A big thanks to everyone who came to the public sharing of our new opera Drifting Dragons inspired by local people’s stories in Merton. We were so pleased that so many people were able to make it and gave us such positive and useful feedback via a lively Q&A session, filmed interviews and questionnaire forms. We’ll now be developing the piece further towards full production on the streets of Merton this summer (and perhaps further afield, who knows) so watch this space…!
We’re having a public sharing of the R&D of our new opera Drifting Dragons on Friday 29th January at 4pm at New Wimbledon Studio. We would love to get your feedback on the three scenes we’ve written so far and your ideas for how the piece could develop. We’re aiming to work towards a full production in the summer in various locations on the streets of Merton so all your ideas would be very helpful! All ages welcome. Refreshments will be provided.
Baseless Fabric Theatre is proud to announce the cast for its new Merton Opera Project.
OSKAR MCCARTHY – Jason
AYAKA TANIMOTO – Sadie
ROSEMARY HINTON – Violin
GREG HARRADINE – Guitar / Composer
OSKAR MCCARTHY
Oskar McCarthy
Oskar studied English and Modern Languages at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar. His operatic roles include Uberto (La serva padrona), Guglielmo (Così fan tutte) and Taddeo (L’italiana in Algeri) for Pop-Up Opera, Falke (Die Fledermaus) and Binnacle/Garibdis (Ulla’s Odyssey) for OperaUpClose, Aeneas (Dido and Aeneas) for Barefoot Opera, Dottorre/Marchese (La traviata), Escamillo (CarMen) and Orest (Elektra) for Secret Opera, Angelotti (Tosca) and Bello (La fanciulla del west) for Midsummer Opera, Trinity Moses (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) for King’s Opera, and Arsamenes (Serse) and Edmund Bertram (Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park) for Hampstead Garden Opera. He will perform Leporello for Midsummer Opera in April 2016. Recital work includes the UK premiere of Schoeck’s Lebendig Begraben and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder for the London Month of the Dead and the world premiere of John Whittaker’s Shakespeare Songs for Opera Anywhere. Oskar is a core company member of ERRATICA, an ensemble with whom he trains and devises innovative cross-genre work, and he is actively involved in actor-musician projects, both as a horn player and singer. Oskar’s ongoing interest in broadening his skillset as a performer has led him to taking masterclasses in clowning at The Comedy School, and attending Jonathan Kay’s Nomadic Academy for Fools. www.oskarmccarthy.com
AYAKA TANIMOTO
Ayaka Tanimoto
Ayaka Tanimoto graduated from the Royal College of Music with a Bachelor of Music (BMus Hons) in 2009 and a Masters in Vocal Performance (MPerf) in 2011. Having trained extensively under Margaret Cable and Patricia Rozario OBE, Ayaka’s studies were supported in by the Okada Cultural Foundation Scholarship as well as the Mie International Exchange Foundation Scholarship (Japan). She then continued her training as a Scholar at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Alexander Gibson Opera School where she sang the main role of Sesto in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito.
Ayaka has won numerous awards in Japan and the UK including the 1st prize at the 3rd International Ernest Bloch Competition in London. To date, Ayaka has taken to the opera stage many times, singing 2nd boy and 2nd Lady in Mozart’s Magic Flute (Longborough Festival Opera & LFO Tour), Iolanthe in G&S’s Iolanthe (Brent Opera), covering Darabella in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (Opera de Baugé), Poppet in Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan (British Youth Opera), Flora Bervoix in Verdi’s La Traviata (Opera Lyrica), Suzuki in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Bury Court Opera/Grimeborn Festival), and Chorus for Opera Holland Park.
Ayaka’s future engagements include, singing Suzuki in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Bury Court Opera and Secret Opera) and Chorus for Opera Holland Park. ayakatanimoto.com Read more
Well, we’ve had a pretty fantastic couple of weeks meeting lots of different people, hearing their amazing real life stories and getting their ideas for what our opera about friendship should be about. We’re feeling totally inspired by everyone and feel very lucky to have met both older people who’ve led such fascinating lives and young people who’ve got so many great ideas!
Raynes Park High School Workshop
For our young people’s workshops we had great fun leading workshops for Wimbledon Park Primary School, Raynes Park High School, the Merton Youth Concert Band and the 4th Morden Girls’ Brigade to teach them about the process of creating stories and song writing. Thanks so much everyone who was involved for all your fantastic ideas. I didn’t realise digging to China with spoons was such a common childhood activity!
Greg and I now have a strong idea of what the story of our piece is – the overall idea is inspired by various conversations with everyone, specific storyline ideas that have come up in our workshops with young people or via our online questionnaire, and little bits of personal stories or short lines people have said are making their way into the libretto. Greg is now hard at work writing the music for these first few songs (or arias and duets) and I’m busy casting our singers to help us bring the piece to life in rehearsal. We’ll be holding a sharing to invite everyone to give feedback on what we’ve done so far so stay tuned…!
