wed 29/11/2023

Theatre Features

theartsdesk in Minsk: feasting with Belarus Free Theatre

Jasper Rees

Budzma! (Cheers!) At a long, food-laden table in a noisy room of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a toast is proposed. We clink glasses and drain moonshine. This happens once, twice, five, 10 times. Between the toasts comes a wave of passionate speeches from some of our fellow diners. Loosely linked, they call up a period of history, controversial and still rarely discussed, when the German invaders were welcomed here as liberators who would deliver Belarus from the Soviet yoke.

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'The greatest play ever written': translating The Cherry Orchard

Rory Mullarkey

The Cherry Orchard is the greatest play ever written,” I declared, confidently, aged 16, to my mother, having just read The Cherry Orchard for the first time.

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'These star-crossed lovers are so young': adapting Brighton Rock

Bryony Lavery

I never have the idea of adapting anything at all myself. The suggestions always come from directors or theatre companies.

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'She has escaped from my Asylum!': The Woman in White returns

Jasper Rees

The Woman in White insists on being told and retold. Wilkie Collins’s much loved thriller is perhaps the most widely and frequently adapted of all the great Victorian novels. In Marian Halcombe it has a resourceful heroine whose appeal doesn't rest remotely in her looks, and in Count Fosco with his...

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David Edgar: 'Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well'

David Edgar

Since mid-August, I’ve been doing something I swore I’d never do again. I’ve been rehearsing a new adaptation of a novel by Charles Dickens. Sometime in the autumn of 1979, I received a phone call from Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

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Soldier On: a theatrical treatment of PTSD

Jonathan Lewis

I was invalided out of the army in 1986. I’d been an army scholar through school and had a bursary at university. I went on to drama school then became an actor, and subsequently a writer and director. But I’ve always been passionately interested in how the military, and the people in it, are portrayed to the wider world.

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'This is how it happened': Tom MacRae on writing Everybody's Talking About Jamie

Tom MacRae

I’d always wanted to write a musical, but I didn’t start actually trying until four years ago. Now four years on, my first show, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, is about to hit the West End –  that’s four years to go from no show, no idea and no experience to opening at the Apollo Theatre. It’s utterly crazy, I still can’t believe it – and this is how it happened...

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Fierce: the Birmingham festival which reaches out to Europe and beyond

Aaron Wright

Since its inception in 1997 Fierce, Birmingham’s International Festival of Live Art & Performance, has championed the work of performance makers not often seen in Britain. The pantheon of body artists under Mark Ball’s era as director included the likes of Franko B, Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly.

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'I come from there': how the Royal Court brought home plays from Ukraine, Chile and Syria

Elyse Dodgson

The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international department.

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'First read-throughs have magic': Simon Stephens on Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle

Simon Stephens

All theatre workers have a day that they dread. For actors there is a particular terror about a first preview that can fuel those performances with adrenaline. For playwrights - well, for me at least - it is the first time a play is ever read out loud by a company of actors. This never fails to shred me.

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Advertising feature

★★★★★

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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