The wonderful story of the Minack Theatre

Down in the far south-west of Cornwall, beyond Penzance which is as far as the Great Western Railway goes, there’s a small coastal village called Porthcurno which can be reached from the A30 via St Buryan (a village named after a sixth-century saint who has a walk-on part in the King Arthur legends). Porthcurno – the name means ‘Port Cornwall’ – is famous for having been the place where underwater telegraph cables used to enter the sea; the first of those was laid in 1870 to provide communication between Britain and India, and Porthcurno’s importance as a major submarine cable station lasted until well into the twentieth century (that, by the way, is just part of a running theme about Cornwall being a centre of global communications, which also takes in the Falmouth Packets of the eighteenth century and the satellite station at Goonhilly).

Today, Porthcurno is a seaside village with a truly stunning beach surrounded by granite cliffs – it’s part of the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (which itself composes of just over a quarter of the county). That alone would make the place worthy of note, but what concerns me today is what’s on top of the cliffs immediately to the west of the beach.

Accessible from Porthcurno via either the winding coastal footpath or a steep, narrow road stands an open-air theatre that is truly unique – for it has been carved into the clifftop, and the stage has as its backdrop the view out to sea. If you were to peruse a list of the world’s most stunning theatres, you would in all probability encounter this one, the Minack Theatre. And the story of how it came to be is as impressive as the place itself.

That it exists at all is due to the determination and vision of one woman – Rowena Cade, who was originally from Derbyshire but who moved down to Cornwall after the First World War. She bought the Minack headland above Porthcurno and there she built herself a home, Minack House. A Shakespeare enthusiast, she got involved with the local amateur dramatics group, and when in 1929 they were looking for a suitable venue to stage an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream she gladly offered them the use of a grassy meadow on her land. This was a great success, and a couple of years later they decided to do The Tempest.

But where could they stage that? Rowena Cade reckoned she had the answer – those cliffs below her house would be ideal, and what better backdrop could there be to a performance of The Tempest than the sea? She needed to make a few changes, though, and over the winter of 1931-32 she and her gardener, Billy Rawlings, worked hard to move granite boulders and carve out a stage and terraces for seating, hauling materials from either the house above or the beach below; that last one was essential as she needed sand to make concrete for the seats (it being more or less impossible to make seats out of the granite that was already there).

The Tempest was duly performed in the summer of 1932. The performers got changed in Miss Cade’s house, while cars parked atop the cliffs provided the lighting. Some of the audience had to take deck-chairs down with them, for there were only a few rows of terracing. It was a resounding success, even getting a positive write-up in the national media (The Times, no less). That spurred Miss Cade on, and over the next few years she and Billy Rawlings worked hard to improve the theatre. More sand was brought up from the beach to provide concrete for the seats, pillars, steps and walkways – which were decorated with Celtic carvings, done by Miss Cade herself with the aid of a broken screwdriver. The stage was gradually built up too – over time there was added a throne for Antony & Cleopatra, and a balcony for Romeo & Juliet.

The Second World War put a stop to theatrical proceedings – Cornwall’s beaches were potential landing-grounds should an invasion have happened, and the telegraph station down at Porthcurno, a major communications centre, was considered to be at risk from attack. Tunnels were dug underneath it, and up at Minack a pill-box was hastily constructed. That, though, did not stop the Minack Theatre from being used as a filming location for the 1944 movie Love Story. The theatre needed a lot of work after the war finished, and it wasn’t until 1951 that it reopened with Tristan of Cornwall (the pill-box had by this point become the box office).

From then, it went from strength to strength. Performances were staged every summer, regardless of the weather, a tradition that continues to this day (weather conditions have to be truly appalling for a show to be cancelled, and anyone planning on taking in a show at Minack should bear in mind that umbrellas are banned, however heavy the rain). Rowena Cade continued to work on the place during the winter, using whatever materials came her way; more seating tiers were added, along with an access road, a car park and some proper steps on the footpath connecting the theatre with the beach. There’s a lovely story about how she even indulged in a spot of wrecking when a Spanish ship carrying timber foundered on the rocks below. She made her way down the cliffs and helped herself, carrying a dozen or so 15-ft beams up to her garden single-handedly, one at a time. When the police came to inspect the wreck, they realised that some of the cargo was missing and started asking around; Miss Cade told them what she’d done, but the cops took one look at this somewhat frail-looking woman and decided that she was obviously having them on. Thus cleared of suspicion, she used the wood to build a dressing-room.

