Worthing's Rainbow Shakespeare review – a high spot of the year

Players: Judey Bignell, Karina Mills, Henny Sonnemann-Petty, Pia Gurner-Levy, Esther Frank; Ross Muir, Simon Pennicott, Jake Snowdon, Alexander HJ Smith, Peter McCrohon, Neil James, David Stephens, Neil James, Luke Hurren, Leo Baker, Leo Jackson, Roman Young, Sebastian Carver. The Tempest’s sprites and spirits – Calibans: Esme Henry, Adam Hogan, Amelia Hogan, Julian Funnell, Issy Tillman. Ariels: Isla Cargill, Keira Morgan, Amelia Vallejo, Rose Sockwell, Phebe Mills.

Nick Young’s Rainbow Theatre summer fortnight at Highdown Gardens can safely stay top of your list if they’re your go-to Shakespeare company. I nearly said ‘outside London’. But if you want your Bard understandable and listenable – especially if you’re trying out what, for you, is a new Shakespeare play – then you may already realise the capital’s not necessarily your best bet.

Worthing and its neighbours have long recognised and cherished Young’ lifetime expertise in sorting out how Shakespeare should be spoken. He has suffered a career of exasperation hearing other company actors, seduced into a fantasy world by the beautiful language, misting over the word sense by misplacing stresses in the sentences, and uttering the performance out of intelligibility. I’d never read nor seen the play but Young’s production of The Comedy of Errors landed on me unhindered or camouflaged by such verbal whim, wonder or pretence.

It’s among the 10 most-performed Shakespeare comedies but to many, the play’s title is known only as an English figure of speech describing comic accidental calamity. Consequently, how many of us knew it’s ‘The’ and not ‘A’ Comedy of errors? If you’d taken me to a production and forewarned me that mayhem tumbles from two pairs of male identical twins, I’d have been terrified of being left to puzzle everything out in the Bardal dialogue from average acting tongues?’

From Rainbow’s opening lines, however, Alexander HJ Smith as the Antipholus of Syracuse – exemplary after only two previous Rainbow seasons under his belt, one as Othello – gave it to me with voice and diction clear as a bell, and meaning and inference straight as a die. No intervening misapprehension on the one hand, no ego-trip clever-dick interpretation on the other. Eyes also speaking volumes, he was superb.

Others followed suit including an endearing, effervescent debutante, Pia Gurner-Levy, already a playwright herself, who in The Comedy of Errors commenced what could be a signature company double act with Rainbow’s current king of favourite character actors, Simon Pennicott.

Pia honed her accent to match Simon’s native northern, and as the twin male livewire lackey Dromios to the dazed and confused Antipholus twins (Jake Snowden and Smith respectively), they put permanent smiles on the audience faces including mine. And that permanence is achieved only through being able to make the listeners understand throughout. That asks thoroughness from the director and stamina from the players. I am guessing that’s produced by their exhilaration at the clarity.

Nick Young’s qualifying pedigree to pull all this off carries formidability from his six decades of Shakespeare. At university, he directed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in their famous Dr Faustus, before he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as trainee, with names including Helen Mirren and Patrick Stewart under his pointing finger. He directed Ludlow Festival, entailing three years of Shakespeare staged in the castle, and then he did literally the lot in mainstream repertory theatre at Worthing’s Connaught, creating one of its 20th Century heydays.

Better communication and no gimmicks is always his dictum. In addressing, entertaining and educating all ages, Rainbow has been his voice-piece for 20 years, with Judi Dench the company’s patron. He starts by taking Shakespeare to schoolchildren. That not only breeds young understanding but also focuses and shapes the actors to make that happen. This carries forward into Rainbow’s public performances. And pays off in box office and feedback. Says Young: “It’s wonderful at Highdown when someone tells us it’s been their first Shakespeare, they’ve understood everything and can’t wait for next year.”

