Alice in Wonderland in our own Wonderland - Off the Ground Theatre in Lismore Castle

Alice down the Rabbit Hole

Last month saw the return of the terrific English Touring Theatre Company Off The Ground Theatre to their annual gig in Lismore Castle. This year they put on a terrific, insane, wacky and wonderful Alice in Wonderland for their Irish tour of various castles and big houses. They were here for one night only, in the courtyard of Lismore Castle as they have done for the past decade, and after a few years of Shakespearian comedies they produced a totally different show - Alice in Wonderland and a cast of all the characters in the original Lewis Carroll book. The Mad Hatter, The Cheshire Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, The Queen of Hearts, the Dormouse, The White Rabbit, and Alice shrinking and growing very convincingly by varying the size of the sets - a big door or a small door, a big key or a small key, and a big or small bottle saying Drink Me! I loved Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass as a child, and the magic came right back when I soaked up the atmosphere of the show.





The only downside was the rain - it was a relentless Irish Mist worthy of Hollywood trying to find an Irish stereotype - it didn't pour and if you glanced out the window you might be forgiven for thinking it wasn't raining at all - that the wet ground was the aftermath of a recent shower. However, a few minutes outside would disabuse you fairly fast - it was a fine spray mist that invaded every crevice of clothing and slowly drenched from the outside in - and made for misery in no time. I went down to the castle for the 7:30pm start armed with a large shopping bag equipped with the following -

• a beach towel (optimist!) for the chair; 
• a roll of black bag bin liners as I didn't have a mac and to put under the towel, over my shoulders, on my head, and on my lap; 
• a couple of cotton shawls for extra warmth;
• bottle of water;
• a few packets of Tayto crisps - ubiquitous and indispensible for any outdoor event
• a roll of Rowntree Fruit Pastilles for a sugar rush 



Painting the trees for the Queen of Hearts

• a Twix Bar - for more sugar rushes. 

Song and dance with Alice

The posh people in the audience who came from further afield for the show were much more organised and had brought proper outdoor theatrical fare - cheese and wine in proper glasses, with wicker hampers and Tupperware full of tasty tapas and fancy vittles - but I was far too disorganised to be so pretentiously upmarket. Aspiring to be an Irish Glyndebourne or Tanglewood is great but as this is on such a small scale with an audience of about 100 you get all sorts of people turning up. There are a smattering of locals, a few from the surrounding area, and a number who travel from further afield, and who evidently see this event as a high point on the social calender of the summer.

Things are getting curiouser and curiouser!

Alice in Wonderland

The castle's upper garden is accessible during the interval, and there was an opportunity to meet and greet the cast, all very informally. I managed to scrounge a plastic poncho from either Tweedledum or Tweedledee at the interval - I think he felt sorry for this dripping black-bag lady and when I asked if there were any leftover he went off and got me one. Many of those who'd arrived earlier than me had snagged one and I was quite impressed with its effectiveness in keeping the elements at bay. Umbrellas are a no-no at these gigs as they ruin the view for the punters sitting in the rows behind and also they drip relentlessly down everyone else's neck. I love that the show starts at 7:30 in daylight and goes on through dusk to floodlit darkness in the beautiful courtyard - and as befits every Off the Ground performance they intersperse the play with terrific song and dance routines - and plenty of audience participation for the kids sitting on the grass in the front row!

The well-wrapped audience in the floodlights - not sun!

I took some photos and videoclips so I hope you get a sense of the atmosphere of the misty August night. If you ever get a chance to catch this company's tour you'll be in for a rare treat, as they only do a dozen or so gigs in Ireland every year.

As You Like It: The Musical - Video Clips from Lismore Castle 2010

I thought I'd share some more videoclips from the open-air production of As You Like It in Lismore Castle last Monday night to add to those I posted during the week with the still photos. It was a great night and I am delighted to have got some half-decent videoclips up on YouTube. These are mostly the songs that interspersed the play, with their relevance to the scenes. It's often thought that the songs are randomly thrown in to bring a bit of light relief to the monotony of a play and to keep the multitude of kids sweet but they are all well chosen to have a link with the overall plot of the play. Here's some of those and on my previous post you have the rest.



Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army" is particularly relevant to the woodland scene where the exiled Duke Ferdinand is hanging with his loyal mates, and Orlando flees to join him when he discovers his brother Oliver is plotting to kill him.



Meatloaf's "Dead Ringer for Love" is a good choice for the finale as the disguises of some of the cast - particularly Rosalind in her cross-dressing as Ganymede - fitted these lyrics well: I don't know who you are but you're a real dead ringer for love.



Queen's "Somebody to Love" is perfect for the scene where the confused crew are all looking to find somebody to love - with the convolutions of this lot in their love lives it's a wonder Shakespeare could track them all not to mention a distracted audience who would need to give the play 110% attention to track them all.



The final clip is a piece of dialogue from the final denouement scenes where children are reunited with fathers, brothers with brothers, and the lovers all pair off. Weddings ensue and they all live happily ever after - Shakespeare didn't just do tragedies and his comedies all seem to have real fairytale endings

The quality is not great but the weather was fairly inclement and I wasn't in clear view of the "stage" but given those restrictions and the fact it was dark for most of these clips I don't think they came out too bad. Enjoy them as I did - warts and all - and if you ever get the chance to see this great company then make sure you do and tell them they are a big hit in Lismore Castle with the entire town and especially this blogger!

