STAGEFRIGHT REVIEWS
The Times
East Anglian Daily Times
Theatreworld
Public reviews
Whatsonstage.com
Local Secrets
Eastern Daily Press
Henry Irving Society
Reviewsgate
Bury Free Press
The Times ***
Libby Purves
Midnight: a guttering gas-mantle in an old theatre, rain down the skylight. Into a dressing-room of shrouded dummies and faceless wigs strides Satan himself. It is Sir Henry Irving, fresh from Faustus and unable to get his horns off without petulantly calling for help. Gothic creepiness meets knowing comedy.
Irving was a theatre giant of the 1890s, striding the boards of his Lyceum theatre in tragedy and melodrama and despising new social realists such as Ibsen (“Those whining women! Life is life and art is art”). Jonathan Keeble’s Irving bridles like an insulted rhino at the barbs of George Bernard Shaw and critics who would “cut up and butter their own mothers”. His star is fading.
Meanwhile, his theatre manager, hurrying to get the horns off the great man’s head, may seem downtrodden but his name will not fade, even now, because he is Bram Stoker. He is writing Dracula in his spare time. Irving wants him to stick to composing his playbills and speeches, and sneers at the typescript. This draws from contemporary record: Irving, it is said, walked out of a reading of Dracula muttering “Dreadful!”
It was a sharp idea of the playwright Michael Punter to use this relationship not for an angsty reflection on art, but for a ghost story streaked with comedy. Keeble’s Irving is all self-absorbed actorly insecurity, while Barry Ward as the darting little Irishman Stoker conveys both devotion and a clearer vision of what fills seats. When Irving boasts of the Prince of Wales’s repeated visits (“He advised me I might call him Bertie”), Stoker points out that it is the girls in tights HRH comes for.
Irving wants Stoker to manage his American tour and abandon his researches into Transylvanian superstitions (conducted in heavily overdue books from Whitby public library, a nice touch). Gradually both men grow uneasy at an unseen presence, possibly a “low comedian” who aspired to tragic leads but was snubbed. He is dead now. Or is he? The pair are locked in, and creepy shocks occur, gratis of Ben Hart’s illusions and one faceless extra who speaks echoey Shakespearean soliloquies down the speaking tube. Thunderclaps, illusions and shocks are leavened with wonderful moments such as Irving at the skylight crying “I — I saw a horrible, a vile thing” and Stoker’s innocently alarmed “Could it have been a reflection?”
This play could become a favourite. Its debut production is directed by Colin Blumenau, marking his last as artistic director of the Theatre Royal, after 15 years in which this unique Georgian playhouse has been restored to glory. An appropriate curtain-call.
East Anglian Daily Times
Things really do go bump - as well as crackle, clap, creak, shriek and bang - in the night during this delicious slice of gothic horror. The Theatre Royal is the perfect setting for Stagefright: its intimate, historic feel adding to the atmosphere of foreboding. We live in a world of sophisticated audiences, dulled by computer-generated special effects.. So creating real shocks in real time, on stage, using whatever physical means can be devised must be even more of a challenge than it was for the Victorians of the era in which this play is set. It is testament to illusionist Ben Hart, writer Michael Punter and director Colin Blumenau that Stagefright contains moments when, judging from the shockwaves, most of the Pit left its seats by a good six inches.
Added to these are downright creepy happenings - the simplest often being the most eerie - and illusions which impress even a modern audience. To describe any would be to spoil them. Suffice to say that nine out of ten are tremendous and a slightly clunky ghost is still pretty good. What holds the whole together are great performances by Jonathan Keeble, as actor and impresario Henry Irving, and Barry Ward as Bram Stoker.
Keeble was a spellbinding Shylock at the Theatre Royal and here turns in another charismatic performance. He is a big actor and conveys Irving’s big ego and big ambitions, while retaining the feeling that the success, fame and bluster are a veneer across the top of a life not far from its humble roots.
Stoker created one of western culture’s great fictional characters, in Dracula. Such is the centrality of the Count to modern culture - too many films and spin-offs to count, plus more recently the drippy Twilight saga - that it is fun to speculate from where Stoker took his ideas.
Punter enjoys speculating over the source of, for example, the name of Stoker’s heroine Mina Harker and the origins of Renfield’s nasty fly-eating habit. Ward, quick and birdlike, conveys the frustrated energy of a man trying to burst out from under the weight of his more famous companion’s plots.
