Alice in Wonderland

Cast your mind back to March and you will recall the sensation caused by Disney’s release of Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton, which ended up becoming the second highest-grossing film of the year worldwide. Arriving just as the excitement surrounding 3D was reaching its peak, the film was widely admired for its stunning visual effects, which clearly leant themselves well to this new cinema phenomenon. The big names on the cast list, including Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway, also undoubtedly contributed to the film’s box office success. However, the merits of the film in its own right should not be underestimated.

Far from being a remake of the former 1951 Disney movie, nor even of Lewis Carroll’s original 1865 novel, the new film instead imagines a return of Alice to Wonderland (or ‘Underland’), ten years later. This older Alice, now a young woman, must help restore the good White Queen to her place as rightful ruler, through a series of altercations and battles with the Red Queen and her followers.

Overall, the film provides a convincing and compelling sequel to the original story of Alice; it is exciting, thought-provoking, and often very funny.

Interview: SUSU Theatre Group's Rob McGough and Richard Copperwaite

Southampton University Theatre Group’s new production, HERE – the Group’s first fully immersive and interactive piece of theatre - will run for five performances this Saturday, the 5th of February. Billed as being ‘A Unique Devised Experience’, the piece has been created entirely by the cast and production team behind it, and all profits will go to charity.

With the rehearsal process for HERE beginning last Saturday, just a week before the performances, co-directors Richard Copperwaite and Rob McGough have had a hectic but exciting few days. They took time out to talk to TNS about what sets HERE apart from more traditional theatre – and why they think their piece will have audiences coming back for more.

Can you explain what ‘immersive and interactive theatre’ is?

Richard: Immersive theatre is a style of theatre where you try and destroy the fourth wall. The audience are no longer just sitting in an auditorium, they are actually in amongst the actors, so you get a chance to take them away into a completely different world.

Rob: What we’re planning on doing is setting up this whole world, this new environment, which is going to be quite strange for the audience. There’s lots of different ways in which they can interact with the action; we’ve got some silly things going on, which should be fun, but also some other things which are genuinely quite shocking. There’ll be choices which the audience will have to make, which will actually affect how the characters interact with each other. They’ll be able to find out about the characters by looking around them and taking in the scenario they’re in, as well as physically chatting to them and working out their personalities.

So it is quite a big challenge for both ourselves and the actors, but it’s one which everyone has been embracing so far.

So will the characters be improvising during the performance, or have you tried to prepare for a few different storylines?

Richard: Of course we can’t possibly prepare for every eventuality, but the best thing we can do is to give the actors the tools they need to be able to deal with as many situations as possible. It really comes down to building up very strong characters, to the point where the actors are able to respond intuitively to whatever the audience is giving them.
  
The methods we’ve been using to achieve this include things like ‘hot-seating’, which is when the actors try to really ‘become’ their characters, and the rest of us then ask them all sorts of questions about that character’s life – what they do in their spare time, things they enjoy doing, their opinions on certain issues, stuff like that. Some of the questions get really quite personal about the characters, as we encourage them to really probe into their personalities. We’ve presented them with a few nasty moral dilemmas, which can get quite tough for them.

Rob: A lot of the rehearsal process has been just talking about the world that we want to create, as well as the kinds of characters we want to place in that world. We didn’t actually come up with our idea for the environment until the end of last Saturday, which was the first rehearsal day for the piece. The characters then didn’t fully come together until the end of Monday. It all just came out of a discussion between ourselves and the whole of the cast.

Richard: It’s been fantastic because it’s actually gone off in an entirely different direction to any of the ideas which we originally started out with. We thought we knew certain things about how it would probably turn out, but because we’ve sat as a group and discussed the pros and cons of every single idea anyone’s had, it’s ended up going off into completely wild and unexplored territory.

How did you start the devising process?

Richard: We literally started with the ideas people had, and built on what everyone said they liked or disliked about those ideas. Everyone’s been brutally honest and just said if they think something’s terrible, but that’s been what’s made it such a great process, because every time someone has said they don’t like an idea, it’s developed into something better than it was before. We kept going ‘till we found an idea that everyone was comfortable with, and then we started setting everyone’s characters in stone. Again, some people had issues with the characters we were asking them to play, so we were able to change them until they felt happier with them. That’s the beauty of devising a piece, because obviously with a script, you just have to play what’s given to you.

What do you consider to be the most important part of the devising process?

