sun 24/11/2024

Theatre Buzz

Bush Theatre: Yorkshire’s Madani Younis gets the top job

aleks Sierz Outsider in town: the new artistic director, Madani Younis

Bush watchers — a species of theatre buff with a particular interest in the rapid changes now happening to the Bush Theatre in West London — have been waiting for several weeks to see which of the various rumours are true about who will be the venue’s new artistic director when the present chief, Josie Rourke, leaves in December. Yesterday, it was announced that the new artistic director is...

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Coming Up Later at the Old Vic Tunnels

Alice Vincent The Old Vic Tunnels won't look like this for the three nights of the Coming Up Festival

It’s not often that a venue’s stage door is easier to find than its main entrance, but The Old Vic Tunnels is one such location. For those behind Coming Up Later, however, this is all part of the fun of a three-evening underground festival featuring a rather wonderfully haphazard range of performances. The event is the product of The Old Vic’s outreach programme, Old Vic New Voices, and the funding and artistic crowd-sourcing network IdeasTap.com. Such collaboration resulted in an...

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War Horse is first past the post at the Tony Awards

Matt Wolf Charge! London theatre continues to trample the homegrown plays in New York

Broadway may not be “just for gays any more”, as the event's unstoppably charming and funny compere Neil Patrick Harris noted in his song-and-dance opening to the 2011 Tony Awards, held last night in New York to honour that city's theatre season just gone. But it’s still very much about the Brits: some habits never die.

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National Theatre Wales announces its second season

theartsdesk NTW's 'The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning' will ask questions about the imprisoned Wikileaks fall guy, who spent his teenage years in West Wales

The inaugural year of National Theatre Wales included an immensely ambitious body of work which tested to the limit the definition of what a national theatre can and should be. In new venues and old, found spaces and open spaces, it staged several freshly created plays, some retrieved ones, as well as adaptations, devised pieces and, in Aeschylus's...

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What happened to Daniel Radcliffe?

Matt Wolf Daniel Radcliffe may Succeed in Business, but won't succeed at the 2011 Tony Awards

That’s the question New York theatre folk are asking this morning, following the announcement of the 2011 Tony nominations, honouring the best of the Broadway theatre season just gone. Radcliffe was thought to be a dead cert for a nomination for his performance as the careerist window washer in the smash-hit revival of Frank Loesser’s How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. And there were many who thought...

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Summary of main Arts Council winners and losers

Ismene Brown

A sliderule of 11-15 per cent reductions in annual grants by 2015, compared with this year, has been applied to Britain's major orchestras, opera, dance, theatre and music organisations. One major gainer is London's Barbican Centre - one major loser is the now world-famous Almeida Theatre, which loses almost 40 per cent of its current annual subsidy despite its reputation for innovation and discovery. However, the Arcola Theatre, another small innovative theatre, gets a big boost.

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Love dies at Olivier Awards, but Smith, Sondheim, Lyttelton soar

Matt Wolf

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Love Never Dies emerged empty-handed at the 35th Laurence Olivier Awards, despite seven nominations, but it was a good night for Legally Blonde, Stephen Sondheim, and, so it seemed, pretty well any production lucky enough to play the National's Lyttelton auditorium.

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And the Donmar goes to...

Matt Wolf

Ending speculation as to who will be the next numero uno at Covent Garden's small but mighty Donmar, Josie Rourke has been announced as artistic director designate of the 250-seater venue; she will accede to the hot seat next January, taking the reins at a theatre where Rourke first worked just over a decade ago, assisting on shows directed, as it happens, by both her predecessors: Michael Grandage and Sam Mendes.

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Cob Studios & Gallery: Is north the new east?

Hilary Whitney 'Les Amants (Cascade )', 2009,  Noemie Goudal: The Cob Gallery opens with an exhibition that contemplates our modern relationship with nature

A burgeoning North London art scene, which includes the Zabludowicz Collection in Chalk Farm and one of the London outposts of the Gagosian Gallery, suggests that the art world has the North firmly in its sights and tomorrow sees the opening of its latest addition, Cob Studios & Gallery, based in the heart of Camden Town. Cob is jointly run by playwright Polly Stenham and Victoria Williams and aims to be a truly collaborative venue exhibiting work by emerging and established artists and...

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Exit Lear, pursued by a technical fault

David Nice Derek Jacobi's Lear, watched by Paul Jesson's Gloucester and Gwilym Lee's Edgar just before the unkindest cut of all

But not for long. The first ever National Theatre Live worldwide screening of a Donmar production came to a halt between great Jacobi's mad musings on archery and toasted cheese; later, pedalling back from Notting Hill against a furious wind, I guessed the reason for the blip. The weather had scuppered Lear's fate, off stage as well as on.

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Advertising feature

★★★★★

A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.
The Observer, Kate Kellaway

 

Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.

 

★★★★★

This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.
The Times, Ann Treneman

 

Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.

 

Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.


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