heart, you broke my heart, you broke my heart you bastard, end song. This doesn’t work in a musical, really: the intensification of “you bastard” isn’t enough. Even if the music has taken you to a completely different place, the words haven’t taken the character to a new place. You can have purely emotional songs in musicals, but only for one or two song moments. Elsewhere songs and musical sequences need to drive forward the plot.

 

That’s a great point. One of the things I’ve always admired about Tori’s song-writing is that her songs tend to be mini-dramas with definite emotional arcs. Her characters are usually in a different place, a different psychological state, by the conclusion of the song.

Yes, Tori is to her very core a story-teller, and that is why the theatre is a natural home for her. But the discipline of active, dramaturgically sound musical narrative with stakes and jeopardy for three-dimensional characters was a challenge we both had to meet. With time, we began to see that we could work as if we were one writer. Tori is all about story and character. She feels dilemmas and predicaments and wants and obstacles deeply. So she is the “book” as much as I am and I like to think that I am part of the “score”. I don’t compose notes or write harmonies and she doesn’t write dialogue lines or build the overall architecture, but we have both had enormous roles in the other’s job. In addition, she has welcomed me as a lyricist. Rewriting is fun. I’m not sure it was what Tori was used to. But she’s used to it now, that’s for sure. She loves it. When we need new music, or when something existing needs rethinking in order to make the moment clearer or to help with staging, or simply to make things better, you cannot keep that woman away from the piano. Always, of course, wearing heels.

When we spoke before, the show had really been developing from your close collaboration with Tori (in heels), but obviously you’ve been workshopping the piece intensively since then. How has that workshopping process been helpful in terms of the show’s development?

I might as well tell you that early on we had what was, for me, a tough workshop … After that, and, by the way, after Night of Hunters, we really pulled our socks up. Tori and I wrote two big sequences, one in each act, in which music, lyric and dialogue were truly integrated, and this changed the entire score, story, tone, form and, most excitingly, our process. We got our confidence back. The next workshop was much more creative. Tori and I had our own room at the National Theatre Studio, and with Tom Brady, our pianist, we would rewrite most days, whilst the actors and Marianne Elliott, our director, were trying things out in another room. I’d go home at night and rewrite lyrics and write new ones and refine story and Tori wrote music where she was staying. We’d meet early in the mornings and present our work to each other and then make it better all day. We reworked a lot of existing material in our little room with tea on the go and sandwiches and people popping their heads in every now and then like we were exotic animals at London Zoo. It was pretty exhilarating, like how you imagine movies were written under the studio system, two Dorothy Parkers in the Writers’ Block. No booze, though.

We learned a lot from seeing actors putting the material on its feet, and having Marianne interrogate the story. I think that workshop was three weeks – which was very luxurious, not something either of us took, or take, for granted. Only a subsidised theatre could allow writers such time and space to refine their ideas. The bulk of our writing has happened at home, at my house and at Tori’s in Cornwall, but that workshop was a really productive one, very tiring and exciting. At the end of it, we felt we had a show. That really was the start of life proper for The Light Princess. And I’ve really felt the benefit of that workshop now we’ve started rehearsals. Of course rehearsals mean changes for the writing but on the whole the rigorous testing-out of the words and music happened in the workshop.

Have you had occasion to sing to Tori again, following the rendition of a Carousel number that you talked about last time?.

Poor Tori. I sing to her all the time. On the phone, in her office, in my kitchen, down the flipping street. I have to: the best way to convey lyrics to her is to sing them at her. She has been wonderfully patient. Only once did she lose her temper, and start clicking her thumbs at me to keep me in time. I thought, “Fair enough”. I can read music, I can hold a tune, but I’m pitchy, and it’s not attractive, and Tori has been remarkably kind to me. She acts, you know. We read to each other. It happened very early on. She performed her songs to me, and she just expected me to read scenes back at her. I thought, “Fair enough”. We act and sing up a storm together. You’ll just have to believe me.

