Archives for October 2008

I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe in ghost stories. They are hopes and fears flickering in shadow form - a culture's anxieties can probably be identified by the spectres it wants to believe in. Theatres - where so many phantom lives are lived out, night after night, should be perfect ghost-spotting material. When I worked at English National Opera in the London Coliseum, a friend who had … [Read more...]

Recent speculation in the comments section about Sarah Palin's future career reminded me about vaudeville, and Trav SD's exuberant celebration No Applause, Just Throw Money. It doesn't only have what may be the best book title ever (though a forthcoming history of dance in Disney movies called Hippo in a Tutu comes very close). It's also a reminder that popular entertainment defines a nation and … [Read more...]

Okay, last week we used our critical specs to peer at the poor saps on Wall Street and in the City of London. Did it make us feel better about the financial crisis? Did it heck. But if it's tragedy tomorrow, it's comedy tonight. Yup, it's time to think about Sarah Palin. Alone among the leading figures from the presidential campaign, Palin cuts an unequivocally comic figure. The wink, the … [Read more...]

So, what's the story? We're getting used to asking this question, to thinking in terms of digestible narrative. It seems that life's not only a pitch nowadays, but a plausible story. Politicians have stopped fighting the media, but now embrace the demand for constructing a clearly defined sequence. Across the Atlantic, election punditry has repeatedly looked at which candidate has shaped the … [Read more...]

If we can all put to one side the dread making itself at home in the hollows of our stomachs, it's time to begin looking at world events like a critic. Not a critic of economics or politics, mercy no. But a drama critic. Yes, my friends, we're looking (nervously, through our fingers) at images from the world's stock exchanges and banks, and using our experience as theatregoers to read the crisis. … [Read more...]

Entrepreneurial is too tame a word for the Mariinsky Ballet (formerly the Kirov) under Valery Gergiev. This week, they have been in both the US and the UK - giving their cornerstone repertory in San Francisco, and showing London some of the more recent (ie 20th-century) material they've been exploring - from early Balanchine to post-modern William Forsythe. Performing everywhere at once is a good … [Read more...]

This may seem an odd choice for the opening number in a series about theatre books. An unreliable memoir of a forgotten figure who performed in a genre we rarely see. It's not, I guess, an essential text. But Charles Dickens' Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, reissued by the enterprising Pushkin Press in a chubby little volume, gets to the heart of the theatre-going experience. It's both about our need … [Read more...]

I haven't got appreciably wiser as I've aged - how about you? Wandering around Rothko: The Late Series at London's Tate Modern yesterday morning, I realised how tempting but misleading it is to view an artist's work as an index of their physical age - or to read it retrospectively, looking backwards from their deathday. You might call this the Prospero Fallacy: the sense that a late work (in this … [Read more...]

In which Performance Monkey sets out his stall Welcome to Performance Monkey, a blog about theatre and dance. I enjoy watching productions, for work and pleasure, but like to think that a show doesn't end when the curtain falls. It's in talking with friends after a show that creative thinking begins, even if discussion often dissipates under pressure of hunger, gossip or public transport. This … [Read more...]