Back at Northern Stage last night – yes, I live there now – to see their production of A Thousand Splendid Suns. A powerful adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s book (which I hadn’t read), it certainly packed an emotional punch – the women sat next to me were openly weeping by the end – and as ever I enjoy seeing a story built around the lives of women. (Link to review here).
However, the real treat for me was after the show, when Production Manager Chris Durant kindly gave me a tour of the set. I met Chris when I did the fantastic workshop tour a few weeks back, where I saw the set of Suns being constructed. Impressed by his knowledge and passion, I interviewed him for a feature – I’ll post the link when it’s live – which gave me a fascinating insight into all the work that goes into what we see on stage.
Seeing the completed set in situ – first as an audience member then from backstage – was an education. Having seen it in scattered pieces of plywood, the transformation into fully blown set was impressive. It also really brought home how important lighting is creating a mood. Lit by Lighting Director Simon Bond, the set had a warmth and vitality that made it look alive – without it, Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s epic construction is almost eerie, pale as a moonscape. (It also made me, a Lifelong Clumsy Person, admire the actors even more, as they had to negotiate getting on and off and moving around such a bulky set, sometimes in burkas. I’d have fallen off a ladder or down a trapdoor or something before I even made it onto stage. That said, given my acting abilities, any audience would be grateful for such a mishap.)
As a lifelong theatre lover, I’ve always appreciated the nebulous magic of the stage – to get a peak behind the curtain at all the nuts and bolts that make that magic possible was really enlightening.
On the ground floor was Jason & Victoria: Disability and Partnership, an observation by Josefin Bengtsson which featured pictures of the titular couple, highlighting their experiences in a world where disabled people are still marginalised, and relationships between them are often erased, ignored or sneered at.
Upstairs there was Forest by Yan Wang Preston, which was a fascinating though quite depressing look at ‘new build’ forests in urban China, and how trees are being transported and transplanted into new cities, with varying success (the story of Frank, a 300 year old tree that was uprooted only to die after being transplanted somewhere else, properly upset me, because apparently I am a person who cries over trees now.) Preston, a British Chinese photographer, spent eight years on the project, and it won first prize in the Syngenta Photography Awards in 2017, so it’s definitely worth your time.
Probably my favourite of the three was Ex-Voto, by Alys Tomlinson (who won the Sony World Photographer of the Year in 2018), a series of landscape and portrait photos taken at religious (Christian) shrines in Ireland, Poland and France. I’d have liked more information about the subjects, but Tomlinson’s style – shot on large format film – made for luminous prints, with the portraits being particularly compelling. Lucky for me, Simon is a photographer (you can see his amazing work 
I have been trying to catch Bonnie and the Bonnettes on stage for a while now. They’ve done many shows at Alphabetti, but they always seem to clash with some major deadline or something else I have booked, so I’m excited to see their show And She, and liked the preview song they did at the performance.
