Barbican Guide
November 2021

It’s one of football’s most exciting games. On the final day of the 1988/89 season, the top two teams in the First Division (today’s Premier League) were close enough on points for their match to be the decider. But for Arsenal to win the league, they had to beat Liverpool by a margin of two goals, away at Anfield. With the Scousers unassailable all season, this was a feat most pundits thought impossible.

So it comes as a surprise when long-time Arsenal fan and one of Britain’s best-known living composers, Mark-Anthony Turnage, tells us that when Barbican Head of Music Huw Humphreys asked him to write a new work about the game, he at first refused.

‘I thought the idea of doing 90 minutes was a slog – it would just be like film music. So I kept saying no,’ he recalls. Then Humphreys explained the piece could cover only the highlights, and Turnage agreed. Up For Grabs, which premieres this month, relives the excitement of that match.

Despite his initial reservations, the composer says: ‘I’ve had real fun with this. I’ve enjoyed it probably more than anything else I’ve ever done.’

While Turnage is excited to share his new music – which will also be livestreamed – he says he’s particularly looking forward to a panel discussion after the performance with members of the 89 Arsenal squad. When he was younger, Turnage lived so near to the Arsenal ground he would see some players walking down his road on their way to the match. But he never had the courage to talk to them. ‘I’ve never gone up to famous people, even rock people. I just don’t do that,’ he says. So this will be his chance to finally meet Lee Dixon and others from that legendary team.

Regarded as one of the most relevant and forthright composers of today, Turnage often absorbs jazz elements into a contemporary classical style, making his work appealing to a broad audience. True to form, this latest work is written for jazz trio and orchestra – for this world premiere the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Bancroft is joined by John Parricelli (Loose Tubes), Peter Erskine (Weather Report) and Laurence Cottle (Earthworks).

Up for Grabs is dedicated to the memory of player David ‘Rocky’ Rocastle, who died of cancer aged 33 in 2001, and has long been a fan favourite.

While Turnage is excited to share his new music – which will also be livestreamed – he says he’s particularly looking forward to a panel discussion after the performance with members of the 89 Arsenal squad. When he was younger, Turnage lived so near to the Arsenal ground he would see some players walking down his road on their way to the match. But he never had the courage to talk to them. ‘I’ve never gone up to famous people, even rock people. I just don’t do that,’ he says. So this will be his chance to finally meet Lee Dixon and others from that legendary team.

Up For Grabs takes place on 5 Nov

Members' Event - Up for Grabs Meet and Greet with Lee Dixon takes place on 5 Nov

Florence Price is known as the first Black American woman to gain major success as a composer. But that’s only part of the story, as Dr Samantha Ege will share in a concert preceded by a talk from the University of Oxford’s Aaliyah Booker.

In fact, there was a significant network of Black women in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s who composed classical music, including Margaret Bonds, a friend of Price who was influenced by her work. ‘For them, it’s not a case of music of African descent on one side and music of European descent on the other – these styles and influences work hand in hand,’ says Ege. ‘And they were proud of both, which they saw as part of their musical ancestry.’

Learning music from a young age, Ege says she ‘spent my whole life learning about it from the periphery. Before I knew about Price’s life and music, I had been inculcated to see classical music as the exclusive domain of white men.’

A foreign exchange year at McGill University, Canada, was transformative when a professor taught a class on Price and Bonds.

‘Price’s music opened my eyes to a completely new narrative in classical music. And that was just mind-blowing for me. Being a musicologist, what I wanted to do was figure out ways in which I could tell this history. Because I’m a pianist, too, and so many of these women wrote for piano, I realised that not only do I have the ability to tell this history, but I can bring it to life for audiences by actually playing it too.’

Ege says she’s passionate about demonstrating the diversity of classical music. ‘The truth of classical music is that it is a very diverse field, although it might not necessarily be taught that way.’ And by researching these stories as a musicologist and historian, she hopes to create a resource others can build on. ‘What I’m seeing is that in response to my work, people are not just seeing these women as isolated figures, but they’re now taking this step forward to look at the wider network around them.’

Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price takes place on 24 Nov

Improbable serendipity is central to the plot of The Comedy of Errors. The tale of mistaken identity, confusion and apparent miracles hinges on things that are unlikely to happen. But when you think about it, maybe there are more examples of ‘unlikely’ events in real life than you’d expect.

‘On the day I met my father for the first time in 28 years in a London restaurant, he was sat at the next table to my professional mentor, who didn’t even live in London,’ says Phillip Breen, who’s directing this production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘I had no idea that he would be there. At moments like this it feels like you’re being taught a lesson about the nature of fatherhood by a benevolent deity or something. But when I tell this story to folk, they all have an equivalent.’

Some people dismiss the events in this play as being so implausible that they could only happen in a fantasy or cartoon world. But that’s to lose sight of the richness of this text, says Breen. ‘The action of the play is unlikely – highly unlikely – but I’m constantly focussing on why it’s possible.

‘Anyway, how many good stories do you know that begin with “this very highly predictable thing happened to me the other day”…? This is a wonderful play, precisely because it is strange and uncanny. But as we all know, with our own stories of weird chance meetings involving doubles and people who oughtn’t to be together, it’s quite realistic. It’s how life is.’