She was still doing heavy lifting and mixing concrete into her eighties – she had the theatre registered as a charitable trust in 1976 and died in 1983, aged 89. Her legacy lives on. Today, plays at the Minack Theatre attract some 80,000 people every year, with a further 150,000 just going to look around the place – which, needless to say, is most definitely worth a visit should you find yourself in the area (and, if you can time it so you can catch a local storyteller retelling the story of how the theatre was built, so much the better). It’s truly unique, and it still very much reflects the vision of its most remarkable founder.

They really got me

Musicals don’t tend to be my cup of tea, although there are exceptions. Sunny Afternoon, featuring the music of The Kinks, is such an exception.

I’m biased of course; I happen to be of the opinion that The Kinks are one of the greatest bands ever to have existed, and that their lead singer-songwriter, Ray Davies, is some sort of genius. I’m pretty sure that there’s more to this than the North London factor.

They were highly innovative, for example – the distinctive intro to ‘You Really Got Me’ was the first use of distortion sound (see below), and when they moved away from  hard-driving rock, Ray Davies developed a flair for social commentary (as seen in ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Dead End Street’ – for which they shot the promotion film, a precursor to the modern-day music video, in Kentish Town), a decrying of increased urbanisation (‘Village Green’ and the subsequent album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation  Society), a sense of British post-imperial malaise (the album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)) and the startlingly modern (‘Lola’). Their influence has resonated down the years; ‘You Really Got Me’ was particularly influential on heavy metal and punk rock, while The Jam (who covered ‘David Watts’), Blur and Oasis all cited them as a major influence. More recently, their music has been used in films like Hot Fuzz and The Darjeeling Limited and, a couple of years ago, Ray Davies released an album called See My Friends in which he had re-recorded a number of old Kinks tracks with various artists.

That said, one does get the distinct impression that they boys from Muswell Hill have been overlooked in favour of the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; no doubt the mid-Sixties ban on playing in the USA at the height of the British Invasion is a factor here, but even the band’s on-stage squabbling – Dave Davies getting knocked out by Mick Avory during a gig, anyone? – seems, when seen through the prism of history, to pale in comparison to the bust-ups of Mick ’n’ Keef, to say nothing of the trail of on-and-off-stage destruction left by the likes of Keith Moon.

Last year, someone (presumably inspired by musicals based on the works of, among others, Queen and Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons) had the idea of putting together band’s songs in a musical; this premiered in Hampstead (not far from where the Davies brothers grew up) before transferring to the West End.

The plot – I believe that in musicals, the technical term for this is ‘book’ – was about the band’s formation and how they – particularly Ray and Dave – dealt with fame and money-grubbing hangers-on. The story of how Dave (who was only 17 when the band made it big) sliced open the speaker-cone of his amplifier and then plugged it into another amp to get the distortion sound for the guitar track of ‘You Really Got Me’ (just one of the band’s many ground-breaking innovations) is retold, as is the band’s hedonistic rock ’n’ roll lifestyle (including the on-stage fights) and their getting banned from playing in America.

As well as the famous songs – ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Lola’ and (or course) ‘Sunny Afternoon’ (accompanied by shameless Union Jack-waving) were all present and correct, as were social commentary tracks like ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’, ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Dead End Street’ – lesser-known tracks like ‘This Strange Effect’ and ‘This Time Tomorrow’ were also woven into the plot. None of them felt like they’d been crow-barred into it, which is the feeling one gets with some musicals. The decision to sing the somewhat fragile ‘Days’ without instrumental accompaniment was a bold one that paid off, while the last twenty or so minutes felt like a particularly raucous gig (as the best ones should be, of course), with the audience singing along and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

During the interval, Dad wondered out loud whether anyone else in the theatre had actually seen The Kinks live, as he did a couple of times at the Wembley Arena back in the day. “Wimbledon Palais,” quipped a man standing near us; this exchange led to a discussion about the relative merits of Something Else and the Kwyet Kinks EP. No-one minded; in fact, several passers-by looked like they wanted to join in.

