First Person
Selina Cadell
"Vary the song, O London, change!" sings Tom Rakewell as he tires of the great metropolis. WH Auden and Chester Kallman's libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress strikes a chord with me too. London has magnificent opera but, at the top end, it comes at a price. Not just for the audience but for the singers. Lavish sets and costumes force historical productions into revivals. Singers fly in, rehearse for a few days, and slot themselves into the existing blueprint. Mood over content can prevail.There is a case now for change.With the current trend for broadcasting productions in cinemas ( Read more ...
Jonathan Lewis
I was invalided out of the army in 1986. I’d been an army scholar through school and had a bursary at university. I went on to drama school then became an actor, and subsequently a writer and director. But I’ve always been passionately interested in how the military, and the people in it, are portrayed to the wider world.My first play Our Boys, about my experiences being invalided out of the military, was revived in the West End in 2012. One of my first big roles was as Sgt Chris McCleod for two series of ITV’s Soldier, Soldier. With awareness of PTSD being greater than ever, I thought it was Read more ...
Roman Rabinovich
I was recently in the UK for some solo recitals and to make my debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. One of the highlights of the trip was playing a similar programme in two very different settings: first on some magnificent period instruments and then a week later on a modern Steinway piano at Wigmore Hall. Having never before performed publicly on historical instruments, my recital at the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park in Surrey felt like a complete experiment. The experience had an indelible influence on the way I approached the repertoire at Wigmore a week later, and has Read more ...
Tom MacRae
I’d always wanted to write a musical, but I didn’t start actually trying until four years ago. Now four years on, my first show, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, is about to hit the West End – that’s four years to go from no show, no idea and no experience to opening at the Apollo Theatre. It’s utterly crazy, I still can’t believe it – and this is how it happened...Chance meetings made everything possible. The first was between me and Dan Gillespie Sells, my songwriting partner, when we met on a gay rights march in Piccadilly. Like me, he’d always wanted to write a musical, but had Read more ...
Aaron Wright
Since its inception in 1997 Fierce, Birmingham’s International Festival of Live Art & Performance, has championed the work of performance makers not often seen in Britain. The pantheon of body artists under Mark Ball’s era as director included the likes of Franko B, Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly. Under the helm of previous director duo Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison came experimental European choreographers and theatre-makers such as Eva Meyer-Keller, Kate McIntosh and Lundahl & Seitl. Many of these artists have made significant contributions to the art form but for some reason Read more ...
Elyse Dodgson
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international department. We probably have to go back over a decade to look at the seeds of this work and the connections they have to one another and to each of us.THE ROAD TO BAD ROADIt is June 2008 and I am sitting around a table in Natal'ya Vorozhbit's new flat in Kiev with her mother Masha, her baby daughter Pasha and our co-collaborator and translator, Sasha Read more ...
Simon Stephens
All theatre workers have a day that they dread. For actors there is a particular terror about a first preview that can fuel those performances with adrenaline. For playwrights - well, for me at least - it is the first time a play is ever read out loud by a company of actors. This never fails to shred me. I had been working as a playwright for five years, though, before I realised how much directors hate the first day of rehearsal.The first day of rehearsal is the day many directors feel they most need to prove their validity. They need to inspire and galvanise a company of actors and ac Read more ...
David Eldridge
My friend, the playwright Robert Holman, says that the writing of a play is always “the product of a moment”. Of course, he’s right, but sometimes you have to pick your moment.In autumn 2015 a TV writing gig hadn’t worked out in the way that I’d hoped it might and I had a gap. Sometimes as a writer it’s great to find you have little to do but walk a lot, read a lot and think a lot, but I was in no mood to reflect. I had itchy fingers and needed to write. I’d had the idea of making a very detailed naturalistic play, beginning with a man and a woman looking at each other, for years; literally Read more ...
Jonathan Dove
When I first read Mansfield Park, some 30 years ago, I heard music. That doesn’t always happen when I read, and it certainly didn’t happen when I read other novels by Jane Austen. There is something about this particular book that provoked musical ideas.Of course, music is often involved in Austen’s stories: there are dances and private concerts, many of her heroines play the piano (as did Austen herself) and some of them sing, while in Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford plays that dangerously romantic instrument, the harp.But while I was reading the novel, what elicited music was not the literal 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 ...
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 ...