Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i Ink Pellet

Lit in Colour is a campaign created by Penguin Books and the Runnymede Trust to support UK Schools and to make the teaching and learning of English Literature more inclusive. Bloomsbury, under its Methuen Drama imprint, is in its second year of a three-year project to publish and promote plays by global majority playwrights which they want taken up by teachers and exam boards. There are now sixty titles on “The (incomplete) Lit in Colour Play List”. The recent event at Conway Hall in central London was an awareness-raising celebration of the wealth of material now available. It was so well attended by teachers, actors and playwrights that the big hall was full. And the atmosphere was palpably and enthusiastically positive, as they cheered readings from plays by actors and…

If you teach for forty years and never change your methods or views you will be in fashion three times – or so runs a cynical old staff room joke. I was reminded of it when I read, with great interest, the report of the English Association’s Summit on the Reform of the English GCSEs which ran in collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe in September. Over a hundred delegates agreed that GCSE English is in need of reform. They want less emphasis on linear teaching and terminal exams, the reinstatement of oral work, fewer set texts and more relevant ones and many would welcome the return of coursework. It all sounded very familiar. In 1985 I was appointed Head of English in a non-selective girls’ school in Kent. I was young,…

Founded by Steve Green in 2010, Fourth Monkey offers artist training – with attitude. And that attitude is thoughtful, benign, professional, kind, realistic and in many ways unusual. Now firmly based in a former workhouse in Seven Sisters Road near Finsbury Park Station, it has carefully converted its high ceilinged, wooden floored building to create attractive studios and rooms for its 130 students and 16 permanent staff. “Yes, we’ve been here ten years now” says Steve, as I pad round in my socks because The Monkey House is a shoe-free zone. “We got the idea from a yoga hall we once hired. It helps to keep the students grounded, literally, and of course it ensures that the whole place is clean which is important for movement classes, for example.” Fourth…

FESTIVE SHOWS IN LONDON… STICK MAN Bloomsbury Theatre, Bloomsbury What starts off as a morning jog becomes quite the misadventure for Stick Man: a dog wants to play fetch with him, a swan builds a nest with him, and he even ends up on a fire! How will Stick Man ever get back to the family tree in time for Christmas? Dates: 4 December 2024 – 5 January 2025 Box Office: ticketing@ucl.ac.uk Also at: The Lowry, Salford, M50 3AZ Dates: 10 December 24 – 5 January 25 Box Office: thelowry.com/whats-on SLAVA’S SNOW SHOW Harold Pinter Theatre, West End Immerse yourself in the whimsical world of Slava’s SnowShow, a spellbinding spectacle where laughter and wonder collide. Slava’s SnowShow is a cavalcade of chaos and charm that invites you to leave the…

How many drama teaching resources have you written? Fifty-two ranging across set texts, practitioners, techniques and genres. These are now available via Digital Theatre who bought them from me earlier this year. Meanwhile I am writing new ones to sell via my own website. My Exploring Theatre … Stanislavsky is probably the fullest practical resource currently available. There are lots of plays, by me and people I’ve commissioned, available for school use on my website too. These are suitable for performance or study at KS3. They’re not for external exam use. So how did you get into drama? My father was a prep school headmaster, so we moved about whenever he changed jobs. At 12 I was sent away to boarding school, Westonbirt in Gloucestershire where I was under pressure to…

Once we’ve found somewhere to sit in the National Theatre foyer and settled ourselves, Mark, with gentlemanly courtesy, goes off to get cups of tea. He’s gone some time but eventually returns with a story which is the perfect interview opener. In the café queue he had got chatting to a National Theatre front of house employee who had just finished seeing the audience in for the matinee of Coriolanus. When Mark quizzed him about the show, the man told him that he didn’t really like it because, although it looked lovely with great music, he couldn’t understand what the actors were really saying. Then he said devastatingly, to Mark who hadn’t admitted to being an actor: “I suppose that makes me a bit uncouth really”. “And that’s exactly the…

From teachers to audience members to actors, it can be production of a play in a school hall or in theatre that first ignites an interest in the arts, just as much as it can be an expressive arts lesson in Drama or Dance or Music. Occasionally, the effect of seeing or being in a live performance can be so powerful that it alters the trajectory of a person’s life (that was certainly my experience when my English teacher started introducing school plays). But even when it isn’t life-changing, the impact of those formative creative experiences can be felt in no less profound ways. From oracy, self-expression, language and communication skills, to problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, tolerance and resilience, we know that access to expressive arts subjects and experience can…

The Pirates of Penzance – Wilton’s Music Hall Sasha Regan’s trademark muscular all-male production opens in a Victorian gymnasium. Lizzi Gee’s choreography is one of this production’s great strengths as the cast leap about and form arresting tableaux. From this, the principals emerge: Robert Wilkes makes Ruth very funny, pegging out washing with incongruous asides as she explains in song how Frederic (Cameron McAllister) came to be an apprentice pirate, but there’s rich pathos there too. When we get to the Major General’s daughter’s daring to paddle on the beach the cast are simpering, fainting, grinning, enjoying innuendoes and never still, which is one of the many things which makes this show so electrifying. Eventually the posse of daughters is reduced to a plausible five including delicious Mabel (Luke Garner-Greene,…

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