Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Compagnia Dello Scompiglio: Trilogia dell’Assenza / Trilogy of Absence

Time – a long time, a short time, recent times, past times. Time – a moment that never passes. The past no longer exists, the future has never existed. There is only the present moment. The present is always – this. Yet still the hands of the clock turn, still the minutes tick by, still we wait for lift-off. Time waits for no man, and certainly for no woman either, so here we all are, and there they all are, caught in this moment forever: two retired ice-skaters making a desperate bid to relive past achievements; a soiled white bride who wants the dreams and desires of the future to satisfy the present, sailing from a great height down into a lake; an ashen black widow who wishes she could wipe out all that is lost, kneading the earth as if it were dough; a team of suited men who read and rant and roll through the hills; an astronaut whose bike was his first spaceship, commencing countdown to the tune of Thus Spoke Zarathustra whilst arranging absent friends into a dream dinner-party.

Cecilia Bertoni’s Trilogia dell’Assenza (Trilogy of Absence), set indoors in the arts centre (first and third shows) and outdoors in the luscious landscapes of the Tenuta dello Scompiglio in Tuscany (second show), is an epic production that takes its audience on a journey – both literally and metaphorically – to explore themes of winning and losing; of childhood shame and adult mortification; of innocence and experience, of presence and absence. And memory – ever-present memory that exists to taunt us, to pull us out of the present moment into a land of hopes and regrets. If only, if only… if only we could be like the Scompiglio dogs Didi and Gogo, always present in the moment. Ah, memory – the joy and curse of being human.

Part one is entitled Tesorino, perche hai perso? (Sweetheart, why did you lose?). We start indoors, in the theatre space, with the ice-skaters who’ve lost everything and want to get it back. It’s as if they are forever destined to overcome past humiliations and failures. They could be Adam and Eve trying to find their way back to a lost paradise. (In the second part of the trilogy a text from Nietzsche reaffirms this suggestion: ‘Smooth ice / Is paradise / For those who dance with expertise.’) Two recorded texts set the scene: a story of a ten-year-old boy’s shame and horror at being home-filmed in his underpants by his crowing father, following an unfortunate incident with a cowpat; and a ten-year-old girl’s humiliation at her Catholic Confirmation ceremony, wearing her emancipated mother’s choice of a cream dress and ‘Florentine’ straw hat, when every other little girl in the church is in virginal white dress and veil. Words, images and associations from these texts resonant throughout this first piece, and in the subsequent two other works in the trilogy. Our two skaters are pulled between gravity and levity: dangling from harnesses, clambering over a multi-tiered moveable scaffold, falling with full force to the ground. The ice is long gone, and with one skate off and one skate on, they hobble and posture and pose, preening themselves and each other. They are past their prime, but there is the hope of one last victory – even if it is just a victory over the other one. The onstage relationship between the two performers (creator of the trilogy Cecilia Bertoni, and French actor/co-creator of part one, Serge Cartellier) bears the mark of longtime collaboration and complicity. They are at ease in their roles and with the interactions of their two characters, creating a playful dynamic that balances the humour and pathos of their situation. The soundscape, by Carl G Beukman, expertly weaves spoken texts, crackling radio recordings and mindless muzaks together into a rich, multi-layered aural tapestry. Grainy videos (by Claire Guerrier) projected onto a rear screen and two small metal cases at the front of the performance space add a layer of visual imagery as hazy as half-remembered dreams. We believe unreservedly in the limbo world our two protagonists occupy, and in the situation that (inevitably) cannot be resolved.

Next we are escorted by a suited man wielding a megaphone into the great outdoors for part two, Riflessi in bianco e nero (Reflections in white and black). We journey through the woods and terraces of Scompiglio, cleverly guided by our man with the megaphone – it is great to witness the always challenging problem of how to lead and steward an audience being dealt with in a creatively interesting way. There are four stops along the way. At the highest point, we sip berry juice and gaze narcissistically into a mirror set into the ground, a pair of white ice skates hanging above, to one side an open dictionary marked at the definition of ‘memory’. Further down the terraces we meet the black widow (Marialucia Carones) and white bride (Serena Gatti), voicing laments and lullabies with their bodies, as harsh cracks and explosions sound across the hills, a posse of men posed on chairs above them. Our two ice-skaters appear as silent witnesses to the action. As we move on to Il Cemetero del Tempo (The Graveyard of Memory), a distorted recording exhorts us to ‘never look back’; the cemetery of decomposing metal beds and rusted gates becomes the site for a symphony of distressed dances and obsessive-compulsive actions. At the final stop, the lakeside Funerale del Tempo (Funeral of Time), we witness a wondrously beautiful scene: the widow close to the lake’s surface; the bride suspended on a harness terrifyingly high from one of the top branches of an extremely tall and magnificent old tree; the posse of men now dressed in vermillion red lounging on the banks, looking as if they are made from the same red brick of the house behind them. From clay we are made, to clay we return: dust to dust, ashes to ashes…