There’s an Amos/Adamson duet album somewhere in the future, clearly! Given that the show is recommended for ages 13+ it’s obvious that you’re not going for a cosy family musical here, but something darker and more subversive. Was this a conscious decision or something that just naturally evolved as you developed the themes of the piece? From the publicity blurb, grief seems to be major concern in your version in a way that it’s not, so explicitly, for MacDonald.

 A conscious decision. What is lightness? Why is the girl light? I must be clear about this: I love the original story. It’s a delight. [But] I think for a contemporary theatre audience, it’s not enough to say “the princess never cried and found everything hilarious till the prince sacrificed himself for her”. She’s not a very interesting character in a dramatic context if she is not only light-bodied, but also light-minded. Lightness, for us, is a form of grief. A retreat. An emotional buffer against the darkness of the world. We explore this in our story: why she is like she is and what life teaches her to get over it. The same for the prince. So it’s a story about finding out who you are as you’re entering adulthood. It’s for everyone older than 13. It’s really not for young kids. MacDonald’s central idea remains, his very brilliant, beautiful and powerful metaphor. The girl must understand loss, and cry, “feel weight”, before she can come to earth. And the theme of sacrifice remains, as well. But we’ve made the story our own, and we spend time giving our two lead characters a voice, so that we can truly understand why the princess is light, what it means to her, what it says about her and her world.

I presume that one of the key characters in the story, the evil aunt who curses the Princess, hasn’t been reinstated in your version. What have been the challenges of creating a new kind of antagonist or “conflict” for the show?

There’s no story without conflict. I’m not going to tell you exactly what it is: you’ll have to come and see it! Suffice to say the prince and princess are from opposite sides of the tracks and the princess has to take on evil in her world. We weren’t that interested in lightness being a curse. More that it was the princess’s personal response to bleakness. The evil aunt is of course a fairy-tale trope, and in the context of the original story, which is a delicious satire of the fairy-tale, she’s crucial; she’s the Maleficent character who propels the plot, and MacDonald takes some pleasure in satirising her. His readers were familiar with the archetype. For us lightness is a complex emotional and psychological state, not an enchantment, so she wasn’t necessary. Our story chooses to be about fathers and children, in a fairy-tale context, not stepmothers or evil aunts and children. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.

I’m glad you mentioned MacDonald’s “delicious satire of the fairy-tale.” Re-reading the story recently I was surprised by just how funny and irreverent it is – in its attitude both to the fairy-tale genre and to Victorian social morality. Given the great humour of your and Tori’s work, I wonder how you’ve gone about translating the comedy of the text into a musical context. Are you being as irreverent with the musical genre as MacDonald is with the fairy-tale?

That’s a really interesting question, Alex. In fact MacDonald’s irreverence with the fairy-tale genre is something that got us into a bit of hot water early on. Tori was writing comic songs that I think she thought were “musical” and I was writing dialogue that sent-up fairy-tales. It was pastiche we were up to, and we were up to no good really, because neither of us is that kind of writer. Pastiche is different from humour. When MacDonald was writing, it was fresh, radical even, to make fun of the fairy-tale. Now, everyone does that. And the second you start, unless it’s a very sophisticated take like Into the Woods, which has obviously been done, it’s very easy to end up in Men in Tights territory. What we found was that it was a mistake to send up the fairy-tale. Instead we had to find the centre of the girl’s story: who is she, how does she feel, what does she want? In pursuing all of those things, we began to see it on the one hand as more modern, but also, curiously, on the other, as more traditional in terms of its form and tone. I went back to Grimm and Andersen and Angela Carter and really looked at how fairy-tales work and why they are timeless. I said to Tori, I want to start this show with the words “Once Upon a Time”. I wrote this phrase: “Once upon a once a, once upon a time, lived a princess and a prince in kingdoms gold and blue” and Tori set it to music. I said, we can’t send it up like the Shrek, movies or make it sophisticated, sardonic and essentially metropolitan like Into the Woods. And we can’t hope to achieve the light, knowing irreverence of MacDonald, who lived in a purer time. I want to tell the story straight. Find humour of course – but not place it in any particular time. So we put our protagonist on a traditional Red Riding Hood-type journey through the forest. The rite-of-passage.

