Theatre Unlocked 3: Signs of activity after a long siesta | reviews, news & interviews
Theatre Unlocked 3: Signs of activity after a long siesta
Theatre Unlocked 3: Signs of activity after a long siesta
Theatre comes to life, albeit gently, and some familiar names crop up online
After a weeklong hiatus due to an absence of noteworthy material, this column is back heralding the return, as well, of something resembling live theatre.
José Saramago’s 1995 novel tells of a pre-Covid pandemic of blindness that spreads through an unnamed city. Now, the Portuguese Nobel laureate’s work has come to the stage as a socially distanced sound installation inviting audiences into the Donmar Warehouse for the first time since their pre-lockdown revival of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away had its run cut short.
The piece, adapted by Simon Stephens, features the voice of Juliet Stevenson and is being performed four times daily until August 22: there are no live performers, which means that the event, now in previews and opening to the press this weekend, can proceed as scheduled.
Fanny and Stella, Garden Theatre, Eagle
Live theatre has to resume somewhere, so why not within the newly refurbished beer garden of The Eagle in south London’s Kennington Lane, which will open Aug 11 (following previews) with an open-air production of Fanny and Stella.
The musical, directed by Steven Dexter, was first seen in 2015 and again in 2019 and tells the Victorian-era story of William Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, aka Fanny and Stella: two drag queens who were arrested for sodomy and eventually acquitted.
Watching Rosie, Original Theatre Company online
Miriam Margolyes is everywhere these days or so it seems, whether sounding off about Boris Johnson or showing us Australia through her eyes on the BBC. Now she can be seen, alongside the fine young actor Amit Shah, in a new 20 minute online play, Watching Rosie, streaming free of charge from August 6 until September 30.
The short play’s cast also includes its author, Louise Coulthard, who plays Margolyes’s granddaughter in this study of dementia in lockdown. Michael Fentiman directs for the Original Theatre Company, whose online production of the Sebastian Faulks novel Birdsong was a success earlier this summer.
Shades of Tay, Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Some theatres may be sitting idle during these strange times, but not Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which has married a series of short original plays with one or more company members from the Scottish playhouse’s 2020 ensemble.
Premiering online August 7 and running into November, the sequence of plays ranges from five to 30 minutes in length and boasts such writers as Jo Clifford (pictured left), Timberlake Wertenbaker, Hannah Khalil, and Dan Rebellato. The Shades of Tay title, meanwhile, comes from the fact that each piece of writing has been shot at a different location along the Tay which, at 119 miles, is Scotland’s longest river.
Alice, A Virtual Theme Park, Creation Theatre
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is everywhere, or so it seems of late, including a Christopher Wheeldon ballet first seen at the Royal Opera House in 2011 and a major exhibition forthcoming at the V&A Museum in London .
The latest iteration of Lewis Carroll’s classic is a live venture being performed twice daily until August 30 as a digitally enhanced immersive production utilising seven actors and some fresh material from the playwright Charlotte Keatley, author of the contemporary classic, My Mother Said I Never Should. The project brings together director-adaptor Zoe Seaton’s Big Telly Theatre Company, the Oxfordshire-based Creation Theatre, and the interactive technology-minded Charisma.ai.
Explore topics
Share this article
The future of Arts Journalism
You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!
We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d
And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
Add comment