The third part of the trilogy, Kind of Blue (titled in English) returns us indoors, this time not to the black-box theatre but to a smaller white-cube gallery space in which we are seated on scaffolding, overlooking the only performer (our astronaut, Mauro Carulli), who in turn is placed inside a metal tower with a playground slide attached, and a bicycle leaning against it. The room becomes the site for a three-sided projection, on two walls and a floor, creating an unsettling and vertiginous perspective. There are echoes from the earlier two sections of the trilogy, but the connecting threads to this third piece feel slighter than the links between one and two – perhaps because we are meeting new characters (live and on film), and those we have already met have faded out of the action for the most part, their headless bodies passing by on the conveyer belt of film to each side of us, their heads arriving, like John the Baptist’s, as offerings on plates at the dream dinner party. Thematically, the main text used – from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, reflecting on summit and abyss not as diametrically opposed concepts but as one and the same thing – ties us in very neatly to part one. The return to childish pleasures on the slide and the bicycle harp back to a section in Riflessi in bianco e nero in which we hear the gentle sounds of music boxes and ball games whilst gazing upon the antics of the occupants in the distressed playground of the Cemetery of Memories.

Each of these three parts of the Trilogia dell’Assenza is a self-contained and autonomous show. Kind of Blue is the newest of the three, and comes accompanied by a small exhibition/installation of photographs and other research materials. During the three-week run at Tenuta dello Scompiglio, the shows have sometimes been presented as separate works, and sometimes as a three-part experience over an afternoon and evening. The first and third part, sited as they are in theatre/gallery space, could be happily toured or presented in other theatres or arts centres. And even though the second show of the trilogy is site-specific to the spaces of Scompiglio, it could potentially be reworked for other spaces. Each of the three feel complete, but there is a special resonance in seeing all three together, noting the echoes and references and developments of the themes throughout.

Taken as a whole: this feels like a truly contemporary theatre – one that is indeed a crossroad of the arts (to steal a line from Jean-Louis Barrault). Original texts and found texts (from Nietzsche, Murakami, Pinter et al); autobiographical confession mixed with poetic reflection and semiotic wordplay; movement theatre and performance actions; montaged soundscapes; video projected in many different settings; short film; sets and structures that invite physical action; aerial performance; inventive lighting; installation in the landscape… the list of ways and means seems pretty endless. But the senses are not overloaded: there is time to savour each new development; there is space to really see and hear and feel what is being presented. The deep themes addressed – loss, failure, memory, regret, the passing of time – could, in other hands, lead to a heavy and wearying audience experience, but the balance is kept between light and dark. Absurd humour often cuts in to relieve the work of any overly oppressive elements, whilst also allowing us to feel the pain and angst of the individual and universal experiences of shame, bereavement and regret that permeate the work. Partaking of all three shows together in one sitting, it feels as if we have been fed a very generous and nutritious theatrical feast.

www.delloscompiglio.org

Blast Theory: Fixing Point

‘Have you used a GPS system before?’ asks the steward, handing me a smartphone and a pair of headphones. Alarm bells ring: I never have much luck with Google Maps. ‘Me’ is me, she explains, and there’s a white dotted line to follow. When circles show up on the screen, I’m to move towards them to locate the sound recordings.

And thus I find myself in a field full of bemused cows, which I need to cross to reach the small copse in which the recordings are located. Being nervous of cows, I develop a strange looped cow-avoidance walking pattern, which throws the GPS into overdrive as it tries to realign me with the dotted line. It’s not a good start, and it’s downhill from there on in.

