Picture: Vivienne Vincent
Musical Theatre Review’s Clare Walters spoke to actor MARC ANTOLIN in his home of Port Talbot in Wales where he had been isolating prior to travelling to Bristol to start rehearsing for Wise Children’s broadcast of Kneehigh’s The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk at the Old Vic. The show is being live-streamed until 5 December 2020 but due to incredible demand for tickets the production can also be purchased in advance and watched at any time from 11-18 December.
Antolin has been playing the character of artist Marc Chagall since 2016. He tells me: ‘’It’s such a big deal and a joy to do this show again. The world is in a different position than when we last did it (in 2018).” He is interested in what now ‘pings out’. In previous versions of the show he has always felt the contemporary resonance of the work and is expecting to be surprised by the extent and nature of this once again.
Bella Chagall (Marc’s wife) is played by Audrey Brisson (recently seen in the title role of Amélie) who was the original Bella in the Flying Lovers and is now returning to the role which was also played by Daisy Maywood in 2018. Antolin says that playing Chagall throughout the life of the show has given him a great personal attachment to the material and it’s a gift to get to revisit it for livestream. He has brought his own spirit and character to the show as well as his authentic Welsh voice. After all, Marc Chagall himself would be speaking Russian and he was from Vitebsk in Belarus not Moscow…
Wise Children has already live-streamed another show Antolin stars in, Romantics Anonymous, in September from Bristol Old Vic. Tickets were available via a variety of venues and 12,000 tickets were sold for the five live performances. As well as reaching a huge new audience, “people saw it again and again. In Emma Rice’s [Wise Children founder and artistic director] shows the audience is another character. The actors talk straight to them. It was terrifying in a way not to have them there for Romantics Anonymous, there was no response from the camera.”
We made it through the tech rehearsals (just) and we’re broadcasting LIVE from the Bristol Old Vic. Join us for The Flying Lovers Of Vitebsk at 7.30pm TONIGHT. Tickets at https://t.co/W6gcPSFLbg @BristolOldVic @WeAreKneehigh pic.twitter.com/pTGWhicSZh
— WiseChildren (@Wise_Children) December 3, 2020
The company has been experimenting in rehearsal with just how much and when to acknowledge the camera in the hybrid world they are creating and which of the monologues and other intimate moments in the show to deliver straight down the camera. Having initially been resistant to embracing what livestream can do in theatre, Rice has now “jumped into it” but still wants the experience to be as “live as possible”, says Antolin. Nothing is pre-recorded.
The plan this time is to allow a bit more technical rehearsal time with the cameras than for Romantics Anonymous so they can play even more with this new form. During the previous broadcast the company realised just how much the camera could pick up slight movements made by the actors. Three to four minutes into one performance the team backstage realised that the livestream was out of sync and Rice went on stage and stopped the show. Antolin’s friends watching in the US said it made it even more real and the company rewrote some of the rhyming lyrics in the show that night to acknowledge what had happened.
Marc Antolin and Audrey Brisson in Flying Lovers of Vitebsk. Pictures: Steve Tanner
Rice has been working with material about Marc and Bella Chagall for many years. Flying Lovers writer Daniel Jamieson originally created a show in the early 1990s about them for Rice and himself to perform at Theatre Alibi in Exeter. This was Birthday, named for one of Chagall’s paintings of himself and Bella made in 1915 just before they were married.
At this point Rice and Jamieson themselves were partners and travelled to Poland together in 1990 with director Nikki Sved to work with the physical theatre company Gardzienice. Jamieson described the experience as “Chagallian, [involving] running up the wall and doing somersaults, and a vivid mixture of song, movement and text. It also involved an expedition to tiny villages in the woods in what is now Belarus. It was essentially the world of Chagall paintings, with its wooden buildings – but with the important omission of the Jews, which struck all of us.”
More than 20 years later, the original production of the Flying Lovers of Vitebsk came really easily, Antolin comments. The read-through of the “beautiful” new script by Jamieson took about 30 minutes but then they began filling the production will playfulness and games, images, underscored music, singing and art. The resulting show is a sort of “play with music… physical theatre, dance and a concert. It’s a niche of a show with beautiful images, Chagall’s use of colour and merging genres”.
Ian Ross, the show’s original composer, and fellow musician James Gow are once again on stage with Marc and Bella in Bristol and the show is underscored throughout with Goy and Ross playing multiple instruments and all four performers sing. “Some of the harmonies were tricky to learn,” Antonin says, but “powerful and rich and all worth it… It’s a joy to perform every time as the musicians really read each other and the changing moods. The show feels fresh.”
The show’s musical palate runs from traditional Jewish lullabies and Klezmer tunes to the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio used in a ballet Chagall was designing for in New York when Bella died from a viral infection. It also includes ‘I’m Making Believe’ (by James V Monaco and Mack Gordon) which was No. 1 in the charts when Bella died in September 1944. Marc Chagall lived through two World Wars and died in March 1985 when the ‘Ghostbusters Theme’ was No. 1 – but they have so far decided against incorporating that as a Klezmer tune despite Rice saying that “people can’t leave the show sad”.
I asked Antolin how he imagines he will personally be feeling doing this particular show: “Bristol Old Vic is big and high. The raked set will help, and the circles wrap around the playing space.” He knows there are considerations in how to pitch his acting performance with intimate details to camera and also to take in the audience spread around the theatre.
In Romantics Anonymous he got nervous, terrified even. And there was “the realisation of the enormity of what they were doing. Being global. People were up watching at 4am. In the second show he managed to relax a bit.
Simon Baker, the sound designer of the original production of Flying Lovers, is back on the show this time and he has been also at the Old Vic working on Lungs. He is one of the masterminds of the whole thing, Antolin says, and adds that he is “delighted that the live-stream movement is creating work for freelancers in the arts and the creativity that is coming from it”.
I look forward to experiencing what Antolin, Rice and the rest of this company can make of the new hybrid format with this show in this theatre and welcome the exciting news that Wise Children is now committed to incorporating live broadcasts of their shows in future programming.
Watch this space! (from wherever you are in the world!)
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