Another sign of the Age of Austerity - The Castle Wellingborough Northants

The Castle Theatre Wellingborough is a community theatre in Northamptonshire. It contains a main house which seats five hundred and three audience members and an eighty nine seat studio theatre. It even contains rooms for a youth theatre group, resident artists space and an art gallery. The Castle is a pivotal part of  local life in Wellingborough who use it not just as a theatre space but also as a community centre. Now the venue needs to find an organisation to take over the space before the first of February to secure the jobs of its staff, unfortunately even if The Castle does get another organisation to take it over the local council will cut its funding by ten percent in April. Considering that in 2010 this mainly amatuer and community theatre venue had such artists as Victoria Wood, Jenny Eclair and Julian Clary put on their work there and that it hosts the East Midlands Youth Theatre Festival every year this will be a terrible blow to Wellingborough. I have always had a problem with closing regional theatres and with them losing their funding and to see what this venue offers and realise that the excellent services they provide will have to be cut does make me worry about the future of regional theatre. With the rise in ticket prices for West End and big city venues run by the larger theatre groups it is more important now than ever that a cheaper option in the provinces is widely available. We all have to do our bit to dig the UK out of this black hole of debt but do we really know what the cultural and educational cost of all this cutting is going to mean to our society in twenty years time. For more information please read this article by Bernie Goodjohn of the Northants Evening Telegraph.

Yeah well the Dog ate it! Excuses to the RTDA

Ok so if this was a Monday Morning about five years ago and I was supposed to hand in or produce some work that I was meant to have done for University and I wanted to stretch my deadline I would have come up with some excuse. I think my main excuse during my college and University years was 'My Printer is playing up again/My computer crashed and wiped the work' which was true due to the strange models of printers and pc's my Dad would purchase. Today I have no excuse really for why chapter two of 'Approach to Theatre' is not completed, I started doing it but didn't finish it. I read the introduction to King Lear and a whole load of information on its historical background, context and source. I even read about where the text originates from and how the great Tragedians throughout history modified the script to solidify their performances but not a stanza of Shakespeare's verse has passed my eyes yet. This is because I was busy this weekend. Busy doing what I hear you cry? Well here is what I was busy doing.


As I mentioned on Saturday we went into the manic and heaving town centre where we added several tomes to my collection of theatre books. However two other things were picked up during this trip to the shops. One was a video game called 'Heavy Rain' and the other was a dvd boxset of that 90s Fantasy television series 'Xena'. Saturday afternoon was then spent watching a couple of episodes of Xena and then copious amounts of Heavy Rain. Now this may seem like a complete waste of time however there were lessons to be learned and I found both very helpful.

Xena the Warrior Princess is about a former Warlord named Xena who is trying to right the wrongs of all the slaughter, chaos and general misery she has rained down on the Ancient World. Along the way she meets friends such as Gabriel who joins her in her roam around Thrace and Greece (I am only up to episode four) doing good deeds and kicking evil doers behinds. Now you may ask what on earth I could possibly learn from such a fantastical piece of television but there are real lessons to be learned from material such as this. One is conviction, the actors in this show give great conviction to their lines and Lucy Lawless (Xena) plays it very straight and honest. There is a certain campness to the whole show, I love it, which would probably make most theatre goers and people who worship the method and serious acting cry for the blood of the producers actors and anyone else involved but the truth is that Xena is well acted and it is a great example of entertaining television. If as a drama student I need to remember anything its that ultimately being an actor is about being able to entertain people and Xena entertained me. Also the way it is costumed and designed is very theatrical and that instantly gives it credit to help me with my understanding of design for film, theatre and television.

Now Heavy Rain may seem like a very odd thing to be writing on a theatre blog but this piece of video gaming is amazingly theatrical. It is essentially an interactive film noir in which you control the outcome of the story and characters involved. Set in an American city somewhere in the Northeast this story revolves around a man named Ethan and his relationships which are ruined by two tragic events. Now I loved this game and LibraryGirl and myself were hooked to the screen all evening and all of Sunday nearly too which is all very good I hear you all cry but again what does it have to do with the theatre? Well Heavy Rain wasn't really animated in the conventional way that video games are done, no its characters move because they were motion captured to move that way. Their faces were motion captured in the same way that Tom Hanks was in Polar Express so what you actually are watching as you interact with this epic movie is real actors playing out a real script. What this game has shown me is the subtle nuances within facial features and movements, because of the way it was constructed I was in the game more and I felt as if the fourth wall no longer existed that I was the characters. I just admired the whole game and the acting ability put forward. The voice acting was very good as well, in recent years people have praised games such at GTA IV for the acting involved but having played both these games Heavy Rain is vastly superior. I really need to work on my facial expressions and vocal skills if I want to be a good actor and that is what I learnt from playing this game.

So yes that is why I did not do my work, that is what led to my distraction. Am I sorry? No not at all because I did learn some things and I can go back to Shakespeare now. This week I will be back on track with King Lear being analysed. This time though I won't fix myself to a two day working period. With home schooling and education you have to balance everything within your day to day life and maybe thats the biggest lesson this weekend has taught me. So keep up with me as I continue working hard at the RTDA.