The Burial at Thebes is Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’s eternal classic of political and moral theatre, Antigone; Oliver Mantell explains its enduring significance…

Mr Sophocles knew a thing or two about politics, human flaws and how badly things go when the two mix. He’s been there, got the toga* and written the first and last word on the subject. And all a couple of thousand years before theatre’s current awkward squad (like David Hare and Harold Pinter) had even thought of pointing the finger at Dubya and Tony for putting their imperialist ambitions before being nice and doing the right thing.

Antigone, which Burial at Thebes is based on, is an absolute classic of political theatre. A young woman’s brothers are killed fighting each other in a civil war. The King (Creon) says that the one fighting on the wrong side (i.e. against him) shouldn’t get buried. If anyone buries the body, they’ll be buried as well. Alive. Well, temporarily, at least.

Problem is, their sister (Antigone) believes that Creon’s order goes against the law of god. And whilst you or I may just hope god’s feeling merciful and keep our heads down, Antigone’s got her priorities straight. Cue defiance, burial of the body, arrest, speeches, burial alive, a couple of suicides and a repentant King C (hey, it’s a Greek tragedy – you weren’t hoping for a happy ending, were you?).

Not only is Burial at Thebes a stonking good play, it’s got a moral: even if you’re Top Dog you’ve got to do what’s right – are you listening at the back there, George? And if even that’s not enough to get you out of your seat, it’s translated by ‘Famous Seamus’ Heaney – who knows more about writing and political conflict (thanks to Northern Ireland) than anybody. Except Sophocles, of course. But then he was a Grecian Heavyweight and among the first to point out (listen carefully now, boys) that ‘shock and awe’ can only ever lead to pity and fear.

Oliver Mantell

* Do you not mean chlamys, Oliver? I believe you do [ed.]

Fairport Convention didn’t just ruffle a few beards with their electrified Folk in the late 60s but reinvigorated a struggling artform that has since flourished in Yorkshire and the rest of the …

You can argue these points endlessly, of course, but if you want to be simplistic about things (and for the purposes of this article we do) then just like the Beatles define pop music and Elvis defines rock ‘n’ roll, it’s Fairport Convention that define folk. 

No-one ‘invented’ folk, obviously, and credit for the revival of the form as a musical force perhaps lies with the generation before and the likes of Ewan MacColl, but it was in Fairport’s hands that folk reached its modern potential. By unleashing folk’s emotional power using the vast musical scope provided by the rock era, they created a sound which was mysterious, enthralling and fresh. The period of their heyday around the turn of the 70s still remains the last time English folk was considered cool.

Progressing rapidly from mid-60s roots as a covers band, each successive album they released was folkier than its predecessor, culminating in 1969’s monumental and Lief. The album featured epic re-workings of traditional songs like Matty Groves and Tam Lin, effectively sealing them as the band’s own, whilst also showcasing the burgeoning and divergent songwriting talents of the band’s principals - Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Ashley Hutchings and Dave Swarbrick. Not for nothing was this voted the most influential folk album of all-time on the BBC.

Throughout the 70s, the Fairport family continued to shape the concept of folk - Thompson and Denny through their solo work, Hutchings via more traditional vehicles Steeleye Span and The Albion Band. The result being there’s very little of the current folk landscape left untouched by Fairport or their offshoots.

Only Simon Nicol of the classic Fairport line-up remains in the current line-up, but his current bandmates are musicians of distinction too, through whom you can trace connections to Jethro Tull, Soft Machine and Pentangle.

So to borrow a phrase from Maddy Prior about Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention ‘is like a bus. It goes along, and people get on and get off it. Sometimes the bus goes along the route you want to go, and sometimes it turns off, so you get off.’ Well, the Fairport bus has been round the block a fair few times, but in doing so has created a legacy not to be sniffed at.

Rob Peacock 

Although it would be false to suggest that folk would not have survived as a regularly played music form in Britain had Fairport Convention not emerged out of the wilds of North London in the late 60s, it is certainly true that the group added new vigour and, controversially, electricity to a music form that badly needed a kick up the proverbial.

Fairport Convention may have made themselves deeply unpopular with the Folk ‘establishment’ by playing historic songs with electric instruments, but they introduced a mesmerised new audience to long-ignored, rarely sentimental, often utterly bleak traditional songs about rape, murder, fairies, desertion, adultery and tragic love. To a blurred history, in a sense.

