Theatre
aleks.sierz
Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of writing contemporary history. In telling the story of the 1993 Oslo Accords – the first ever agreement between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation – American playwright JT Rogers gets around the disadvantages of documentary theatre by writing what he calls “a scrupulously researched, meticulously written fiction”. And he Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Thebes Land returns to the Arcola Theatre as part of the wider CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, following a short 2016 run that resulted in an Off West End Award, or Offie, for Best Production. Director Daniel Goldman's pinpoint translation of Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco's original text proves a tight, exhilarating two-hander on themes of violence and the ethical boundaries of theatre itself.Writer T (Trevor White) is devising a play based on a series of interviews he is conducting with Martin (Alex Austin), a prisoner serving a life sentence for murdering his father, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack Cardiff was one of the all-time greats of cinematography, the man who shot such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, worked on John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and lensed Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl. He was renowned as “the man who makes women look beautiful”, but despite this he didn’t shrink from shooting Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood (Part II).Terry Johnson’s new play for Hampstead Theatre depicts Cardiff in his twilight years, reliving chunks of his past while his Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History comes to the stage of the Globe only rarely – at least if you compare the frequency of productions there from that segment of the Shakespearean canon against the tragedies and comedies – which is certainly one reason to welcome Boudica. Much more importantly, however, Tristan Bernays's new play offers a crackingly powerful central female role, one which puts the first-century British queen right at the centre of the narrative. It’s one that has the kind of sheer dramatic grandeur that admits contradiction of character, and Gina McKee has made it her own.Given that Bernays has written Read more ...
David Kettle
You’ve got to hand it to David Greig. The artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre has shown quite a knack for surfing the zeitgeist with his programming – and more importantly, tackling urgent political issues in a properly theatrical way.He did it with last year’s season opener, Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women, and its parallels with today’s refugee crises. He did it in August with Rhinoceros for the Edinburgh International Festival (a production that returns to the Lyceum in February), Zinnie Harris’s new Ionesco adaptation as a thinly veiled critique of Trump and how easily people Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The late David Storey spoke movingly, elsewhere on The Arts Desk, of his sense of overwhelming powerlessness at the challenge of accepting his father’s death. “I was quite racked by his death, and what death had become as an abstraction - in other words, what's my death, what's death itself?” he said.The question that shapes his 1989 play, The March on Russia, is the equally overwhelming prologue to that particular state, what you might call pre-death, the purgatorial existence between the end of your working life and identity and death. In the case of two old people married 60 years, what Read more ...
Blake Morrison
Is there anything more terrifying for a playwright than the first day of rehearsals? For months, even years, you’ve been working and reworking the text, saying the words aloud to yourself in an empty room and imagining the actors saying them to a packed auditorium. Now at last you’re here, for the read-through, with the cast, director, costume designer, choreographer, lighting man, deputy stage manager, etc, arranged round a big table. It ought to be exciting. It is exciting. But also scary. The dialogue, in others’ mouths, sounds different from how it sounded in your head. Less crisp, less Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Anyone who likes playing “Spot the weirdo” will find themselves instantly at home in Howard Brenton’s new play, which has its world premiere in this West End fringe venue, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. Its subject is Swedish playwright and writer August Strindberg, and the psychological crisis which he suffered while he was living in Paris in 1896. He documented this experience of breakdown and hallucination in his autobiographical novel, Inferno, written in fury while he was experiencing paranoia and other delusions. Helping Brenton make sense of Strindberg’s plight is Jasper Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatre artist, political agitator, cultural advocate: Sir Peter Hall was all these and more in a career that defies easy encapsulation beyond stating the obvious: we won’t see his like again any time soon. He helped shape my experience and understanding of the arts in this country, as I am sure he did for so many others. “We don’t stand high in the world in many things,” he memorably told a room full of American journalists at a luncheon some 30 years ago, speaking of Britain at the height of Thatcherism, “[but] we stand high in the arts.” What he didn’t add was at every turn apparent: that Read more ...
Tanya Moodie
Trouble in Mind, written by Alice Childress, the black actress, playwright and novelist, first opened at New York’s Greenwich Mews Theatre in November 1955. The show made Childress the first African-American woman to win an Obie Award for an off-Broadway production. Based on her own professional experiences, the play focuses on Wiletta Mayer, an actress who challenges the racial stereotypes she is always given to portray.Even though Trouble in Mind had its British stage premiere at the Tricycle in 1992, I hadn’t heard of it until I was urged to read it by a playwright colleague. I immediately Read more ...
Rachel Trezise
I’ve always written alone. As a novelist, that’s what you do. Sit around in your pyjamas composing sentences that come almost entirely from your own imagination. It’s difficult sometimes to conjure the self-discipline required to complete a draft in a satisfactory period of time, but it is always safe. The first draft is supposed to be dross. Nobody’s going to see it. My first play was written that way, too. I wrote three drafts of Tonypandemonium in my spare room over two years, occasionally allowing the then artistic director at National Theatre Wales to read them and offer suggestions Read more ...
Peter Brook
A long time ago when I was very young, a voice hidden deep within me whispered, "Don’t take anything for granted. Go and see for yourself." This little nagging murmur has led me to so many journeys, so many explorations, trying to live together multiple lives, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Always the need has been to stay in the concrete, the practical, the everyday, so as to find hints of the invisible through the visible. The infinite levels in Shakespeare, for instance, make his works a skyscraper.But what are levels, what is quality? What is shallow, what is deep? What changes, what Read more ...