With more than a week to run, this production is certainly worth catching. Just leave your car parked under a streetlight.
Mark Crossley
Theatreworld
With a superb blend of tension and humour, this new play written by Michael Punter is set in the Manager’s Office of the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1894 will provide you an evening of incredibly scary and also very funny moments. It is now being premiered at this last remaining Regency Theatre where the intimate atmosphere of the building is just ripe for such a production
The two main characters (forget about the ghost for now!) are the arrogant and dominant Victorian actor Henry Irving (Jonathan Keeble) and the modest manager of the theatre Bram Stoker (Barry Ward). The latter is not only a most loyal assistant to Irving but also a writer. The fact he was in the early stages of surreptitiously writing a novel where he creates the character of Count Dracula all helps to provide a thoroughly intimidating scenario.
With Irving and Stoker locked in the theatre overnight after a performance, we see in this invented situation the depth of their relationship. Jonathan Keeble plays Irving as a strong Shakespearian character whose stage presence is commanding. His haughtiness has no bounds and Jonathan portrayed this in a flawless manner. By contrast Barry’s depiction of Stoker was that of a modest and sometimes troubled individual, who on the quiet could and in the end did knock spots of Irving. Yet the chemistry between the actors and the characters they performed was amazing to watch, and you never wanted to miss a moment.
The set is uncanny and full of nooks and crannies from which all sorts of eerie noises and sudden movements emanate. Even when the unexpected occurs and the fright is quite clear in both Irving and Stoker, there is sometimes a ‘one liner’ or a bit of tomfoolery that breaks the tension – well until the next ghostly visitation occurs.
The illusionist Ben Hart is always one step ahead of the audience, and when both actors leave the stage unattended for a few seconds, you kind of wait for something horrible to happen. The fact it does not provides temporary relief, but the truce is short-lived especially when the blower system bursts into action again and the voice of an actor long gone quotes excerpts from a well-known piece of theatre.
The audience will probably be highly amused, slightly scared and maybe even challenged over their beliefs of the supernatural. Most of all they will be thoroughly entertained and engrossed by the brilliant performances of this dynamic duo of Jonathan and Barry.
Public Reviews ****
It is 1894 and something is stirring in London’s Lyceum theatre. Something terrifying, something breathtaking, something . . . supernatural.
Henry Irving, a revolutionary actor of his time, and his theatre manager Bram Stoker – yes, him of Dracula fame are trapped in a dressing room of the Lyceum theatre in the dead of night. It would appear that they are not alone – or are they?
The story starts as Irving arrives back in the dressing room following the end of his evenings performance. Bram Stoker has sent all the staff home and rather thoughtlessly the porters have locked our characters into the theatre.
The obvious merriment following a successful performance quickly descends into dread and torment. A series of un-explained events leads to a shocking climax for both of our characters.
The play is based on historical fact. Bram Stoker did work for Henry Irving at the Lyceum theatre. He was in fact still in Irving’s employ until Irving’s death in 1905. The rest of the story is from Michael Punter’s exceedingly talented and rather active imagination.
From the title of the play the audience isn’t expected to be having many laughs but there are plenty laughs to be had. There are visual as well as verbal jokes a plenty. The visual play with Irvings Devil’s tail raised a childish titter from around the theatre but it worked on both the innocent level (there were children in the audience) and for the obvious double entendre.
Jonathan Keeble as Henry Irving was totally credible as the over bearing Irving. His presence on the stage is very commanding. As soon as he appeared on the stage you knew who he was and were immediately dragged into believing he was the A-list celebrity he was in 1894. At first you feel that his lumbering is reminiscent of another character popular in the Victorian era – Frankenstein’s monster. Then you realise that this is an actor playing an actor coming out of character after a show.
Bram Stoker, played by Barry Ward, was a surprise. You believed he was the creator of the dark novel Dracula but felt that he was to good to have created such a masterpiece as he was too “nice”. Punter’s creation and writing of this role made a perfect foil for the over the top Henry Irving. Ward played him to perfection.
Ward and Keeble work well as a team. You really do believe that they are friends. Although the balance is slightly in Irving’s favour as he is Stoker’s employer.
In one part of the play Irving is seen pouring himself a drink and drinking it. However he used the glass Stoker had been using. In Victorian society it would have been unthinkable for Irving to even think of drinking out of the same glass as one of his “staff”. The glass was left on the stage and this proved problematical for another character, who was supposed to be other worldly but was pre-occupied with dodging the glass.