Not only that, but Fairport Convention grasped the true nature, power and, remarkably, the history of these songs, adapting with the utmost care and then playing these songs, written long ago, with youthful, forceful drive, passion and skill. In so doing, folk was reawakened and ‘funky’ audiences obsessed with the new were reminded that there was something to this traditional English and Scottish music after all, thus resulting in the inception of Folk clubs across the land, nowhere more so than in Yorkshire, where such venues have since remained and flourished.

Rory ffoulkes

Somewhere between Shakespeare and the Victorians, a whole theatrical era has fallen from popular consciousness. Matthew Sanders explains why we’re missing a trick…

Somewhere between Shakespeare and the Victorians, a whole theatrical era has fallen from popular consciousness.  Crowd-pleasers though they were in their day, plays such as A Bold Stroke For A Wife, have fallen off the theatre-goers’ radar. Which is why, just like the theatres in which they were originally performed, efforts are being made to restore them to their former glory.  Over the coming months, the Georgian Theatre Royal, in conjunction with the Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds, is re-introducing some lost Georgian classics in its Restoring the Repertoire series. We asked Matthew Sanders, of the latter theatre, to tell us what makes Georgian theatre different…

The predominant style of theatrical presentation in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries and the theatre buildings which housed this period’s repertoire represent something of a vital ‘missing link’ in the history of English theatre, which starts with the theatre of the Elizabethans and leads to the early examples of Victorian theatres.

By virtue of the fact that Elizabethan theatre was usually open-roofed, virtually outdoor, and that the height of the stage distanced it from the audience, the effect was of having two separate spaces. It was, arguably, not a theatre that encouraged subtlety and it relied on the actors’ ability to demand attention.

In a Victorian theatre the audience can be found in one room in front of the proscenium arch whilst the actors are to be found behind the arch in their own room competing with the spectacular scenery to be found there. In the larger and later Victorian theatres this separation and competition demanded that the actors developed a ‘barnstorming’ style of performance known as ‘Rant, Cant and Claptrap’, the forerunner of melodrama. It was the death of subtlety.

Taking its cue from Sir Christopher Wren’s early Drury Lane Theatre by pushing the scenic stage behind the proscenium arch and placing the actor in the same room as the audience on an extended forestage, Georgian theatre succeeded in creating the conditions where the intimacy of a theatrical experience could be shared by both parties. Indeed some lucky members of the audience could share the same physical space as the actors by having their seats virtually on the stage. It is this sharing of the experience which is so crucial. There was a delicacy and subtlety possible which was unavailable to the Elizabethans and subsequently rejected by the Victorians in favour of the grandiose and the spectacular.

Importantly, due to the disappearance of almost all Georgian theatres in this country and their unique stages, the repertoire for these stages has lain dormant for over a hundred and fifty years. The repertoire depends for its success on the combination of the physical circumstances which only the Georgian stage can offer. There are literally thousands of plays, many of which are fine examples of the literary and theatrical tradition of the period, which offer a real opportunity to add a significant body of knowledge about the early 19th century English drama repertoire which has hitherto been overlooked. With the restoration of such playhouses as the Georgian Theatre in Richmond and the Regency Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds, we now have the chance to rediscover this ‘lost’ repertoire.

Matthew Sanders

Not everybody can be original all the time; for that matter, nobody can, particularly when it comes to writing…

James Joyce, even, despite the seismic effect his unorthodox work had on literature, must have struggled to be original at all times, so too Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Beckett, Ibsen, Euripides, Pope, Dryden and – whisper it quietly – Shakespeare.

In fact, any writer that has picked up a quill, pen, typewriter or laptop must have, at some time, thrown open the doors and windows to let the unusually tardy Muse in, only to find that, on this occasion, she’d missed the bus and wasn’t on her way. ‘Damn!’ they must have each thought, ‘I’m bleedin’ William Shakespeare (Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Aphra Behn, Lewis Carroll, Timmy Mallett… insert name as you will) and yet I can’t think of one single thing to write about; what on earth shall I do? If I don’t write something today, I reckons I’ll go off me rocker!’ So what’s their next course of action? Dip into Reader’s Digest or some other treasure trove and nick a few ideas off Dickens, Sheridan, St Augustine, Proust, Tom Clancy or Jeffrey Archer, that’s what.

