Theatre in lockdown: amidst this unsettling period for the arts, writer Tracy Harris and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama’s acting graduates bring original and pioneering theatre into our homes.

Picture the scene. It is 2018, two years prior to the pandemic. I am at a lively Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, having just watched a number of brilliantly talented RWCMD acting graduates perform a collection of new writing. Fast forward two years later and the setting is somewhat different. I am sat on my bed; dinner at the ready and eyes fixated on my laptop screen. I am watching eight of the 2020 acting graduates perform in the same new writing festival but this time the stage takes the form of their own homes. What clearly hasn’t changed under this unusual setting is RWCMD’s ability to produce some of the country’s best acting talent, as well as the Welsh conservatoire’s determination to produce new and innovative ways of storytelling.

Set on an online rehab course spanning ten weeks, Ripples sees eight strangers all suffering with some form of addiction confront the traumas of their past and recount these experiences to the group. Tracy Harris deals with the difficult topic of addiction with great sensitivity, giving way for sprinkles of humour as well as hope. Originally meant for the Sherman Theatre’s stage, the play’s adaptation for screen is innovative and wholly original. The weekly sessions take the form of a ‘Zoom’ meeting, and participants join from their respective rooms in the rehabilitation centre.

Without revealing too much, we see some wonderful creativity in the staging of the production. Matthew Holmquist’s sure direction not only allows the play to run smoothly, but the impeccable timing of individuals joining and exiting scenes (or their Zoom meeting) really plays into the ‘liveness’ of this event. Describing the performance as a ‘play-reading’ would serve to disparage the care put into creating this albeit virtual but very real narrative space. Holmquist’s clear direction, paired with tactful performances from his cast allows the audience to empathise with, and become wrapped-up in the characters’ stories. Ripples proves that it is possible to make high-quality theatre under these current constraints, with the immersive tech surprisingly running with ease, as though the play was in fact made for this digital setting. There is no doubt that Matthew Holmquist’s work with The Other Room, Cardiff, has made him the perfect fit for breathing lively and engaging narrative into such small, confined theatre spaces.

The creative team behind Ripples has produced a piece that sets a leading example to other theatres and theatre companies worldwide. They have proven that during these unprecedented times, Wales can still be a frontrunner in the world of new writing, standing shoulder to shoulder with its inspiring work in the ‘real world’.  

You can catch the RWCMD acting graduates on demand until 16 May at https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_shows/ripples/

12 Plays in digital spaces:

National Theatre Wales and Sherman Theatre will work together with a range of independent companies and artists to produce play readings, showcasing the talent of playwrights, companies and creatives across Wales.

The partnership will enable Welsh directors, actors, and designers to be fully supported and funded to deliver the readings, while providing a platform to share homegrown work, alongside contemporary classic titles that may yet to have been performed here in Wales.

Find out more here: https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw-projects/network/#network_projects

 I wasn’t exactly disappointed but I wasn’t
satisfied either – for several reasons. 
This puts me in a minority of one, as it seems both the play and this
production have been universally well-received:

– A must see

– a talented young cast

– terrific energy as the fight goes on

– so good all you want to do is roll out one
superlative after another

– and so on.  So, why dissatisfied?

‘Blue Stockings’ is issue-based.  The subject – the refusal of Cambridge
University to recognise women’s equal intelligence by awarding female students
degrees and allowing them to graduate – takes precedence over the
characterisation of the cast and any personal drama.  The general circumstance – that of an institution
pigheadedly refusing to accept women as men’s intellectual equals – is a given
and it replaces the normal dramatic tension set up in scenes where there is a rising
tension between the protagonists.  So,
does this subject provide suitable material for a play?  For one thing, we know the ending in advance,
so there is limited suspense.

The standard
approach to tackling issues is to show a sympathetic character – a hero or
heroine – as being involved in or effected by what is going on in society.  Thus in ‘Henry
IV’, Prince Hal and Falstaff can play out their relationship against a
backdrop of what it means to be a king in waiting; in ‘The Crucible’, Proctor and Abigail’s story explores the immediate
meaning of national paranoia; Hedda Gabler’s passion has nowhere to go and her
behaviour when confronted by an unassailable patriarchy becomes both
fascinating and horrific.

None of the people
portrayed in ‘Blue Stockings’ are of
heroic stature.  They are not intended to
be.  By giving us a number of female and
male undergraduates and a number of men and women academics, Jessica Swayle
spreads the load, as it were.  But I
think she has done this too evenly.  She
avoids the problem sometimes caused by having a pre-eminent main character –
the feeling  that his/her problem is
unique – by her spread approach, but she leaves an attentive audience wondering
exactly where and on whom to place their attention.

