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The last time I blogged I was about to set off for the Orient.
Here's someone who never left the Orient:
Long ago in a distant galaxy my friend Townsend and I would spend our Saturday afternoons on a windswept slope called Bunkers Hill, supporting through thick and thin - often VERY thick, often indescribably thin - a wayward and often feckless Hull City Football Club as it roamed the Third Division.
Last week Townsend came to visit Walthamstow Waterside, all the way from Wellington New Zealand. Across the marshes we heard the strangled cries of a failing football club - Leyton Orient! We hailed a cab - ten minutes later we were pushing through real old-fashioned turn-styles, forking out fifteen pounds apiece. We paid threepence to see City, but hey, that was in a different universe where balls were made of leather, super-stars like Stanley Matthews were paid twenty pounds a week, and your half-time cracked mug of Bovril set you back tuppence.
And the O's God bless 'em, need the money. Not only are they now facing major competition in the shape of Premier side West Ham having moved into the Olympic stadium a bare mile from their ground, but they seem to have lost the knack of winning any games. They've sunk to the very bottom rung of what is cruelly called League Two, a misleading modern euphemism for the Fourth Division, and now face relegation clean out of the Football League.
The day we went they lost 4-1 to Doncaster Rovers, whose supporters were in full voice, robust full-throated northern vowels rattling the rafters of the East Stand, bringing echoes of those far-off Humberside days. Sympathetically we chewed on hot meat-pies at half time, and marvelled at the resolute cheeriness of the several thousand locals who turn out in regular support.
There's a crowd-fund been started to raise the quarter of a million reported necessary to save the club from bankruptcy - the link is below. This is grass-roots stuff, it's one of London's oldest football clubs, an oasis of fun and colour it would be so sad to lose, so I'm going to chip in. When I last looked they'd raised £154, so there's a bit of a way to go...
And meanwhile, what of the other Orient, of Far Cathay? Back in November I retreated from the worrying West as Trump triumphed and Brexit began to bite, and went off to work at one of China's most venerable seats of learning, Peking University. This has a beautiful campus in Beijing, in the palatial grounds of a former home of an Imperial minister in pre-revolution days:
It's a university steeped in history, regarded by many as parallel with Oxford or Cambridge, and in the last century was a focus for both Mao's Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests. Nowadays there is much talk of cultural links with other countries - the gent on the plinth is Miguel de Cervantes, no doubt dreaming the impossible dream...
So what was I doing there? Well I thought I was going to teach a course in communication skills, but I found myself knee-deep in preparations for a Festival of Chinese Comedy, due to be presented in London during the Chinese New Year, February 2017. When in the East one has to adopt a somewhat Zen attitude to changes in life's pathways, so I went with the flow. But whatever one does in Beijing, or any major Chinese city these days, there is one big challenge, and that is in simply breathing. In the brightest of sunshine the air has a slightly unreal sparkle, and when the smog comes down it's nothing short of alarming, the air pollution forty or more times the World Health safety level. Storm-trooper masks are what everyone who's anyone is wearing...
Here's the view from my room at dawn...
...here's the same view 3 hours later...
..and here's me on my way to work.
So: it's a long, long story. Suffice to say that the "Happy Chinese Comedy Festival", produced by Peking University's Professor Lin Yi came to London in early 2017, and there were three performances at three separate venues - the RADA Studio Theatre, the Corbett Theatre at E15 Acting School, and the Soho Theatre Downstairs.
There were many twists and turns of fate as the project unfolded in Beijing - including a late disappearance of a large chunk of the expected funding. The idea had been to assemble a mix of Chinese actors with traditional opera skills and Chinese actors with a good command of English, who could perform modern comedy in translation.
But as the end of January approached I found myself back in London with no English-speaking actors at all - and the first performance scheduled for January 29!
The response to a request for help from Leon Rubin, Principal of the E15 Acting School and his team was nothing short of miraculous. Leon swiftly produced a group of talented, lively South-east Asian acting students who immediately got stuck into evening rehearsals, despite being involved in full-time training and college performances during the days.
If anyone's reading this in the Vatican, I fully support any move towards canonising Leon Rubin! Other generous, unstinting help came from my wonderful stage manager Diana Fraser, and much-loved former colleagues at RADA.
There was enough budget to fly out three professionals from the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing, to perform comic scenes from traditional Chinese opera. The modern comedy scenes translated into English were (eventually) delivered by the group from the E15 school, supplemented by an M.A. student from RADA and one remarkable London-based professional actor/director.
Oh, and me. I can now say "Very big, China" in Mandarin. Stop me and ask me to do it if you catch me in the street.
The other performers were all terrific. Somehow the three performances happened, despite one of the three Beijing professionals having his visa refused as he was about to set off! The London-based and the (two) Beijing-based actors met each other for the first time in a conference room in a hotel in Waterloo on the morning of Sunday January 29th - and the first performance took place that evening. The audience (largely invited by the Chinese embassy) seemed to enjoy it.
I have to note that the project survived and came together largely because of another hero - Hao Wu, currently assistant director on "Chinglish" at the Park Theatre: this bi-lingual naturalised Brit, originally from Beijing, contacted me out of the blue in my darkest hour, and with a combination of wizadry and sheer hard graft made it all come to pass, in the space of six days.
East 15 images: Hao and the students warm up for rehearsal.
Stanley Seah (from Singapore) and Hsin-Hue Huang (from Taiwan) run a scene in the garden.
Chinese Opera scenes in performance:
Hanchi Hu in "The Miser" with Peizhi Zen (RADA M.A. student)
Linghui Tu, Yuyang Liu (E15 student) & Hanchi Hu in "Love in a Box"
So that is why, dear readers, this blog has been off-line since before Christmas. I have to say the whole caper left me knackered....I ended up as director, co-producer, dramaturg, script-writer and adapter, production manager, PR/venue co-ordinator and performer.
However, as Mrs May and her raffish team of negotiators start to slice our ties to Europe I guess cultural links with the world's second-biggest economy may stand us in good stead, so I await thanks from Downing St. God knows, now our cousins across the Atlantic are led by a seriously scary simpleton, maybe better deals await in the inscrutable Orient....
Next time, I will return to reports from the UK theatre scene, including cheering news for ageing actors in London, and observations from the front line at the European City of Culture. In the meantime, if like me you feel an indispensable part of British culture is the survival of the cheerful underdog, please support our own, local Orient! I've just checked, and alas the crowd-funding site seems to have shut down - but according to the local news website there is a glimmer of hope in the shape of an "unknown American investor", which you can read about on the link below. Hang on a minute...."unknown American investor"...surely it couldn't be..could it? But then a quiet, dusty corner of east London would make a restful change from dealing with pesky liberals in Washington....
Watch this space - back soon!
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..and here's me on my way to work.