Much had been made of the effects and sadly some of them did not come off too well. The first “ghost” looked like a “Scream” mask thrust upwards on a broom handle. However, the first supernatural event really does have you looking around the stage trying to second guess what spooky thing will happen – and there are many.
The lighting and sound effects were perhaps used too much. The crash of thunder and the flash of lightening at the very beginning did much to set the scene. As the play wore on the thunder and lightening became passe.
Stagefright is having it’s world premiere here in Bury St Edmunds. The director, Colin Blumenau, who makes a pivotal vocal appearance in the play, hopes that this will go on to bigger locations. Who knows, perhaps Bury St Edmunds will be able to boast that they were influential in getting Henry Irving back into the West End. Watch this space.
Whatsonstage.com ***
It’s an agreeable enough piece of hokum for most of its two hours, but Michael Punter’s Stagefright has the potential to have been something more.
We are in the manager’s cluttered eyrie in London’s Lyceum Theatre. The year is 1894 and the actor-manager in question is Henry Irving. The glittering audience for a revival of W G Wills’s version of Faust – Irving naturally starring as Mephistopheles – has departed, as have the other actors and the stage crew.
So the theatre is empty – except for the actor and his business manager, the former civil servant and part-time journalist Bram Stoker (not yet famous as the author of Dracula). Or is it? The building was already 60 years old at the time when Stagefright is set, with its tragedies and failures as well as successes. As a storm rages outside, odd things start to happen.
Which is all well and good. Theatre can do mysterious very competently; after all, its main business is the creation of illusion. The trouble with the two main characters is that Punter only skims the surface of what drives them and why; they remain two-dimensional. The set and lighting by Kerry Bradley and Joshua Carr respectively are excellent and both Barry Ward as Stoker and Jonathan Keeble as Irving give committed performances, Ward especially.
Director Colin Blumenau has used illusionist Ben Hart to create the special effects which multiply as the evening progresses. They don’t really work. Imagination, even the collective one of a theatre audience, conjures far more frightening images than any amount of palpable stage trickery. What tension has been built up then dissipates just before the last scene through a longish pause during which stage management bridges a three-year gap in the action.
The comedy thriller is a difficult genre in which to succeed. The comedy chiller is even trickier to pull off. This one, unfortunately, doesn’t do it.
Local Secrets
Whether or not you believe in the supernatural, most of us have had a spooky experience at some stage. Whether it be hearing or seeing something odd, or even just sensing that something is near you when you are totally alone. If I were to sum up the feel of Michael Punter’s Stagefright, that would be it. I was constantly on the edge of my seat waiting for that something or someone to appear.
The play centres around two men, Bram Stoker (Barry Ward) the author of Dracula, and Henry Irving (Jonathan Keeble) the greatest actor of the Victorian era. We watch their relationship unfold, seeing them as theatre manager and actor, actor and his personal manager and finally, as two best friends. So this duo, an almost Holmes and Watson as Punter describes them, are faced with being alone in the Lyceum Theatre at the dead of night... and things start to happen. The illusions, created by Ben Hart, made my jaw drop. They ranged from big shocking tricks to small subtle changes, providing a disconcerting atmosphere, but also a thrilling experience. Children and adults alike gasped and squealed as things moved, appeared and disappeared within a blink of an eye. One feels you could watch Stagefright several times over and notice something different each time.
What really makes this play, however, is its blend of tension, comedy and drama. Both Keeble and Ward portray a realistic and believable friendship, full of banter but with some contentions. Maybe Irving and Bram did have such conversations? Or perhaps they didn’t confront their demons at all...
But that is the beauty of the imagination folks. We can watch as if we were right there with them, at the Lyceum in 1894. You certainly won’t leave without taking something you found touching or funny. Its conclusion is particularly thought provoking. We are left with the idea that Art is Art and Life is Life. But is this true, and to what extent? After what happens to our men, surely art and life are inseparable? To what extent are the actor and his character separate entities? Are writers and their written word the same thing? Where do one end and the other begin?
This is not to say that it is vital to explore such issues in order to enjoy Stagefright, far from it. For those who enjoy period pieces but need a change from cinema-going, Stagefright is perfect. Opening night proved the play is greatly appealing to teenagers— with its thrills and surprises, they all left in awe. As for their elders, you can really appreciate the small theatrical touches which create great effects (without the need for 3D glasses) such as music, lighting and clever use of movement.
