Five Gold Rings...

Welcome to the Hoipolloi Advent Blog! It is the final week in the office before we all take a break to enjoy the delights of Christmas and New Year so we thought we should do something special.

Instead of five gold rings, you get five blog posts this week. Lucky you! As it is the end of the year I thought it would be fitting to do a nice little round up of 2009. Of course I only joined the team in August, so I have trawled through all of David’s posts from January to July in order to get the low down on all of the exciting things that happened before I rocked up. So this is in effect, the Hoipolloi blog 2009 ‘digested’; if you didn’t get a chance to follow the whole thing this year, then do not despair, the key events will be reported right here...

JANUARY

Hugh was a busy bee performing The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes at The Junction in Cambridge. We are big fans of The Junction here at Hoipolloi and we can highly recommend Gomito’s Christmas show, A Merry Little Christmas, which is being performed there at the mo.

Hugh also performed sneak previews of his new show Invisible Town at the Barbican in London. As I wasn’t there I’m afraid I can’t fill you in on the intimate details of the performance. Although I will take this opportunity to say how much I enjoy following the yellow line which takes you from the tube station to the Barbican. It always makes me feel a little bit like Dorothy following the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz.

FEBRUARY

February was a month of great adventures with Hugh, Aled and Sioned flying to Singapore, where Hugh and Aled performed Story of a Rabbit at the National Museum. Meanwhile, back in Blighty, Shon starred in a Radio 4 documentary about limericks. The show was put together by the performance poet John Hegley. John introduced Shon with the following lovely lines...

Shon Dale-Jones
Who write and directs and who hones
Works for the stage
Which inform and engage
And his company Hoipolloi have used some of Edward lear's limericks in the creation of a biographical drama.

MARCH

More exciting travels for the gang, with performances across Australia, including Floating at the incredible Sydney Opera House. At the same time, we revived the classic My Uncle Arly in London and Los Angeles and ended up with a time where both shows were on stage at exactly the same time!

When Hugh and the crew zipped over to Melbourne they experienced an earthquake during the tech rehearsal of Floating. Luckily it was only a little one, lasting for about thirty seconds but poor Tom was caught up on a rickety balcony at the time.

To round things off, here's a video of Hugh Hughes' day trip to Anglesea (that's the one near Melbourne, Australia and not Hugh's homeland in Wales!). We'll see you back here tomorrow for the next installment...

Posted by Marieke Audsley (Marketing & Admin Assistant, Hoipolloi). Thanks to Jerry 7171 for the photo

All across the world

In just over 24 hours time, a momentous occasion in the history of Hoipolloi will occur. When I discovered this, just yesterday, I shrieked with excitement at the good fortune that's being delivered to us by time zone variations!

Our first performance of Floating here at the Ten Days on the Island festival in Launceston, Tasmania kicks off at 2pm on Saturday. This also happens to be 8pm on Friday in Los Angeles when My Uncle Arly will be 30mins into its first public performance at UCLA's Freud Playhouse.

And thus, for the very first time, two Hoipolloi shows will be playing at exactly the same time in two differerent corners of the world, neither of which are our home territory!

It's not actually the first time we've had two shows performed on different continents on the same day; if you cast your mind back to about this time last year, Hugh and Aled were over in Bogota, Colombia performing Story of a Rabbit whilst The Doubtful Guest was running at Watford Palace. However, none of these performances occured at exactly the same moment in time.

If you're in the UK and would like to celebrate the moment, I'm afraid you'll have to stay up until 3am on Saturday morning, but if you happen to be in Los Angeles or Launceston, please join us for one of these historic shows!

John Hegley's Hoipolloi Limerick!

Our Artistic Director Shon Dale-Jones just made a small but perfectly formed contribution to John Hegley's Radio 4 documentary There Was a Young Man From Limerick.

It's a lovely little show, featuring a latin limerick allegedly written by Thomas Aquinas, Wendy Cope's limerick version of TS Eliot's The Wastelands, "serious" limericks and lots of discussion of Edward Lear, the much-loved nonsense poet who popularised the limerick and whose work inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly.