Rob:  In this case I would definitely say characterisation, because they really need to be unbreakable. In order to maintain this world, we have to ask of the actors that they don’t break from their characters in any way. In a normal theatre, when the actors have a hundred people looking at them, you have to heighten everything; it has to be exaggerated, compared to the way you would behave in real life. The thing about immersive theatre is that they’re so up close and personal with the audience that they have to be realistic and down to earth - completely believable – and that’s asking a lot of the actors, that’s asking for a lot more detail in their characterisation than they would normally need.

Richard: It’s definitely a challenge - but if it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

Do you prefer co-ordinating a project like this, or directing a more traditional scripted piece?

Richard: I think this production has definitely been more exciting for us. With a script, it’s much more of a set, regimented process; it’s a slow development towards the finished product. With this sort of show, it’s been much more intense, but also much more satisfying to literally see these characters coming to life before our eyes. It’s really been everyone’s creation; everyone’s contributed to it.

Rob: For everyone working on it, it’s their baby, it’s their piece, they’ve watched it grow. I was lucky enough to direct The Pillowman, Theatre Group’s Halloween production last year, which was scripted. It’s almost impossible to compare the different styles of direction, they are so far apart from one another, and they’ve both challenged me personally in very different ways. With a scripted piece it’s a lot more about leadership, whereas this is a lot more about working with people in a team.

Finally, on the production’s website, you claim about HERE that: ‘It will make you laugh. It will make you sick. It will break your heart.’ Do you expect each individual audience member to have a different reaction to the piece?

Rob:  There’ll be different stuff going on in every corner of the space. Your opinion will probably be based on how long you spend talking to a certain character.

Richard: Absolutely. In fact we expect that audiences coming along to different performances will all have a different experience – so we think it’s worth coming more than once!

Performances of HERE will begin every two hours at the Student Union this Saturday, with the first performance beginning at 1pm and the last at 9pm. Reserve tickets by emailing here@theatre-group.com.Interactive theatre is the next step on from that - what I like to call breaking down the fifth wall - where the audience actually have a chance to interfere with parts of the story. This is a very new type of theatre; it’s very experimental, and quite risky in many ways, but it’s also really exciting.

LIVE REVIEW: Chapel Club at Talking Heads

Chapel Club hit Southampton’s Talking Heads as the penultimate stop on their first ever UK headline tour.  The sold-out performance proved that the relatively new five piece, who formed in 2008 and were signed in late 2009, have undoubtedly found their stride.

Opening with their current single, 'Surfacing' - the chorus of which borrows from 1930s classic 'Dream a Little Dream of Me' - the band instantly established an assured and powerful stage presence, which they maintained throughout the set.

This group have a very particular performance style, and they’re not afraid to stick with it - though their almost entirely straight-faced and static approach could leave them open to accusations of smugness or complacency. Personally I would argue that if their focus is on producing a high-quality and musically impressive set, then that can be no bad thing. Certainly it could not be disputed that they delivered on these points; there was not a single wrong note to be heard throughout the 45 minute performance.

Their cool concentration meant that there was no singing along or mouthing of the lyrics from anyone in the band except vocalist, Lewis Bowman; all were entirely focused on their own instruments, and no other mikes were on stage at any time. Guitarists Michael Hibbert and Alex Parry did give in to some movement at a few particularly passionate moments, but drummer Rich Mitchell was the only one breaking a sweat by the end of the set. It would be fair to say that bassist Alex Parry’s expression slipped from an air of calm confidence into the realms of disinterest at some points, but again this was a small price to pay for the quality of the sound produced.

Bowman himself gave a strong and impressively note-perfect performance, delivering each line with an intensity that showed in his face as well as his voice.  Again, his unswervingly serious look could perhaps have been interpreted as a sign of conceit, but any threat of this was in large part balanced out by his friendly and modest comments to the audience. A few songs in, he asked jokingly: "I said thanks for coming didn’t I?", adding "I don’t really have anything else to say... I have to say something otherwise people write that I’m arrogant."

He went on to thank the crowd for cheering at his mention of the release of the band’s debut album, Palace, before admitting, upon their enthusiastic reaction to his announcing an off-album track: "Every other time I’ve said that on the tour it’s just been completely silent." Later, on introducing the melodic ‘Fine Lines’, he gave some light-hearted encouragement to the slightly subdued audience: "It starts slow but it gets faster, so if you want to dance, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t."

