Reviews For Shoemakers

3D play in Covent Garden Church: The Shoemaker’s Holiday at the Actors’ Church

August 14, 2010 3:10pm by Tessa Ditner
the london alternative fringe festival

“We had an acoustic problem.” Director Jemma Gross tells me as a church-full of people pour out onto the cobble stones. “Our venue was meant to be a garden and when you’re used to yelling...” But the yelling in the church venue is one of the lovely details of this play. You’re sitting on your pew expecting to hear a sermon and instead, there’s a voice coming from the organist’s balcony. The audience twists round as the stage is now up and behind. The other technical problem associated with a play in a church, is the lack of control over lighting. This was dealt with beautifully by Philip Worrall who created a giant lollipop, with one side of the circle depicting the sun and the other the moon, to show the passing of time. It’s particularly lovely during the interval when the actors turn the lollipop onto the moon side and snooze mask-and-all beneath it, like characters in a painting.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday is an Elizabethan play written by Thomas Dekker, performed for the first time in 1599. It’s tells of love overcoming social class. This production kept the Elizabethan clothing and language. Undergarments and corsets were made by costume designer Sarah Jones and the outfits included pouch-like wallets hanging from belts. They also kept expressions such as “A pox on them!” and “Prick thine enemies’ Ralph!” Jemma admits that what first drew her to this play however, wasn’t the time in which it is set, but rather the comedy in the writing.
“It’s a silly script,” she says “it’s Austin Powers in Elizabethan times.” Indeed the comedy is turned to life by the zesty performances from the cast. David Fensom had us all in stitches with his finger twiddling, body twisting attempts to seduce, whilst Elizabeth Webster’s portrayal of the undaunted Rose had us on her side from the beginning.
 
The play also borrows a few ideas from stand-up, by including audience participation, which caused great applause when one of us read our line right. Even the underlying presence of terrors of war is used to comic effect, with the actors spitting onto the marble floor at any mention of the word ‘France’. The seriousness of this spit becomes clear when Ralph, played by James Rose, returns from war with an amputated leg. He manages a mightily long hobble all the way from the back of the church to the front (and back again). Every character uses the entire space of the church to hobble, run, scream and ride horses. My favourite moment is when the lovers finally see each other and climb over the seating audience saying “excuse me” and then, finally, slowly, kiss above and in the middle of all the pews. “It slows them down.” Jemma says “You love best when you have an obstacle.” I recently say Danton’s Death at the National and felt my legs go wooden despite the brilliance of the cast, because there just wasn’t enough movement. The way the actors in this play made full use of every nook and cranny redefined the idea of stage space. Just when you thought you’d turned your head in every possible direction, an actor pops out of the pulpit like a Super Mario Land mushroom and the show continues from there. It’s like a 3D movie, but better, because it’s actually 3D.
 
Tessa Ditner – blogged with love on the 13th of August 2010
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 review by Mags Gaisford for EXTRA! EXTRA!

We are in a Church. A buxom, red – lipped, corseted woman sidles up to my brother. ‘Is he yours?’ ‘No,’ I reply. ‘You can have him!’ At which she laughs loudly, perhaps uneasily, and promptly moves away. ‘Fair enough’, we say to each other. The mingling of the cast, in magnificent Elizabethan dress, (and sporty plimsolls) with the crowd, in anticipation of their own show, sets the tone for BlackSuns’ production of Thomas Dekkers’ The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which is a tour de force in integrative choreography.

There is gratuitous hawking of phlegm in reference to the French, with whom we are at war, apparently. Sir Hugh Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, anxious to prevent the budding romance between Roland, his son, and Rose Oatley, the Mayor’s daughter, has packed him off as the Colonel of a company to fight. But like a hardy weed, love finds its own way through the cracks in Lacy’s scheme. Roland sends Ralph, a shoemaker, in his stead (tearing him away from his own fiancée Jane), disguises himself as a Dutch cobbler called Hans, and persuades the ebullient head – honcho Simon Eyre to take him on in his company, hoping to reach Rose under cover. Cue some highly camp comedy characters sent to complicate events with their misplaced and decadent desires, some ensuing dramatic ironic knots made of silly string, some irresistible Monty Python – style coconut horse riding and a healthy dose of bawdy humour. Then the bumbling plot takes off for fantasy land as Eyre, the shoemaker, in an unlikely act of social rebellion, is made Mayor and a gauche King knights Roland for his lovelorn cowardice.

At least I think that’s what happened. It’s clear from the programme’s jocularly bewildering plot synopsis that Jemma Gross’s production is not aiming for the careful, detailed delivery of a meaningful story. Brief internet research reveals Thomas Dekker’s dramas were characterised by their ‘slightness and hurry’, or criticised for their ‘hasty and careless composition’. As a performance, The Shoemaker’s Holiday hits the ground running. Cast members dance and skip down the aisles, scramble over pews, scream from the rafters and drag audience members up into the pulpit to read out lines. The result is a dizzying impression of comedic chaos. The play is normally performed in the open air, but on the night I went to see it, the rain had driven it inside. The tragedy is, the acoustics in St Paul’s Church are perfect for the solemn sermonising of ministers, and not for the rapid fire of Elizabethan jokes.