Swayle’s large
pool of dramatis personae gives her an additional problem.  Those associated with Cambridge, whether
working or studying there, are not and never have been representative of wider
UK society.  We can’t shrug off our view
of them as elitist and privileged.  En
masse they put us on the defensive. ‘Why,’ we ask ourselves, ‘should we care tuppence
about these toffs?’

One answer is because
they are not all toffs.  Even in the
nineteenth century there would have been those at Cambridge who did not fit the
mould.  Swayle shows us this by having a
working-class female undergraduate, Maeve Sullivan, and a genuinely egalitarian
male lecturer, Thomas Banks.  (Banks’
career is derailed because he refuses to give up his Girton teaching when offered
a fellowship at Trinity.  I thought
though, because of a bit of injudicious staging in this production, he might
have got into trouble because of the proximity of his hand to a student bottom,
occurring when he pushes Tess around on a bicycle – but maybe I wasn’t meant to
notice this).

Swayle also sets
up an overarching tension by giving us two real historical characters:  Elizabeth Welsh, the mistress of Girton, and
Henry Maudsley, the famous psychiatrist. 
Mrs Welsh has been working patiently towards obtaining degrees for her
girl students; Maudsley has been diligently exploring hysteria and has a number
of theories about it.

The presentation
of Maudsley needs much more careful handling because he is shown as representative
of contemporary male thinking.  Swayle
gives him the space to present ideas which today appear as complete nonsense
but the way she does this is quasi-farcical. 
We are encouraged to find him ridiculous, to laugh uproariously at his
‘wandering womb’ theory, without being simultaneously obliged to place the idea
in its real context.  It was not funny
for the women of the time to be considered wholly at the mercy of their
misunderstood biology. 

Equally the
thinking that Maudlsey and others put into hysteria was well-intentioned,
insofar as it was part of the early attempts to understand why women were so
unhappy and why many of them succumbed to severe mental illness.  In other words, today Maudsley is both absurd
and understandable.  In fact he
made a huge contribution to the treatment of the insane, giving what Wikipedia
describes as an astonishing amount of his own money to ensure the completion of
the hospital that was named after him – and which is still providing mental
health services today.  If he was shown
on stage as a more rounded and complex character and not just as a blithering
idiot he would be both funnier and more interesting.

Apparently –
Wikipedia again – Elizabeth Welsh managed to rise from being a tutor at Girton
to become the first mistress to have any say in the college’s direct
management.  She did not, however, manage
to achieve what the play suggests was her great ambition – the awarding of
degrees to female undergraduates.  Cambridge
obstinately continued its male-centred approach until 1948.  It was the last British university to reach
this point, some seven hundred years after Bolgona, where a woman got a degree
in 1237.  A couple of women were teaching
at Spanish universities in the seventeenth century.  Ironically enough, the first woman to be given
a BA Cantab was the Queen Mother, and this was only an honorary award.  What does that say about respect for women
academics?

The problem as far
as the play and this production is concerned is how to flesh out Elizabeth
Welsh.  Again I think Swayle needed to
handle this more carefully. As it is there is just insufficient modulation in Welsh’s
behaviour.  One moment she is seen
talking quietly and intelligently to her out of order or worried students and
the next she is shouting at a member of her staff she disagrees with.  She comes across as more like a stressed out
secondary teacher than a thoughtful member of an intellectual community.  In the end she is transformed into a
monstrous harridan, booming at all and sundry. 
I was relieved when she was pushed over and the ranting came to an end.

Highly educated
people, whether female or male, don’t resort to shouting one another down in a
hurry, because they have been equipped with a wide variety of vocal and verbal
resources.  They deploy these resources so
as to be able to avoid direct confrontation – which they normally consider to
be both pointless and ridiculous. (It’s only when they get to the House of
Commons that they forget what they have been taught and start behaving badly.)  I don’t object to violent arguments on stage
but they require preparation: they are only effective when we have experienced
the build up behind them.  You can’t fast
forward.  Because Elizabeth Welsh is not
the primary focus of the play’s story, she appears in the way to have a very short
fuse.  Thus, her mood swings work against
the play’s main theme – that women are not driven exclusively by their
emotions.  Who, honestly, would want
someone like her in the common room?

