Duncan Hayler’s witty set keeps transforming itself: the rehearsal mirrors become a train the studio’s upper windows lift
Duncan Hayler’s witty set keeps transforming itself: the rehearsal mirrors become a train, the studio’s upper windows lift to become the arched glass roof of the station. Everybody piles onto the train, which whistles and blows steam, and moves.
Puck is the ballet master. Theseus, the artistic director, wants his ballerina Hippolyta to retire when they get married. The train is splendid. In Northern Ballet Theatre’s bright, slight and cheerful A Midsummer Night’s Dream, David Nixon grafts Shakespeare’s plot on to a new story about a quarrelsome 1940s ballet company
The train is splendid. In rehearsals, we’ve all felt we have a vicarious relationship with James.”‘Coyote on a Fence’, The Studio, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (0161-833 9833) tonight to 10 April; then Duchess Theatre, London WC2 (0870 890 1103) from 22 April.
If this play gets on, can it be done in England?’ That was an extraordinary thing to read, once we knew this production was a done deal. I had all these productions of Coyote coming up and, at the risk of sounding cynical, all the fun of my death-penalty play suddenly went out the window For a while, I felt I was making money from James’s tragedy. Part of me was saying: ‘I hope I made the last year more interesting for James and took his mind off things’, and part of me said: ‘Did I use him? Should I have tried to help his case?’”Esdaile says another of Beathard’s letters to Graham hit her almost as hard “He writes: ‘I’ve got one favour to ask you. The first words were: ‘By the time you read this, I’ll probably be dead.’ I didn’t finish the letter, but ran upstairs, got on the internet and found that he’d been executed two nights before. What shall we have for dinner?’” That explains why she has set up audiovisual presentations in the foyer outside the Royal Exchange Studio, carrying news of the latest US executions – prisoners’ crimes and their last words.
There’s additional background information in the Coyote programme, including a chart topped by Texas, whose staggering total of 316 executions since 1976 (Virginia is in second place, with 89) includes James Beathard, put to death by lethal injection on 9 December 1999, after Governor George W Bush, as he was then, ignored the many pleas on his behalf.Graham recalls learning of Beathard’s demise in unnerving fashion: “My wife and I had been away for a week, and when we got home there was a letter from James. Despite his dark side, Bobby is very funny, and through the relationship with Brennan he develops a kind of sensitivity. But there’s an awful line near the end when you realise that he’s never going to change.”The play’s director, Sarah Esdaile, thinks that Coyote will speak as directly to British audiences as it has done to American ones, “because it deals with human-rights issues that transcend guilt or innocence and the fact that we don’t have the death penalty. It’s not a didactic, ‘issue’ play, but at the same time I don’t want people to come out just thinking: ‘That was nice, dear. “When I read Coyote,” he says, “I was up for a part in some really dodgy American B-grade film, which was going to pay quite good money, but this is such a good play that there wasn’t really a choice to make.