As You Like It - Shakespeare revisits Lismore Castle

Last Monday night saw the long awaited production of Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It in Lismore Castle Courtyard. It was presented by Off The Ground Theatre who come over from the Wirral in the UK every summer and put on a terrific outdoor show in a number of "Big House" venues around Ireland. I wrote about their last play a year ago in this blogpost (Much Ado About Nothing) and I have been to nearly every show for the past 10 or so years, since A Legend of King Arthur.

This year they didn't disappoint, even thought the weather forecast was for rain on Monday, despite Sunday being the hottest day of summer. We had wonderful hot sunshine ensuring we stayed in the garden all day and had a barbecue to round it off a perfect day. We have been very lucky this summer with a good June and even though July was the wettest on record it didn't feel like that because it was warm and a lot of the rain seemed to fall at night. I can live with that sort of rain allocation, and it keeps the farmers happy too - seems this year we'll have a decent spud (potato) crop unlike last year when the ground was so sodden the harvesters and tractors couldn't avoid sinking to their axles in the mud. We know we'll have a bumper crop of apples as the windfalls are already making their way to Apple Jelly and the first few Apple and Blackberry Tarts have been made - even though the Bramleys are still quite tart they make a perfect tart with a little extra sugar. This is a big change from last year when we had a total of 6 apples from our 3 trees.



How I digress - Shakespeare would be proud of me! I go off on as many tangents as the Bard himself, without the poetry or lyricism. I have learnt so much about Shakespeare from Off The Ground productions as they present the plays in a totally anarchic, quirky and fun manner while staying true to the script and the plot, all the while interjecting song and dance routines from the present or recent past - this year being no exception and I will post some of the video clips here. What I love is the way the songs - usually about unrequited love as so many of these comedies are - are relevant to the play and segue perfectly from the script to the song and back again.




There was a wonderfully moving soliloquy which moved me to tears as it was one of those that my mother recited frequently when I was a child - All the World's a Stage - which I used to know as The Seven Ages of Man. She had a great love of Shakespeare and could recite many of the soliloquies word-perfectly along with lots of other poetry. So as I didn't realise this soliloquy was from this play it came as a bolt from the blue - and I surprised myself by remembering most of the lines as it was being played out. I'm here having a debate with youngest son about the semantics of Monologue vs. Soliloquy and I'm not sure which category this fits, but have decided the melancholy Jaques could have been talking to the other characters or just being reflective.



This year the anachronisms were many and varied - while last year's play was set in the 1930s of tea dances and floral frocks and dandy youths, this year's was a miscellany of ages - from the original Elizabethan doublet and hose and maximum cleavage to - punk rockers in the Forest of Arden! The banished Duke Ferdinand who lives there with his Robin Hood-like band of brothers is festooned in chains and black leather, and there are some wonderful cockscomb hairstyles among his buddies.



The love interests are many and convoluted and you'd need a map to track them all - but as I see the pattern emerging in Shakespeare's comedies there were few surprises - banished brothers, nefarious villains, and cross-dressing youths and comely maidens abound. This play had less cross-dressing than Twelfth Night which was on a few years ago, but as characters go, fair Rosalind made a very convincing Ganymede.

Orlando, the impoverished dispossessed heir to a fortune, loves Rosalind, the soon-to-be-banished daughter of exiled Duke Ferdinand whose evil brother Frederick distrusts her as much as her father; Touchstone the clown loves Audry the goat-herd (should that be goat-herdess?); Silvius the shepherd loves Phoebe the shepherdess - whose accent is pure Chav, and who, to complicate matters, has fallen in love with Ganymede, while Oliver, the evil fortune-hunting brother of Orlando loves Aliena who is actually Frederick's daughter Celia in disguise as she accompanies Rosalind/Ganymede in exile.

Now that was easy to follow, wasn't it? Yes, I felt the very same whirlwind of confusion and thank goodness for the programme notes or I'd be totally lost. As the actors from the company have remained largely unchanged over the years, there's a tendency to typecast them and certainly the lead characters reprise similar characters in the different plays - the buffoon clown and the burly philosopher and the droll wit and the buxom lass and the winsome waif - they're all there and the skill and talent is exceptional.

The key to enjoyment is comfort so it's imperative to come prepared for all weathers - there was an eclectic assortment of fashion and accessories among the audience, with the seasoned veterans bringing sleeping bags to snuggle into as night fell, picnic rugs for the kids sitting on the ground, and lots of scarves, shawls and waterproof ponchos - umbrellas not being very audience-friendly. I had about 4 layers of clothing on under a shawl I got in India 30 years ago, and one of my knitted cotton caps, and as the rain was but a drizzle in the first half, I was quite cosy. I went for a stroll in the upper gardens of the Castle at the interval as it was still quite bright, and I was keen to see the summer gardens as it was April since I'd been there, at the launch of the Castle Arts Summer exhibition.

Here are a few videoclips from the play, and some still shots - you get the idea of the ambience from these - and I will add more when I upload them to YouTube - a tiresomely slow process but worth it to build a nice video library of personal clips over the years - if you like to see them then just check out LismoreLady on YouTube - they're all there!