site-specific
Down by the Greenwood Side, Harvey's Depot, LewesTuesday, 13 May 2014
The question about Harrison Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side is: what is it? Designated by the composer as a “dramatic pastoral”, which is not very enlightening, it is not really an opera, nor a play with music, nor a piece of performance art... Read more... |
Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited, National Theatre WalesMonday, 05 May 2014
Dylan Thomas’ iconic play Under Milk Wood boasts a host of colourful characters. From the blind sea Captain Cat to the loveable Polly Garter washing the steps of the welfare hall, the play is a play for voices; a play for characters. Thomas, born in... Read more... |
Maudie's Rooms, Bute Street, Cardiff BayMonday, 14 April 2014
Cardiff Bay’s Bute Street is home to many imposing buildings, a large number of which are derelict. They have the potential to become something more than they currently are. They can be revived, and that’s what Louise Osborn has done by mounting her... Read more... |
Barry is ready for her close-upWednesday, 02 April 2014
The idea for Day to Go – the show takes its name from a bus ticket – sprang from my own bus journeys around Barry and from a desire to make a piece of theatre specific and relevant to the town. I persuaded a local company to lend me a bus for a few... Read more... |
Listed: Celebrating Dylan ThomasSunday, 30 March 2014
It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been... Read more... |
Blood + Chocolate, York Theatre RoyalSunday, 06 October 2013
Never before has “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” been a more fitting opening gambit. This sprawling wartime spectacle knew few bounds as it marched across York’s cobbled streets for an evening that produced watery... Read more... |
Enquirer, National Theatre of ScotlandSaturday, 06 October 2012
Site-specific theatre is hard – where to put the audience, can they stand for nearly two hours, how do we enable them to see/hear, most importantly, what is the purpose of the site and how is it to be used? Verbatim theatre, too, is hard – how to... Read more... |
Treasured, Anglican Cathedral, LiverpoolTuesday, 02 October 2012
You could say that the Titanic has been done to death, and that any new show would really need to say something different, something so far unknown, unearth a new angle, find new facts. To some extent, Treasured does that. Who’s ever heard of Mouser... Read more... |
Coriolan/us, National Theatre Wales/RSCFriday, 10 August 2012
National Theatre Wales like the word “us”. It was there in Michael Sheen’s Passion of Port Talbot – its film adaptation was called The Gospel of Us – and it is here, prominently, in the multi-layered title of Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes’ latest... Read more... |
Survivor, Hofesh Shechter & Anthony Gormley, Barbican TheatreFriday, 13 January 2012
Empty vessels make the most noise. That pithy old aphorism floated into my head a scant few minutes into the much-heralded new work by the undoubtedly talented, but here way off-beam, Hofesh Shechter. And again, a few minutes later. And again, and... Read more... |
BIBLE story: artist inserts himself into the New TestamentFriday, 21 October 2011
It’s a shame that Joseph Steele’s BIBLE didn’t come a week later. Halloween would have been a far better backdrop to the haphazard heathenism that the evening entailed.Presentation, exhibition – it is difficult to define the events which Steele... Read more... |
Decade, Headlong at Commodity Quay, St Katherine DocksFriday, 09 September 2011
Ten years on from 9/11 and the polyphony of reactions will not, and should not, be stilled. Creative artists have had to tread carefully in what they amass, and how they present it. Headlong theatre company’s fresh-thinking artistic director, Rupert... Read more... |