Based in Castleford, Yorkshire Art Circus is a community arts organisation that provides support to writers and artists throughout the Yorkshire region, running a range of courses and programmes to help aspiring writers to develop.

This month, Lizzie Linklater is running a half-day course called ‘Becoming a Magpie’. Magpies are often to be seen wearing Mr T necklaces, stolen from the around the neck of the Man himself, and writers themselves can borrow or build up a store of ideas, by stealing from the richness of the literary sources around them. On those days when no ideas seem to be sticking and the page is blank, the things you learn on this course will allow you to draw on sources, techniques and ideas that will help you keep going.

Rory ffoulkes 

Jeff Brown’s 1968 storybook, adapted by the reputed Yorkshire writer Mike Kenny and brought to the stage with the help of famous children’s theatre company Polka Theatre, is ideal for kids from 3-7 years. It’s anything but flat, as Fran Graham explains…

Stanley Lambchop wakes up one average morning to two fairly startling new concepts. The first, that the pin board everyone had assumed was rigidly attached to the wall over his bed, had jumped or fallen on him (this was never confirmed to my satisfaction) during the night. The second revelation, that in doing so, it had rendered him entirely flat. Yes. Flat.

Although unharmed, , until then a standard 3-dimensional model, had been radically down-sized. Compressed – but no harm done! Not a family to waver or wallow, the Lambchops quickly adapt to ’s new shape. Mrs Lambchop sends his clothes to be taken in by the tailor and life goes on, but in Flat Stanley’s world, there are some new, otherwise unimaginable opportunities ahead.

More rounded children are not so easily or economically transported around the world. The Lambchops quickly recognise that ’s body mass index now makes him more suitable for travel by post. So, he goes on holiday – by air-mail.  And the surprising, funny, and weirdly logical discoveries just keep coming!

I can still remember the first time I encountered Flat Stanley, bought on a trip into one school holiday. Read aloud on a bus in rush hour, Stanley Lambchop was my hero in minutes. He survived a potentially fatal crushing and used it to his advantage. could get into situations (and through limited spaces) that other children never could. I tried lying under heavy books, but it never had the same effect. My sister helpfully offered to drop them on me instead, but something didn’t add up…

Of course, any rational mind might well query how the body’s major organs could continue to function in a 1-inch-thick cavity and it’s not clear whether was required to turn to flat foods (quesadillos, Rivita and the like) but all this is mere detail. made the flat-pack lifestyle acceptable long before Ikea got wind of it – and he’s back…

Fran Graham

 As versatile as they are hilarious, and now on their first stage tour, Rob Peacock tells us what he digs about that pair, Mitchell and Webb…

‘Two guys… out… looking for… it’. That’s self-deluded slacker Jez Osborne inelegantly convincing his buttoned-up flatmate Mark Corrigan of the benefits of a night out in Channel 4’s slow-burning hit comedy, Peep Show. 

The same two guys, or at least David Mitchell and Robert Webb, the actors in the show, are indeed now ‘out’ (on tour) and the ‘it’ they are looking for is fulfilment of the creative - rather than the sexual -variety.

For this is potentially their breakthrough moment – the moment they do a Little Britain and turn cult TV status into huge catchphrase-wielding, merchandise-flogging stage success.

They were devastatingly convincing as the aforementioned flatmates in Peep Show, an excruciatingly close-to-the-bone portrayal of life as a frustrated twenty-something male. To its core audience, it has all curl-up-and-die moments of The Office turned up to the nth degree, with much of the same pathos heaped on for good measure. As your heart goes out to Tim in his ultimately successful pursuit of Office receptionist Dawn, so you feel for Mark as he tries and fails with work colleague Sophie.  Only, as in real life, you just get the feeling it’s never going to work out.

Watching Mitchell as Mark leaving a message on Sophie’s voicemail makes the skin crawl. We’ve all done it, been thrown by speaking to an electronic box. But not all of us have started off jibbering about the photocopier being out of paper and ended singing improvised lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s Something Stupid. In time, Mark’s voicemail moment will be as cherished as a Dead Parrot sketch, a Delboy falling through the bar, a David Brent dance.