Ultimately, Stagefright delivers us a gripping thriller, with comedy breaking up the tension and leaving you with an uplifting, touching story.
Stagefright has been extended to run until the 25th of February, at The Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds.
The Henry Irving Society
Thunderclaps, lightning flashes, mysterious voices, headless torsos, ghosts emerging from property baskets...
A wet night in 1894. Winter. HI, having just performed as Mephistopheles, is trapped with Bram Stoker in the manager’s office at the Lyceum. The evening paper runs the story of a suicide, a mother and baby in the river. The speaking-tube whistles; a voice recites speeches from Richard III, Lear, Hamlet, The Corsican Brothers. A practical joke? Then books fly from shelves, papers scatter, lights flicker and ghostly forms are seen through the uncurtained window.
HI’s Mephistopheles has, it seems, conjured up a real spirit, that of an actor, Richard Nightingale, who once trod the boards of the Lyceum himself, and that of his daughter, once a child actress in HI’s company, and drowned this very day in the Thames. Through a long and terrifying night HI and Stoker, haunted and helpless, rant and cower, plead and strike attitudes. Wonderful Gothic stuff, all the more dramatic for being played out in the intimate splendour of the Theatre Royal.
Within all this, much shop talk of the theatre of the day and of HI himself: his background, his marriage, his friendship-or-more with Ellen Terry, his hatred of modernism and realism and Bernard Shaw: his dislike of Stoker’s Dracula, being written at the time. Familiar stuff to the Irvingite, but, as the author points out in his extensive and helpful programme notes, there are so few Irvingites about these days...
There is much to praise in this splendid production, directed by Colin Blumenau and designed by Kerry Bradley. Jonathan Keeble makes an imposing and virile and autocratic Irving, resplendent first in Mephistopheles costume and switching briefly into Gloucetser and even Dracule, more than hinting that HI was a model for the Translyvanian Count. As Stoker, Barry Ward is more than a foil; he is a foil with an agenda of his own, a great man deferring to a greater. The relationship is by turns tender and tense.
Special mention should be made of the wonderful stage illusions of Ben Hart; one is left wondering ‘How on earth...?’, which is as it should be. HI would have been impressed.
Sad to relate, there are, at the time of writing, no plans for Stagefright to be put on elsewhere. It deserves a long run somewhere, though Keeble and Ward are unlikely to find a better setting for this wonderfully spooky piece than the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds.
Reviewsgate
Good ingredients don’t come to the boil.
Plenty of ingredients are here for a fine ghostly chiller. Victorian London – best of all - late Victorian London, land of deerstalkers and peasoupers. A room in a theatre, haunt of many a ghost. And a theatre inhabited by the most famous actor of the age and his equally famous theatre manager.
This is the Lyceum, home to Henry Irving, whose celebrity went beyond theatregoers, and the man who finally made theatre respectable, becoming the first theatrical knight.
The manager is Bram Stoker, who also wrote novels, and Stagefright author Michael Punter has some good fun at the sources he’s using – including a seriously overdue volume from Whitby Library – in researching his novel Dracula.
It isn’t vampires causing concern late this winter’s night in 1894, but a ghost somehow deduced to be that of a minor actor, though the spirit turns out – unsurprisingly in view of its anonymous, cloaked and masked manifestation - not quite who they think. To say more would be unfair to anyone seeing the play. And it needs all the shocks and surprises it has on offer.
One problem is the casting. Jonathan Keeble is a fine actor, as he’s previously demonstrated at the Theatre Royal, and he handles the script well. But his imposing presence is the opposite of Irving’s.
Part of the Victorian star’s power laid in a temperament that stormed stalls and galleries from a comparatively small physique, while the historical Stoker was more robust in stature. Here, Barry Ward is a smaller figure flitting around the great man like an attendant flea, even when asserting himself.
But the main problem lies in a script that, despite some humour and decent plot elements, lacks urgency and conviction. Outside moments of direct attack by the supernatural, the dialogue is desultory and meandering. So both characters become bland, with most of their talk seeming authorial diversions, draining any sense of urgency from the action.
Colin Blumenau’s production rightly gives scope to the ghostly moments on Kerry Bradley’s crowded set, with shocks, surprises and some laughter until the final, fine surprise brings a measure of explanation.