On my headphones is a pretty average electronic soundscape (by Chris Clark of Warped Records – I’m a great fan of Warped, but what I’m hearing isn’t particularly inspiring), interspersed with verbatim soundbites about a ‘disappeared’ person that pop into your headphones when you and the GPS system coincide at a given spot. The absent character at the heart of the piece is a real person: Newry man Seamus Ruddy, who went missing in a wood in France almost thirty years ago – killed (it is claimed) by the Irish National Liberation Army, a breakaway group from the Provisional IRA. The words are those of Seamus’ sister Anne Morgan, although spoken by an actor (Amanda Jones). I manage to locate two recordings out of a possible six or so, and also get to hear an introductory text that pops up as I cross the field. I understand that I am supposed to receive this as a fragmented narrative, but the combination of the minimalism of the texts, the imbalance of sound levels of texts and soundscape, and the fact that I only locate some of the spots, means that I come away feeling I’ve learnt very little about this man, and the devastating effect of his disappearance. It is immensely frustrating. There was more to learn about Seamus from the A4 sheet of photocopied paper we are given afterwards than is manifest in the show itself.

We are, I suppose, placed in a wood in a field because Seamus disappeared in a wood (in France, 28 years ago) but, for goodness sake, writing and theatre exist to evoke a sense of place – we don’t have to be physically placed in a woodland to understand Seamus’s plight, and that of the family who have never found his remains. The source material (email correspondence transposed into spoken word) might have made a good sound piece in someone else’s hands, and had that been the case it would have made more sense to me as an experimental radio play, broadcast on Radio 3.

I suppose you could argue that being alone in the woods, frustratedly searching for something you can’t locate, is a metaphor for the plight of the lost man’s family, but I wasn’t even alone – the small copse was occupied by three other people whilst I was there, and at least two of them were having as many problems as me with locating the sound recordings. I spent a lot of time standing still, waiting for the system to catch up, and often it froze completely for many minutes. After 30 minutes it cuts out, sending a ‘your time is up’ message.

So the fundamental problems with the piece could be summed up as: technology that isn’t yet up to the job; a nebulous connection between site chosen and the core content of the piece (the story of Seamus Ruddy); a less than inspiring soundscape by the collaborating musician; a desire to tell an important story that gets strangled by the chosen means of communicating that story.

The worthiness of the cause – promoting the plight of the ‘disappeared’ – should mean that the art that attempts to address it really is worthy of that cause, and this sadly isn’t. Seamus deserves better.

www.blasttheory.co.uk

Clod Ensemble: Zero

‘You are nothing but a big zero,’ says the Fool to Lear. I paraphrase, apologies Mr Shakespeare. But this is not, you understand, a version of King Lear, although that was the starting point – a period of research supported by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which Clod Ensemble discovered that what they didn’t want to do was make a version of the play.

What they’ve done instead is take the play’s five-act structure, some of its themes (jealousy, desire, father/daughter dynamics, sibling rivalry, the absent mother), and some of its motifs and metaphors (weather, nature, storms) to create Zero, which has been commissioned by Sadler’s Wells and Brighton Festival, in collaboration with South East Dance. I see it on its second ever performance, and it does feel very new and, to be honest, not quite cooked yet. Actually, even more crucially, there are some fundamental flaws in the piece…

It’s an end-on piece presented in a large space (as in large stage and large auditorium). The large performance space is familiar territory for Clod, but many of their works (An Anatomie in Four Quarters, Red Ladies, Under Glass) are presented in spaces that are shared with small audience groups, or, in the case of shows in which the audience is in a more traditional seated auditorium, that have an intense and intimate feel (for example, in two of their collaborations with Split Britches – Must, and It’s a Small House and We Lived in it Always). Zero tackles the big stage / big auditorium dynamic by going for a full-on visual and aural assault with things happening all over the place, and hardly a chance for the audience to draw breath or take in what they are experiencing. Certainly, when it comes to the physical action anyway, as soon as something interesting starts, it stops, or is interrupted.

As always with Clod, this show is a collaboration between the company’s two co-directors, composer Paul Clark and movement theatre director Suzy Wilson – and as always the two artforms are both of equal importance. It is – despite the fact that it is supported by Sadler’s Wells and South East Dance – not a contemporary dance piece; it is a total theatre piece, in which the aural, visual and physical elements interweave harmonically.