As for the musical theatre form, I hope it’s fresh in a few ways: there’s a piano in the pit for starters, which is surprisingly rare. The songs rarely - if ever - conform to traditional AB, AB, CB structures. We’ve looked a lot at musicals. Tori and I both love musicals. Disrespect musicals at your peril if you’re writing one: the best are finely wrought. We’re not trying to reinvent the form, though hopefully we’ve done our own thing. I’m obsessed with the notion of music as the engine for story. There’s a part of me that thinks it’s as much “opera” as “musical” but honestly all these terms are unhelpful, as anyone who creates or sees music theatre knows. There it is: it’s a piece of music theatre.

 

In the comment you made for PopMatters about collaborating with Tori last year you talked about her music having “the expansive drama of opera” and referred to “the twists and turns of her compositions, her complex harmonies … with their sudden curves into brightness.” Could you comment any further about the variety of musical styles in The Light Princess?

I’d prefer not to give too much away about the score! Tori’s music is rhapsodic and folk-like at times; jagged and rhythmic; there are extended sequences of musical story-telling that I’d describe as tone poems. I’m not being too indiscreet if I say that the orchestral world of Night of Hunters is not dissimilar to The Light Princess. One thing you do get with this score is that Tori has written every note. Certainly Martin Lowe our musical supervisor and John Philip Shenale our orchestrator have made invaluable contributions, but Tori has written all of the underscoring, all of the dance music, in addition to all of the music for the songs and sequences. That’s rare in musicals: it’s difficult for the composer because it means she has to be on hand at all times during rehearsals. Someone else is often engaged in rehearsal to create music for dance sequences based on the show’s themes. Tori is having none of that! She’s there all day every day. Every single note is story and character-based, as per our journey together as writers. And every single note is the note Tori wanted in relation to the notes around it. Even for transition or underscoring, the music has been carefully composed after many discussions with me. I do think she has written a very cohesive score. We weave themes not just through individual songs, but through the course of the evening. It’s a score that will bear repeated listening, I hope! It’s full of little surprises, little thematic cells that appear then reappear in new guises. It’s also one of the benefits of taking our time. We’ve been able to do lots of interesting things with leitmotifs. Pardon the pun.

Both your work and Tori’s reveals a fascination with complex, nuanced female protagonists. How does the Princess fit in? What kind of heroine is she?

She is a smart, funny, grieving, truculent, defensive, adventurous, contradictory and ultimately loving teenager. The story is her journey towards adulthood in a world that doesn’t understand her.

Let’s talk about some of your other collaborators on the show. You’re working again with Marianne Elliott, fresh from her great success with another very challenging literary adaptation, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. What makes Marianne an ideal director for The Light Princess, in your view?

I’ve been lucky enough to work with Marianne on several projects. She doesn’t stop. I like that in directors. Some do stop. They have short days and things like that. Marianne just keeps working. I’m not going to say that’s always easy. Marianne never lets up. If there’s something she doesn’t like, and you can’t convince her of it, or you don’t address it, she will not let it go. Ever. She’s very meticulous, very funny, very dry. She has a first-class bullshit-detector. She has a strong visual sense. She loves fairy-tales. She knows how to run a room full of big personalities. She’s developed a very specific method with actors, though it’s quite traditional in some senses; actioning every line, all that. We have a great team — Steven Hoggett, the choreographer, Rae Smith, the designer — and many of us have worked together before, so there’s a shared language. Marianne is the best skipper I know.

