Rufus Norris’ bereft, survivalist production of Macbeth was the show that launched a thousand thinkpieces about his regime at the National Theatre. The reviews were overwhelmingly hostile, and this apparently misfired Shakespeare followed on the heels of a series of mishit new plays in the Olivier Theatre, the company’s flagship space. Was Norris’ time up? Several weeks on, and with a fistful … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the book in The Inheritance
A companionable slump of young men sits on the floor and frown over notebooks and laptops. They squirm to tell their story, but they’re struggling. One clutches a cherished volume – Howards End by EM Forster. Speaking in the third person, he announces, ‘he opens his favourite novel, hoping to find inspiration in its first familiar sentence.’ That sentence, which we’ll hear more than once in The … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the axe in Buggy Baby
It was Chekhov who defined the essential rule of theatre props. ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall,’ he told a friend in 1889, ‘then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.’ It doesn’t need to go off in predictable ways – Uncle Vanya proves that – but without the bang, it’s just window-dressing. When I saw the emergency axe pinioned high on … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the dolls in John
The best scene in any play in London right now (don’t argue, I’m not listening) opens the second act in John by Annie Baker. Three women – Mertis, who runs a guesthouse in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; her close friend Genevieve; and the much younger Jenny, who is staying at the guesthouse with her boyfriend – discuss the interior life of dolls. Jenny: When I was little I was always worried about … [Read more...]
Would you vote for Julius Caesar?
Be honest – would you vote for any of these dodgy, blundering political contenders? The talking point around Nicholas Hytner’s production of Julius Caesar has been that many of us get to swarm around the action, gawping at the Roman elite, swayed by their rhetoric and shoved by security. First of all we’re whooping at Caesar’s rally (there’s beer! I bought a badge!), then eavesdrop as Cassius … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the letters in Hamilton
For a show that might reshape the musical for the 21st century, there’s an awful lot of paper in Hamilton. The stage is a flurry of letters, ledgers, leaves and broadsides – it’s almost antiquated. Hamilton has sui generis swagger and the sound of something new, but it’s a story about what is written, what is read. It’s a show built on pen scratching furiously over paper. In 2009, Lin-Manuel … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the ironing board in Trouble in Mind
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...]