Theatre

FUNNY LOOKS LIKE THIS

Robert Butler — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:29:27 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 19th 2011

Alan Ayckbourn's 75th play, "Neighbourhood Watch", which runs Off Broadway till January 1st, is directed by Ayckbourn himself. Plenty of playwrights make a hash of directing their own work, but on BBC Radio 4 yesterday Ayckbourn passed on some tips about his successful lesser-known career as a director.

Quite a lot of decent directing is counterpoint. So you've got something happening, which is the speech end, but something else physically happening, which counterpoints it. I use the plumber-in-the-cupboard analogy. The wife lets in the plumber in the morning. He goes into the pantry and shuts the door, and he's busy working on some pipes in there and she conveniently forgets about him. The husband comes in and she and the husband then have one of those awful rows that only married couples can have.

As Ayckbourn describes the row, the couple almost destroy one another. If you read the dialogue on the page, he points out, it's a hair-raising experience, but when you see it on stage, you see the plumber in the pantry not knowing whether or not to come out before the argument gets any worse. Ayckbourn says,

The audience is then balanced on two sides. Half of them are laughing at the plumber. And the other half are gasping at the row that's going on. read more »

STOPPARD WASN'T HAVEL'S TYPE

Robert Butler — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:42:06 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 19th 2011

Tom Stoppard is our most literary playwright. You can see this in two ways. There's the influence of writers in his work: Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett all contribute to "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". And there's the literal presence of writers in his work: Alexander Herzen in "The Coast of Utopia", James Joyce in "Travesties" and A.E. Housman in "The Invention of Love". Those are all historical examples. The contemporary writer who probably most influenced his work—in "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour", "Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth" and "Professional Foul"—was his friend Václav Havel, the dissident playwright and Czech president, who died yesterday.

In 2006 Stoppard returned to the theme of censorship and freedom of expression with "Rock 'n' Roll", which centred round a rock band's resistance to the Communist regime in Prague in 1968. Two of the characters were based in part on Havel. When Havel was in London to see the premiere he was interviewed by Jasper Rees, a regular contributor to Intelligent Life, who asked him if he would ever return the compliment and consider putting Stoppard in one of his plays. Havel replied,

Tom is a wonderful person and a sensitive and modest man who is also very smart. I tend to get my inspiration from arseholes.

SMALL ISLAND, BIG IDEAS

Robert Butler — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:39:54 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 9th 2011

Western Europeans woke up this morning to discover something very big had happened, but they weren't quite sure what. As The Economist's Charlemagne candidly admitted:

We journalists are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this morning the European Union split in a fundamental way.

It's also clear that the British have returned to their self-image, never far from the surface, as an isolated, go-it-alone, island people. The Financial Times says, "UK left isolated..." Le Monde says "La Grande-Bretagne plus insulaire que jamais." The Daily Mail says, "We're on our own now". The city broker Terry Smith told this morning's Radio 4 listeners that David Cameron was as "isolated as somebody who refused to join the Titanic just before it sailed."

All this will add a certain frisson to tonight's performance of "Richard II", which opened this week at the Donmar in London. The speech that will jump out at the audience is John of Gaunt's in the second act. Michael Hadley breaks into the famous speech, informally, as if approaching it sideways. But there will be no avoiding how his words will resonate with the day's headlines. read more »

IT'S NOT ABOUT SEX

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:09:51 +0000

Even the sassiest of London theatregoers may not have heard of the Ovalhouse. Running since the late 1950s from its South London location, the theatre has kept a low profile. Instead of courting a mainstream audience, it has dedicated itself to working with the dramatically under-represented—with those that, in the West End, have little or no voice at all.

Yet the Ovalhouse’s two new artistic directors, the 28-year-old Rachel Briscoe and 29-year-old Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, are at pains to draw more attention to a theatre that has long been consigned to the margins. “People think of the Ovalhouse as the black theatre or the gay theatre or the women’s theatre,” says Atkinson-Lord. “But surely good theatre appeals to anyone.”

So it is somewhat amusing that these joint “Director of Theatre” found themselves inundated with questions about their sex when they assumed their new roles last year. It is unusual to have two female artistic directors in London, and particularly for them to be under 30. Many wondered whether the theatre would turn more dogmatically feminist. “We found ourselves justifying who we were, what we were doing, and why we wanted to work together,” says Atkinson-Lord. “But my gender has absolutely no bearing on my work. Being female is intrinsically part of who we are but it is not all we talk about.”

The theatre’s new season, entitled “Lady-Led”, wryly takes on such questions. The programme is full of plays written and directed by women. But the hope is that these productions will reach a large audience, despite the gendered conceit. These plays are crafted to speak to “feminists and people who’ve never heard of feminism,” says Briscoe. read more »

MARK RYLANCE'S DIVINE PRESENCE

Isabel Lloyd — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:22:07 +0000

Mark Rylance is a god. That’s not meant in some slobbery, fan-speak sense, but more literally. In the final scene of “Jerusalem”, Jez Butterworth’s violent, comic modern pastoral that recently came home to London after a returns-only run on Broadway, Mr Rylance undergoes an extraordinary physical transformation: in the final seconds, what you see under the green arboreal light, bloodied, sweating, eyes bulging white from his sockets, is not an actor, but Pan, the god of misrule himself.

Usually theatre achieves its magic through trickery—misdirection, trapdoors, smoke and mirrors. But occasionally there’s something more arcane at work. In “The Way of the Actor”—a must-read for drama students since the late 1980s—a British professor of psychology called Brian Bates drew parallels between tribal shamans and the most compelling contemporary actors. With the help of hallucinogenics such as peyote, plus long sessions of repetitive drumming, stamping or clapping, these men and women would appear to change. They might “become” animal totems, ancestor spirits, gods, whatever. But it would always be something greater-than-human, something fiercely compelling that would bind together the group watching.
read more »

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:48:36 +0000

In “Chinglish”, a new Broadway play by David Henry Hwang, an American businessman goes to China to rustle up business for his family's ailing sign-making company. The title of the play refers to those famously kooky translations found in China, where a mundane phrase in English such as "Please keep off the grass" is translated into "I like your smile, but unlike you put your shoes on my face."

