Author: catherinedoveyroche

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I spent most of this summer term working as MD/composer on two 2^nd year productions on Italia Conti’s Acting Course.

The shows were Complicité’s The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol and Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, directed by Sue Colgrave and Jack Gogarty respectively. Each show was of an actor-musician nature.

There were some good musicians among the students, though the Course isn’t set up to be especially actor-musician in form. I greatly enjoyed working non-virtually with two excellent director-tutors and with two enthusiastic and focused casts.

I’m playing for another silent film on the Kennington Bioscope website in June. In a programme of films by the French film director who worked primarily in the USA, Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the key women filmmakers of the silent era.

I’m on Cousins of Sherlocko. This is a 10 minute comedy crime caper.

We finish recording the present series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue this Friday in the BBC Radio Theatre, another comedy crime caper. We’re all socially distancing, and the audience is on mics in their own homes. This seems to work well as a medium-term solution, though we all miss being in front of a live audience in a theatre. The series is broadcast from June 14^th.

Italia Conti’s acting course has invited me back this term to oversee the music for two 2^ndyear actor-musician productions. While they don’t run an actor-musician course as such, the students are expected to use whatever musical skills they have – or whatever skills I can discover in the students – to complement their acting. The shows are A Monster Calls and The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol.

Kennington Bioscope has continued its series of accompanied silent films in Lockdown, and on Wednesday 10^thMarch the subject was the English slapstick comedy star Fred Evans, screen name ‘Pimple’. He was an exact contemporary of Chaplin’s. The BFI’s Bryony Dixon curated the many films in the programme. I accompanied ‘Pimple’s Part’, about an aspiring actor rehearsing his lines in public and at home, nearly leading to his arrest; and ‘Pimple Has One’, in which our hero begins drunk and gets drunker, again leading him into clashes with the Law.

I was invited by Niall Weir, Rector of St Paul’s West Hackney and keen jazz fan, to provide a solo piano version of Thad Jones’s ‘A Child Is Born’ to accompany the last couple of minutes of his church’s virtual Candlemas service on Sunday 31^st January – also available on YouTube.

The first of the 2021 Kennington Bioscope online programmes opened with D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Day After’, first released on 30^th December 1909, an appropriate date given the New Year’s Eve/’morning after’ subject matter.

It was written by Hollywood newcomer Mary Pickford, only 17 at the time and not yet established on film herself.

I pre-recorded a piano score, and it was a fun piece to accompany – much to my surprise, as I don’t associate Griffith with comedy.

By the way, all the Kennington Bioscope online programmes are available on YouTube. This is their 14th programme – you can view it here.