While Peep Show’s natural constituency is post-pubbers and students, the duo, like other Cambridge types, have the ears of the Radio 4 brigade too, thanks to sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound, the stepping-stone to their recent TV adaptation, That Mitchell and Webb Look. Mitchell, in particular, is a natural when entertaining the broadsheet readers, as he has demonstrated working the panel game circuit with appearances on Have I Got News For You, Mock The Week and QI.

It’s this incarnation of Mitchell & Webb that you’ll find on tour, parodying daytime TV quizzes (anyone for Numberwang?), highbrow panel shows (welcome to Big Talk with Raymond Terrific) and sports commentators (the Smashy and Nicey mannerisms of snooker link men Ted and Peter). It lacks the edge of Peep Show edge, but when they hit the right combination of intellect and playfulness, such as with their pair of anxious Nazis, they are onto something special. Their Pythonesque versatility and prolific work rate suggest Mitchell and Webb are destined for lasting comic careers, long after those catchprase-emblazoned tour t-shirts have faded.

Rob Peacock

As Denys Baptiste, star saxophonist of contemporary British jazz, pays tribute to John Coltrane with a performance of A Love Supreme at York Dune Jazz Festival, Rory ffoulkes illustrates the massive significance of the composition…

The image of jazz is not a friendly one, but an image is just an impression and those, as we all know, can be misleading. One would be lying if they described jazz, particularly that jazz pioneered by the likes of Bird, Mingus, John Coltrane, Bud Powell and Thelonius Monk, as being immediately accessible to new listeners or instantly easy to listen to in the way that melody might be.

Jazz became the means of expression of a musically brilliant, horribly put upon community of artistic Black Americans inarticulate in words. Jazz, that is, be-pop and activist, free-form jazz, presents a struggle to those newly introduced to jazz, whether they be led to meet it by a friend or stumble upon it themselves, but that is exactly the point: no form of true expression can be straightaway easy to comprehend, to grasp, for if it was so, it would not so move us once we had found that connection after necessary struggle. Jack Vettriano’s paintings are easy to comprehend, clear, sentimental and unthreatening; Picasso’s explode familiar shapes and forms, remove us from our areas of comfort, threaten, disturb, accentuate jagged emotion and reveal to us all those things that make us uncomfortable to be human or even to exist. Which of these painters has left the greatest mark?

John Coltrane is synonymous with those forms of jazz most challenging to their listener, yet it was not always so; indeed, the Editor of a rival magazine to our own was once heard to describe Contrane’s 1957 album Blue Train as ‘piano lounge music’, much to the bemusement of at least one hearer in attendance. Blue Train is most certainly not as that said person described it, yet, although probably the best album with which to introduce the timid musical explorer to free-form jazz, nor can it be said to be the album that best represents Coltrane’s almost immeasurable contribution to jazz and 20^th Century culture.

A Love Supreme is as exigent, world shuddering and, for some, emotionally moving a musical composition as any produced during the 20^th Century. Literally a prayer to God, whom Coltrane believed himself to have insulted whilst conducting a turbulent private life fuelled by the scourging heroin addiction from which he felt himself now Delivered, Coltrane had really stuck his head beneath the axe-head of secular jazz criticism with A Love Supreme. God’s not cool, remember.

Having spent weeks alone in a room in the secluded house that he shared with his wife and baby son, Ravi, painstakingly composing in his mind the music that he believed might be worthy to be called a musical prayer in praise of the God that had saved him, Coltrane called, at last, for three of the greatest jazz musicians ever to have thrown back a Bourbon: pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison.

Through the quartet, unofficially Coltrane’s, made complete by Coltrane and his boundless talent on sax, the complex, extreme and triumphant suite A Love Supreme was expressed, improvised upon and finished, incredibly, on one hugely intense, December night in 1964, described by all involved as being the most fulfilling, gratifying and spiritually lifting experiences of their musical lives.

Rory ffoulkes

The tales of love and loss by Sheffield’s tormented troubadour, Richard Hawley, will always find a way into Rob Peacock’s play list…

Humdrum urban life has always made good song writing fodder. You use it one of two ways; detail the squalor and seediness of backwater Britain to paint a gritty portrait of life on the edge (see Arctic Monkeys, Jarvis Cocker), or ludicrously romanticise it, turning every cracked paving stone or box bedroom assignation into a drama of cinematic proportions, erm, Jarvis Cocker again, and Sheffield’s premier balladeer, Richard Hawley.

