Features
Lammermuir Festival 2017 review - rich and deeply rewardingTuesday, 26 September 2017
Increasingly, the Lammermuir Festival is – one audience member whispered conspiratorially to me – what East Lothian music lovers are switching to alongside the Edinburgh International Festival. It’s insidious to compare, of course – but still, you... Read more... |
'Fanny Price’s pained silences gave me the impulse to write music for her'Saturday, 16 September 2017
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... Read more... |
‘A massive party full of treats and surprises’: Annabel Arden on six mini masterpieces at Opera NorthThursday, 14 September 2017
The first day of rehearsals for The Little Greats was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure: the casts of six shows, the whole chorus, all the creative teams and management milling around and talking nineteen to the dozen in the big, reverberant... Read more... |
'Making it new' - Blake Morrison on adaptation, and how his new play came to lifeWednesday, 13 September 2017
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... Read more... |
Peter Hall: A ReminiscenceTuesday, 12 September 2017
Theatre artist, political agitator, cultural advocate: Sir Peter Hall was all these and more in a career that defies easy encapsulation beyond stating the obvious: we won’t see his like again any time soon. He helped shape my experience and... Read more... |
'No matter where our intersections lie, we are all fundamentally connected'Tuesday, 12 September 2017
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-... Read more... |
'We're Still Here': Rachel Trezise on her NTW play about Port Talbot steelworkersMonday, 11 September 2017
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... Read more... |
Aspiration, ecstasy, melancholy: 'The Tale' of TorbaySaturday, 09 September 2017
A dark star explodes. I cannot remember the future. A figure appears on the beach. We're always reaching out. It's always just over there. We're always dreaming. The grey rocks, the red sand, the blue sea. Everywhere, the sea. Everything you ever... Read more... |
'The kaleidoscope of an entire lifetime of memories'Thursday, 07 September 2017
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards: Art, Design and Craft - weaving magic at Dovecot Tapestry StudioTuesday, 05 September 2017
Art, design and craft is such a broad category that it is no surprise – even less a criticism – that most of the nominees comfortably inhabit just one of these areas of endeavour. Nominated principally in recognition of The Caged Bird’s Song, made... Read more... |
The 'self-experimenter': Howard Brenton on Strindberg in crisisMonday, 04 September 2017
I wrote The Blinding Light to try to understand the mental and spiritual crisis that August Strindberg suffered in February 1896. Deeply disturbed, plagued by hallucinations, he holed up in various hotel rooms in Paris, most famously in the Hotel... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards: Music - opening up the futureTuesday, 29 August 2017
The second decade of the 21st century will undoubtedly be remembered for huge innovations in accessing music, just as much as for the music itself. As well as acknowledging upfront talent, then, the Hospital Club’s h.Club 100 Music shortlist for... Read more... |