Timothy Ramsden
East Anglian Daily Times
Theatreworld
Public reviews
Whatsonstage.com
Local Secrets
Eastern Daily Press
Henry Irving Society
Reviewsgate
Bury Free Press
The Times ***
Libby Purves
Midnight: a guttering gas-mantle in an old theatre, rain down the skylight. Into a dressing-room of shrouded dummies and faceless wigs strides Satan himself. It is Sir Henry Irving, fresh from Faustus and unable to get his horns off without petulantly calling for help. Gothic creepiness meets knowing comedy.
Irving was a theatre giant of the 1890s, striding the boards of his Lyceum theatre in tragedy and melodrama and despising new social realists such as Ibsen (“Those whining women! Life is life and art is art”). Jonathan Keeble’s Irving bridles like an insulted rhino at the barbs of George Bernard Shaw and critics who would “cut up and butter their own mothers”. His star is fading.
Meanwhile, his theatre manager, hurrying to get the horns off the great man’s head, may seem downtrodden but his name will not fade, even now, because he is Bram Stoker. He is writing Dracula in his spare time. Irving wants him to stick to composing his playbills and speeches, and sneers at the typescript. This draws from contemporary record: Irving, it is said, walked out of a reading of Dracula muttering “Dreadful!”
It was a sharp idea of the playwright Michael Punter to use this relationship not for an angsty reflection on art, but for a ghost story streaked with comedy. Keeble’s Irving is all self-absorbed actorly insecurity, while Barry Ward as the darting little Irishman Stoker conveys both devotion and a clearer vision of what fills seats. When Irving boasts of the Prince of Wales’s repeated visits (“He advised me I might call him Bertie”), Stoker points out that it is the girls in tights HRH comes for.
Irving wants Stoker to manage his American tour and abandon his researches into Transylvanian superstitions (conducted in heavily overdue books from Whitby public library, a nice touch). Gradually both men grow uneasy at an unseen presence, possibly a “low comedian” who aspired to tragic leads but was snubbed. He is dead now. Or is he? The pair are locked in, and creepy shocks occur, gratis of Ben Hart’s illusions and one faceless extra who speaks echoey Shakespearean soliloquies down the speaking tube. Thunderclaps, illusions and shocks are leavened with wonderful moments such as Irving at the skylight crying “I — I saw a horrible, a vile thing” and Stoker’s innocently alarmed “Could it have been a reflection?”
This play could become a favourite. Its debut production is directed by Colin Blumenau, marking his last as artistic director of the Theatre Royal, after 15 years in which this unique Georgian playhouse has been restored to glory. An appropriate curtain-call.
East Anglian Daily Times
Things really do go bump - as well as crackle, clap, creak, shriek and bang - in the night during this delicious slice of gothic horror. The Theatre Royal is the perfect setting for Stagefright: its intimate, historic feel adding to the atmosphere of foreboding. We live in a world of sophisticated audiences, dulled by computer-generated special effects.. So creating real shocks in real time, on stage, using whatever physical means can be devised must be even more of a challenge than it was for the Victorians of the era in which this play is set. It is testament to illusionist Ben Hart, writer Michael Punter and director Colin Blumenau that Stagefright contains moments when, judging from the shockwaves, most of the Pit left its seats by a good six inches.
Added to these are downright creepy happenings - the simplest often being the most eerie - and illusions which impress even a modern audience. To describe any would be to spoil them. Suffice to say that nine out of ten are tremendous and a slightly clunky ghost is still pretty good. What holds the whole together are great performances by Jonathan Keeble, as actor and impresario Henry Irving, and Barry Ward as Bram Stoker.
Keeble was a spellbinding Shylock at the Theatre Royal and here turns in another charismatic performance. He is a big actor and conveys Irving’s big ego and big ambitions, while retaining the feeling that the success, fame and bluster are a veneer across the top of a life not far from its humble roots.
Stoker created one of western culture’s great fictional characters, in Dracula. Such is the centrality of the Count to modern culture - too many films and spin-offs to count, plus more recently the drippy Twilight saga - that it is fun to speculate from where Stoker took his ideas.
Punter enjoys speculating over the source of, for example, the name of Stoker’s heroine Mina Harker and the origins of Renfield’s nasty fly-eating habit. Ward, quick and birdlike, conveys the frustrated energy of a man trying to burst out from under the weight of his more famous companion’s plots.
