The air crackles when Beatrice and De Flores come together.Alongside this, the subplot offers a rich comic counterpoint from Cannell in partnership with Rachel Ferjani (Isabella) and Ferdy Roberts – a remarkably versatile actor who manages to combine three roles in The Changeling with a part in Beautiful Thing.It is in the latter play, however, that Roberts flowers fully, possibly aided by the fact that Tony is the only funny character. To counter this decline in traditional repertory theatre, Salisbury Playhouse has launched the Springboard Project, which selects the cream of drama school graduates to work on two plays in a “mini-rep” environment.
The result is the juxtaposition of two very unlikely bedfellows: Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling and Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing – a tense Jacobean psycho-thriller and a 1990s comedy of blossoming gay love.The discrepancy in the number of characters between the two plays means that the rep effect is somewhat lost, especially as three of the main actors from The Changeling – Irene Rambota (Beatrice-Joanna), Stephen Campbell Moore (De Flores) and Asa Cannell (Vermandero/Lollio) – do not appear in Beautiful Thing.Yet this has the advantage of leaving Rambota and Campbell Moore free to devote their full energies to a searing portrayal of the blend of lust, devotion, loathing and violence that characterises The Changeling’s central relationship. Nowadays, unfortunately, a young actor is more likely to boast a fistful of fleeting appearances in Casualty and The Bill than a solid season in rep. With its short rehearsal periods and the need to shoehorn the available performers into every play on the company’s programme, rep offers an excellent schooling for actors seeking to develop a breadth of character and a firm grasp of technique. You start to understand how his body, like his sayings, was only of use to him as long as it expressed his personality. Once that had stopped, it was better that only the words were left.Rachel HalliburtonTo 11 Dec, 0181-743 3388.
“REPERTORY THEATRE is the traditional training ground for the future stars of tomorrow,” proclaims the programme for this double bill. It is a shock every time he moves, for his words have so much life and alacrity in them that his body seems like their aged and unwelcome relative. In life, Crisp famously commented that “Manners are a way of getting exactly what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine”, and an obituary this week told how he had once outmanoeuvred hooligans who were trying to beat him up with the observation: “I seem to have offended you gentlemen in some way.” With similar courtesy, Bourne came out of script to calm the man down, defusing the situation with respect and understanding.Crisp’s longing for death has been written up in papers everywhere, and Bourne manages to convey the physical restrictions that must have made the grave such a relief. Laughter here becomes something revelatory, unmasking facades with a worldly wise Crispian flourish.Bourne shines throughout, but on the evening I went, the most extraordinary moments came when disruptions to the performance showed how deeply he had immersed himself in Crisp’s character.A man sitting in the audience seemed to be drunk or drugged, and started making comments and creating a disturbance. His benevolent presence turns the tables on the world – so that Crisp is no longer the absurd element, and it is everyone else who is floundering in a confusion of false colours and artificially crafted identities. Tim Fountain’s script boasts the linguistic wealth of a life of one-liners, and the audience is quickly drawn in by Crispian pronouncements on: politics – “A medium in which a person can suspend his monstrous ego”; relationships – “Is there life after marriage?”; and suppressed anger – “Mass murderers are simply people who’ve had enough.”
Despite the acidic veneer, it is obvious that Crisp’s wit stemmed from love of the absurd rather than from bitterness, and Bourne emphasises this with the warmth of his delivery, eyes glittering as he looks round and enjoys the audience’s laughter. The whole experience feels less like a trip to the theatre than a warmly extended invitation to tea.
Sitting among the carefully sculpted cobwebs and piles of books, Bette Bourne turns performance into life as lovingly as Crisp always turned life into performance. Tenants will be asked to vote next November on whether they want their streets in the city of Glasgow to be paved with gold after all.. QUENTIN CRISP may have died on Sunday, but you only need to see Resident Alien at the Bush theatre to realise that the force of his personality makes mortality no more than an insignificant detail. It is as if every witticism that dropped from his lips encapsulated a fragment of his soul – put enough of them together, and once more you see the whole man preening himself before you. Regulations by the Treasury put the brakes on public sector borrowing.
Glasgow City Council wants to privatise council housing, handing over half the existing stock to new “not for profit” housing associations managed by banks and building societies in association with tenants.In exchange for repairing council housing and holding rents at no more than inflation, these banks or building societies will be guaranteed an income in rent from the Treasury. The idea of Arts Council-sponsored events throughout the 1990s was not “to hold a beauty contest between cities, it was to involve the whole community in architecture for the future”, Lally says. That is his major gripe about Glasgow City of Architecture & Design 1999. “We haven’t met that promise.”In Glasgow, 90,000 council house owners still live in unheated, damp houses. Yet the council’s housing debt means that it will not be modernising any more of its 180,000 properties for at least 30 years. He wanted to give the people a voice in the development of a new Glasgow.