Unlike last year’s heat, Rainbow’s cooler 2023 ran the weather gauntlet, but they lost only one Tempest and one Comedy performance to rain. “Our audience is unbelievably loyal,” remarks Young. “They dine out on having seen us when the weather’s its wettest. But they dress for the conditions and stay to see the whole thing though. Our biggest problem’s drying out our costumes in time. Some write to us, saying our Highdown Fortnight’s the high spot of their year.”

The Worthing audience team-bonds with Rainbow actors who will have served some of them when soaked to the skin. Before curtain up, in character, they circulate among the sitting, sometime picnicking crowd. Then they exit after their final curtain call, again through the audience, thanking them cheerily. Resultantly, the audience will produce their phone cameras and back will come the cast for a public group photo.

Young doesn’t baulk at casting child groups of Shakespeare’s fairies or sprites, and these were a winning feature of Rainbow’s Tempest. That’s his unnamed Rainbow acting nursery, and annually there’s the refreshment of some fresh adult blood. New to audiences was Neil James as king Alonso (Tempest) and then goldsmith Angelo (Comedy), and the company’s Covid Pandemic online play reading in 2020 unearthed some talented, now retained local ‘community’ actors – in action here being Esther Frank, Luke Hurren, the veteran Tom Mitcham, and fresh faced Leos, Jackson and Baker.

In only her second year, Worthing student Henny Sonnemann-Petty (she’s half-German) was Prospero’s innocent, lovestruck daughter in The Tempest, but then the worldly courtesan in The Comedy. This collective potential is starting to flourish alongside long-serving professionals. Judey Bignell and Ross Muir personify the versatility obligatory if heading up tragedy as well as comedy. Bignell is also Young’s assistant director and her added wardrobe curator role is building convincingly on Rainbow’s sometimes fairly sketchily-costumed past.

This time, Bignell played a male role, the lord Adrian in Tempest and then in Comedy added another feisty female lead, Adriana, to her portfolio of Shakespearean heroines or valiant, tormented innocents. Muir jested as The Tempest’s Trinculo, then agonised in The Comedy as Egeon, the Syracusian merchant facing the gallows simply for treading Ephesusian soil, but joyfully discovering long-lost descendants and earning sympathetic pardon.

Karina Mills, a 13-year pro who debuted last year, also one of two comedies, returned as another open-hearted character in the sisterly Luciana, but began this Fortnight weaving ethereal mystery as the Tempest’s Ariel. Peter McCrohon, a recent favourite in romantic, royal, then drunken Rainbow roles, was now the beautifully ugly Caliban, in his fourth career visit to The Tempest’s magically drawn island.

Another first-time returnee was David Stephens, as Prospero himself in Tempest, but then doubling up as two frivolous characters in Comedy, as a chaotically over-ardent kitchen maid and a dubious schoolmaster/conjuror. Yet further ubiquitous examples were Smith and Snowdon. Honest-to-goodness brothers in Comedy, the previous week they’d been Tempest villains Antonio and Sebastian.

All the bonus Rainbow variety of being Worthing’s long-resident fully professional theatre company. This trademark acting duality heightens public interest in both fortnight productions.

So, too, does the prospect of new Youngian instinct, vision or overview. While Shakespearean directors of his vintage may settle on proven interpretations of certain plays, Young’s an ongoing production thinker. This eighth Tempest of his career, he switched his presentation to something taking place entirely in Prospero’s head and imagination. Young told his audience that this time he saw it as a spiritual process rather than an interactive concrete experience that takes Prospero, unlike more famous Shakespearean heroes, from vengeance-seeker to redeemed forgiver.

About The Comedy of Errors, he said, “It’s a glorious comedy,” says Young. “I love farce and directing it, and inviting an audience to join the enjoyment of the silliness and to celebrate the foolishness of humanity.”

This year, Rainbow’s theatre programme came in colour. There, as always, were the comments about the plays, of not only director but – often hilariously – his players. Annually, this magazine, too, is part of the town’s own constant Shakespearean enlightenment and illumination.

Richard Amey