Theatre
carole.woddis
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.It’s not always easy to detect. At first you think you may be mistaken. Isn’t this “great acting” I see before me, the eyes furrowed towards the floor, the voice low, even a little seductive? You blink – and blink again. You wait for something to happen on stage. But wait a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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.Despite a subsequent decade of considerable uncertainty, such fears would prove largely unfounded. This month’s visit by Moscow’s Sovremennik Theatre to London offers a chance to see the very Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 2011 the Barbican offers eminent theatre directors Robert LePage and Peter Brook along with the diversions of London International Mime Festival. Music includes composer focuses on Unsuk Chin, Brian Ferneyhough and Peter Eötvös, and high-profile visits by great conductors Sir Simon Rattle, Bernard Haitink, Sir Colin Davis and Barbican resident guest Valery Gergiev. Joan as Police Woman, the Waterboys, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Marianne Faithfull are among contemporary music performers while video and media art is featured from Ryoji Ikeda and Cory Arcangel. Full season listings below. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We remember JM Barrie as the creator of Peter Pan, that quintessentially English fairy story which features Neverland, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and where “to die would be an awfully big adventure”. Generations have embraced this mythical tale as an expression of the spirit of upper-class Deep England. Here the Victorians are us. But James Matthew Barrie himself was the child of a Scottish Calvinist working-class family, and is the subject of Alexander Wright’s play — a hit in Edinburgh last year — which aspires to be a kind of anti-myth.The Boy James is staged in an evocative crypt-like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Problematic in performance in a way that the “problem plays” simply aren’t, Shakespeare’s Roman plays remain some of his hardest to stage satisfactorily. Updated versions too often turn into Magritte-esque fantasies of identikit, suited politicos, while the togas of more traditional approaches can feel absurd, unavoidably laden with satiric or Hollywood associations. Courting rather than rejecting evocations of the latter, Lucy Bailey’s 2009 Julius Caesar for the RSC brings cinematic scope and contemporary gore to its treachery, demanding that its audience lend not only ears, but eyes, Read more ...
carole.woddis
I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Shakespeare Company celebrates its 50th birthday season with the grand reopening of its transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre at a cost of £112.8 million. The temporary Courtyard Theatre folds curtains on the sold-out smash hit that is Matilda, awaiting one last flourish in the Olympics Shakespeare Festival next year before its intended demolition. New productions of Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet inaugurate the revamped RST, while London operations transfer from the Roundhouse to Hampstead Theatre for the premieres of three new plays. The season is capped with a six-week Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Donmar Warehouse's 2011 season listings take audiences, as so often, in unpredictable directions, from the farcical tensions of American competitive spelling to the high tragedy of 18th-century Schiller. Full season guide below.King Lear, William Shakespeare, 3 Dec-5 Feb, 2011Derek Jacobi has long had his eye on the title role of King Lear and finally gets to play it under the direction of Michael Grandage, with whom he has worked profitably in Don Carlos and Twelfth Night. Read theartsdesk's Q&A with actor Derek Jacobi.The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, William Finn/Rachel Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The National Theatre's 2011 season listings offer double Shakespeare rations in an eclectic schedule: as Nicholas Hytner's unfussy, modern Hamlet goes on tour round the UK with an authoritative Rory Kinnear as the Prince, a new Twelfth Night by octogenarian Sir Peter Hall stars his daughter. Two scientific men go astray - Mary Shelley's monster creator Dr Frankenstein, who hits the boards under the direction of Danny Boyle, a stage talent poached for film stardom, and the drab dentist in Clifford Odets's 1938 drama, Rocket to the Moon. New plays about Israel and its effect on London Jews (by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The 2011 season at Sadler’s Wells features attractions including horses and mass nudity on stage, the Pet Shop Boys' first ballet, William Forsythe, New York's American Ballet Theatre, the usual hip hop, flamenco and tango seasons, and generous helpings of Belgian and Catalan contemporary dance. Full listings guide below. Winter-Spring 2011Matthew Bourne's Cinderella, 30 Nov-23 Jan 2011, Sadler's Wells TheatreSet in London during the Second World War, Bourne's 1997 interpretation of Prokofiev's haunting score has, at its heart, a true wartime romance. Completely revised, this brand-new Read more ...