Formerly a journeyman guitarist (he supplied the guitars on All Saints’ Under The Bridge), he’s now stepped out on three solo albums, slowly gathering plaudits on the way. Now, with the right rain-soaked epic, he could crack the James Blunt blub-into-your-beer market, but put this commercial proposition to Hawley and you’d probably get a barrage of choice Sheffield language.

Despite the lilting country and syrupy strings, he’s a chiselled rock ‘n’ roller at heart. Call him a romantic and you’ll be told, as DJ Steve Lamacq was, to ‘fook off’. Ask him about Sheffield and he’ll admit, ‘it’s a post-industrial shithole, but it’s my favourite post-industrial shithole’. Ask him about the title of his album, Coles Corner, and he’ll tell you it’s the place in Sheffield where his parents met, before adding ‘and then they had a shag and here I am’.

But for all the prosaic put-downs, Hawley does for Sheffield what Springsteen does for rustbelt America – chronicles its lost hopes and faded dreams and mythologises them. And with a voice in the old school tradition of Scott Walker or Roy Orbison or - if you’re Radio 2’s Jimmy Young, ‘a cross between Andy Williams and Percy Sledge’ (is that a good thing?) - he’s got the perfect tool to deliver his message.

This is music for the misty-eyed, the heartbroken and the terminally romantic. When he sings ‘I’m going downtown where there’s music…’ on the aforementioned title track, Coles Corner, you’re wanting the girl of his dreams to be waiting for him, but you know she’ll never turn up. So for goodness sake, if you’re of a sensitive bent, bring a hanky or at least a stiff upper lip; you’ve got Sheffield’s most tortured romantic on your hands. Just don’t say that to his face.

Rob Peacock

Ever heard people talk about Baroque music and wondered what it really meant? Music writer Hazel Davis explains…

I could talk of diatonic tonality and imitative counterpoint ‘til the cows come home, but you’d run off. So, to help you get a Händel on the Baroque period, it’s perhaps easier to think of harpsichords and hairpieces.

We’ve all been in situations where we have to describe the difference between Baroque and Renaissance, surely? You’re right, they both feature polyphony (basically the opposite of hymns where everyone’s line is different) but according to the experts, the polyphony in the Renaissance is used differently and Baroque utlises stricter rules when it comes to the tonal progression. Oh, and there are more puns to be had with the Baroque (I won’t patronise you by saying ‘Baroque and Roll’ or anything simplistic like that, though).

In short, Baroque music is the musical style from 1600 to 1750. Its original meaning is ‘irregularly shaped pearl’, which applies more to the corresponding architecture. Famous Baroque composers include JS Bach, Vivaldi and Handel and much of it is done on a harpsichord – but not the singing: that would be counter-productive. During the period, ornamentation (or widdly bits) came into their own and the fugue (musical questions and answers) emerged. So now you know.

Hazel Davis

Katherine ffoulkes toasts Bob Fosse, hugely influential choreographer of Cabaret and Sweet Charity…

Bob Fosse was a choreographer like no other; style, interpretation and innovation ensured that everything he created was tailored to the genre and tone of the film or musical that he was working on.

Fosse’s biggest achievement, arguably, was choreography and direction for 1972 film Cabaret, later brought to stage at the Donmar Warehouse by Sam Mendes, to high acclaim, with Fosse’s vision still intact. Fosse’s interpretation of Berlin was crystal clear and utterly convincing, seeming to represent a marionette’s-eye view of a time and a place in our history that was ‘brassy, wanton and doomed to crumble’ (New York Times).

The carefully constructed choreography in Cabaret, in numbers like Cabaret, Money Makes the World Go Around and Wilkommen, weaved clever layers of comedy and tragedy with the characters’ sexual, almost puppet-like movements.

Another huge success for Fosse was Sweet Charity, which he also directed and choreographed, and in which he created a dream-like fantasy, a sexy fairytale where the dancing makes you want to jump out of seat. Like Cabaret, Sweet Charity is witty and packed with enough energy to pop the cork of any champagne bottle.

Bob Fosse is a much celebrated and exciting artist, one that took absolute ownership of a film, leaving you with a fizz in your veins and an irrepressible (perhaps inadvisable - Fosse dance is very, very difficult) urge to start dance lessons.

Katherine ffoulkes