Northern Broadsides' Othello

On Saturday, February 14th, - Valentine's Day - somewhat ironically in view of the subject-matter of the play - Othello opens at The West Yorkshire Playhouse.

It's been produced in partnership between Northern Broadsides, Barrie Rutter's very highly-regarded Halifax-based company, and The West Yorkshire Playhouse.

The production has already attracted a lot of attention because Othello is played by comedian-turned-actor Lenny Henry, who has played many major roles for television - - but this is his Shakespeare debut.

The month-long run at The West Yorkshire Playhouse is now almost completely sold out and then the production will tour nationally (click here for dates) until the end of May.

Direct Personal Management actor Rachel Jane Allen is playing Bianca in this production.

Rachel's played many roles in Shakespeare. For Northern Broadsides, most recently, she was Ariel in The Tempest in a tour of China, and she was Cordelia in King Lear several years ago. Other roles include Maria in Twelfth Night and Paulina in A Winter's Tale (both Theatre of the Dales) and Ophelia in Hamlet for Creation Theatre.

When tickets for Othello went on sale in Scarborough there was a queue round the block and I think it will sell out just about everywhere. It should be an exciting production and also stars the always-excellent Conrad Nelson as Iago. If you'd like to see it, buy your tickets soon!

Agency!

"The day-to-day life of the agency would make a great soap," said David. "You could call it Agency!"

That was in 1993, soon after I had started working for the actors' agency. It was then known as Direct Line but is now called Direct Personal Management.

In those days, things were different.

Our office was a tiny room in central Leeds with no window and, even more interestingly, no ceiling. This enabled it to be freezing cold in winter and unbearably hot in summer. Most of the actors smoked, so the air was usually two parts smoke to one part oxygen.

We had a telephone, which rang but rarely. We had an electric typewriter. We didn't have a computer of any sort.

We didn't have a fax machine either and we were thrilled when we bought one and could send letters by this miraculous method.

Casting information came to us laboriously, once a week, by post. We would spend the whole of Friday morning typing it onto a newsletter which we would post out to our actors on Friday evening.

The actors didn't have mobiles. Some of them didn't have answerphones. It made it hard to get hold of them on the rare occasions when the phone rang.

But I always found it interesting and gradually, in spite of the problems, actors began to get work.

Things have changed. Now we are in an office with a large window looking out onto the garden. We have two phone lines. We still have a fax machine - - though hardly ever use it. Most casting information comes by email - - dozens of times a day. We have three computers in a network and a couple of laptops that can be pressed into service if we're busy.

And the work's still fascinating. Susie, my colleague, and I are going to tell you about it.

We will follow some rules. Actors are always looking for their next job and we hope that this blog may help some of them to find the next job. We won't tell you anything in this blog that might jeopardise that. But we'll try to make it interesting, I promise.