A taste of royalty

EMILY Pithon has been getting a taste of what it’s like to be royal playing Queen Anne in a new production at York Theatre Royal.

“We were rehearsing a scene in which the king and queen are in a carriage – we were pulled around the room on a truck by the ensemble cast waving. I thought this is what it’s like for Kate and William all the time,” she says.

Pithon is currently rehearsing Two Planks And A Passion, Anthony Minghella’s play about the citizens of York staging a medieval production of the Mystery Plays when Richard II and Queen Anne make a surprise appearance.

The guilds staging the plays find themselves in competition to impress the royals.

The production comes in the run-up to the York Mystery Plays 2012, which will involve over 2,000 community members in the show in Museum Gardens.

Pithon is currently on stage in York as Margo in My Family And Other Animals as part of the In The Round Ensemble Season at the theatre.

She read Gerard Durrell’s book, on which the play is based, as a child and loved it.

“Margo is utterly bonkers – the whole family are in different ways and completely obsessive about their own little things. With her it’s acne, dieting and falling in love with boys,” she explains. “She’s very funny without realising she’s funny, which is the best kind of funny. It’s really enjoyable.”

In Two Planks, the royals arrive in York from London where things are getting “very politically uncomfortable”, she says. “Richard II was a patron of the arts and keen on theatre, so he might have possibly come to York to see the plays and see his friend, the Earl of Oxford, who’d been banished and was hiding out in York.

“They were happy, which was very unusual in an arranged marriage. They were very much in love, but she couldn’t conceive a child. She died of the plague. She’s quite ill in the play, and gets weaker and weaker.”

She did some research into Queen Anne which is “useful up to a point – at the end of the day we have this play by Anthony Minghella and you find out what information you can to flesh out what’s in the text,” she says.

Once Two Planks is over, she’s off for a short break to see her sister, who’s just had a baby, in France. Then she’s set to appear in Tartuffe in Liverpool.

“I was taken at a young age to the theatre and have always loved it,” Pithon says. “There is something very special about live performance.”

THREE other cast members from My Family And Other Animals – Stephen Billington, Helen Kay and Simeon Truby – are rehearsing the first of the ensemble season’s productions in The Studio theatre.

Katie Posner directs award-winning writer Jez Butterworth’s dark comedy Parlour Song, seen at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2009 but rarely, if ever, in the regions. Since then Butterworth has won a Tony award and Evening Standard Award for his play Jerusalem on Broadway and in London.

Posner – associate director of York Theatre Royal-based Pilot Theatre – says he’s one of her favourite writers. Hopes he’d be attending rehearsals have been dashed, although they’ve been having email conversations about the play.

She hasn’t seen Parlour Song although she has seen much of his other work. “It’s about people who’ve reached a point in their lives and go, ‘oh God, is this it?’,” says Posner. Butterworth himself said in an interview that the play is semi-autobiographical, referring to his childhood home on a cul-de-sac in St Albans, in Hertfordshire, and the “memories of residential oppressiveness”.

What’s been helpful, considering the tight rehearsal schedule, is having a cast who’ve worked together before on two other plays in the ensemble season – The Crucible and My Family And Other Animals. That’s meant they have a shorthand in rehearsals. Two of them, Kay and Truby, are married to each other in real life – and play a dysfunctional married couple in the play.

Posner is directing another Studio production in the season – Black Bird. Both cast members have worked with the York theatre before – George Costigan starred in Death Of A Salesman and Saran Quintrell played Roberta in the production of The Railway Children.

Posner, who has been with Pilot for nearly two years, used to be an actress. Then she taught before deciding on directing.

“I directed at college and university and found I really liked it. I think my time as an actress has made me a better director. For a little while I was directing, acting and teaching.

I think all things made me better at the other things.”

Three years ago she decided to concentrate on directing. She never says never to acting again, but feels directing is the right thing for her. “I always prefer telling the whole story.

Also dealing with actors. I understand where they’re coming from and ways of communicating with them. I know what it’s like to be in that vulnerable position when you’re on stage.

“Directing is what I want to do. I love creating and finding out. You read any play and ask yourself, ‘what is this play about, what does it mean to me’? With Parlour Song there are so many things to explore.”

Parlour Song: York Theatre Royal Studio, June 30-July 23.
Two Planks And A Passion: York Theatre Royal, July 1-16.
Tickets 01904-623586 and online yorktheatreroyal.co.uk