The cast assembled for the show is exciting, and I know that some of the performers have been attached to the project for quite a while. I wonder if you’d care to comment on the cast, and, in particular, your two accomplished leads, Rosalie Craig and Nick Hendrix?

I think Rosalie has been with us since the beginning. She can do it all. She has helped us, inspired us. It’s a challenging role, a big sing, and Rosalie has been training for it for some months. Nick also came to us through the audition process. He’s a young actor with a great voice. It felt right for us and the character of the prince, as it’s very powerful and he has a lovely falsetto, but he trained first as an actor, and it’s not traditionally “music theatre”. Not that there’s anything I don’t love about a music theatre voice. We have plenty of big powerful show voices. Laura Pitt-Pulford, Amy Booth-Steel, Jamie Muscato, Kane Oliver Parry, Clive Rowe — these are talented people with great pipes. The casting process was pretty rigorous. Finding those double- and triple-threats was fun. And it wasn’t just Rosalie who inspired us. Certain vocal lines in the show have been fashioned around the talents of particular actors. Tori doesn’t get precious about keys and things like that — we cut the dress to fit the girl; Tori’s phrase. And the suit to fit the boy. I think Tori’s loved writing for men, by the way. Only the week before last we fashioned something for Kane — he’s an incredible rock tenor.

 

Over the years, Tori’s spoken about how working on The Light Princess has influenced her approach to her concept- and narrative-driven projects, from American Doll Posse’s character studies to Night of Hunters’s dynamic adaptations of classical pieces. Do you feel, similarly, that working on the show has influenced your other recent projects? I was interested to see how central song and dance were to Larisa and the Merchants, and you have Gabriel currently at the Globe.

To put it simply: if I could, I’d work with musicians all the time. Let’s face it, music is it. What else is there, really? I’m not being facetious. Music is it.

To what extent do you see The Light Princess as “complete” now – and how likely is to continue to evolve through the rehearsal process? Do you and Tori anticipate more rewriting?

We’re in rehearsals now, and daily little things come up. This week, I’ve been observing in the main rehearsal room, keeping an eye on story, book and lyrics, while Tori’s been in another room painstakingly going through every bar of the orchestration with the musical supervisor. Always things to do. But the core of the show is there.

What’s been most rewarding for you in terms of working on The Light Princess – so far?

Tori. Her musical gifts, her energy, her persistence, her grace under fire. Being a small part of her world from a privileged position — watching her perform on tour and so on.

And what are you most looking forward to about the next few months before the show opens?

I love rehearsals. I’ve learned over the years to savour them as they’re over so quickly. Just sitting there, observing. Tori whispered to me yesterday, in a moment when she and I as the writers weren’t really needed and boredom was creeping up on us: “Just keep observing: patience comes from observation. Watch what all these people are doing. Think about what it takes to do it.” We both sit there with our scores and scripts and tea and pipe up when it’s necessary. We’re lucky.

What are your hopes in terms of what audiences will get from The Light Princess?

 

Well, I hope they enjoy it! I hope they get swept up in the fairy-tale romance of it. I hope they see in the central characters and their journey towards adulthood a little bit of themselves.

A couple of quick questions to end. What was the last book you read that had an impact on you?

Rose Tremain’s Restoration — a great novel I only recently encountered.

The last films?

Frances Ha and Amour.

The last theatre productions?

This House, The Amen Corner and Death in Venice.

The last album?

Alison Balsom’s Sound the Trumpet conducted by Trevor Pinnock. I’m biased, because I’ve just worked with Alison and Trevor on Gabriel at the Globe, but it’s a glorious album.

Complete the following sentence: “Writing a new musical is …

 … like living in a scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ”

 The Light Princess previews at the National Theatre from 25 September, and opens on 9 October. Adamson and Amos talk about the production in an NT Platform on 18 October.

Further details here.