With more than a week to run, this production is certainly worth catching. Just leave your car parked under a streetlight.
Mark Crossley
Theatreworld
With a superb blend of tension and humour, this new play written by Michael Punter is set in the Manager’s Office of the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1894 will provide you an evening of incredibly scary and also very funny moments. It is now being premiered at this last remaining Regency Theatre where the intimate atmosphere of the building is just ripe for such a production
The two main characters (forget about the ghost for now!) are the arrogant and dominant Victorian actor Henry Irving (Jonathan Keeble) and the modest manager of the theatre Bram Stoker (Barry Ward). The latter is not only a most loyal assistant to Irving but also a writer. The fact he was in the early stages of surreptitiously writing a novel where he creates the character of Count Dracula all helps to provide a thoroughly intimidating scenario.
With Irving and Stoker locked in the theatre overnight after a performance, we see in this invented situation the depth of their relationship. Jonathan Keeble plays Irving as a strong Shakespearian character whose stage presence is commanding. His haughtiness has no bounds and Jonathan portrayed this in a flawless manner. By contrast Barry’s depiction of Stoker was that of a modest and sometimes troubled individual, who on the quiet could and in the end did knock spots of Irving. Yet the chemistry between the actors and the characters they performed was amazing to watch, and you never wanted to miss a moment.
The set is uncanny and full of nooks and crannies from which all sorts of eerie noises and sudden movements emanate. Even when the unexpected occurs and the fright is quite clear in both Irving and Stoker, there is sometimes a ‘one liner’ or a bit of tomfoolery that breaks the tension – well until the next ghostly visitation occurs.
The illusionist Ben Hart is always one step ahead of the audience, and when both actors leave the stage unattended for a few seconds, you kind of wait for something horrible to happen. The fact it does not provides temporary relief, but the truce is short-lived especially when the blower system bursts into action again and the voice of an actor long gone quotes excerpts from a well-known piece of theatre.
The audience will probably be highly amused, slightly scared and maybe even challenged over their beliefs of the supernatural. Most of all they will be thoroughly entertained and engrossed by the brilliant performances of this dynamic duo of Jonathan and Barry.
Public Reviews ****
It is 1894 and something is stirring in London’s Lyceum theatre. Something terrifying, something breathtaking, something . . . supernatural.
Henry Irving, a revolutionary actor of his time, and his theatre manager Bram Stoker – yes, him of Dracula fame are trapped in a dressing room of the Lyceum theatre in the dead of night. It would appear that they are not alone – or are they?
The story starts as Irving arrives back in the dressing room following the end of his evenings performance. Bram Stoker has sent all the staff home and rather thoughtlessly the porters have locked our characters into the theatre.
The obvious merriment following a successful performance quickly descends into dread and torment. A series of un-explained events leads to a shocking climax for both of our characters.
The play is based on historical fact. Bram Stoker did work for Henry Irving at the Lyceum theatre. He was in fact still in Irving’s employ until Irving’s death in 1905. The rest of the story is from Michael Punter’s exceedingly talented and rather active imagination.
From the title of the play the audience isn’t expected to be having many laughs but there are plenty laughs to be had. There are visual as well as verbal jokes a plenty. The visual play with Irvings Devil’s tail raised a childish titter from around the theatre but it worked on both the innocent level (there were children in the audience) and for the obvious double entendre.
Jonathan Keeble as Henry Irving was totally credible as the over bearing Irving. His presence on the stage is very commanding. As soon as he appeared on the stage you knew who he was and were immediately dragged into believing he was the A-list celebrity he was in 1894. At first you feel that his lumbering is reminiscent of another character popular in the Victorian era – Frankenstein’s monster. Then you realise that this is an actor playing an actor coming out of character after a show.
Bram Stoker, played by Barry Ward, was a surprise. You believed he was the creator of the dark novel Dracula but felt that he was to good to have created such a masterpiece as he was too “nice”. Punter’s creation and writing of this role made a perfect foil for the over the top Henry Irving. Ward played him to perfection.
Ward and Keeble work well as a team. You really do believe that they are friends. Although the balance is slightly in Irving’s favour as he is Stoker’s employer.
In one part of the play Irving is seen pouring himself a drink and drinking it. However he used the glass Stoker had been using. In Victorian society it would have been unthinkable for Irving to even think of drinking out of the same glass as one of his “staff”. The glass was left on the stage and this proved problematical for another character, who was supposed to be other worldly but was pre-occupied with dodging the glass.
