Presented by DEMI-PARADISE PRODUCTIONS
at The Gregson Centre, Lancaster.
Friday 11 February 2005

A packed house enjoys a first-rate, cracking show

A good and fascinating balance
The programme was a comprehensive Celebration of Love & Lovers in Words and Music, just as the soirée's full title promised. They were all there, from clerics to cabaret, Shakespeare to Showtime, the heartless to the heartbroken, the reason, rationality, remembrance and romance describing and underpinning that strange thing know as love, and which almost all of us experience - in one form or another - in our lives.

Whilst the bulk of the songs and words were British or American, there was a good historical and wider geographical spread too, from the Japanese Nara Period (eighth century AD), and on to the English Renaissance. We variously enjoyed the anonymous and stark sixteenth-century poem Western Wynde, and works by Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674), Hull's crypto-Catholic MP, diplomat and poet Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678) and William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) and others.

Also represented were later generations of writers and musicians, with some good choices from the nineteenth century. These included Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 – 1837) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861), with a wonderful sonnet, though it doesn't read like one – ah! - the skill in that. This example from 1850 begins as follows:

SONNET from the PORTUGUESE

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being …

The last hundred or so years provided the majority of the programme, and with some unlikely juxtapositions. Here Sir John Betjeman (1906 - 1984) rubs shoulders with Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) and Stephen Fry (b 1957) – can you imagine them across the dinner table?! There were also Laurie Lee (1914 – 1979)'s masterly prose (I don't recall Cider with Rosie being that erotic! – and nor did Demi-Paradise Producer Steve Tomlin), songs from John Lennon and Paul McCartney, epigrams from Dorothy Parker and, back across the Atlantic to the Mersey, Roger McGough (b 1937), whose epigrammatic Vinegar is so visually evocative that you can all but smell the Scouser chippie and see the unkempt cassock:

VINEGAR

sometimes
i feel like a priest
in a fish and chip queue
quietly thinking
as the vinegar runs through
how nice it would be
to buy supper for two.

I noticed some cuts in the material both sung and spoken, and was told that this was "in the interests of balancing the short and the long, the spoken with the sung'. This makes perfect sense. I do not envy Demi-Paradise the task of having to cope with one of every writer, anthologist or impresario's most difficult and painful questions, ‘what do I leave out?'.

Something for everyone
There was some consolation on this front for the audience, however. As Elaine Singleton noted her review of the event in the Lancashire Evening Post (12 February 2005, p4), "The joy of these mix'n'match productions is that if there's a part that you're not keen on, you only have to wait a moment and another choice comes along.' She is right, for it's just the same as window shopping in a decent city, or trains at Clapham Junction at peak hour (on a good day). The numbers from the musicals were not really my cup of tea, and my preferences were more than adequately met by other jewels on the wide and catholic lists.

The capacity audience, perhaps mainly an open, mature bloom rather then in love's first flush, was enraptured from the very start. The (very!) audible responses were are varied as the fare: there were knowing titters for the rude bits, heartfelt ‘aaaaaahs' for the smoochy ones), contented chuckles at the ‘pastoral' bits (and the dreary Betjeman), snorts of delight for the pithy two-liners, and unrestrained guffaws at Jack Worthing's discussions with Gwendoline Fairfax and Augusta, Lady Bracknell. And the Grease number…

But that's for later. The spoken extracts ranged from the witty two-liners to the rather longer. I couldn't help noting – and make no apologies for quoting here – some of the gems which particularly stuck me. Here they are, in chronological order:

The works of celebrated divine, Dr John Donne 1572 - 1631, regularly enter the lists and anthologies with the some of the best love poems of all times, but of his metaphysics and lust there was no mention on this occasion. We hear instead – in the common metaphor from the time of sex/death - from his friend and diplomat, Sir Henry Wotton (1568 – 1639). The then Provost of Eton (whose mistress was the ‘Queen of Bohemia') wrote the following epigram upon the death of his half-nephew, MP and (English) Secretary of State, Sir Albertus Morton (c1584 – 1625). The latter's demise was followed by the death of his widow, and the couple's love is clearly and concisely evident:

