The talk around us was all about the dishwashers. ‘Look, there’s two of them,’ murmured the woman in front of us. ‘Three dishwashers,’ gasped a guy in the row behind. By the end, I counted four: it turns out there were seven. What else does the kitchen in Julie, Polly Stenham’s reboot of Strindberg, contain? An ostentatiously long table/worktop. A couple of cupboards fitted alongside the … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the flowers in Creation (Pictures for Dorian)
Beauty. Beautiful. Beautifully. It’s just possible I overuse these words. A quick search through my dropbox suggests that in the past year I’ve applied them to: Alina Cojocaru’s acting in Giselle; the final image (watches!) in Robert Icke’s Hamlet; Rebecca Frecknall’s production of Summer and Smoke; the difficult pleasures of Swan Lake; the pacing of The Inheritance; the handbells in A Christmas … [Read more...]
Odd ducks and different buds
‘You must have been quite an odd duck as a boy,’ I said to Barry Humphries, as the entertainer described his unusual devotion to Berlin cabaret artists, fostered in stuffy suburban Melbourne. ‘Yes, I was,’ he replied. He gave me a look. ‘I expect you were too.’ Guilty as charged: part of my duckery was also an interest in the sauce and swoon of Weimar performance – from Cabaret to Brecht/Weill … [Read more...]
My week with swans
I’ve spent a week thinking about swans. Ballet swans, mostly, with feathery bodies, aching hearts. Last Thursday, Liam Scarlett’s richly imagined Swan Lake opened at the Royal Ballet, replacing a 31-year-old version and offering an opportunity to rethink the way the story is told. I took part in some of the events the Royal Opera House held in its wake – interviewing artists, facilitating … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the fans in The Way of the World
There’s no limit to how much bad acting you can do with a fan, if you’re in a folderol frame of mind. Point it for emphasis, snap it shut in high dudgeon. Make peekaboo eyes over the top or flutter it for the full coquette. It can easily become camp. Anyone who doesn’t enjoy costume drama onstage will be no fan of the fan. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Most of the props that sashay into … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the plastic bags in Macbeth
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...]