Fog in the regions. London cut off.
I don't know if you've read that Stephen King story where people get sucked into a cloud of fog and are eaten alive or the James Herbert novel where people are sucked into a cloud of fog and go insane. Anyway, that is exactly what it looks like outside my window right now.
I know there are ships outside, because I can hear them using their foghorns, but I can't see them. This is a direct contrast to every other day, where the ships still blast their horns, but out of 'river rage' rather than necessity. Seriously people, if you're sailing down the Mersey in a ship the size of six double decker buses on a clear day, you do not need the foghorn to alert people to your presence.
Speaking of people desperate to be noticed, I went into Manchester on Friday to attend a talk on whether the London theatre scene was eclipsing theatre in 'the regions'. I hate that term soooooo much. For those of you unfamiliar with it, 'the regions' = 'the entire rest of the country'. Sort of like if the USA were routinely divided into '"the regions" and Washington D.C.' It makes me mental.
The discussion was chaired by a London theatre critic. Between the panel and the audience there was a fair spread of people from across the North West. There were representatives from Liverpool and Manchester theatres, playwrights from Cumbria and I think I spotted one of my old drama lecturers from Chester. (Which meant that I spent the first five minutes doing that awkward neck-craning thing, where you think you know somebody and you'd like to say hello, but you want to make eye-contact first in case it turns out to be a total stranger instead.)
The debate veered in all the expected directions with just as much 'Well yes, there is a London bias, but we're soldiering on and actually producing some very valuable work up here' as you'd expect. But two points that came out of the discussion bear repeating here...
1.) If the train service wasn't so craptastic, reviewing plays in Liverpool wouldn't require an overnight stay and theatre critics would be more likely to come up from London and review stuff.
I can only agree wholeheartedly. What the hell sort of city doesn't have a mainline station open into the night? After a certain point in the evening, Liverpool is about as easy to leave as the Hotel California. It's really annoying trying to accommodate the stupid train schedule when I go away for the weekend, it's annoying that I can't use the station cashpoints at night and I know for a fact that the lack of night trains annoys the people living in other parts of Merseyside who come into Liverpool for nights out. These people have some serious spending power; wouldn't it be nice if their money were going into Liverpool’s economy instead of the pockets of minicab drivers on the Wirral?
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the efforts they’ve made to renovate Lime Street Station, (except for those neon inflating flowers, which were both tasteless and terrifying) but I’d rather they spent the money on keeping the damn place open at night. In fact as cranky, pedestrian-in-residence, I’d probably divert funding from The Big Dig, because that is another thing that makes me mental. (More on that another time.)
2.) Liverpool has no fringe-theatre scene and what's up with that?
I mean, I guess we have the Unity theatre for small-scale stuff, but even that isn't really what I'm talking about. I had a lot of fun in Birmingham following the fortunes of a theatre company called Maverick, who specialised in putting on plays in pubs, thereby automatically solving one of the most annoying things about traditional theatre venues - the crush at the bar during the interval. Liverpool doesn’t have anything like enough theatre going on in small, non-traditional venues and I think that’s a damn shame.
So your homework for this week is to go form a company specialising in pub-theatre. Speaking for myself I'm just going to sit here looking out at the fog over the river and wondering where Birkenhead went.
I know there are ships outside, because I can hear them using their foghorns, but I can't see them. This is a direct contrast to every other day, where the ships still blast their horns, but out of 'river rage' rather than necessity. Seriously people, if you're sailing down the Mersey in a ship the size of six double decker buses on a clear day, you do not need the foghorn to alert people to your presence.
Speaking of people desperate to be noticed, I went into Manchester on Friday to attend a talk on whether the London theatre scene was eclipsing theatre in 'the regions'. I hate that term soooooo much. For those of you unfamiliar with it, 'the regions' = 'the entire rest of the country'. Sort of like if the USA were routinely divided into '"the regions" and Washington D.C.' It makes me mental.
The discussion was chaired by a London theatre critic. Between the panel and the audience there was a fair spread of people from across the North West. There were representatives from Liverpool and Manchester theatres, playwrights from Cumbria and I think I spotted one of my old drama lecturers from Chester. (Which meant that I spent the first five minutes doing that awkward neck-craning thing, where you think you know somebody and you'd like to say hello, but you want to make eye-contact first in case it turns out to be a total stranger instead.)
The debate veered in all the expected directions with just as much 'Well yes, there is a London bias, but we're soldiering on and actually producing some very valuable work up here' as you'd expect. But two points that came out of the discussion bear repeating here...
1.) If the train service wasn't so craptastic, reviewing plays in Liverpool wouldn't require an overnight stay and theatre critics would be more likely to come up from London and review stuff.
I can only agree wholeheartedly. What the hell sort of city doesn't have a mainline station open into the night? After a certain point in the evening, Liverpool is about as easy to leave as the Hotel California. It's really annoying trying to accommodate the stupid train schedule when I go away for the weekend, it's annoying that I can't use the station cashpoints at night and I know for a fact that the lack of night trains annoys the people living in other parts of Merseyside who come into Liverpool for nights out. These people have some serious spending power; wouldn't it be nice if their money were going into Liverpool’s economy instead of the pockets of minicab drivers on the Wirral?
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the efforts they’ve made to renovate Lime Street Station, (except for those neon inflating flowers, which were both tasteless and terrifying) but I’d rather they spent the money on keeping the damn place open at night. In fact as cranky, pedestrian-in-residence, I’d probably divert funding from The Big Dig, because that is another thing that makes me mental. (More on that another time.)
2.) Liverpool has no fringe-theatre scene and what's up with that?
I mean, I guess we have the Unity theatre for small-scale stuff, but even that isn't really what I'm talking about. I had a lot of fun in Birmingham following the fortunes of a theatre company called Maverick, who specialised in putting on plays in pubs, thereby automatically solving one of the most annoying things about traditional theatre venues - the crush at the bar during the interval. Liverpool doesn’t have anything like enough theatre going on in small, non-traditional venues and I think that’s a damn shame.
So your homework for this week is to go form a company specialising in pub-theatre. Speaking for myself I'm just going to sit here looking out at the fog over the river and wondering where Birkenhead went.
posted by Essy at 2:13 pm
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