BFI Player and funding for the Screen Sector

On 24th March BFI announced a new partnership with The Film and TV Charity to create a new COVID-19 Film and TV Emergency Relief Fund. Established with a £1m donation from Netflix, the new fund will provide emergency short-term relief to active workers and freelancers in the UK who have been directly affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. The Film and TV Charity is currently working on the precise eligibility criteria and level of individual funding, but the fund will be open to those working in production, distribution and exhibition.

The excellent BFI player is currently offering a two-week free trial, and the BFI website provides a number of archive clips and features to watch for free anyway. 

National Theatre YouTube Streaming

Starting on 2nd April with a showing of One Man, Two Guvnors, the National Theatre will be streaming full performances on its YouTube channel every week, with each performance remaining free to watch for 7 days after the first streaming. Following One Man, Two Guvnors will be Jane Eyre on 9th April, Treasure Island on 16th April and Twelfth Night on 23rd April. 

It has also announced: “In light of the Coronavirus pandemic, the National Theatre Collection, including 24 full filmed plays, will now be available to pupils and teachers at state schools and state-funded further education colleges via remote access in partnership with “Bloomsbury Publishing. During this temporary period schools will be able to share log-in details with pupils to access resources at home.

Bloomsbury Publishing has also extended the free trial period for academic institutions including universities, libraries and independent schools until the end of May 2020 to continue to support the educational community across the globe.” 

Get your login details today! 

The blackShed Gallery Announces 

“While the gallery is closed, we want to stay open in other ways for you, our loyal supporters. The blackShed has been a voice for art and artists for over 10 years, which we’re extremely proud of! Over the coming weeks we plan to revisit and share some of our favourite exhibitions with you. Entitled Virtual Spaces we’ll be featuring highlights, videos and interviews from some of the artists who have worked with us during this time.

“On Monday, we will launch our first online exhibition A Return To Order by an artist you all know and love, Robert Sample. Robert has exhibited with us on three different occasions and we look forward to revisiting these events with you all, next week!

“We want to encourage your comments and thoughts along the way, as we work on creative inspiration and new ways of working and connecting with our followers.

“We’ll continue to be in touch with regular updates and developments via email, but as always the content will be featured on our social media channels, so if you’re not following us already, please do!

“We look forward to welcoming you back to the gallery as soon as possible. In the meantime, we hope the blackShed can continue to offer our supporters something different! Please continue to interact, share and support what we do, your support means more now than ever!” 

• Read more here or visit www.theblackshedgallery.org.uk

An Exhibition of Works made by Isolation?

Local artist Ben Fenton writes: 

“This is to any and all artists local to Hastings and St Leonards. I’m imagining that like me, you’re holed up, probably at home, and away from your usual studio or work materials. I also imagine that, like me, that’s not stopping you from creating work in any way that you can. 

“Well, I’ve had a thought. I would dearly love to collect as many as you together, find a venue and then, when this surreal and terrible period of time is over, exhibit all our lockdown work together. 

“It might help some of us recoup a little of our lost earnings, but primarily it will stand as an example of the triumph of imagination and creativity in adversity. 

“This is just an idea right now, so I would love to hear from you if you’d be interested in taking part. When I have an idea of numbers, I can try and make some solid plans. There’s an awful lot of truly fantastic artists round here, and I think it would be wonderful to unite in this way and have something to focus on.” 

• You can find Ben Fenton on Facebook and Instagram, or email us at 
arts@hastingsindependentpress.co.uk and we can pass on the message.

Joking Apart, a classic comedy written by Alan Ayckbourn and first performed in 1978, has many elements ideal for the modest resources of local theatre. There are seven characters, each with scope for dramatic development as the action evolves in four scenes spread over 12 years, with a series of roles for an eighth player as successive extra. There is one set: the leafy garden of a middle-class home featuring a back patio, patches of lawn and the corner of a tennis court.  

Anthea (Tara Buchanan) and Hugh (Mike Bendell) enjoy the garden fireworks”)

PIC: Peter Mould

But there are also a series of set-pieces, staged tantalisingly on the fringe of the action, to give director and stage manager (in this Stables production, Christopher Lacey and Carrie Beeson) logistical challenges: a Guy Fawkes night firework display in the opening scene, and a tennis contest later on, each of which requires sustained precision in timing to counterpoint the on-stage dialogue.  Technical delivery, even on the first night, was superb, with plaudits to be shared around a clearly proficient backstage team.

Home and garden owners, Richard (Gavin Nevett) and Anthea (Tara Buchanan) play host in each of the scenes, set successively four years apart.  Their visitors are on each occasion the same two dysfunctional middle-class couples – next door neighbours, well-meaning vicar Hugh (Mike Bendell) with neurotic wife Louise (Jackie Eichler), and Richard’s OCD Finnish business partner Sven (Michael Wilson, an especially rich portrait of self-defeating envy) with passive-aggressive wife Olive (Fred Lacey) – plus Brian (Neil Mitchell), a charmless employee in the business who arrives at each four-year interval with a different woman in tow (each played, with a disarming range of characterisation, by Aisling Tigwell). 

The twist from normal Ayckbournian comedy is that the host couple themselves are, at least from the point of view of their visitors, unnervingly and implacably charming and successful. Richard’s business flourishes even though, according to Sven, he devotes only a modicum of time and energy to it; his wife Anthea maintains herself slim and gorgeous, attracting (wholly unrequited) romantic devotion from both Hugh and Brian, while playing the perfect meal-producing hostess; as parents they bring up an apparently well-adjusted daughter Debbie, whose eighteenth birthday celebration forms the fourth and final scene, in contrast with their neighbours’  (unseen) socially challenged son.

They seem to have it all, effortlessly.

In conventional drama, we should expect such apparently superior characters to get their come-uppance during the course of the play, to have underlying flaws first exposed and then exploited. Joking Apart turns this standard dramatic trajectory on its head to darker comic effect. The perfect couple stay perfect, while their visitors grow increasingly resentful at the unfairness of their own comparative life misfortunes, ever more demoralised by their inability to compete on equal terms. 

Ayckbourn himself was quoted in the Stables programme as noting that the play remains one of his own favourites (among no less than 70 full-length plays written over a 50-year period). Asked whether it was still “relevant” 40 years on from its premiere, he said: “I suppose it will remain relevant so long as there are people who resent being created unequal and can never find it in their hearts to celebrate the good fortune and accomplishments of other people.” 

Of course everyone in our society, save the insanely sunny-tempered, harbours somewhere in themselves a degree of that resentment.  Thus, as in all good comedy, the Stables audience were laughing at elements of themselves.

• Joking Apart was performed at the Stables Theatre between 15th and 23rd November. Next production is Treasure Island, running between 17th and 23rd December and again 27th -29th. “This is no pantomime”, according to the promotional brochure. “This is the National Theatre’s thrilling new version”.