All the World's a Stage

Producer Notes

The idea of life as performance and theatre as a microcosm of the wider world dates back further than Shakespeare but no one mastered the metaphor quite like he did. We open – as many good plays do - with a prologue. As the war-like clouds gather ahead of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the chorus apologetically beg the audience to excuse the limits of ‘this wooden O’. The linguistic wizardry of this speech lies in its ability to simultaneously highlight the physical limits of the theatre while conjuring up a rich imaginary world peopled with princes, monarchs and proud steeds. William Alwyn’s Elizabethan Dances, with its 1950’s reimagining of the music of the 1600s
acts as a percussive counterpoint to this rousing opener.

The world of theatre and show business is populated with what Irving Berlin called ‘show people’, and the public fascination with stars of stage and screen is as old and enduring as the urge to perform itself. T.S Eliot’s faded feline matinee idol Gus is a perfectly rhymed skit on the soused retired actor, while Dorothy Parker’s Hate Song to Actresses takes an unashamed swipe at simpering starlets. Thomas Hardy’s To An Actress captures in its plaintive melancholy the sadness of an admirer who can get no nearer than to see the name of his love in lights. The power of the seductress on stage is at the heart of Strauss’ Dance of the Seven Veils – his Salome painted musically in vivid syncopated sensuality. Hector Berlioz fell under the spell of the actress Harriet Smithson as she played Ophelia - he later gave musical expression to his adoration in the ground breaking, unwieldy and thrilling Symphonie Fantastique.

The theatrical life, for all the splendour of the bright lights and thundering applause is one underpinned with sadness. The life of a star is a brief one and the road to stardom littered with those who never quite made it, or those whose time at the top has run out. Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Old Stage Queen stares wistfully at the young pretender who has stolen her crown, while Sondheim’s Desiree, formerly a celebrated actress, looks back sadly on a once glittering career with an air of tired melancholy.

Shakespeare has the last word – this time in The Tempest. He once again asks the audience to turn its attention to the artifice in which they have been engaged for the duration of his play. As the old magician Prospero vanishes the world of the theatre, he tells us that the ‘cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces’ are nothing but a vision; we are returned to the world outside the theatre and reminded of the strange magic that descends upon an audience as the curtains draw back and the lights come up.

Producer: Georgia Mann