Archives for March 2009

It's a stage set waiting to happen. Freud only used his study in Hampstead for a year before his death in 1939, but the furniture, books and multifarious artefacts were transported from Vienna when his supporters brokered a deal that allowed him out of Nazi Austria. The house - in which Freud's daughter Anna also lived and practiced, until her own death in 1982 - is now the Freud Museum. A visitor … [Read more...]

There are many strange things about Marlowe's first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, now revived at the National Theatre. Not that such a sardonic, cruel and plangent piece of theatre has been largely neglected for decades by the British stage. Nor that its construction is teasing (the squabbling gods interfere horribly with the hearts and minds of Dido and Aeneas, then lose interest and disappear … [Read more...]

A filmed display in the new theatre galleries at the V&A shows snippets of rehearsals from the National Theatre's The Wind in the Willows in 1990. Adapted by Alan Bennett from the British riverbank classic, it was a successful family show, easily transmuting its crotchety bachelor beasts (mole, toad, rat and badger) into roles for seasoned character actors. As the film indicates, their research … [Read more...]

They do these things differently in France. The thing in this case being not exquisite cuisine or bristling political protest, but how to approach their national tragic playwright. Last week I went to Oxford to see Cheek By Jowl's bracing, nervy production of Racine's 1667 tragedy Andromaque on its British tour (there's a brief review here). The production opened at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris in … [Read more...]

Looking for Hamlet in a theatre display? At the new Theatre and Performance Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, you can see the prompt book and skull (signed by the cast) from the Royal Court's 1980 production starring Jonathan Pryce. There are Edward Gordon Craig's boldly monolithic sketches for his set designs. Or, rather madly, a Hamlet-themed costume for the girlie … [Read more...]

How do you tell a life through dance? Or, at least, give an impression of someone's life and work. A conventional printed biography can do this: but ballet? Kenneth MacMillan's attempt to encapsulate the phenomenon that was Isadora Duncan was considered tantalising but uneven when it premiered in 1981. An ambitious project, Isadora was a full-length ballet which cast two Isadoras - a dancer and an … [Read more...]

What are the uses of 'abroad' to a playwright? In a piece I wrote earlier today for the Guardian theatre blog, I wondered a little about how British playwrights had historically used foreign locations, and why. In Renaissance drama, this is particularly striking - above all, the Mediterranean was the place they selected for romances and identical twins, for baroque masques of poisoning and … [Read more...]

We often think about sound and vision in theatre - but what about smell? I saw a cracking first play at the Royal Court Theatre last night - A Miracle by Molly Davies, set in rural Norfolk, the arable corner of eastern England. The audience sat on all four sides of a small stage, which was floored with damp mud, scrubby bits of grass and a mess of fallen leaves turning to sludge by the roundabout. … [Read more...]

So many books, so little shelf space. I was weeding out playtexts today (I come from a line of great-aunt hoarders, and know that there's a bags-in-the-bathtub scenario which sits at the worst-case end of the stockpile spectrum). There's a version of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler that I've been havering over. It's by Lucy Kirkwood, and, to be honest, is pretty flawed. Performed by the Gate Theatre in … [Read more...]

'You can't come in without your ticket,' said the usher at the Roundhouse as I made my way back after the interval of Hofesh Shechter's rousing dance set. 'But but but, I've just come out of there,' I spluttered. 'I've left my coat on the seat. I've left my gloves!' Suddenly, I sounded like an Edwardian baronet. Thankfully a lovely press officer intervened and got me back inside before I could … [Read more...]