UPON THE DEATH OF SIR ALBERT MORTON's WIFE

He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) wrote to his wife, and the soon-to-be author of Frankenstein, Mary (Wollstonecraft Godwin) Shelley (1797 – 1851) as he was waiting for her to join him at Este, inland from Venice in Italy, in 1818. He ends his letter, with the best ‘sign-off' line I have ever seen, thus:

LETTER to MARY SHELLEY

Dearest love, be well, be happy, come to me – your own constant and affectionate - Shelley

The Hon Victoria Mary (‘Vita') Sackville-West (1892 – 1962), also produced some exquisite declarations and definitions of love. A letter she wrote to her beloved Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) ends like this:

A LETTER to VIRGINIA WOOLF

I just miss you, in a quite simple, desperate, human way. […]
It is incredible how essential to me you have become.

The word ‘essential' (my emphasis) says it all. What a clear, cool, simple and absolutely total declaration of her devotion to the younger writer.

From the cerebral, then, to the physical. Here that is dramatically depicted, with a sting in the tail, by Adrian Mitchell (b1932):

WHEN I AM SAD AND LONELY

When I am sad and lonely,
When I think all hope is gone,
As I walk along High Holborn,
I think of you with nothing on.

And all that in the generally demure and rather middle-class Gregson!

Good choices of music
The music too was varied, from William Lawes (1602 – 1645) of the Caroline pre-Cromwell court with its French/Catholic influences, to the worlds of the musical, pop, mainstream opera (Stephen Joshua Sondheim, b1930), The Beatles, the movies (Sondheim's Sooner or Later is from the 1990 film Dick Tracy), and ‘songs from the shows' aplenty.

Love grows and develops. So did the programme, through the carefully-complied sections the Celebration was conveniently divided into. Invitations, Anticipations, Declarations to the inevitable Separations and Desolations. You can feel the progression … and there was also pause for thought, with parts devoted to Contemplations, Lamentations, Interrogations and Calculations too.

What about the Consummations, do you ask? They were left to the audience, who needed no further encouragement or stimulation from the verse, music, prose or even wine. They had formed their own conclusions and fully understood the message.

The strong dramatic engagement with the audience continued throughout the whole performance. This momentum was unstoppable, for the rapture at the end demanded – and of course got - an encore. This was Summer Lovin' from Grease, with which the first half had ended.

The second and final rendition, though, was rendered with enormous panache, and with even less restraint, more abandon, higher camp, and even more audience participation than thitherto. There was handclapping, shouts of ecstasy and foot stamping which called to mind yet another side of love, the savage orgiastics from a post-Neronic Saturnalia.

A local professional enterprise
In all, then, a heady and fine evening's entertainment for the early Spring celebratory rituals of love and rebirth. The exquisitely-staged and wonderfully-delivered evening's entertainment was the brainchild of the perpetually dapper and reassuringly placid Steve Tomlin, of Shakespeare et al in Lancaster Castle fame. Performing this confection were Sue McCormick, who originates from Preston, Rachel Battersby who hails from Accrington, and Simeon Truby, (title rôle in Macbeth in Lancaster Castle in 2002) with fine and broad musicianship from the David Battersby, who comes from the same roots as his wife, on (electronic) keyboards.

So it was all first-rate stuff from local Lancashire talent – all of them professional, both in practice and in this performance. If only Demi-Paradise would get out more! They have an excellent track record of quality shows, and never fail to fill their venues. As Elaine Singleton also added on her excellent review, "tickets for future [Demi-Paradise] shows, be they at the Castle or elsewhere, should be seized upon'. Quickly.

A personal reflection
As a gay man, I have only a minor reservation. The audience included same-sex couples of both kinds, so I noted with some regret that the male gay bits (Fry and Shakespeare) were read by women, rather than the more appropriate male. But that is probably a churlish cavil (- but also an interesting point - ed). John and I came away exulted and elated.

The start of a regional tour?
I have heard gossip that the show might go on tour further afield to Beetham, Milnthorpe and beyond, to Hoghton Tower near Preston, and Manchester Cathedral. We look forward to hear if there will be another Demi-Paradise Shakespeare at the Castle ... watch this space. Audiences further south will undoubtedly have a whale of a time with this fine celebratory divertimento from Lancaster's own professional theatre ensemble.

Along with every single member of the packed audience on Friday (including The Gregson's bar staff!), we most certainly did.

Copyright © 13 February 2005 Michael Nunn