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About Me

Alex Ramon

Alex Ramon is a teacher and critic from London, UK, who is currently based in Łódź, Poland. He has written about film for Sight and Sound, BFI, and Film International, about film and music for PopMatters, and about theatre for British Theatre Guide and The Reviews Hub. He's interviewed Agnieszka Holland, François Ozon, Tori Amos, Samuel Adamson, Andrzej Chyra, Małgorzata Szumowska, Mark Umbers, and June Tabor (among others) and is the author of the book Liminal Spaces: The Double Art of Carol Shields. Email: lookcloser1@yahoo.co.uk Twitter: @BoycottTrends

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Favourites: By Year

Films 2018

1. Fugue (Smoczynska)

2. Wildlife (Dano)

3. Lean on Pete (Haigh)

4. Peterloo (Leigh)

5. Roma (Cuaron)

6. The Chambermaid (Aviles)

7. Tully (Reitman)

8. Djon Africa (Guerra/Reis)

9. Apostasy (Kokotajlo)

10. Nancy (Choe)

11. Journey to a Mother's Room (Rico)

12. Joy (Motezai)

13. Support the Girls (Bujalski)

14. Faces Places (Varda/JR)

15. Sorry Angel (Honoré)

16. Sauvage (Vidal-Naquet)

17. Becoming Astrid (Christensen)

18. Monument (Szelc)

19. Candelaria (Hendrix)

20. Las Herederas (Martinessi)

Theatre 2018

1. The Nether (Otchłań) (Jaracz)

2. The Meeting (Chichester Festival Theatre)

3. Utility (Orange Tree)

4. Caroline, or Change (Hampstead)

5. Fun Home (Young Vic)

6. Ich Czworo (Four of Us) (Jaracz)

7. Richard II (Almeida)

8. Operetka (Jaracz)

9. Nine Night (NT)

10. Hadestown (NT)

Music 2018

1. Sinners Got Soul Too (Peyton)

2. Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (Arctic Monkeys)

3. Negative Capability (Marianne Faithfull)

4. Whistle Down the Wind (Joan Baez)

5. Float Like A Butterfly (Barb Jungr/John McDaniel)

6. Lost Souls (Loreena McKennitt)

7. My Indigo (My Indigo)

8. Dirty Computer (Janelle Monae)

9. American Utopia (David Byrne)

10. High As Hope (Florence and the Machine)

Films 2017

1. A Ciambra (Carpignano)

2.-3. Frantz/L'amant double (Ozon)

4. Lost in Paris (Gordon/Abel)

5. God's Own Country (Francis Lee)

6. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)

7. Maudie (Walsh)

8. mother! (Aronofsky)

9. Manifesto (Rosefelft)

10. Summer 1993 (Simon)

11. Chavela (Gund/Kyi)

12. My Happy Family (Ekvtimishvili/Gross)

13. A Quiet Passion (Davies)

14. Insyriated (Van Leeuw)

15. Little Men (Ira Sachs)

Theatre 2017

1. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Pinter Theatre)

2. Mother Courage and her Children (Teatr Narodowy, Warsaw)

3. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Merton Art Space)

4. Romantics Anonymous (Sam Wanamaker)

5. JOAN (Ovalhouse)

6. An Octoroon (Orange Tree)

7. Twelfth Night (NT; Globe)

8. Czarownice z Salem (Teatr Jarazca, Lodz)

9. Winter Solstice (Orange Tree)

10. The Glass Menagerie (Duke of York's)

Films 2016

1. Paterson (Jarmusch)

2. The Last Family (Matuszynski)

3. Things to Come (Hansen-Love)

4. Lemonade (Beyonce, et al)

5. Theo and Hugo (Duscatel/Matineau)

6. Summertime (Corsini)

7. Hissein Habre: A Chadian Tragedy (Haroun)

8. Aquarius (Filh0)

9. The BFG (Spielberg)

10. Staying Vertical (Guiraudie)

Theatre 2016

1. Les Blancs (NT)

2. The Maids (Trafalgar Studios)

3. A Midsummer Night's Dream (Globe)

4. Richard III (Almeida)

5. The Rolling Stone (Orange Tree)

6.The Flick (NT)