Much had been made of the effects and sadly some of them did not come off too well. The first “ghost” looked like a “Scream” mask thrust upwards on a broom handle. However, the first supernatural event really does have you looking around the stage trying to second guess what spooky thing will happen – and there are many.
The lighting and sound effects were perhaps used too much. The crash of thunder and the flash of lightening at the very beginning did much to set the scene. As the play wore on the thunder and lightening became passe.
Stagefright is having it’s world premiere here in Bury St Edmunds. The director, Colin Blumenau, who makes a pivotal vocal appearance in the play, hopes that this will go on to bigger locations. Who knows, perhaps Bury St Edmunds will be able to boast that they were influential in getting Henry Irving back into the West End. Watch this space.
Whatsonstage.com ***
It’s an agreeable enough piece of hokum for most of its two hours, but Michael Punter’s Stagefright has the potential to have been something more.
We are in the manager’s cluttered eyrie in London’s Lyceum Theatre. The year is 1894 and the actor-manager in question is Henry Irving. The glittering audience for a revival of W G Wills’s version of Faust – Irving naturally starring as Mephistopheles – has departed, as have the other actors and the stage crew.
So the theatre is empty – except for the actor and his business manager, the former civil servant and part-time journalist Bram Stoker (not yet famous as the author of Dracula). Or is it? The building was already 60 years old at the time when Stagefright is set, with its tragedies and failures as well as successes. As a storm rages outside, odd things start to happen.
Which is all well and good. Theatre can do mysterious very competently; after all, its main business is the creation of illusion. The trouble with the two main characters is that Punter only skims the surface of what drives them and why; they remain two-dimensional. The set and lighting by Kerry Bradley and Joshua Carr respectively are excellent and both Barry Ward as Stoker and Jonathan Keeble as Irving give committed performances, Ward especially.
Director Colin Blumenau has used illusionist Ben Hart to create the special effects which multiply as the evening progresses. They don’t really work. Imagination, even the collective one of a theatre audience, conjures far more frightening images than any amount of palpable stage trickery. What tension has been built up then dissipates just before the last scene through a longish pause during which stage management bridges a three-year gap in the action.
The comedy thriller is a difficult genre in which to succeed. The comedy chiller is even trickier to pull off. This one, unfortunately, doesn’t do it.
Local Secrets
Whether or not you believe in the supernatural, most of us have had a spooky experience at some stage. Whether it be hearing or seeing something odd, or even just sensing that something is near you when you are totally alone. If I were to sum up the feel of Michael Punter’s Stagefright, that would be it. I was constantly on the edge of my seat waiting for that something or someone to appear.
The play centres around two men, Bram Stoker (Barry Ward) the author of Dracula, and Henry Irving (Jonathan Keeble) the greatest actor of the Victorian era. We watch their relationship unfold, seeing them as theatre manager and actor, actor and his personal manager and finally, as two best friends. So this duo, an almost Holmes and Watson as Punter describes them, are faced with being alone in the Lyceum Theatre at the dead of night... and things start to happen. The illusions, created by Ben Hart, made my jaw drop. They ranged from big shocking tricks to small subtle changes, providing a disconcerting atmosphere, but also a thrilling experience. Children and adults alike gasped and squealed as things moved, appeared and disappeared within a blink of an eye. One feels you could watch Stagefright several times over and notice something different each time.
What really makes this play, however, is its blend of tension, comedy and drama. Both Keeble and Ward portray a realistic and believable friendship, full of banter but with some contentions. Maybe Irving and Bram did have such conversations? Or perhaps they didn’t confront their demons at all...
But that is the beauty of the imagination folks. We can watch as if we were right there with them, at the Lyceum in 1894. You certainly won’t leave without taking something you found touching or funny. Its conclusion is particularly thought provoking. We are left with the idea that Art is Art and Life is Life. But is this true, and to what extent? After what happens to our men, surely art and life are inseparable? To what extent are the actor and his character separate entities? Are writers and their written word the same thing? Where do one end and the other begin?
This is not to say that it is vital to explore such issues in order to enjoy Stagefright, far from it. For those who enjoy period pieces but need a change from cinema-going, Stagefright is perfect. Opening night proved the play is greatly appealing to teenagers— with its thrills and surprises, they all left in awe. As for their elders, you can really appreciate the small theatrical touches which create great effects (without the need for 3D glasses) such as music, lighting and clever use of movement.