At least, that’s what it should be. At the moment, the movement work feels much too far into the contemporary dance camp for comfort, and to a contemporary dance that feels pretty dated: there are rather too many references to Pina Bausch’s gestural dance; too many sections of choreography that doggedly tag and illustrate the blues-inspired score; too many references to popular dance (Charleston, for example) that get repeated too many times; too many clichés of contemporary dance and theatre (such as the stopping-another-dancer-in-her-tracks intervention so beloved of Wendy Houston/Forced Entertainment). I often find myself thinking that I’ve seen so much of this choreography so many times before. It is almost as if Suzy Wilson hasn’t quite allowed herself to do what she does best – make visual/physical theatre that uses dance as one of its elements, rather than dance per se.

And yet despite the criticisms I enjoyed a lot about Zero. I loved the robust and earthy music, played by a group of seven musicians that includes legendary harmonica player Johnny Mars and trombonist Annie Whitehead; I loved the energy of the performers, and mix of bodies of different ages and sizes and experiences onstage (the ensemble including Clod favourites like Zoe Bywater and new company members such as Antonia Grove); I enjoyed the soundtrack of found or recorded texts from many different sources (including clips of siblings Jackie and Joan Collins, and the Kray brothers) that were cleverly edited and placed in counterpoint to the live music. There are some lovely hero/chorus ensemble sequences, some good same-sex duets exploring power struggles within relationships, and some great solo vignettes – I particularly enjoyed the Hebrew rant by charismatic Israeli actor/dancer Uri Roodner.

So there is a lot to like in Zero, yet still it feels lacking. Previous Clod Ensemble shows bear the mark of a highly talented director of physical theatre, a marvellous manipulator of bodies and spaces; Zero suffers a little from Suzy Wilson being cast (or casting herself) as a contemporary dance choreographer, and falling a little short. More visual theatre, less contemporary dance please, Clod!

www.clodensemble.com

Victoria Melody: Major Tom

In which Victoria Melody, a 35 year-old performance artist with a winning smile and an interest in anthropology, and her trusty dog Major Tom, a six year-old Basset hound with lovely long ears and an interest in Schmakos dog treats, pursue parallel paths of gruelling competition in their endeavours to become beauty queen / champion show dog, respectively.

And all in the name of art! What some might call intensive research for a theatre show, others might view as a life-as-art decision to really live it in order to know it, before you can even start to tell the story. And here onstage, telling that story in their very different ways, are Victoria Melody and Major Tom.

There’s a deceptively simple, beautifully designed set: dark stage, white dog cushion and bowl (stage left), white semi-opaque folding Chinese screen for the costume changes (stage right), and upstage a large screen, with underneath it a set of rather nice letter blocks spelling out Major Tom’s name in lights. Victoria mostly talks (well, you’d be surprised if I said the dog did) whilst Major mostly snoozes, and the anecdotes are supplemented by short bursts of video that take us, directly and without the need of any additional ironic framing, straight into the world of dog shows and beauty pageants – plus we get a number of quick-change costume catwalks (dress wear, swim wear, evening wear) and a little bit of pimping and preening of Major’s basset assets. The lighting design is elegantly crisp and simple, the sound and video perfectly supportive of the live performance. Everything that happens on stage is carefully choreographed, and executed with panache and precision – there is evidence of the influence of Victoria Melody’s mentor, Ursula Martinez, and that is only for the good.

Major Tom is the one wild card, free as he is to do as he will. He looks, says Victoria, like an old Tory, and that is exactly how it is – he dozes through the rhetoric like a House of Lords veteran, occasionally looking up and yawning or shaking those long ears, as if in agreement or approbation. Now and again there’s some noisy slurping from his water bowl, and the occasional stroll round the space. As Pina Bausch and Alain Patel have found, having a dog on stage adds a wonderful extra dimension to performance work – dogs are just so perfectly present.

