It’s only a moment. Giselle, a migrant seamstress made rootless by a changing world, confronts the dauntingly affluent Bathilde. Their encounter ripples with instinctive distrust (unwittingly, each loves the same guy; this is ballet). Bathilde wears sumptuous black, plume-topped and lace-swathed. Giselle is in faded blue (washed out and washed again) – but she won’t simper, won’t sink in … [Read more...]
Great job. You’re fired
Shakespeare’s Globe yesterday released a baffling public statement. It praised Emma Rice, its new artistic director, for the creative, critical and commercial success of her first season, her achievement in attracting new, diverse audiences. And then it sacked her. Rice will lead one more season, and then she goes – taking, the open-air theatre has decreed, her ‘designed sound and light rigging’ … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the whisky glasses in The Red Barn and No Man’s Land
The past is another country: they drink things differently there. After the gin-marinated 1950s of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, this week I hit the whisky: in the 1960s Connecticut of The Red Barn and then with the 1970s Hampstead topers in Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Gin, in Osborne’s play, is predominantly a woman’s tipple: mother’s ruin, and the ruin of Archie’s maudlin wife Phoebe, loosening … [Read more...]
Madhouse/playhouse
When the great Victorian actor Ellen Terry was preparing to play Ophelia, she visited a London asylum to observe young women who might unlock the character. However, the madwomen were, she wrote, useless for research: ‘too theatrical.’ The interplay between playhouse and madhouse is a theme running unobtrusively through much of Bedlam, a fascinating exhibition at the invaluable Wellcome … [Read more...]
We’ll have a real good time
I rarely meet a revival I don’t like. Classic plays are good for thinking: they re-reveal themselves in each new production, and choices in text and staging function as a conversation between a past and present moment – whether sympathetic discussion or knockdown argument. And then comes Rob Ashford’s benighted retread of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, which doesn’t so much converse with the … [Read more...]
Queering the canon – the new normal?
In John Tiffany’s absorbing production of The Glass Menagerie (seen in New York in 2013, now playing at the Edinburgh International Festival), isolation is a defining note. The Wingfield family’s St Louis apartment is lapped by inky water, so that the rooms appear like islands. They’re marooned. The Wingfields are feely – so much feely – but rarely touchy. Cherry Jones’ mother … [Read more...]
The world is broken. Smile!
Tales from Edinburgh 1 What do you do when the world is broken? You can do worse than laugh. My usual taste is for dystopia, plays for endtimes that will sob you to sleep. I don’t go to the theatre to enjoy myself, thankyouverymuch, I get enough of that at home. And yet, a brief scurry through the Edinburgh Fringe unexpectedly skewed towards the bright – raucous, ramshackle theatre which took … [Read more...]
Propwatch: Richard III’s spine
When archaeologists excavating a Leicestershire car park in 2013 uncovered a battle-scarred skeleton, the emergence of its severely curved spine was the first strong indication that these were the remains of Richard III: England’s most notorious monarch, Shakespeare’s irredeemable villain. Further research and DNA testing supported the archaeologists’ theory: hitting a nerve at the juncture of … [Read more...]
Stainspotting
It’s the pale grey sweaters that are so creepy. Thin, tight, high necked, they cling to the performers’ bodies. They’re nubbled by nipple and you can practically count the ribs. And, within minutes of the two performers launching into the rancid domestic intensities and dance-lunge routines of I Heart Catherine Pistachio, a dark seep of sweat becomes visible. Rockpools under the armpits, rivulets … [Read more...]
Alien nation
London’s my city. Always has been and (I hope) always will. I’m a grandchild of immigrants, and grandchild too of a rootless, vicious century which has played havoc with the idea of home. Home is where you are for now. Home is where you hope you’ll stay, but you don’t count on it. I don’t suppose I’m the only person to keep a mental suitcase under the bed – if I had to, what would I take, where … [Read more...]