The ironing board has an iconic status in the history of British theatre. What became known as kitchen-sink drama was more properly ironing-board drama. In 1956, the originality of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was not its frustrated hero mouthing off at an unhappy woman – so far, so drama – but that the central characters were a working-class man with strong views on Suez and a woman who, … [Read more...]
Yaël break
You’d know a Yaël Farber production at 100 paces. The air sweetly smoked and full of noises. The lighting crepuscular but sharded with moonlight. The movement deliberate, registering the actors’ full body weight. And that’s all before anyone speaks a word. Becoming intimate with a director’s style and sensibility is a theatregoing pleasure. It’s not the author who delivers the screed or the … [Read more...]
Propwatch – all the stuff in Hir
‘No good ever came from things.’ This line from Hir by Taylor Mac is guaranteed to strike fear into propwatchers. For what is this series but an act of devotion to the innate goodness of things, to the conviction that you can crack open a production via the portable stuff on stage? A prop is where stage illusion meets the material world. However fantastical the production, a prop – a real … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the facepaint pots in An Octoroon
There are knives and flames and even a tomahawk in An Octoroon. But the most hazardous, incendiary objects are three small pots of make-up. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ delirious date with an antebellum melodrama from 1859 brings the theatrical politics of two ages into collision. It’s about finding the frisson in antiquated material – and it turns out there’s no quicker way to do that than a thick … [Read more...]
Old world order
It’s hard to dismiss someone who looks you in the eye and tells you their truth. We were in the front row for Atlas des Kommunismus at the Gorki Theatre in Berlin, so the amateur performers could and did catch our gaze – amateur because they were there to tell their stories not to dazzle with professional sheen. This is a documentary play from the Argentinean director Lola Arias – whose … [Read more...]
The hole story
Georg Büchner died in 1837 with his masterpiece unfinished – a masterpiece because it’s unfinished, perhaps. The text of Woyzeck is incomplete, the scenes disordered. Based on a real-life murder, it gives naturalism a swerve, and the holes and fractures have lured many subsequent theatre artists. (The one that sticks with me is Robert Wilson’s collaboration with Tom Waits: stylised, … [Read more...]
Never such innocence again
We huddled from the rain under a small platform shelter at Hackney Wick the other night. Which was great, because it meant eavesdropping without strain on the couple arguing about This Beautiful Future, the play we’d just seen at the Yard Theatre. An amicable but irreconcilable disagreement, it boiled down to this: HER: Lovely! HIM: Offensive! HER: Baby chicks! HIM: Nazis! Then the train … [Read more...]
Never forget
What lingers from what you see at the theatre? Alarmingly random things, in my case. And, as I grow older, alarmingly distant things. Chatting with a friend yesterday evening, it turned out we’d both seen the same RSC production of King Lear as teenagers and between us could name most of the cast. We could probably do you the storm scene at a push. What I saw last week? Not so clear. In fact, … [Read more...]
Funny or die
What makes a comedy? Perspective. Ask Shakespeare’s Malvolia, Titania, or Andrew Aguecheek if they’re living in a comedy and they’ll gaze at you with tear-stained incredulity. Publicly shamed, sexually humiliated, drugged and tricked into – oh yes – public sex with a donkey. Oh, how they laugh. Whether we laugh – or whether we’re encouraged to do so – depends on the production. Perhaps we … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the watches in Hamlet
‘You’re back again?’ said the friend-of-a-friend usher at the Almeida when I arrived for Hamlet. She was mistaken. The insanely awaited production starring Andrew Scott is so very sold-out that buying even one ticket felt like a triumph. And, at nigh-on four hours, I was sure once would be fine. Nah-uh: Scott’s performance and Robert Icke’s production are a blanket of revelation. I arrived … [Read more...]