Dekker’s skills lay in his kindly, if mocking eye for individuals’ idiosyncrasies and his vivid rendering of contemporary society and not in the structures of his plots. There were no changes of tone in the play, and nothing, therefore, to punctuate particular scenes or emphasise elements. Its relentless pace, and the deeply unfortunate blurred acoustics swallowing up the witty details, made characters and words slide together, offering little by way of incentive for someone with no previous knowledge of the drama to keep up. All the more shame, because the cast was solidly coherent, seamlessly dancing around one another under Ian Brener’s inspired movement direction. But few actors had found a way of being heard, so that rich individual talents were undersold. Perhaps David Fensom came closest, with his delightfully hopeless would – be womaniser Hammon. Elizabeth Webster’s Rose’s vulgar adolescent hysterics and forceful lust gave a refreshing comic edge to your standard romantic heroine.

There were moments of artful visual communication, such as the burnt – out revellers lazily propping up a sign with the moon on it from the pulpit, only to be nudged awake and reminded to spin the sign around to show the sun before falling asleep again. The antics of Eyre’s shoemakers and their petty politics were well staged. Alas, around me, I saw other audience members looking equally strained and lost as I was, so that the biggest irony is that for all its emphasis on audience participation, this production ultimately left us feeling excluded. See it outside, in a secluded garden, and it may be a very different story. It will probably feel less like gate crashing a private party in a strange world.

The Bardathon- Warwick Blogs.
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/pkirwan/entry/the_shoemakers_holiday

August 09, 2010
The Shoemaker's Holiday (Black Sun) @ The Dell, Stratford–upon–Avon

Since its institution during the Complete Works Festival, the Stratford open air festival at the Dell has become an annual event, offering free theatre to Stratford passers-by. While it's now relocated slightly further along the river, the spirit of the outdoor performances has remained the same: accessible, entertaining and pleasantly brief.

Perhaps most exciting prospect in this year's programme was the opportunity to finally see a bit of Thomas Dekker, in the guise of The Shoemaker's Holiday, performed by Black Swan under the direction of Jemma Gross. Modestly trimmed to fit into 90 minutes flat, it's an ebullient comedy eminently suited to a casual, open-air environment.

Tom Radford's Lacy and Elizabeth Webster's Rose inevitably drew most of the attention. Rose was something of a revelation; the traditional waif-like heroine was here reimagined as a vivacious and robust figure of bawdy fun, who yanked Lacy about, flirted teasingly with Hammon and couldn't keep her hands off her new husband even in the King's presence. The equality of the lovers gave the production an interesting dynamic, riffing on Romeo and Juliet (particularly in the masque scene) to emphasise their shared and proactive love as the driving force of the play. The boisterousness of Webster's Rose additionally served to render Lacy's rather passive disguise as Hans all the more amusing; Sybil all but dragged the heroic but rather bumbling Lacy out of his shop, and it was the women who took charge of hiding him as Oatley returned to find the lovers together.

The other most notable reading was that of Hammon, played by David Fensom. In the text, Hammon is something of an ambiguous figure: he pursues Rose, but applaudably gives up his claim on her refusal to marry him; then, woos Jane and, on the revelation of her husband's name, offers her a letter which includes his name among the register of the dead. He then continues to press her, and finally relinquishes his claim when Ralph, Jane's husband, interrupts their wedding day. While he does offer Ralph money for his wife, he takes the refusal in good part and gives husband and wife the money anyway as a gift before swearing off romance. The character is thus, in a generous reading, reasonably noble, although with several questions unanswered - such as, does he really believe the letter he gives to Jane? Here, Hammon became an entertainingly foppish comic villain: arrogant, swaggering and full of sickeningly OTT charm. Fensom livened up the stage on his every appearance, and his genial confidence made him a rather appealing figure. In Jane's shop, he thought quickly upon hearing that Ralph was in the wars, and quickly added the name himself to a list of the dead (and even pointed it out when she was slow to find it in the list). By adding this knowing villainy to his actions, the subsequent scenes were conceived more as a comic confrontation in which the man was suitably deflated, although not for long. Upon swearing off wives, he suddenly caught a glance of someone in the audience, and threw himself down next to them. The rounds of applause which accompanied the close of his scenes identified the performance as one of the most successful, and it certainly added colour and zest to the plot.

The scenes in the shoemaker's shop were pleasant, powered by fun comic performances from Edward Simpson (Hodge) and John Last (Firk). The joking over the language spoken by the Dutch (or "Dutch") characters was passed over rather too quickly, diminishing the amusement of Lacy's scenes undercover, but the energy of Simpson and Last, whether drunk, scheming or petulant - gave the scenes the necessary camaraderie to make sense of a plot that depends on the fraternity of their craft. Ralph (James Rose) was played seriously within this environment, a rather wistful limping young man who was supported by his fellows to reclaim his bride, Anneka Harry, who similarly provided a straighter performance than might be expected in a role so infused with innuendo. It allowed for an interesting inversion: the love plot among the higher-class characters became a bawdy romp, while a tenderness was found between Ralph and Jane that elevated their plot beyond the merely amusing.

The more sober backdrop of the Hundred Years' War was repeatedly brought to attention in an affection that had cast members spitting on the floor every time they mentioned France - even the demure Jane, who shrugged uncomfortably at the audience before joining in. Apart from one slightly unfortunate incident where an actor didn't look before spitting directly in an audience member's face (taken in remarkably good humour!), this was an effective way of emphasising the context for the story, and might perhaps have even led to a more serious interpretation - after all, a story of how the wives of soldiers fighting foreign wars cope has no small contemporary resonance. This would not, however, have been in keeping with the spirit of a production which embraced the play as romp. Despite taking a while to get going, this was a sympathetic and lively rendition of The Shoemaker's Holiday, and a pleasingly offbeat addition to the Dell's programme.

  Peter Kirwan 9th August 2010

P.S. Massive kudos for beginning Dodger’s Scene 18 speech with “My lord, I come with a lazy plot device to bring unwelcome news”!