P.S. If you haven’t yet filled in our online questionnaire and would like to be involved please do so here
Merton & Morden Guild
Exciting news! We’ve been given Arts Council funding to create a new opera in Merton and we need your help! We are talking to people based across the whole borough to gather their stories about friendships throughout their lives and how these friendships change over time. So far we’ve been talking to the wonderful people at Merton & Morden Guild (including at their fantastic Christmas lunch!) and some lovely ladies from the Wimbledon Cancer Friendship Group. Thanks everyone for their time and great stories!
Merton & Morden Guild
We’re talking to lots more people at different groups in the new year so if you have a story about your friends that you’d like to share with us we’d love to hear from you!
Greetings, Team Lilac/Amber/Lucy/David/Ciaran/Seema!
As you may remember, customers of the A First Class Death service were given a little gift from our founder Jennifer at the end of the opening ceremony evening – a personal note of advice from Jen’s list and some sweet peas for you to grow.
So how are the sweet peas doing? The first photo has come in from @RachelTurner284!
Send us your sweet pea photos over Twitter/Facebook! We’d love to see them!
After an amazing sell-out week at the VAULT Festival we’re holding a Death Cafe next week!
At Death Cafes people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. The aim is to increase awareness of death to help people make the most of their (finite) lives. You can find out more information at http://deathcafe.com/
It will take place on Monday 16th February at EV Deli near Waterloo from 7pm. You will be able to purchase your own food & drinks from the Deli Counter. Later on we will move to the EV Bar (2 doors down) and enter the Afterlife part of the evening, celebrating the show and the themes that emerged. There may even be a bit of cake to take home!
Registration is on a first come first served basis. If you do want to attend please click the link below to sign up so we can get an idea of numbers.
The First London Necropolis terminus
The London Necropolis Railway existed from 1854 to 1941 to transport London’s dead and their mourners from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. It opened in response to severe overcrowding in London’s existing cemeteries. The newly built Brookwood Cemetery was intended to home the entirety of London’s dead for at least the next 150 years. Most of the route of the London Necropolis Railway ran on the existing London and South Western Railway (LSWR).
The first station was completed in 1854, at a total construction cost of around £1.9 million today. It was specifically designed for the use of mourners, so had many private waiting rooms, which could be used to hold funeral services, and a hydraulic lift to raise coffins to platform level. Existing railway arches (now the Leake Street Vaults) were used for the storage of bodies.
In 1899, the London Necropolis Railway station was blocking the expansion of Waterloo station so, in return for the existing site, the LSWR supplied them with a new station on Westminster Bridge Road. This new building was designed to contrast with other funeral directors’ premises by being as attractive as possible.
London Necropolis Railway and boundaries
Why did they need a Necropolis Railway?
In 1801, the population of London was a little under a million people, but within fifty years the population quickly expanded to 2.5 million. There was a crisis in London concerning its dead. With limited space for burials in the city’s graveyards, it wasn’t just the old graves that were exhumed to free space for new burials. Grave diggers reported having to cut up recently buried bodies; paupers’ coffins remained unburied in church crypts; and there are records of ‘mingled dirt and human remains’ being thrown into the Thames from Waterloo Bridge. Decaying corpses contaminated the water supply, and the city suffered regular epidemics of cholera, smallpox, measles and typhoid, which resulted in more deaths and more bodies. After a cholera epidemic in 1849 killed near 15,000 people, something had to be done to cope with London’s dead.
London Necropolis Coffin Ticket
What class are you?
The London Necropolis Company offered three classes of funerals. First Class allowed complete choice of gravesite within Brookwood cemetery, and a permanent memorial. Costs began at £2 (about £205 in 2015) for a basic 9-by-4-foot plot with no special coffin specifications.
Second Class cost £1 (about £82 in 2015) and allowed some choice of burial location. A permanent memorial would cost an additional 10 shillings (about £41 today), and if a permanent memorial was not erected the LNC reserved the right to re-use the grave in future.
A First Class Death Rehearsal Wall
Rehearsals for A First Class Death are in full swing! So far, we’ve been discussing our own memories of funerals, researching about the history of the Lower Marsh area, and creating the characters to populate our play.
It’s been a busy couple of days, but we thought we should tell you a bit about our acting company who will be guiding you through your journey with the London Necropolis Railway. By way of introduction, we asked them to share with you the song that they would like played at their funerals.
So what song would you like people to remember you by?
Julian Pindar
Hope There’s Someone
(Antony and the Johnsons) 
Marie Blount
Here, There and Everywhere
(The Beatles)
Siu-See Hung
We’ll Meet Again
(Johnny Cash)
Barry McStay
I’m Going To Go Back There Some Day
(The Muppets)
Chandni Mistry
Out of the Blue
(Electric Light Orchestra)
Rajneet Sidhu
Walking on the Moon
(The Dream)
We’ve set up a crowdfunding campaign to help support our show. We’ve got some fantastic rewards – you could have your photo in our prop ‘Book of Condolences’ used in the show, attend a rehearsal to get a sneak peak before anyone else, have a special pre-performance experience for you and a friend, or even dinner with the director and writer!
You can check out our cool video to give you an idea of the production:
‘A First Class Death’ on IdeasTap
Thanks so much for your support!