Ultimately, Stagefright delivers us a gripping thriller, with comedy breaking up the tension and leaving you with an uplifting, touching story.
Stagefright has been extended to run until the 25th of February, at The Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds.
The Henry Irving Society
Thunderclaps, lightning flashes, mysterious voices, headless torsos, ghosts emerging from property baskets...
A wet night in 1894. Winter. HI, having just performed as Mephistopheles, is trapped with Bram Stoker in the manager’s office at the Lyceum. The evening paper runs the story of a suicide, a mother and baby in the river. The speaking-tube whistles; a voice recites speeches from Richard III, Lear, Hamlet, The Corsican Brothers. A practical joke? Then books fly from shelves, papers scatter, lights flicker and ghostly forms are seen through the uncurtained window.
HI’s Mephistopheles has, it seems, conjured up a real spirit, that of an actor, Richard Nightingale, who once trod the boards of the Lyceum himself, and that of his daughter, once a child actress in HI’s company, and drowned this very day in the Thames. Through a long and terrifying night HI and Stoker, haunted and helpless, rant and cower, plead and strike attitudes. Wonderful Gothic stuff, all the more dramatic for being played out in the intimate splendour of the Theatre Royal.
Within all this, much shop talk of the theatre of the day and of HI himself: his background, his marriage, his friendship-or-more with Ellen Terry, his hatred of modernism and realism and Bernard Shaw: his dislike of Stoker’s Dracula, being written at the time. Familiar stuff to the Irvingite, but, as the author points out in his extensive and helpful programme notes, there are so few Irvingites about these days...
There is much to praise in this splendid production, directed by Colin Blumenau and designed by Kerry Bradley. Jonathan Keeble makes an imposing and virile and autocratic Irving, resplendent first in Mephistopheles costume and switching briefly into Gloucetser and even Dracule, more than hinting that HI was a model for the Translyvanian Count. As Stoker, Barry Ward is more than a foil; he is a foil with an agenda of his own, a great man deferring to a greater. The relationship is by turns tender and tense.
Special mention should be made of the wonderful stage illusions of Ben Hart; one is left wondering ‘How on earth...?’, which is as it should be. HI would have been impressed.
Sad to relate, there are, at the time of writing, no plans for Stagefright to be put on elsewhere. It deserves a long run somewhere, though Keeble and Ward are unlikely to find a better setting for this wonderfully spooky piece than the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds.
Reviewsgate
Good ingredients don’t come to the boil.
Plenty of ingredients are here for a fine ghostly chiller. Victorian London – best of all - late Victorian London, land of deerstalkers and peasoupers. A room in a theatre, haunt of many a ghost. And a theatre inhabited by the most famous actor of the age and his equally famous theatre manager.
This is the Lyceum, home to Henry Irving, whose celebrity went beyond theatregoers, and the man who finally made theatre respectable, becoming the first theatrical knight.
The manager is Bram Stoker, who also wrote novels, and Stagefright author Michael Punter has some good fun at the sources he’s using – including a seriously overdue volume from Whitby Library – in researching his novel Dracula.
It isn’t vampires causing concern late this winter’s night in 1894, but a ghost somehow deduced to be that of a minor actor, though the spirit turns out – unsurprisingly in view of its anonymous, cloaked and masked manifestation - not quite who they think. To say more would be unfair to anyone seeing the play. And it needs all the shocks and surprises it has on offer.
One problem is the casting. Jonathan Keeble is a fine actor, as he’s previously demonstrated at the Theatre Royal, and he handles the script well. But his imposing presence is the opposite of Irving’s.
Part of the Victorian star’s power laid in a temperament that stormed stalls and galleries from a comparatively small physique, while the historical Stoker was more robust in stature. Here, Barry Ward is a smaller figure flitting around the great man like an attendant flea, even when asserting himself.
But the main problem lies in a script that, despite some humour and decent plot elements, lacks urgency and conviction. Outside moments of direct attack by the supernatural, the dialogue is desultory and meandering. So both characters become bland, with most of their talk seeming authorial diversions, draining any sense of urgency from the action.
Colin Blumenau’s production rightly gives scope to the ghostly moments on Kerry Bradley’s crowded set, with shocks, surprises and some laughter until the final, fine surprise brings a measure of explanation.
Timothy Ramsden