Victoria Melody is an engaging performer, and her show is a clever weaving of the parallel stories of dog shows and beauty pageants. It all starts with Major Tom. We hear the history of his provenance and pedigree, and we learn that Victoria and her husband Mitch agreed that they’d first buy a plant, and if that lived buy a dog, and if that lived have a baby. Victoria (whose previous work includes an intensive and long-term engagement with Northern pigeon-fanciers) decides that an investigation of the world of dog shows will be her next artistic venture, so Major finds himself propelled into the limelight. Unfortunately, although he does well as an amateur, once he turns pro he keeps coming last, so needs a fair bit of training and grooming. Later his ‘mummy’ decides that it is only fair that she puts herself through a similar ordeal, and thus starts her journey on the beauty trail, with her eventually winning the title Mrs Brighton and being entered for the coveted crown of Mrs England (no, really!). Meanwhile, back in the dog world Major Tom’s success has risen to dizzy heights and he finds himself being entered for Crufts…

The story of how they both get sucked into the world of competition, and eventually ease out back into normal life, is a ‘gentle ride’ (as one fellow theatre-maker described it after the show), but the gentleness is deceptive. Had this been presented as a polemical rant against the Beauty Myth and the ways in which women’s bodies are judged, we’d have switched off in the first five minutes. Instead, Victoria Melody seduces us into her world with laughter. We guffaw at the absurdities, and we share her ambivalence towards it all, questioning the ethos whilst still loving it, as she does. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have lovely legs, shown off to their best advantage in a pair of five-inch-heeled sparkly silver shoes?

There are hard-hitting undercurrents – but they hit us through the holes forged with laughter. There are many cutting moments of awareness of the convoluted and simultaneous demands of so many different cultural attitudes to beauty – human and canine. We feel for Major when his ears and ribs and teeth and legs are commented upon. We are with Victoria as she battles with her weight, takes on a personal trainer, forces herself into skin-tight frocks, gets waxed and tanned, learns to walk in the highest of heels. I’m reminded of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and its discussion of women taking on ‘femininity’ as a drag queen does. Victoria’s stance is of someone taking on a feminine identity that is other than her own, although one she enjoys indulging in and playing with, almost treating herself as a real live Barbie Doll.

No doors are left unopened – there’s a fantastic moment when she recounts an incident in a changing-room, as she realises that all her beauty contestant companions are staring aghast at ‘her hairy bush’. At other moments, we hear of criticism of her thin, fine hair (she gets extensions) and her ‘upside-down’ mouth, which she is told will turn further downwards when she ages unless she gets plastic surgery now (she doesn’t do it, which causes the female members of the audience to roar in approval).

At the end of it all, the competitions won or lost, and the making of the theatre show underway, we learn that Victoria’s husband Mitch asks, ‘Can we go back to normal now?’

Major Tom, created and performed by Victoria Melody, commissioned and produced by Farnham Maltings, is a major achievement – bright and breezy sexual politics without the polemic, entertaining and thought provoking. It’s beautifully designed, carefully choreographed, and performed with panache. A grand success!

http://www.victoriamelody.co.uk/

Peter Reder: The Contents of a House

Pedigree and provenance, that’s what it’s all about. This ‘subversive promenade performance’ is one of the key commissions for this year’s Brighton Festival, and follows in the Festival’s tradition of commissioning high quality site-responsive work as a key part of its theatre programme.

It takes the form of a tour around Preston Manor, described quite accurately as ‘the epitome of Edwardian glamour’, set in its own luscious grounds on the outskirts of central Brighton. The provenance of the objects within – many of which, we learn, were not originally here at all, but were bussed in by Preston Manor’s enterprising first curator, a Mr Roberts, who saw the place as ‘his very own Wendy House’. The pedigree of the people who lived here – to wit, the formidable Lady Stanford, who could give Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell a run for her money by all accounts; her half-sisters, who were thrown out on their ear somewhere along the way; her as-good-as disinherited son; her beloved grandson who tragically died young; and her various husbands, who were obliged to take her surname. Not to mention the dogs…

The dogs play a crucial part in this story, serving to illustrate the importance of ‘pedigree’. The dog-owners of Brighton and their peculiarities get casually mentioned in Peter’s introductory talk, as we gather in the manor’s dining room. Later, the dogs that have occupied the house get solemnly name-checked, as we stand in the morning room (or is it, asks Peter, a mourning room?). He skilfully segues together a reflection on grandsons lost to mustard gas poisoning in the Great War with tributes to the occupants of Preston Manor’s famous pet cemetery. It’s interesting, says Peter, that we know the names of the dogs that lived here, but we don’t know the names of the servants. And it is noted that Jock and Queenie and the rest of Lady Stanford’s pedigree chums have the expected epitaphs – ‘faithful friend’ and ‘beloved pet’ bar one that reads ‘Here Lies Tatters, Not that it Matters’. And why doesn’t it matter? Because poor Tatters was a mongrel. Towards the end of the show we see film footage of a black dog frisking around the grounds, unencumbered – we presume the ghost of Tatters (ghosts being another thread through the show).

