20 YEARS IN 20 WEEKS

 This week’s Throwback Thursday is heading back to 2010 and a season that saw some of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays programmed alongside some rarely-seen gems.

The season opened with Artistic Director, Gordon Barr, directing Shakespeare’s great tragedy, King Lear, in its full-scale outdoor debut for the company. Led by a powerful, heartbreaking performance from George Docherty as Lear, the acting company featured a number of Bard in the Botanics’ stalwarts, including Beth Marshall as Goneril, Nicole Cooper as Regan, Kirk Bage as Edgar, Alan Steele as Gloucester and Stephen Clyde as Kent. Beautiful period costumes from costume designer, Carys Hobbs, helped this formidable group of actors bring some of Shakespeare’s most vivid characters to full-throated life. Utilising the natural scenery of the Botanic Gardens as its backdrop, the production featured only minimal scenery – a throne and a large metal wall that could be pounded to generate the sounds of a storm when Mother Nature didn’t make her entrance on time! With such a thrilling story to tell, such magnificent language to tell it with and such a strong group of actors, the production didn’t need much decoration – it was a testament to the storytelling skill of Shakespeare and a group of talented artists.

 Meanwhile, in the Kibble Palace, our “Lesser-Spotted Shakespeare” series entered its second year – and in typical Bard fashion, our ambitions for what could be achieved in this small space skyrocketed! Director & adapter, Jennifer Dick, took one of Shakespeare’s most amazing female characters – Queen Margaret – and excavated her story from the 4 plays in which she appears (Henry VI Parts 1, 2 & 3 and Richard III) to tell a thrilling story of a powerful, complex woman negotiating the power struggles of a male-dominated world. Love, marriage, motherhood, civil war, grief, loss, political machinations – you name it, Margaret experienced them all in the course of the play – and in Sarah Chalcroft’s breathtaking performance, brilliantly supported by Paul Cunningham & Tom Duncan, audiences lived every moment of her turbulent life along with her. Queen Margaret really set the standard for the ambitious, emotionally bruising, politically charged adaptations that would become the hallmark of our work in the Kibble Palace ever since.

 Our second outdoor production of 2010 was Twelfth Night with Nicole Cooper and Stephen Clyde leading the company as Viola & Malvolio, respectively. Set in the late Victorian period, the production featured another set of gorgeous period costumes from Carys Hobbs and, like King Lear earlier in the season, the production had minimal staging – just a round piece of decking to define the playing area, a small garden table and 2 chairs. But with an ensemble full of brilliant Bard performers, including Kirk Bage as Sir Toby Belch, Paul Cunningham as Feste, Tom Duncan as Orsino, Beth Marshall as Maria and Alan Steele as Antonio, audiences were guaranteed an evening as rich as the most sumptuously staged Shakespeare could ever hope to be!

 Our final production of 2010 saw our Emerging Artists Directors’ Scheme resurrected for the first time since 2006 as we welcomed recent Royal Conservatoire of Scotland graduate, Marc Silberschatz, to direct a production of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, Titus Andronicus. Together with a brilliantly committed company of actors, he created a full-blooded, action-packed, mud-splattered version of this Tarantino-esque revenge thriller and gave audiences a welcome opportunity to enjoy another rarely-seen title.

 Simple staging, vivid characters & exquisite acting combined to create a season of powerful work for audiences.

Looking back on 2010, Associate Artist, Nicole Cooper, had this to say:

“2010 was my first full season with the company. I was thrilled to be back and also really excited to work on King Lear - a play that I had got to know and fell in love with the previous year when I worked with Gordon as his assistant director on a production with RCS students. It's such a perfectly written and I was so excited to be working with some of the core company members, who I had seen performing in 2009. Beth Marshall is still someone I idolise and I was very nervous to work alongside her! As heavy as the material was, I remember the rehearsal period being a lot of fun but also such a huge learning curve.  I spent a lot of time watching my fellow cast members and learning everything I could from them. Alan Steele's Gloucester was heart breaking - I found it really difficult to hate and torture him as Regan!!!!

