Theatre Features
Opinion: Please will you stop talking?Tuesday, 15 March 2011
I can tell you the year (1983). I can tell you the theatre (the newly opened Barbican), the actors (Gambon, Sher), and the speech (“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!”). Hell, I can all but tell you the seat number. Lear and the Fool in the storm stood on a platform mounted on a high pole. It was an arresting way of establishing their elemental isolation. Or it would have been if the gantry gaining the actors access to the platform had been withdrawn. Read more...
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Interview: Actor James PurefoyThursday, 10 March 2011
A disproportionate number of column inches seem to have been devoted to James Purefoy’s matinee-idol looks, his ability to carry off a pair of breeches and the amount of time he appears on television naked. However, while he has admittedly spent much of his career swaggering around in period costume - Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon, Mark Antony in HBO’s... Read more... |
Tanika Gupta on Adapting Great ExpectationsWednesday, 16 February 2011
A few years ago my brother and I were stuck in a traffic jam somewhere in London and a Rolls Royce drew up next to us with an elderly Asian gentleman at the wheel. He turned to us both and smiled sweetly before gliding on. For a blink of an eye, the driver morphed into our dad who died 20 years ago. Read more... |
Interview: Playwright Enda WalshFriday, 04 February 2011
No prizes for guessing what the future holds for the four Irishmen ensconced in the empty swimming pool in Enda Walsh’s latest play, Penelope, which opens at Hampstead Theatre next week. For these unfortunate creatures are the last of Penelope’s suitors from Homer’s Odyssey, the pariah who invade Odysseus’s home and make merry at his expense whilst shamelessly trying to win the hand of his faithful wife – and their time is up. Read more... |
Interview: Novelist DBC PierreFriday, 28 January 2011
Very early in 2003 I went to the offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury to meet a first-time novelist. At 41, he looked slightly long in the tooth to be fresh out of the traps, even a bit roughed up by life. With seasoned teeth and capillaried cheeks, he had evidently survived a battle or two. It was his first ever interview. I remember asking him if he had any idea how good his book was. To be taken on by such reputable publishers after half a lifetime of epic underachievement... Read more... |
Opinion: 'Internalised' acting is a complete turn-offMonday, 17 January 2011
Do Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg have a lot to answer for? Or can we place the blame, if blame it is, elsewhere? I’m referring to the steady, insidious advance of theatre mumbling. You may have noticed it at a theatre near you. It’s the art that disguises itself in “naturalism”, a kind of quasi “Method” style of acting. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Moscow: The Sovremennik Theatre Visits LondonSunday, 16 January 2011
Twenty-odd years ago, on the eve of the break-up of the Soviet Union, the country’s cultural world was anticipating cardinal changes – anything from a series of closures to a radical alteration in which the way art would be produced under new economic circumstances. Nowhere more perhaps than in theatre, where the established universal nationwide system of repertory companies faced potential implosion. Read more... |
Year Out/Year In: Theatre Raises the Bar, From Old to NewSunday, 02 January 2011
One expects Shakespeare to be rediscovered afresh on the British stage (if not here, where?), and it was gratifying during 2010 to find the Royal Court - a venue all about the new - raising the authorial bar ever higher via an (almost) unbroken series of triumphs culminating, for me, with E V Crowe's Kin. Read more... |
Bah Humbug: Judi Dench - the greatest stage actor ever?Monday, 20 December 2010
Seems we’re living through a silly season. There are rumours afoot that our PM’s Big Society is nothing other than a fig leaf for a chaos theory of how to run society, ie let the devil take the hindmost. And in the arts we’ve got theatre’s esteemed trade paper declaring, in a much-publicised puff - organised through a star-studded panel of the Great and the Good and “hundreds of readers voting from a list of 10 actors” - that... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Composer Dario MarianelliSaturday, 06 November 2010
Dario Marianelli won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his score for the movie Atonement, and his return to the theatre after a long absence as composer for the Young Vic's new production of Tennessee Williams's first big Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie, is hotly anticipated. In the rehearsal room he talks about the intricate process that marries music to drama, be it on celluloid or stage. He talks about what fires his imagination and how, for instance, a typewriter...
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★★★★★
‘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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