Romeo and Juliet

The Reader Organisation, in partnership with Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, Mersey Care NHS Trust, Cobalt Housing, Merseytravel,  Liverpool City Council and Liverpool PCT will be deliver a community production of Romeo and Juliet in August 2010. Full details will be announced shortly.

Please see our website for details of our previous Community Shakespeare production of The Winter’s Tale (Birkenhead Park 2008)

Applications are invited for the post of Designer for the 2010 Merseyside Community Theatre production of Romeo & Juliet.

The successful candidate will be responsible for the concept and delivery of the design, both set and costumes. You will have professional experience and be based locally, preferably with some experience of community work. You will work with the script, director, lighting and sound designers and oversee the whole creative process, ensuring that it is delivered on time and on budget. You will be working with a large team of community volunteers and willingness to work with non-professionals will be a key quality the Director and Producer will be seeking. The production will have 4 weeks rehearsal culminating in 6 performances at the end of August. You will also work on a project launch event scheduled for the end of April 2010.  Fee £3k.

Please send a letter of application and your CV to Zoe Gilling, Business Manager, The Reader Organisation. Applications must be received no later than 5.00pm Tuesday 16th March. No applications arriving after this time will be considered. Email applications are preferred: zoegilling@thereader.org.uk

Interviews will be held at The Reader Organisation offices, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, on the afternoon of Friday 19th March.

People who are involved in Get Into Reading may know the poem because it’s been read in quite a lot of groups. It’s always a lovely surprise to see this Victorian gem, which might be considered a bit obvious, a bit corny, come to life in human hands. The poem has a  kind of magic about it, in that the more difficult the lives of its readers the more moving it becomes.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

I hadn’t realised that it was a key poem for Mandela during his years of incarceration (and wish I had, as some politically correct persons have occasionally  told me that they are  troubled by the undercurrent of colonial racism hinted at in Henley’s use of the word ‘black’).

The film is an old-fashioned move-you-to-tears and to-punching-the-air triumph-over-adversity story, which had me in tears within minutes, perhaps seconds. Mandela’s calm determination and belief is worth learning from, there’s a terrific performance from an actor whose name I don’t know but who used to be nurse in Casualty, Damon has found his niche as a lumpen inarticulate but courageous sportsman, and Freeman was born to play Mandela: the two are now one in my mind, as if they always were one and the same. Go with a rugby fan, take hankies for two, and be prepared to be inspired.

Set almost entirely in Wales, the drama tells the story of 10-year-old Dylan Hughes and his family’s small petrol station; when his father leaves the family, it coincides with the arrival of a contingent from the National Portrait Gallery in London, who have brought paintings to Wales for safe-keeping after the gallery was flooded. The novel was inspired by the real-life practice during the Second World War of keeping paintings in Welsh mines.

(www.thebookseller.com)

Framed was directed by Andy De Emmony, and stars Trevor Eve and Eve Myles.

In an interview with Emma Brockes of the Guardian, Everett talks openly about his personal life and acting career, as well as the challenges he faced whilst creating this series on the life of Lord Byron.

You can read the Guardian’s full interview with Rupert Everett here.

Long before the doors of the Small Concert Room in St. George’s Hall opened on Sunday, people were lining the stairs in eager anticipation for the commencement of the fifth annual Penny Readings. Once inside, and after some negotiation with the lighting, the packed hall was welcomed and prepared for the proceedings by Jane Davis whilst a picture of the man himself, Charles Dickens, rested at the back of the stage. The audience were then treated to the work of Sarah Jane Vespertine, Somalifields and a fantastic reading of some of T.S. Eliot’s poetry by a very lively Brian Nellist; a big hit with the audience.

Songs by Kensington Community Choir were another highlight of the evening, with professional, enjoyable and moving performances. El Ghawazee, a belly-dancing group, shimmied us into the interval for another favourite of the evening – the raffle! Having won books, wine and chocolates, the audience settled back into the second half of the night with more musical performances, before the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Janet Suzman read from Great Expectations, which enraptured the whole audience in the power of its delivery.

The ‘pudding’ of the evening came in the form of Phil Davis’s reading from A Christmas Carol, before Kensington Choir took to the stage once more to sing ‘Deck the Halls’, this time with (very willing!) audience participation. With such a wide variety of acts, a full turn-out and an extremely festive atmosphere, there is only one question that needs answering: would Dickens have liked it? Yes he would!

Posted by Claire Speer

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Read an online article about the Penny Readings published in the Liverpool Daily Post.