7. King Lear (Old Vic)

8. Bitches (Finborough)

9. Dogville (Nowy Teatr, Lodz)

10. After October (Finborough)

Music 2016

1. Lemonade (Beyonce)

2. Stranger to Stranger (Paul Simon)

3. Upcetera (Jim Moray)

4. The Colour in Anything (James Blake)

5. Lodestar (Shirley Collins)

6. Blond (Frank Ocean)

7. A Seat at the Table (Solange)

8. Boys for Pele, 20th Anniversary Reissue (Tori Amos)

9. Blackstar (David Bowie)

10. Come Together: Songs of The Beatles (Barb Jungr/John McDaniel)

Films 2015

1. Sunset Song (Davies)

2. 11 Minutes (Skolimowski)

3. Mountains May Depart (Zhangke)

4. James White (Josh Mond)

5. Mediterranea (Carpignano)

6. Inherent Vice (Anderson)

7. A Bigger Splash (Guadagnino)

8. Moje Corki Krowy (These Daughters of Mine) (Debska)

9.Regarding Susan Sontag (Kates)

10. Corki Dancingu/ The Lure (Smoczynska)

11. They Will Have To Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile (Schwartz)

12. An (Kawase)

13. Love Is Strange (Sachs)

14. Body/Cialo (Szumowska)

15. The Pearl Button (Guzman)

Music 2015

1. The Light Princess (OCR)

2. The Trackless Woods (Iris DeMent)

3. Skeleton Crew (Madisen Ward & the Mama Bear)

4. Music Complete (New Order)

5. Carrie & Lowell (Sufjan Stevens)

6. The Rose of Roscrae (Tom Russell)

7. Joy of Living: A Tribute to Ewan MacColl (Various)

8. The Other Side of Desire (Rickie Lee Jones)

9. Honeymoon (Lana del Rey)

10. Leonard Cohen: Zaspiewany (Various)

Bonus: Made in Dagenham (OCR)

Films 2014

1. The Duke of Burgundy (Strickland)
2. Exhibition (Hogg)
3. Radiator (Browne)
4. Winter Sleep (Ceylan)
5. The Immigrant (Gray)
6. Mr. Turner (Leigh)
7. Mommy (Dolan)
8. Night Bus (Baker)
9. Girlhood (Sciamma)
10. Fotograf (Krzystek)



Music 2014



1. Morning Phase (Beck)
2. Give My Love To London (Marianne Faithfull)
3. Unrepentant Geraldines (Tori Amos)
4.From Scotland With Love (King Creosote)
5. This Is All Yours (alt-J)
6. So Long, See You Tomorrow (Bombay Bicycle Club)
7. World Peace is None of Your Business (Morrissey)
8. O Love (Ernest Troost)
9. Salad Days (Mac DeMarco)
10. The Voyager (Jenny Lewis)


Theatre 2014


1.Mr. Burns (Almeida)
2. Festival (Orange Tree)
3. Rachel (Finborough)
4. Made in Dagenham (Adelphi)
5. My Night With Reg (Donmar)
6. East is East (Trafalgar Studios)
7. A View from The Bridge (Young Vic)
8. The Merchant of Venice (Almeida)
9. The Boss of it All (Soho)
10. Our Town (Almeida)

My Blog List

• Going Gently

  Timing

  16 hours ago
• Partially Obstructed View

  Theatre review: Cleansed

  4 days ago
• popsublime

  28th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 10th - 14th, 2026)

  1 month ago
• There Ought To Be Clowns

  My 10 favourite shows of 2025

  7 months ago
• movies and songs 365

  GPS Prank

  6 years ago
• Last Seat on the Right

  Little Men (2016, Sachs)

  9 years ago

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