The director, who made his RSC debut in 2012 with The Merry Wives of Windsor, says if you want Shakespeare plays to be ‘rational’ in order to understand them, then you’re ‘on a bit of a hiding to nothing’. ‘Shakespeare, like all great artists, is concerned with what something feels like from inside, how life is experienced and felt. If you want concrete solutions, do a crossword or join a cult. If you want to experience some of the mystery of life and how it is experienced in realms just beyond the limit of our understanding, then Shakespeare is a hell of a guide.’

This being a Shakespeare comedy, everything ends happily. The family, for so long apart, is finally reunited. And that feels particularly appropriate for welcoming RSC fans back to the Barbican after theatres have been dark for such a long time.

‘The madness in the play comes from the characters’ isolation,’ reflects Breen. ‘In the final act, peace and sanity are restored because, ultimately, we don’t organically know who we are, and we only know who we are because of other people. It’s a play that posits that you can only know truth collectively; there’s no sense in being convinced of your own truth in isolation while calling the rest of the world mad.

‘It’s a play about the fragility of the self, how quickly and profoundly we can lose ourselves when we lose touch with people. It’s about how close we all are to chaos despite our best efforts at convincing ourselves otherwise. It’s about what happens when the world stops behaving like it used to, and everything feels indefinably strange and out of kilter – it looks like the world you know, but doesn’t feel like the world you know.

‘More generally, this is a play that begins with a man looking at some dark clouds and assuming there’s going to be a massive storm. So he panics. And then his wife panics. And then, because the parents panic, the kids panic and start to cry. And then everyone on the boat panics. And the man lashes himself and his family to the masts, and the sailors jump in the lifeboats and row away. Then the sun comes out. And there is no storm. And the ship serenely sails into a rock in calm seas because, out of panic, no one is driving the bloody thing. This feels to me like the social media age. People responding hysterically to cloud patterns, jumping to extreme conclusions, thereby causing panic and hysteria everywhere, which stops everyone from being able to see where they truly are. As Shakespeare is constantly reminding us in this play, “the storm’s in your head, man…”. Quit wailing and lashing yourselves to the mast when there are a few dark clouds in the sky; put your hands on the wheel and pilot the ship.’

The production is set in the 1980s, and the Ephesus it’s set in takes its influences from a variety of places. ‘We wanted something that was going to liberate the play,’ says Breen.

He says in choosing the setting, the team looked at the basic facts of the play: Shakespeare’s Ephesus is a place where there is an autocratic ruler who has the power of life and death over its citizens, who can introduce laws by diktat. It’s somewhere people can become rich very quickly and poor very quickly. There’s class disparity; reputation matters. It’s a place where money talks. It’s a place of ’east meets west’, a thriving world port, a city of conspicuous consumption.

‘In shaping our Ephesus, we looked at Gulf states such as the UAE and Qatar where there’s a real world melting pot, with a high proportion of migrants,’ says Breen. ‘Spectacular things get built almost overnight, and it’s a place of curious dissociation, which felt important to the play. Snow domes in the desert, air-conditioned malls serving ice cream in 50-degree heat, people appearing and disappearing, indentured slavery, and an undercurrent of autocracy.

‘But Ephesus is also a place with an abbey and an abbess, so we thought about the sounds of Istanbul, cathedral bells, muezzin, the music of the synagogue and so on.’

He explains that choosing the 1980s avoided the problems of mass worldwide communication such as text messages, FaceTime and so on because the plot would unravel with that technology.

‘This setting felt fun, and was the period of many influential comedies of my childhood which have a strongly dissociative element, such as Back To The Future, Trading Places and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. As well as the work of David Lynch.’

Some people say The Comedy of Errors is a purely farcical play, best known for being short and funny. But Breen thinks that’s under-appreciating this work. And that gets him on something of a soapbox.

‘It is short and funny. That’s no bad thing. If you take anything away from what I’m saying here, it should be that The Comedy of Errors is short and funny. But no great play is“purely” anything.

‘The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Comedy of Errors have quite a lot in common, in terms of the way “what they are best known for” clouds our ability to fully understand them.

‘These plays are amazing if you treat them like Hamlet and twice as funny.

‘Shakespeare’s “comic” characters are routinely forbidden complex psychologies. Because so often Shakespeare’s comedies are riven with strange inconsistencies; because they don’t behave as stage comedies should, they are assumed to be either full of mistakes or lesser works. I think they’re like life as it is lived.

‘I suppose that is why tragedies outsell comedies by and large. The tragic view of the universe is more comforting. The world ends in a conflagration. Or in a nuclear war. Because we’re bad. It somehow makes sense of things and puts human beings at the centre of the narrative. It makes our actions somehow more significant. The comic view of the universe where all the molecules unhook from all the other molecules, and we drift off in a post-mordial soup in a billion years’ time, offers little comfort. Our actions are perhaps more absurd within that context, but the vision for the universe is perhaps more true.

‘While there are “farcical” elements in The Comedy of Errors, those are just the things that draw you to the stage. The real business of the play is to remind us of our common humanity by showing how fragile the notion of the self is.’

However you choose to approach this play – as light relief, or an opportunity to contemplate philosophical concepts of self and the individual – what you will have is a cracking night out. Being back in theatres, watching exceptional actors perform work by one of the world’s great playwrights is a joy.

‘We couldn’t imagine this play on our own,’ says Breen. ‘We can’t make it make sense without you, the audience. You can’t do life on your own. It just doesn’t make sense.’ And that makes perfect sense.

The Comedy of Errors takes place from 16 Nov–31 Dec