He certainly couldn’t help but smile when a large number of voices began singing along with him to past single ‘All the Eastern Girls’, and was clearly happy to see a core group in the crowd begin to jump and wave their arms. The great response to this track helped to lift the mood of the gig, and showed that the audience did contain a significant number of already-converted Chapel Club fans.

Though Bowman deemed their closing encore track, ‘The Shore’ to be his favourite from the album, it was in some ways an odd choice, being more subdued than crowd favourites ‘O Maybe I’, ‘All the Eastern Girls’ or the first track of the encore, ‘Five Trees’.  As such, the peak of excitement reached with ‘All the Eastern Girls’ and sustained through ‘Five Trees’ was a little deflated by the end of the performance.

Nevertheless, the set overall was a highly enjoyable and slick showcase of Chapel Club’s undeniable talent, and it seems highly improbable that this will be the last tour they headline. The group give a distinct impression of precise and assured professionalism, which can only have come from very hard work and a true belief in their material.

'Palace' is out now. Chapel Club are currently touring the US and Europe, but will return to London in May. For more information visit http://www.chapelclub.com/.

Everybody Needs Good Neighbours...

Channel Five’s online catch-up service, Demand Five, describes Neighbours as ‘an essential part of student life’. Whilst this bold assertion could be nothing but a marketing ploy, for me (and a large number of my friends), it couldn’t be more accurate. So what makes a soap set in suburban Australia so irresistible to university students in the UK?

The overwhelming British success the show has enjoyed is no secret. Since its arrival on the BBC in 1986, just a year after its Australian debut, Neighbours has drawn a consistently impressive audience.  Staying on the BBC for 22 years, the series moved to Five in 2008, in a deal reportedly worth close to £300 million. The channel’s new acquisition was responsible for a large boost in its ratings, and the daily episodes of Neighbours consistently make appearances in Five’s ten most watched programmes every week, with an average of around 1.6 million viewers per episode.

Whilst it is notoriously difficult to calculate actual viewing figures for the student population, especially given the widespread use of online catch-up services amongst this group, many articles written about the British popularity of Neighbours acknowledge its large student following. However, more difficult to find are any particularly detailed explanations as to why this should be the case. Evidently, the daytime scheduling for Neighbours fits in to the student lifestyle well. Those of us with just a few lectures to attend are more likely to be at home in the middle of the day than those trying to hold down a full-time job; even the teatime showing at 5:30 would be a push for most non-students.

Yet I can’t help but think it must be more than just a question of timing. There is clearly a lot of love for Neighbours amongst students – and not even the often questionable acting, or equally unconvincing storylines, can put us off. Indeed, based on my own views and those of my friends, it is the classic Neighbours combination of blatant predictability, mixed with impressive levels of implausibility, which makes the programme such compulsive viewing. We moan about the writers’ seemingly non-existent grip on reality, we shout at the screen as yet another dark secret is discovered when someone eavesdrops through a wide-open door, but really, we’re loving every second.

Maybe it’s that unswerving predictability which makes Neighbours so endlessly appealing; it is consistently unrealistic. It’s good to know that no matter what else is going on in your life, the Kennedys will still somehow be fitting a ridiculous number of teenagers into their modestly-sized home, Toadie will be balancing a very successful law career with a large number of daytime social events, and Paul Robinson will be making millions, yet apparently not considering a move to a larger house. No matter what disaster has just hit Ramsey Street, you know that it will all be worked out in the end;  no matter how serious that last argument was, you can guarantee it won’t be long before they’ve put it all behind them, and are back to being ‘good friends’,  as promised in the opening credits.

Perhaps we are sometimes willing to sacrifice realism for a more interesting plotline, even if it is wildly far-fetched. Whilst such plotlines are of course a common trait to all soaps, those produced in Britain tend to be decidedly grittier, often dealing with far darker content. Neighbours is gloriously idealistic and, aside from the occasional villain thrown in for good measure, is unashamedly optimistic about human nature.

It seems to me that it is this stubbornly positive outlook on life, contained in the views of the characters of Neighbours, which keeps us students coming back for more. There is just something about the constant sunshine – and almost constantly smiling faces – which provides a great release from all degree-related stress. There’s nothing like a bit of escapism to make you forget about that impending deadline, and where better to do it than on the most friendly, cheerful and community-spirited street in Australia?