 I was lucky enough to put everything I'd learned from that experience into the next show - Twelfth Night. Playing Viola was a dream come true. I was very nervous but Gordon and I had already established a symbiotic way of working so I trusted him to steer me correctly.  And yet again - I was surrounded by such accomplished actors that every day was a school day. Even during the show...every night I stayed backstage, as long as I could before running off for a costume change, because I wanted to hear Stevie Clyde's Malvolio. I also loved the setting of that show. It was up in the rose garden and the space was just enchanting. Looking back, Twelfth Night was a great show to cut my teeth on, in terms of playing a lead character. It's a real ensemble piece - so I didn't feel the entire weight and pressure of driving a story so early on in my career with Bard. I was able to just trust the writing, trust the experience of the cast around me and enjoy every minute of it.”

 FUN FACTS:

- 2010 saw more of our current Associate Artists make their Bard in the Botanics’ debuts. Alan Steele played Gloucester in “King Lear” and Antonio in “Twelfth Night”. Since then he has played a number of roles for the company, including another Antonio in “The Merchant of Venice”, Polonius & the Ghost in “Hamlet” and Menenius in “Coriolanus” – a sharp contrast to his other life as our beloved panto dame at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews!

- Robert Elkin, another Associate Artist, also made his Bard debut in 2010. He’s well-known to our audiences now for playing major roles such as Richard III, Richard II, Bertram (Beatrice) in Much Ado and Viola in Twelfth Night – but he first joined the company while still in training to play the relatively small role of Valentine in 2010’s Twelfth Night. Valentine wasn’t in that many scenes and many company members have a vivid first memory of Rob as “that lovely, shy boy who sits in the backstage tent and knits” – he still knits a lot but he’s definitely not as shy anymore!

- 2010 was the first of 2 outdoor productions of Lear’s story that we’ve staged at Bard in the Botanics – the other being 2017’s “Queen Lear”. Both runs featured a performance in which Lear’s exhortation to the heavens to “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” was the cue for a real storm to kick off – one of the coincidences which come with outdoor performance or something more mystical? We prefer to think of it as mystical because, you know, it makes a better story!

- King Lear proved that stage management are always great at multitasking. At one point in the production, hidden behind a small screen, stage manager Sam Ramsay could be seen using both hands to smear make-up over Kirk Bage’s Edgar for his quick-change into the alias of “Poor Tom” while simultaneously blowing a hunting call into a bugle – the strange skills stage managers need to develop!

- Our Emerging Artist Actors in 2010 were Pierce Reid (playing Oswald in King Lear and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night) and Camille Marmie, who was engaged to play the challenging dual role of Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear. Both were brilliant young performers and Camille did such a tremendous job that when another actor was forced to pull out of playing Olivia in Twelfth Night, we were delighted she could extend her contract to appear in that show too!

2009 COMPANY:

Kirk Bage (Actor); Gordon Barr (Artistic Director); Sarah Chalcroft (Actor); Stephen Clyde (Actor); Mark Coleman (Actor); Nicole Cooper (Actor); Wendy Crosby (Actor); Paul Cunningham (Actor); Euan Cuthbertson (Actor); Jennifer Dick (Director – Queen Margaret); George Docherty (Actor); Tom Duncan (Actor); Eve Everette (Actor); Alex Fthenakis (Actor); Lucy Goldie (Actor); Mitchell Grant (Actor); Kay Hesford (Festival Manager); Carys Hobbs (Costume Design – King Lear, Twelfth Night); Camille Marmie (Actor); Beth Marshall (Actor); Steven McMahon (Actor); Gilchrist Muir (Actor); Gavin Purdie (Actor); Steven Rae (Actor); Sam Ramsay (Stage Manager); Pierce Reid (Actor); Eric Robertson (Actor); John Scougall (Actor); Marc Silberschatz (Director – Titus; Fight Director); Sam Spanjian (Actor); Alan Steele (Actor); James Watterson (Actor)