By Chris High

In the annual Penny Readings, now in its fourth year of emulating Charles Dickens’s event of 1862 in which the great author described the room as “simply perfect”, The Reader Organisation have managed to encapsulate not only the very essence of Christmas, but also the very heartbeat of what Liverpool ‘08 should be about. What better way to herald the arrival of Christmas than to spend a somewhat chilly Sunday evening in the luxurious surroundings of the Small Concert Room to listen to some of the city’s finest exponents of the spoken word reading festive extracts from Hardy, Dickens and Shakespeare?

Introducing some of the city’s musical foundations such as the Life Changers Empowering Ministries Gospel Choir – incorporating singers from seven different countries – and the Merseyside Dance Initiative’s, African Youth Dance, whose performance was filled with colour and unrestrained enthusiasm, BBC Radio 4 presenter, David McFetridge, held proceedings together as MC, reading extracts from Capsica’s Mersey Minis anthologies.

But it is the guest readers who make the event what it is and not least this year was Annabelle Dowler - Kirtsy Millar in The Archers and The Shepherd in The Liverpool Playhouse production of The Flint Street Nativity – who read from The Winter’s Tale and As You Like It, bringing scenes vividly to life with great energy.

Equally as eloquent were the University of Liverpool’s Brian Nellist MBE, who read from Thomas Hardy’s Under The Greenwood Tree and poet Jenny Joseph, reading from Bleak House and her own work, Led By The Nose, A Garden Of Smells.

As is traditional at the this event, however, it is the chosen passage from A Christmas Carol read by Philip Davis, Editor of The Reader magazine, that closed the show and so released the five hundred strong audience into the chilly night air with a lighter heart and a renewed sense of what the meaning of Christmas should be.

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Chris High is an author and freelance journalist. He also writes crime fiction book reviews, theatre, music and film reviews, and interviews writers, media personalities and musicians. We are not entirely sure what his tastes in cake are. Or if he even likes cake.

(Festival Girl is away)

This year, the event features renowned UK poet Jenny Joseph; The Archers star Annabelle Dowler; and BBC Radio 4 and CBeebies presenter, David McFetridge; the 500-strong audience will hear readings from such famous classics as Bleak House, A Christmas Carol and A Winter’s Tale.  Other highlights of the evening include performances by the Liverpool African Youth Dance group, three community choirs, a Dickensian trumpet player and a string quartet.

The Reader exists to promote the good in literature, believing that reading can be fun, life-enhancing and creative for everyone, and this is why we host The Penny Readings. As in Dickens’ day – when he would travel around the potteries and Liverpool, reading to thousands of people for only one penny – we too only charge one penny for this event, so that it is inclusive and available to all. We want everyone to benefit from the positive impact that literature can bring to people’s lives and this is one thoroughly enjoyable way that we are able to do it.

You can read the full press release on the University of Liverpool’s website. Tickets are now sold out for this year’s event but you are can place your name on a list at Liverpool Central Library to ensure you are amongst the first to know when tickets go on sale for 2008.

Next year we are thinking of putting one hundred of the tickets on ebay in order to add excitement to the scramble for tickets and raise money to support the event. A penny for your thoughts, please.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

At these large events you rarely feel that you see anything of the ‘real’ person, especially with actors–that’s what they do, act–but occasionally you glean something from what is said that seems to come from somewhere more personal. Dame Helen discussed how dissimilar she felt from her friends whilst growing up (her father, Boris Mironof, was a Russian immigrant), how in the theatre she was (and still is) always rebelling against formal acting doctrines and trying to make her way forward as a woman in a male dominated arena. What you can infer from all of this, is that Mirren carries a sense of ‘otherness’ in her life: she was acutely aware of her status as an immigrant’s daughter; she left the RSC to join Peter Brook’s innovative theatre company in Paris, describing him as a “tough task master but very truly brilliant”, and holds in very high esteem, “there’s beautiful rhythm to his plays, he’s like a composer–he picked the best from us all and created beautiful compositions”; her strong female roles, most obviously as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect and the Queen, have demonstrated her desire to put women at the “centre of drama.”

We all battle with ‘otherness’ in varying degrees–it’s what makes us individuals–but I suddenly realised how these huge celebrities have to deal with not only their own otherness but the otherness of being a ’star’ and the pressure that entails. When she received her Oscar, Mirren explained that “everything stopped, everything shut down for a moment”, the actor was left behind and she was lost in herself, in her otherness.

Posted by Jen Tomkins