Set in Guiyang, a “small” city of 4.3m in south-west China, Mr Hwang’s shrewdly funny play, directed by Leigh Silverman, is performed in English and Mandarin with English supertitles, and features plenty of faux pas and intrigue. But what is surprising is just how well Mr Hwang, a Chinese-American playwright, manages to capture the nuances of rapidly changing China and a shifting global order. He also conveys the skewed expectations that Westerners and Chinese have of each other—and themselves.

Now 54, Mr Hwang pioneered plays with Asian and Asian-American themes in the 1980s. Since then he has worked on a variety of projects, including co-writing the libretto for Elton John’s Broadway musical “Aida”. He is best known for his 1988 play “M. Butterfly”, about a French diplomat who has a 20-year affair with a Chinese singer who turns out to be a man, which won a Tony award and was a Pulitzer-prize finalist. At the time Mr Hwang’s plays were, as he recalls, “exotic ethnic theatre”. But now that China plays a bigger role on the world stage, the country is becoming more visible on a theatrical one. read more »

THE Q&A: ROBERT LOPEZ, COMPOSER

James C. Taylor — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:01:28 +0000

For well over a century the most piercing satire of one of the most widely read works of American fiction, Joseph Smith’s “The Book of Mormon”, could be found in Mark Twain’s 1872 book “Roughing It”. That changed this year, when the populous but still fringe religion made a surprise splash on the Great White Way.

The Broadway musical titled “The Book of Mormon” uses song and dance (and some raunchy language that might turn Twain as white as his suits) to convey the absurdities of Smith’s epic. Despite its frank depiction of religious hypocrisy, the show has wildly defied George S. Kaufman’s famous stage adage that “satire is what closes on Saturday night” and is a runaway box office hit. (The Economist reviews it here.)

When “The Book of Mormon” swept the 2011 Tony awards over the summer it also swept Robert Lopez into the annals of Broadway history. By winning his second Tony award for best score, Mr Lopez joined an illustrious crowd of composers: Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers & Hammerstein), Jerry Herman (“Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Follies”) and Tim Rice (“Evita” and “Aida”). Cole Porter and Kurt Weill each won the award only once. read more »

HAROLD PINTER'S ONE-ACT PLAYS

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:38:18 +0000

Harold Pinter's plays are rarely comforting. From his breakthrough with “The Birthday Party” in 1958 until his death in 2008, he specialised in taut dialogue, uncomfortable situations and a surreal, dark humour. “One for the Road” and “Victoria Station”, two rarely performed one-act plays from the 1980s, are duly unsettling works of brilliant theatre. They deserve to be seen more often, so it is good news that a co-production between The Print Room and the Young Vic is running through this weekend in London. read more »

LIFE ON STAGE AFTER DEATH

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:13:47 +0000

"Kaddish (or The Key in the Window)” opens with the figure of the poet crouching, physically twisted in the attempt to recover a tormented past. For its 50th anniversary, Allen Ginsberg’s searing narrative poem has been reimagined as a memory play by Donnie Mather and his director, Kim Weild. Mr Mather looks nothing like the young Ginsberg, but his possession of the poem is so astonishing that the shadow he casts against the whitewashed brick wall of the stage uncannily resembles the poet. The play consists of almost all of “Kaddish”, and the production manages to integrate the eternal cast of poetry with the ephemeral nature of theatre.

After years of crises, suicide attempts, hospitalizations and insulin electroshock treatments that ended in a prefrontal lobotomy, Ginsberg’s mother Naomi died of a stroke in Pilgrim State Hospital on June 9th 1956. Having found some measure of happiness and stability living in Berkeley with Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg was told of her death in a telegram. Over the next few years he travelled and planned his “Kaddish or the Sea Poem, irregular lines each perfect. Now all is changed for me, as all is changed for thee, Naomi.” He ended with the charge to himself: “Write Kaddish.” Back in New York City in November 1958, under the guidance of William Carlos Williams and influenced by Whitman, Shelley, Blake and Hart Crane, Ginsberg sat and wrote for 36 hours, fuelled by coffee, boiled eggs, morphine and methamphetamine, and completed most of what Robert Lowell called “his terrible masterpiece.” read more »

SHOWS TO LOOK FORWARD TO

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:58:51 +0000

A sudden chill in the air means that the new Broadway season is nearly under way. In addition to Stephen Sondheim's acclaimed musical “Follies”, a revival of which opened in September (starring Bernadette Peters), curtains will rise on 16 new productions before the end of the year. Some beloved stage stars will be making their way back to Broadway in the process, such as Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin. With the season poised to burst into full bloom, we asked a dozen of the biggest names on Broadway—from seasoned directors to Tony-award winners to incoming stars—for their "must see" recommendations.

Michael Cerveris
(Tony award for best featured actor in a musical for ASSASSINS; will perform in the EVITA revival in 2012)

Must see: DETROIT, a new play by Lisa D'Amour, which premiered at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2010
"I've seen [Ms D'Amour]'s previous grassroots and experimental work and am eager to see how her smart, poetic and lyric voice makes the transition to a more traditional theatrical environment. Add to that the visceral acting style of Steppenwolf Theatre and the soulfulness of director Austin Pendleton, and you have the makings of a very exciting new American play."

Josh Gad
(Now performing in THE BOOK OF MORMON, which won the 2011 Tony for best new musical) read more »