And as for provenance, there are a hundred and one fascinating tales about the things in the manor that are in and out of time and place. We see a library now stripped of books and turned into a dining room, and a maid’s bedroom with furniture that has been subsequently brought in: because, says Peter, when the house first opened to the public, who’d have been interested in seeing a maid’s room? This is one of many points on the tour where the upstairs-downstairs binary divide of Edwardian life is discussed, and Peter makes the interesting point that a girl in service was significantly less free than a girl working in a factory. She would have had almost no private life, may even have been stopped from marrying by her masters, hardly more than a slave.

And so where are the books? In the very public drawing room there’s a few novels that the Stanfords (or perhaps the curators that re-arranged their possessions) wanted their guests to see – including a very nasty 1930s book on eugenics that nowadays, if we were to own such a thing, we would almost certainly hide from view. Yet hidden away in the vaults, Peter came across a copy (in French!) of the Karma Sutra, which no one nowadays would be at all ashamed about owning. In another room, there’s a bookcase devoid of books but stuffed full of white porcelain – we surmise, says Peter, that Lady Stanford was not a big reader. The hideous Foo-dog statues lined up hardly strike us as desirable objects, but apparently they were (quite likely) looted from China, so their provenance no doubt added a frisson of desirability.

Running through The Contents of a House is a constant questioning of what is ‘real’ and what is not. There are numerous references throughout to ways in which reality and fantasy interweave: the house as a real home versus the house as a film set; the real snow in the grounds when Peter started his research in January and the fake snow that caused a mess when the house was hired by Noel Edmonds for a TV Christmas Special; the real life staff who work here and the Edwardian ghosts they may or may not have encountered; the traces on the wrangles and bell-pulls of the nameless cooks and butlers who really lived and worked here versus the fictional cooks and butlers – hammy actors who play out the imagined stories for the parties of school children who come along to dress in pinafores and caps and learn about Edwardian life. We are told again and again that things are not what they seem to be – everything on view has been tampered with or changed in one way or another, often many times over. And it’s not just inside the house that’s been tampered with, changed: the noise of the busy London Road traffic outside would once have been the flow of a small river, now forced underground.

There are stories and musings and things to look at and reflect upon, this augmented by a number of short video pieces interspersed throughout the tour – the best of which is a nicely edited montage of short interviews with Preston Manor employees about ghosts and ghostly encounters. And as in earlier works by Peter Reder that use a similar format (the performance lecture cum guided tour), the artist’s own autobiographical material is weaved into the work – the most poignant example being the placing of a photo of his deceased father on the four-poster in the main bedroom, prompting a monologue on the desire to die in one’s bed and the changed roles that beds play in our lives nowadays. How many of us, like Peter, grow up sleeping in the very bed we were born on? A section that tries to link the Stanford family’s relationship with the SW7 district in London to Peter’s own memories of South Kensington is less successful, feeling a little forced.

The Contents of a House was seen by Total Theatre on the press night, which (bizarrely for a whole-month run) was the very first show. Peter Reder is a seasoned performance artist, and for the most part relaxed and in control, but a little unsure of himself at times, as anyone would be on the first outing of a complex one-man promenade work. And it was a tough audience – a bunch of journalists with crossed arms and frowns and/or notebooks in hand, which hardly helps. There was one scene (the Karma Sutra one) in which a would-be humorous suggestion that the second husband of Lady Stanford was gay falls flat on its face. He also caused a little bit of consternation at one point by asking the audience not to walk around behind him whilst he was talking, whereas at the beginning of the show they had been encouraged by the person introducing the event to feel that they could look (if not touch) quite freely. So a little adjusting in audience management needed – which will surely come throughout the month.

First nerves and early teething troubles aside, an interesting piece, well researched and well delivered. Perhaps a little too bound to its tour guide format – Peter Reder could, potentially, subvert the set-up more forcefully – but a very full and rich experience.