Tag Archives: theatre

Theatre Scratch Night—sharing of new student work

This post was contributes by Jennifer Wilson, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Text and Performance.

Birkbeck’s yearly Arts Week brought both staff and students together to watch the presenting of new work devised, written, and acted by students of Birkbeck College. This event was to celebrate the opening of a theatre space, Room G10, which was previously used solely for the purpose of lectures, classes, and workshops. The night opened with a piece by four students from the MA Text and Performance programme. Using Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling, the group intertwined spoken words by Fred and Rose West, two notorious British serial killers. The second part of the evening’s performance showcased 10 excerpts of new plays written by Birkbeck’s BA Creative Writing students. The pieces presented were directed and performed by Birkbeck’s own MFA Theatre Directing students. After the final performance, the night ended with drinks, snacks, and lovely conversations amongst everyone; an official “kick off party” for the new theatre space. The future of theatre lies in the hands of the current generation of students and their voice were able to be heard in each performance. A round of applause goes out to everyone involved in Theatre Scratch night. A job well done!

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Handel’s Cross

This post was contributed by Dr Fintan Walsh, lecturer in theatre and performance studies in Birkbeck’s Department of Enghlish and Humanities.

Thursday night saw a production of Handel’s Cross take place in the recently launched G10 performance space in Birkbeck’s School of Arts. Directed and performed by Birkbeck lecturer Andrew McKinnon, and written and also performed by Martin Lewton (his partner in Theatre North), Handel’s Cross stages one man’s recurring sexual fantasy involving the 18th-century composer.

The performance begins with Lewton removing his clothes and being bound to a St. Andrew’s cross by McKinnon. He directly addresses the audience, sharing a story which takes us back to 1751, on the night of the premier of the then 66-year-old Handel’s cantata ‘The Choice of Hercules.’  The leading role is performed by renowned 22-year-old castrato Gaetano Guadagni.

Few details are known about Handel’s personal and especially sexual life.  Historians tend to agree that he was over-weight and even greedy, as mocked in Joseph Goupy’s caricature that features a grotesque pig’s snout (see right). Lewton takes the ambiguity surrounding Handel’s imitate life, and the notion (based on his rousing music) that he must have been a passionate man, to imagine a relationship between Guadagni and the composer, and to imagine himself as a subject of his brutish desires.

As Lewton speaks from the cross, acting as a kind of Handel substitute, McKinnon steps in at various points to attach nipple clamps, spray his chest with hot wax, and whip his body. With Handel’s music intermittently flooding the space, the S&M scenario combines with historical fantasy to powerfully suggest a link between artistic pain, Christian suffering, and homoerotic desire.

‘What are the attractions of fantasy in a world where bodies are bombarded and oppressed?’ Lewton asks towards the end of his 45-minute performance. It’s not a question he answers, but it’s one that lingers after his dismount.

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Freshwater

This post was contributed by Roisin Lynch, an intern at Birkbeck’s School of Arts.

Virginia Woolf wrote her little-known and only play Freshwater in 1923, and revised it in 1935 for a single performance by her family and friends in her sister Vanessa Bell’s art studio in Bloomsbury.

Freshwater is a comedy, poking good-natured fun at Woolf’s great aunt, photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and the artistic and moral sensibilities of her Victorian set. In the Cameron’s home at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (played by Woolf’s brother, Adrian Stephen, in 1935) lurks about the house reciting Maud at every opportunity, while Julia Cameron (played by Vanessa Bell) searches in vain to find a policeman with manly enough calves to play Galahad in one of her Arthurian photographs. The plot centres on Ellen Terry (Woolf’s niece, Angelica Bell), the sixteen year old wife of George Frederic Watts (Duncan Grant). Bored by life as a model for her elderly husband’s paintings, at the end of the play she escapes – wearing trousers, no less – to the dissolute freedom of a life in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

As part of a series of events during Arts Week, academics from Birkbeck’s Department of English gave a lively and enjoyable rehearsed reading of the play in the beautiful Keynes library in the School of Art’s buildings in Gordon Square, once home to Woolf herself. The performance was enthusiastically received by the audience, in particular the various props – a copy of Maud, a helpfully annotated picture of a leg, a small model omnibus – held up by Professor Hilary Fraser to embellish the reading, and the very special guest appearance at the end of the play by Queen Victoria herself.

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