Shakespeare? What a pain!

Posted by Nell Mead at 15:48 on 19 Nov 2011

I was lucky enough taken to the Old Vic recently by an old friend, to see Kevin Spacey playing the lead role in Sam Mendes’ production of Richard III. I’m not generally a huge Shakespeare fan (memories of watching Macbeth at the National Theatre when I was studying it at GCSE put me off somewhat; and I found Jacobi’s Lear unconvincing this summer) nor am I a particular Spacey fan; but this show really blew me away. I was enthralled and barely glanced away from the stage for the entire three hours.

But three hours is an awfully long time for a man to play a twisted hunchback; the King is rarely offstage and the physicality of Spacey’s performance was quite extraordinarily compelling and consistent. He played a man in pain extremely convincingly; in fact I’d be amazed if he wasn’t genuinely in quite some significant pain by the end of the production, and I wonder if I was the only audience member relieved to see Richard hoisted aloft by his ankles at the end: at least he finally got some traction to relieve his poor, tortured spine!

After all, Kevin Spacey wouldn’t be the first actor to be left crippled by Shakespeare. I rather assume this story is apocryphal, or at least that the wording has been altered over the years; but according to Antony Sher’s “Year of the King”, at the end of the original production of Richard III, Burbage told Shakespeare “If you ever do that to me again, mate, I’ll kill you.” Somewhat later, in 1972, Robert Hirsch of the Comédie-Française apparently found some sort of solution: his Richard limped on alternate legs from night to night!

Simon Russell Beale managed a five-month run as Richard III in Mendes’ production for the RSC in 1993; but just three days after it transferred to the Donmar Warehouse, he was forced to retire and to have an operation on a prolapsed spinal disc. The same thing happened to David Tennant in 2008 during a run of Hamlet: after a successful summer run in Stratford-upon-Avon, the production moved to the Novello Theatre and Tennant ended up in surgery.

Given how slowly spinal discs go wrong, it seems unlikely that Shakespeare and his directors can be completely blamed for this spate of injuries to leading men. They probably had some degree of back pain before they took up their roles. However, there’s no doubt that the physical demands of playing a role which requires extreme postures to be maintained for prolonged periods, will cause a degree of soft tissue deformation and also of extreme concentrations of compressive stress on the spinal discs. Moving and changing position regularly causes compressive stresses to alter, and it is thought that this assists with disc nutrition (which is why it forms the basis of Sarah Key’s “pressure change therapy” theory); the reverse is also true, with prolonged relatively static postures, particularly extreme postures, effectively reducing the discs’ nutrient supply and causing damage.

So my pleasure in watching this extraordinary production was tempered somewhat by the thought of the damage the leading actor was doing to himself in his effort to provide a superb experience for the viewing audience. Mr Spacey, I do hope you have a good physio!
 

Teaching - the Sarah Key way

Posted by Nell Mead at 12:00 on 28 Nov 2011

Last year, Sarah Key invited me and nine other physiotherapists (all accredited practitioners of the Sarah Key Method, or APSKM) to a meeting at Highgrove, where she revealed that she was beginning to think about retirement and wanted us to consider taking on the legacy of teaching her courses in the future, and also that she was planning to write a textbook of her method for physiotherapists, to which she wants some of us to contribute. I understand that her popular books are already being studied in some schools of osteopathy, but she’s written nothing specifically for practitioners yet.

As experienced physiotherapists and enthusiastic practitioners of the SKM, we were all pretty flattered to be invited, and keen to get involved; and as Sarah has never let anyone else teach her courses before, we set out to train ourselves up. We’ve had help with this from Sarah herself, who has given us access to the PowerPoint presentations we’d be teaching, and also from her administrative staff Carmel, Ruve and Federica – and most of all from physiotherapist and researcher in spinal biomechanics Manos Stefanakis and his PhD supervisor, Professor Mike Adams who presented a superb lecture at our teacher training meeting at Kensington Palace in June.

We’ve all put in a lot of individual work into reading and absorbing reference papers, learning teaching and presenting skills; and meeting up on a regular basis to practise, update each other on the latest spinal research and discuss logistics, in Tetbury, Bristol, London and Belfast and during Skype-based conference calls.

And this month, we finally had the chance to put it all into practice as five of us took turns to teach the Sarah Key Masterclass 1 course at Highgrove.

With Sarah herself and Manos watching and assessing our teaching, we were all a little nervous; but the fifteen delegates were enthusiastic and the course went really well, with no real glitches. Everyone felt well prepared, and I think the work we’d put into learning and understanding the academic research behind the presentations really paid off. They do say that if you want to improve your knowledge of something, you should teach it; and that definitely rings true for me.

After the course, Manos took each of us aside to feed back on our performance, which was extremely helpful and reassuring as he felt we had all done well; but equally important and gratifying was the response from the delegates, who reported back with comments including:

• “enjoyable and helpful”,
• “I have honestly never been to such a good course before”
• “a fantastic few days”
• “a huge inspiration”
• “a really enjoyable 3 days of amazing learning and discussion”
• “your course has ignited my passion again... I can’t fully express to you my sense of relief and enlightenment”

Pretty awesome, huh?  Of course, the real credit goes to Sarah as it's her passion and years of work that underpin the Masterclass; but it's nice to hear that we managed to convey it successfully.

The next Sarah Key Masterclasses will be run in 2012 in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as we’re breaking away from just using Kensington Palace and Highgrove to make the courses more accessible. They’re open to physios and osteopaths. If you’re interested in attending, please contact Federica Bertolini at admin.uk@sarahkey.com.

*Picture taken by Manos Stefanakis of me standing on Sarah Key, at her 2010 Back in a Week course.