Archives for February 2009

Have you heard the story of Romeo and the gorilla? Christopher Gable was the dancer on whom Kenneth MacMillan created the role of Romeo for the Royal Ballet in 1965. MacMillan planned a harrowing final scene; the distraught hero, he said, should attempt desperately to revive Juliet, but when his efforts failed, she becomes no more than a piece of meat as his hopes fade. Gable was reminded of a … [Read more...]

Practical criticism is a loosely recurring strand of the blog in which we look at the outside world through the eyes of a critic. It's kind of a pun. But today, people, we're going to do old-school prat crit, the like of which I haven't done since college. We're going to look at a text, and decide what it's telling us. We'll look for rhythms and repetitions. We'll parse individual phrases. We may … [Read more...]

It's the time of rustling envelopes, awkward presentations and a deranged gush of thanks or gracelessness. Awards season reaches its Oscar apogee this weekend, while British theatre continues to scatter statuettes over the profession, leading up to the Olivier Awards ceremony on 8 March. As we know, awards are random acts of randomosity and little weight should be attached to who's in and who's … [Read more...]

Performance Monkey's blurb claims that theatregoers sit in the dark. Well, not always. In fact, increasingly less often, as site-specific and promenade productions frequently exploit the visible presence of the spectators and implicate them in the show. None has been more eerie, for me, than Punchdrunk's phantasmagoric Faust in 2006. We crammed beaky white masks over our faces and wandered the … [Read more...]

Most drama we see on stage is historical drama - written, set or referencing the past. Do we ask it to fit our notions of a lost era? Some of these questions popped up the other evening at Barry Lyndon, part of a Stanley Kubrick season at the National Film Theatre in London. My, but it's a brilliantly strange movie - the 18th century but not as we know it. It's the kind of film which is often … [Read more...]

When Britain decides how it should feel about foreigners, it will be a nation transformed. I briefly scratched my head today over the news that comic Omad Djalili, born in London of Iranian parents, will succeed Rowan Atkinson as Fagin in the West End revival of Oliver! in July. A performer whose act riffs off Middle-Eastern stereotypes but whose screen roles often embody them now has a chance to … [Read more...]

Every cultural moment finds the classic drama that will help it make sense of the present, and I have a feeling that the recession could be the time to return to classic German-language plays. Not so much Schiller and Goethe, but the writers who derived their energies from the fertile, febrile decades between the mid-19th and mid-2oth centuries. London awaits major new productions of Brecht's … [Read more...]

Here in Britain we're often accused of living in the past. This week it's true - specifically 1978, our winter of discontent. There have been unexpected snowfalls, London's public transport ground to a halt, post went undelivered and trash uncollected. And last night the power failed, so we sat around with candles and red wine - free from the laptop at last. Dim light and shadows have not only … [Read more...]

Nominations for Britain's glitziest theatre awards, the Oliviers, have been announced, and Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington is chafing at some omissions. In particular, he feels that Gethsemane, David Hare's new play at the National Theatre, has been neglected. There are a zillion things wrong with awards and their randomised outcomes, but on this point Billington seems pretty much alone … [Read more...]

We ran into the pope this summer, as you do. We were aiming for the centre of Cagliari, Sardinia's capital city, but found one street after another was blocked. Traffic accident? Roadworks? Only when someone spotted the 'Il Papa in Sardegna' posters did we realise that his holiness was with us for the day. We began our holiday mooch around, but even on foot, all roads led to the cathedral, and … [Read more...]