I expected the plot
as it unravelled might centre on Maeve Sullivan and her struggles to integrate
with her peers whilst she laid the foundations for a professional career and her
escape from her family background. 
Instead, when her brother brings news of her mother’s death she is told
– by Elizabeth Welsh, no less – that she has to go home and look after her
siblings and accept her limited destiny. 
The glades of academe are not for such as she.  But, as we have not got to know her properly
before this happens, we don’t feel very sorry for her.  She is quickly forgotten – like the girl or
girls murdered at the beginning of a Scandi noir TV series.  Rather than serving as a dramatic
counterbalance to the other, upper middle class female undergraduates, she
remains – as described in the cast list – ‘a mystery’.  Why?

One of those other
female undergraduates who is given a bit more air space is Tess Moffat,
described as ‘a curious girl’.  This sounds as if it might be ironic – aren’t
all Cambridge undergraduates curious? – but she is not given very much more
room to manoeuver than Maeve. 

In an early scene,
we watch her pluck up the extraordinary courage required to confront Maudsley
in a lecture.  But here again, Swayle’s
touch is wrong. Maudsley rapidly loses his temper when Tess interrupts and
throws the uppity girl out of the lecture hall. 
In reality he would have resorted to irony, the favourite linguistic
device of the academic.  He would simply
have cut her down to size with a few well-chosen put-downs.  That’s all it takes in a tense public space
where a practiced sneer can reduce anyone a bit insecure to human jelly.  Any presentation of Cambridge life which
doesn’t show irony as almost the lingua franca is just unconvincing. 

Because she has
not been humiliated, Tess’s holds her head up high – until she falls for a
Trinity man – Ralph, a cad and a bounder. 
Ralph bowls her over with the trick that must have been old even in the
1890s, reading her a piece of Italian poetry. 
Being a romantic nineteenth century nineteen year old – rather than an
unsentimental modern miss who would collapse in fits of giggles  – Tess succumbs to Ralph’s less than obvious
charms.  We are not, therefore, surprised
when we find out he is going to propose to another.  In any case, university love affairs are not
often of more than passing interest. 
Does this sub-plot add anything to the main story?  Only insofar as Tess’ stormy love-life
disturbs her concentration, so she flunks her exams.   Female intellect being undermined by emotion.  Why not show Tess as bouncing back
easily?  Everyone gets dumped.  Most shrug it off.

There seems to be
a minor error in the unfolding of the love story.  Tess and her beau have a picnic on what is referred
to as a hill from which they can see Kings College Chapel.  I believe you can see the chapel from a
distance – or you could until modern buildings got in the way – but this is
because Cambridge is almost completely flat.

There was another
minor error, too, in the conversation flowing from the male
undergraduates.  One remarks that
‘employers all want firsts’. This is an anachronism.  Gentlemen did not go up to Cambridge in the
nineteenth century to please prospective employers.   They went up because it was expected that
they would complete their education.  It
was only the poor – like Maeve Sullivan (remember her?) who had to think of
getting jobs.  The gentlemen had ‘prospects’
that would not be affected by the class of degree they took.  They would be supported by Papa until friends
of the family set them up and opened the necessary doors.  I understand even today it can be a bit like
that for some of them…

All the male
students appear to be paid-up members of the Cambridge equivalent of the
Bullingdon Club, with the exception of one, Will, who for some reason is hiding
the fact that he has known Tess all his life. 
The aristocracy certainly behaved in the way shown but, yet again, it
would have been more interesting if there had been depth and variation in this
group of characters– if we had seen some of them worried about debt, others
obsessed with sport, even some concerned about their sexuality.  Having Will as a student at Kings rather than
Trinity hardly counts as variation.

A scene which had
potential and which went awry involved a confrontation between one of the
Trinity men, Lloyd, and one of the Girton students, Carolyn Addison, – ‘an early bohemian’ – in a shop.  Carolyn falls back, cowed into silence, when
Lloyd launches a tirade against her.  I
think he would have been rude rather than bombastic, sniggering cleverly in the
way that misogynists do when they don’t have a gallery to play to.  I’m also sure that Carolyn, smart and
demi-mondaine, would have had a killer riposte at the ready for when he refers
to female students as unnatural.  Young
post -adolescent men like Lloyd are terrified of women.  It doesn’t take much – a gesture, a movement
referring to real femininity – to reduce them to nothing.  Lloyd is not in any position of power over
Carolyn and she has nothing at all to lose from ridiculing him.  By having her turn away, as beaten down as
the female shopkeeper obliged to serve him, Swayle suggests that women were all
powerless.  This goes too far.  There is ample evidence in the literature of
the nineteenth century, from Trollope to George Eliot, showing women could hold
their own in social exchanges.  That’s
one reason why they did get degrees in the end. You can’t imagine a Jane Austen
character backing off like Carolyn – and they had to operate a century earlier.