It was that sort of evening.

Macbeth

When Allison and I decided to take in a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre earlier this year, the one criterion as to which one was that it had to be one we’d both studied at school. That way we’d both be in a position to figure out what was going on should we get lost amid the Shakespearean dialogue.

Thus did we end up watching Macbeth, or ‘The Scottish Play’ as it is apparently referred to by actors who have a superstition about saying the word ‘Macbeth’ out loud (for a particularly good send-up of this, I refer you to the Blackadder the Third episode ‘Sense & Senility’ – and for a good take on what presumably goes on behind the scenes in theatres with explicit reference to Macbeth, please watch the second series of Slings & Arrows; I still cannot understand why no British TV network ever imported that show; it’s not like we haven’t heard of Paul Gross).

It’s hard to believe that I had never actually seen a Shakespeare play performed live before – I guess I just assumed that actually going to see one in London was something only tourists did. Since this was my (and Allison’s) first live Shakespeare experience, we reckoned that we might as well go all the way and see it at the Globe.

Back in Shakespeare’s time, the Globe was one of several theatres on the South Bank, and they were located there because the City of London authorities had a problem with the staging of plays in the City, as crowd control tended to be an issue. The original was built in 1599, burned down in 1613 (when a cannon was fired on-stage) and rebuilt only to be closed down and demolished by the Puritans in 1644. The modern-day reconstruction was built in the 1990s and was the brainchild of the actor San Wanamaker.

The reconstruction aims to be as authentic as possible, and is constructed of English oak; no structural steel was used and so it is as authentically late-16^th century as you can get; the Globe also has the only thatched roof to have been permitted on a new building in London since the Great Fire of 1666.

As for the play, I rather enjoyed myself. Macbeth seen live at the Globe was much better than Macbeth as studied in GCSE English Lit, and it got a lot more laughs than you might expect from a play about a warrior-turned-bloodstained-psychopath.

We went for the seats as we didn’t fancy standing in the pit for several hours. The seats are hard wooden ones, but at least you can hire cushions.

Another London experience completed…

Frankenstein

Here in East Finchley we are lucky enough to live a few minutes walk away from one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas in the country. The Phoenix dates from 1910, and is a local landmark which we love to visit.

Not so long ago they started showing screenings of theatre plays as well – which is great for those of us who couldn’t get tickets for when the plays were on in the West End. Earlier this year, we went to see The Audience (the one about the Queen’s weekly meetings with the Prime Minister, with the incomparable Helen Mirren as the Queen).

This week, as part of the National Theatre’s 50^th anniversary celebrations, the Phoenix showed Frankenstein, Danny Boyle’s 2011 production of Nick Dear’s play (itself based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel).

It starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller, two actors at the top of their game who alternated between playing Victor Frankenstein and the Creature (one presumes they shied away from calling him the Monster as a result of the old A-level English Lit argument that the real monster of the piece is Victor for thinking he can play God). The version we saw had Cumberbatch as Victor and Miller as the Creature.

The production was sensational. I liked how it closely mirrored the novel – albeit without the introductory stuff about Captain Walton and how Victor’s childhood fascination with science led him to make a sentient being; instead, the play starts with the Creature’s ‘birth’. Johnny Lee Miller gave much pathos to a character that I’ve always felt has been short-changed by the popular Boris-Karloff-with-a-bolt-through-his-neck image of Frankenstein’s monster; this version, by contrast, can quote Milton. Cumberbatch was equally good as the medical student who gets carried away with his unorthodox experiment and is subsequently torn apart by guilt, despair and regret for what he has done.

Despite having been written nearly 200 years ago, Frankenstein remains highly relevant today – what with the advances of modern science in recent decades it still serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking things too far. This stage adaptation was an incredibly well-acted play which also serves as a great advert for modern British theatre. If they sold the screenings on DVD, I’d buy it.