You can click here to launch BBC iPlayer and listen to the show anytime for the next seven days.

John Hegley introduced Shon in a typically quirky fashion, with this "limerick":

....Shon Dale-Jones
Who write and directs and who hones
Works for the stage
Which inform and engage
And his company Hoipolloi have used some of Edward lear's limericks in the creation of a biographical drama.

We'd like to thank John Hegley and BBC Radio 4 for inviting Shon onto the show.

I hope you get chance to listen on iPlayer this week if you didn't catch it first time round!

There Was a Young Man From Limerick

Tomorrow, Hoipolloi's Artistic Director, Shon Dale-Jones, will be featured on a Radio 4 documentary about limericks. The show has been put together by John Hegley, the renowned performance poet, who has ammassed a legion of fans over the years (inluding Shon!) with his uniquely comic and quirky performances.

John Hegley is famous for his humourous rhymes and feelgood performances. Recurring motifs of his writing include dogs, his hometown Luton and glasses. In one recent show, he invited everyone in the audience who was wearing glasses to join him on stage for a "glasses dance", and he regularly rants against the "deserters" who opt for contact lenses!

Shon has admired John's work for years and was delighted to be invited onto the show. The two of them met up recently to record some musings on their mutual love of limericks.

The limerick, of course, was popularised in the 1860s by Edward Lear, whose nonsense verse inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly. Arly is about to go back out on tour - click here for my recent Blog post with all the tour details.

There Was a Young Man From Limerick will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am on Tuesday 24 February. You'll be able to listen again on iPlayer for a week after the show is broadcast.

The Dong With the Luminous Nose flies to LA

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)


The Dong With the Luminous Nose and The Pobble With No Toes will soon be flying to Los Angeles, as Hoipolloi revives its comic and colourful production My Uncle Arly: a show based on the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear.

First performed in 2002, My Uncle Arly has been one of Hoipolloi's most popular shows. It was nominated for a Total Theatre Award in 2003. It was also the first Hoipolloi show I ever saw, back when I was seventeen!

The tour has been organised in association with WebPlay, a company which allows primary school children in Britain and America to talk online, and discuss a play which will be performed in both of their countries. This year's project will link London with Los Angeles.

The first performances of My Uncle Arly will be at the Unicorn Theatre from 11 to 13 March. Then the company will be flying to Los Angeles to perform at UCLA from 27 to 29 March.

To get you in a silly mood, I'll leave you with a stanza from my favourite Edward Lear poem, The Dong With the Luminous Nose. (Click here to read the whole thing.)

Slowly it wanders,pauses,creeeps,
Anon it sparkles,flashes and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along,
'The Dong! the Dong!
'The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
'The Dong! the Dong!
'The Dong with a luminous Nose!'

A Gorey Discovery...

Posted by Shon Dale-Jones (Artistic Director, Hoipolloi.)

When Hoipolloi toured My Uncle Arly to the USA in March 2005 I was interested to find out how popular Edward Lear was over there. I went into a children’s bookstore to look for one of his titles, but couldn’t find one, so I asked the shop attendant whether or not they stocked any Edward Lear.

She said, “Is he the guy Edward Gorey did some illustrations for? I think he is”, and walked towards one of the bookshelves in the corner of the shop. She handed me a collection of Edward Gorey’s illustrations – which included one for Edward Lear’s, "The Jumblies."

Before I knew it I had looked through the whole book and was asking the shop attendant for more Edward Gorey. She found five or six of his titles and I spent the next hour immersed in his work.

By the time I left the USA later that month I’d bought every title I could find in every bookstore I walked into. On the plane journey home I kept returning to The Doubtful Guest and got hooked on the world of this illustrated story.

Edward Gorey’s fantastical imagination and creation of unusual and biologically questionable creatures are perfect inspiration for the theatrical world of Hoipolloi.

We are approaching the tone of the illustrations, the world of the family and their house and the magical nature of the doubtful guest itself. The more we work on it the more we find. We are continually surprised how much there is to discover through this story.

We very much look forward to our continued work on this project. We are excited by what is emerging and feel privileged to be working with such powerful and fantastic source material.