fri 01/12/2023

Theatre Features

'I’d never written a play as a single action before': David Eldridge on 'Beginning'

David Eldridge

My friend, the playwright Robert Holman, says that the writing of a play is always “the product of a moment”. Of course, he’s right, but sometimes you have to pick your moment.

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Young Reviewer of the Year Award: the four finalists are...

theartsdesk

In July we launched a competition in association with The Hospital Club to unearth talented young critics. We were clear about what we were looking for: “We want to read reviews that make us think – provocative, entertaining writing that gets under the skin of the art it addresses, that dares to ask uncomfortable questions and offer new answers.

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'Making it new' - Blake Morrison on adaptation, and how his new play came to life

Blake Morrison

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 packed auditorium.

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Peter Hall: A Reminiscence

Matt Wolf

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 understanding of the arts in this country, as I am sure he did for so many others.

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'No matter where our intersections lie, we are all fundamentally connected'

Tanya Moodie

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.

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'We're Still Here': Rachel Trezise on her NTW play about Port Talbot steelworkers

Rachel Trezise

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 a satisfactory period of time, but it is always safe. The first draft is supposed to be dross. Nobody’s going to see it.

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Aspiration, ecstasy, melancholy: 'The Tale' of Torbay

Philip Hoare

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 wanted to be.

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'The kaleidoscope of an entire lifetime of memories'

Maggie Bain

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 perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry.

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The 'self-experimenter': Howard Brenton on Strindberg in crisis

Howard Brenton

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 Orfila in the Rue d’Assas.

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Christopher Shinn: 'I did not know if I would be alive and someone wanted me to write a play'

Christopher Shinn

Plays do not usually come into being in isolation. When I search my gmail archive I see that my first communication with Robert Icke about a commission came in April 2012. Rupert Goold and Rob were still at Headlong then. I was busy so asked that we keep the conversation going but not commit to anything.

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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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