News
News from Vanessa Rosenthal
Karen’s Way: A Kindertransport Life
Vanessa has completed a play with music based on the life and works of the poet Karen Gershon, who was sent as a child to this country from Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport. Both Karen's parent perished in the holocaust.
Throughout the writing process Vanessa has been consulting Stella Tripp, Gershon’s third child – a practising artist living in Exeter.
The play opens on Tuesday 17th April 2012 at the York Theatre Royal Studio, with further performances at Seven Arts in Leeds, and on the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe (see Tour Schedule).
“I must atone because I live… I don’t want to be reconciled. What is left to me of my childhood and my parents is precisely thinking about it, the memories of it. To be reconciled is next door to relegating it, to putting it aside, being done with it, and I don’t want to be done with it because then I would lose it. As long as I’m not done with it, I still keep possession of it, I have my parents close, my memories close.”
(Karen Gershon speaking in ‘Strangers in a Strange World’, an TSW television production)
Gershon’s story is a remarkable one that needs bringing to a wider audience. Based on her autobiographies and poems, it has an impact with which few things, outside of Anne Frank, can compare.
After her escape from Germany, Gershon lived in Edinburgh from 1942 to 1947 and was a student at Edinburgh University.
Vanessa’s previous play about the Holocaust, “Exchanges in Bialystok”, was chosen to represent the BBC at the European Script Broadcasting Conference in Helsinki.
The musicians involved are of the highest calibre.
David Riley, formerly of the SCO and the Scottish Baroque Ensemble, plays violin in the orchestra of Opera North.
Marion Raper taught piano at The Leeds College of Music and first worked as accompanist on this kind of show at The Barbican, accompanying Judi Dench and Michael Williams. She is responsible for the annual Lieds Lieder Festival.
From Alan Meadows
Joseph & His Round-the-World Dream-Boat
Alan has written a play to be performed by young people about the 18th Century naturalist Sir Joseph Banks.
Here’s why:
His colleague on the Board of Trustees of the Carers Federation, Dr Cheryle Berry, is also Chair of the Sir Joseph Banks Society. Banks sailed round the world with Captain Cook and was later President of the Royal Society for more than forty years. The Society not only commemorates his many achievements but also develops work opportunities for those who find it difficult to enter the labour market.
Joseph & His Round-the-World Dream-Boat (thanks to Maria Warburg for the title) is a pretty anarchic affair, full of songs, comedy and mime sequences in which you can involve almost as many young performers as you like.
The script is a gift to the Society so it’s entirely up to them how they use it.
It may be performed by school groups as part of a major celebration in 2013, but it seems possible that a young theatre group in Horncastle, Lincolnshire – the home of the Joseph Banks Centre – may claim it first.
Watch this space…
News from Chris Wilkinson
Last year Chris played Sir Cecil in William Douglas Home’s “The Kingfisher” for Rumpus Theatre, opening at the Pomegranate Theatre in Chesterfield, and touring to Chatham.
In November 2010 he directed “Haunted” by Chris Hawes for Cottongrass Theatre; and at the end of the year was filming in “The Laying Up", written and directed by Roger Glossop, for Old Bakery Films in Bowness on Windermere.
At present he is transcribing the letters of the children’s story-writer, Joan Lamburn, to the American writer, Alyse Gregory, one-time Managing Editor of ‘The Dial’ – and the novelist/lecturer Louis Wilkinson (“Louis Marlow”).
In April 2012, Chris will be directing Vanessa’s new play, ‘Karen’s Way’.