In terms of
holding their own, one of the reasons why women were finally admitted to
Cambridge was that they began getting better marks than men in exams.  Not only were they acquiring knowledge but they
had the confidence and the skills necessary to use it and present new
ideas.  This is an important historical
and sociological point but – can it make for great theatre?

Swayle shows us the
Girton undergraduates coming out with snippets of knowledge about more or less
every conceivable subject.  They are bright,
well informed and well prepared for University Challenge.  We do not see, however, what this
intellectual attainment has cost them, so it is hard to connect with it.  We are informed by one – Celia, ‘a fragile hard-worker’ – in the course
of a conversation, that she has had a nervous breakdown.  This hardly seems important as shortly
afterwards she sails through her viva. 

I confess to being
puzzled by what seems to be another anachronism. In this viva, Celia refers to
Einstein, although relativity didn’t appear on the scientific scene publically
until 1915, about twenty years after the period in which ‘Blue Stockings’ is
set.  Time and space may be relative but
Celia would not have been able to travel through them, however brilliant she
was.

I think most of
the problems this production faced came from weaknesses within the play itself,
rather than the performers.  It’s hard to
fail with some plays but it’s not easy to deliver on a combination of cameos
and set-pieces.  Other than Polly Lister as
Mrs Welsh going over the top, nobody did anything wrong. The trouble was that
nobody did anything very right or memorable, either.  If there are no  characters with depth and complexity, actors
have to work very hard to ensure they can find individual ways of differentiating
themselves from one another.  Groups of
undergraduates are rarely exciting on stage and there was a lack of detail
here: both the young women and the young men appeared to be little more than
their normal selves, with a touch of acting applied.  Neve Kelman did manage to squeeze some
original life into Carolyn but none of the others were remarkable in any
way.  If the production is revived this
could be addressed.  Everything and
everyone was a little too safe and conventional.  Nobody went mad or was truly weird  – even though these are staple quantities of
Cambridge university life.

I gather that ‘Blue Stockings’ has entered the national
curriculum, where it is used for teaching purposes.  This seems to me reasonable, although I hope
it won’t displace any major works.  With
its large cast, there is scope for student productions and the ideas in the
play are of interest.  In many ways, the
play is more suitable for a young audience than for adults. It’s easy to see
how it would spark off writing projects and further reading. 

Whilst it left me
unsatisfied, ‘Blue Stockings’ did
prompt me to go away and look into the background – and to write an overlong
review.  I’m grateful for this, of
course, but plays are about a lot more than education.  I need to be distracted and fascinated,
disturbed and enthralled, when I go to the theatre.  I don’t want to have to do background study
work afterwards.  I may not normally have
the time. 

Jessica Swayle is
adapting ‘Blue Stockings’ for TV.  This is
probably where it belongs as material, not on the stage.  TV is a medium suited to docu-drama, because
it operates on its audience in a different way. 
Good camera work, for example, can make up for brief moments of
dialogue.  By and large, too, there seems
to be an insatiable escapist demand for period drama on TV, where there is more
room to explore a wide range of people on a superficial level. Production
companies love the challenge of recreating the nineteenth century and you can
include scenes that are impossible in a theatre.

One of the most
extraordinary events associated with the issue of women at Cambridge was the
huge riot that took place in 1897, when an effigy of woman cyclist was
suspended from the Cambridge University Press bookshop.  Showing this would make for a tremendous
start for a series and it might really open up the world of the play’s time.  The repressed violence that emerged in the
riot connects after all to what was to happen only seventeen years later in a
war where the sons and younger male relations of the Cambridge blue stockings
were ordered to don red-ribboned caps and walk across open ground towards
machine guns. 

In the year of that
riot, too, one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, deemed only a minor threat, was
sentenced to three years exile and found himself in to a hut in Siberia.  Away from Cambridge, the times they really were
a-changin’.  For me, Swayle needed to tap
into the Zeitgeist of the period a lot more thoroughly.

This is a BSL video review. You can read a written version of the review by Chris below.

Hello my name is Chris Coles, I went to the WMC to watch Beauty Parade. The play itself was about three woman who were spies in World War Two. It showed what life was like being spies, that they don’t live for long during the War, it was a max of 6 weeks if they were lucky.

The play itself was amazing showing the good relationship between deaf people and hearing people can work. Special effect, captions and music were brilliant and written well into this play. I recommend you see this play if you like period drama.

Heather a Deaf friend of Chris also attended, Heather said that it was great to see a Deaf actress in a mainstream production and she enjoyed the way the captions and effects were presented.

The Beauty Parade plays at The Wales Millenium Centre until the 14th of March.