National Theatre
Q&A Special: Actor Derek JacobiTuesday, 07 December 2010
Derek Jacobi (b 1938) grew up in Leytonstone. His father was a tobacconist, his mother worked in a department store. Although he entered the profession in the great age of social mobility in the early 1960s, no one could have predicted that he would... Read more... |
Beauty and the Beast, National TheatreThursday, 02 December 2010
“You’ve never heard a fairy tale before unless you’ve heard it told by a real fairy. And I am a real fairy.” Festooned with magic, colour and humour, the National Theatre’s Christmas production of Beauty and the Beast is solid-oak tradition gift-... Read more... |
Debate: Should Theatre Be On Television?Tuesday, 30 November 2010
The relationship between stage and screen has always been fraught with antagonism and suspicion. One working in two dimensions, the other in three, they don't speak the same visual language. But recent events have helped to eat away at the status... Read more... |
Alan Bennett and The Habit of Art, More4Saturday, 27 November 2010
Few theatrical collaborations have been as successful as that achieved over five plays, two films, several decades, and numerous awards by the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Nicholas Hytner, who had jointly made a habit of art well before... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Musician Femi KutiWednesday, 24 November 2010
When the hit Broadway musical Fela! reached London last week, Femi Kuti joined the ovations on opening night with more feeling than most. The musical’s subject, his father Fela Kuti, was a government-taunting mix of James Brown and Che Guevara, a... Read more... |
Men Should Weep, National TheatreTuesday, 26 October 2010
“It seems to me there’s nae end tae trouble. Nae end tae havin’ the heart torn out of you.” That’s the gut-wrenching cry of despair voiced by Maggie Morrison, the worn-down woman who is herself the heart of Ena Lamont Stewart’s vivid, sprawling 1947... Read more... |
Who earns £630,000 at the Royal Opera House?Tuesday, 26 October 2010As arts cuts announced today start to bite, few people are aware that the Royal Opera House pays its two top people more than £630,000 and nearly £400,000 each. Although Covent Garden is refusing to identify them, it is likely that they are chief... Read more... |
Hamlet, National TheatreFriday, 08 October 2010
The National Theatre’s new production of Hamlet is both a very good Hamlet, yet also a somehow disappointing one. For a work so rich in possibilities, with so much emotion, so much superb and intricate engineering, it is often like this, in England... Read more... |
Or You Could Kiss Me, National TheatreWednesday, 06 October 2010
Theatrical conceits, much like London buses, seem these days to come in threes. Or so it is suggested by the Neil Bartlett/Handspring collaboration Or You Could Kiss Me, the third Cottesloe production this year to peer into the future, albeit only... Read more... |
Complicite and the Mozart and Salieri of MathsWednesday, 08 September 2010
In 1913 a 25-old-year mathematician from Tamil Nadu sailed to England. He journeyed at the behest of a Cambridge professor who had been mesmerised by the display of untutored genius evident in the young Indian’s correspondence. Within four years the... Read more... |
Danton's Death, National TheatreFriday, 23 July 2010
The longest and most densely historical play by Georg Büchner (1813-37) is a potential monster. In German, Dantons Tod can run to four hours or more. There's little action and much speechifying. In plays by his equally wordy, history-obsessed... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Playwright Howard BrentonSaturday, 17 July 2010
Political playwright Howard Brenton (b. 1942) is always in the process of being "rediscovered". Yet at the same time he has been at the heart of British theatrical life for the past 40 years, since his debut in 1969 with Christie in Love. True, he... Read more... |
