Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i Ink Pellet

“This is the tenth time we’ve done this, but the first time we’ve moved the conference out of London” says Ellara Wakely, NT’s Head of Schools Engagement, adding that over 1600 teachers have participated during the last decade. “Of course, many people enjoy coming to London and connecting with us in our base on the Southbank and we’ve always had great attendance, but this year we also attracted many teachers who live and work further north and who hadn’t taken part before which was really good.” She adds: “This is a tough time for the arts and teachers are an essential extension of what we do here at the National. One teacher said this year that he works in a department of one and often feels isolated. Coming to our…

The warm, rich creamy yellow and the soft wood tones are extraordinarily beautiful. Even before you get through the Orange Street door to the National Gallery’s Roden Centre for Creative Learning, with its newly incised stonework over the entrance, you are looking upwards and marvelling. The learning centre itself is not new but now, with some very inspired, architectural design by Hannah Lawson of Lawson Ward Studio it has been radically reworked with sustainability, accessibility, practicality and light at the centre of the concept. For example, there are window seats and recessed benches throughout and they’re made from scraps from the National Gallery’s framing department and look lovely. There is a “Changing Places” toilet which caters for almost any kind of disability. The class-sized lockers for group use are intended…

Backstroke by Anna Mackmin – Donmar – Runs until 12 April 2025 Beth (Celia Imrie) has a stroke and is taken to hospital where she lies inertly. We see the hospitalisation scene with paramedics twice for no particular reason. Thereafter her life and complicated relationship with her daughter Bo (Tamsin Grieg) is gradually unpicked in a series of flashbacks. Anna Mackmin’s pleasingly crafted new play which uses an all-female cast of five, is about mothers, motherhood, matriarchy and matrescence. As such it tries, in places, to be slightly too clever and to include too many issues. Nonetheless, there’s much to admire – and, in my case, strongly identify with – here. Imrie is, of course, very good indeed as this colourful, outrageous, irrational, difficult, irritating and capricious woman, vacillating between…

Synergy Theatre Project was founded by Esther Baker over 20 years ago to provide opportunities for people affected by the criminal justice system. Susan Elkin attended a rehearsal of the company’s new play, Providers. Three professional actors and Daniella Henry, who was released from prison just four days ago, are working on the early scenes of Ambreen Razia’s smartly observed new play billed as being “about family, money and what we do when we don’t have enough of it”. Two pairs of siblings alternate scenes. Daniella’s character, Mia 15, is desperately worried about her elder sister who has a whole raft of mental health issues. Money is very short. Their mother has died but Mia hasn’t drawn official attention to this because it will land her in care. Meanwhile the…

How many stage musicals can you think of which are adaptations of films? Little Shop of Horrors, The Producers, Kinky Boots and dozens of others, I expect. Then there are plays created from novels. Ballet Shoes, for instance has just closed at National Theatre but we’re promised a revival next Christmas because it has been a runaway success. Most TV dramas start life as novels. So do operas such as La Traviata, which is based on La Dame aux Camelias by Alexander Dumas. Meanwhile lots of opera creators have adapted plays (Verdi’s Macbeth, Othello and Falstaff) or poems. Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes is based on George Crabbe’s poem of the same name. Prokofiev and Michael Bourne, among others, have created ballets from plays such as Romeo and Juliet too. And…

Chatty, warm, businesslike and feisty, Jilly Bond is good company. “I fell in love with theatre when I was 4,” she chuckles, remembering that her role in the primary school play got her first laugh. Then, more soberly, she adds: “It was my father who laughed. He’d left us two years earlier and was in the audience with his new wife.” She adds ruefully: “So I suppose it was that old thing of a little girl wanting to please her father”. Jilly and I are chatting congenially in the bar at the Brockley Jack in South London, in the late afternoon before one of the last performances in the run of Trestle in the Jack Studio next door. She plays Denise in this revival of Stewart Pringle’s two hander play,…

“It was the best day of my life. I felt like I had just conquered the world.” That’s how one nine-year-old in Norwich described his experience of the Shakespeare Schools Festival. As the programme celebrates an important milestone this year, we’re looking back on a quarter-century of transforming young lives – and ahead to more, much more, in the next 25 years. FROM WEST WALES TO THE WEST END Over two evenings in the year 2000, eight secondary school classes took to the stage and performed abridged Shakespeare plays for an audience of family and friends. Little did they realise, they were to be the first of more than 350,000 young people to have this remarkable experience over the next 25 years. In the 1990s, S4C’s Shakespeare: The Animated Tales…

RSC For information on all of these opportunities visit: rsc.org.uk/learn RSC CERTIFICATE IN TEACHING SHAKESPEARE: FOUNDATION If you’re new to using rehearsal room approaches to teach Shakespeare, then this course is for you. Are you passionate about inspiring young people and teaching Shakespeare? This course will help you acquire the knowledge, confidence and skills to begin using our approaches to bring Shakespeare’s plays to life in your classroom. 28 - 29 March 2025, and 4 July 2025 www.rsc.org.uk/learn/schools-and-teachers/teacher-professional-development/certificate/foundation RSC CERTIFICATE IN TEACHING Shakespeare: Intermediate Course The next tier involves three days which delve deeper into the language structures and historical contexts of Shakespeare’s plays that make them so exciting to encounter in our classrooms. Designed for teachers who have completed three days of training with the RSC, such as three…

What is your background? I grew up in Bermondsey, the youngest of four widely spaced children. My parents were immigrants from Turkey who settled here in the early 1950s. I went to school in Bermondsey and then, after my dad was made redundant from his factory job, we moved to Dartford when I was 12 and I attended a selective school. How did you get interested in drama? I took part in plays at primary school and loved it. I was the star of the school play! And I wrote little scripts to act out with friends in in the playground. At secondary school I loved needlework and the fashion clothes world and started making bits and pieces. I suppose cat walks and the like are another form of drama?…