Theatre

ON THE MENTAL SPECTRUM

Rebecca Willis — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:41:54 +0000

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, May 4th 2012

Watching “The Bridge”, the latest offering of Scandinavian noir to reach our TV screens, makes me feel hopeful—despite the increasingly dark deeds of the criminal mastermind who's keeping the police of Copenhagen and Malmö on their toes. That's because of our heroine, Saga Noren. She has the white-blonde good looks of a Swedish ice queen and an unusual brain under all that hair. Saga can’t read social signals, can't relate emotionally to other people, and takes everything literally, at face value. In short, she is somewhere on the autistic spectrum. "I don't think she knows she has Aspergers", the actress Sofia Helin, who plays her so convincingly, told Time Out. "The writer Hans [Rosenfeldt] was very precise about this. She just thinks she's odd". Label or not, she makes Sara Lund in "The Killing" just look mildly workaholic. read more »

ACTING LIKE RUPERT MURDOCH

Robert Butler — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:34:38 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 1st 2012 read more »

A 17TH-CENTURY MIKE LEIGH

Isabel Lloyd — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:37:42 +0000

~ Posted by Isabel Lloyd, April 27th 2012

Just in time for his birthday, it’s been announced that Shakespeare got some help writing “All’s Well That Ends Well”. The stylistic fingerprints of Thomas Middleton, WS’s younger, hipper contemporary, are all over some sections of the text, researchers say; they go on to paint a picture of early-17th-century theatre as a place of creative cross-fertilisation and collaboration, like “a film studio with teams of writers". Britain’s most feted genius farmed out bits of scripts to underlings? You can almost smell the bile rising in the dress circle.

But at the risk of being pelted with rotten tomatoes, I have a pet theory of my own. At university, studying Shakespeare and with an eye on a career in theatre, I was constantly puzzled by the flatness of some of Shakespeare’s female characters, particularly the young ones. The liveliest young women—Rosalind and Viola—dressed up as young men. Miranda, Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia—more often than not, they seemed like ciphers that stuff happened to, simply to further the plot. My instincts rebelled against the thought of playing these girls—all they were was pretty and nice, and a bit irritating sometimes. No meat to them. But I put it down to dodgy 17th-century sexual politics, and trotted off to drama school. read more »

FROM SHAKESPEARE TO HUFFPO

Robert Butler — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:26:10 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 23rd 2012

The birthday tributes to Shakespeare today range from the launch of the World Shakespeare Festival to the publication of a sonnet by Mark Ravenhill, best known as the author of the play "Shopping and Fucking". Ravenhill's sonnet quotes him twice (both times from "The Tempest") and mentions him three times ("Shagsbeer", "Shaxpeer", "Will-full"), but the distinctive Shakespearean argument—the theme, the development of theme, the counter-theme and the reversal—are missing. You wouldn't know from Ravenhill's sonnet that he had read any of Shakespeare's.

Another birthday tribute this morning came from Arianna Huffington who tweeted, "Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare! Whoever you were, there's never been anyone like you." This brought a blunt retort from @brokenbottleboy: "You know that he was paid for his work?" (Not only paid, of course, but a shareholder too.) Nothing marks the 400-year gap between Shakespeare's world and ours more than a website that attracts 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54m comments in a year, and yet its best-known aspect is that it doesn't pay for its content. read more »

BETWEEN THE POSTS: 3

Robert Butler — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:38:35 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 20th 2012

In yesterday's post, "Bradley Manning's Education", we noted that it's possible to watch Tim Price's new play "The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning", which is performed this week at Cardiff High School, on your laptop at home. The play starts at 7.30pm BST, and there's a sizeable online audience watching from Europe, Canada, America and Australia. Last night this blogger was one of them. The Cardiff audience filed in and took their seats—quite literally, as the seats were handed to them by actors in combat gear—and the internet audience watched through the CCTV cameras in the hall. Even on a computer screen, it was a gripping and illuminating piece of theatre. One thing was clear: to feel part of the theatre audience, whether you were 150 miles away or, in the case of many others, several thousand miles away, you had to watch it live. I only had one tiny criticism. At the end, the cast should have taken a bow in the direction of the CCTV cameras and their global audience. We would have clapped too. read more »

BRADLEY MANNING'S EDUCATION

Robert Butler — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:40:34 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, April 19th 2012

It's the part of the story most people don't know. The year after Susan Manning divorced her husband, she left Oklahoma with her 13-year-old son, Bradley, and moved back to Wales. They lived in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire and Bradley went to the Tasker Milward school. At 17, he returned to America, joining the army in 2007, where his IT skills led to a job as an intelligence analyst. Most people know the next bit: in May 2010 Bradley Manning was arrested on suspicion of passing on 250,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks.

The youngish Welsh playwright Tim Price has written a play that moves between Bradley's teenage years in Wales and his solitary confinement in Quantico, Virginia, while also weaving in famous radical moments in Welsh history that might have influenced him. "The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning" had its previews at Tasker Milward last week (Manning's mother was in the audience). This week it's performed at Cardiff High School, and next week at Connah's Quay High School.

These may sound like improbable locations for a play staged by the National Theatre of Wales, but the company performs all round Wales, indoors and outdoors. Their production last year of Aeschylus's "The Persians", for instance, was staged in a deserted village owned by the Ministry of Defence. But you won't need to be in the school hall to watch tonight's performance. You can follow CCTV footage of the production through Adobe Flash Player and this live webstream gives additional links for background information. read more »

KING'S SPEECH STUTTERS ON STAGE

Simon Willis — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:42:04 +0000

~ Posted by Simon Willis, March 29th 2012

There aren't many plays that work better as movies, but perhaps "The King's Speech" is one of them. David Seidler wrote the story for the stage and then it found fame—and a hatful of Oscars—as a movie. All this happened by chance. The film's British director, Tom Hooper, has explained how his mother, who is Australian, was invited by friends to a rehearsed reading at a small theatre in north London of an unproduced play about an Australian speech therapist and the King. Afterwards she rang her son and told him she had found his next project.

This week the stage version received its premiere in London, directed by Adrian Noble, the one-time head of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Even as a movie, it had felt quite stagey: the most important scenes take place in a single room, where George VI, aka Bertie, is treated for his stammer by his unconventional Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue. This was a good old-fashioned two-hander. Psychologically, it felt theatrical too: here was a piece about a man constricted by power he doesn't want and a disability he cannot shake.

And yet seeing it last night at the Wyndham's, I still felt that I wanted the focus to be even narrower. This was no fault of the actors. Where Geoffrey Rush's Logue had an edge of eccentricity, Jonathan Hyde's is dry, hollowed out, much more the insecure colonial. And Charles Edwards' Bertie is gawkier than Colin Firth's, wearing a crown but emotionally still in shorts. Anyone who's seen the movie will remember how certain lines are said, but Edwards and Hyde make each line their own. read more »

"LES MIS" BEHIND BARS

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:59:58 +0000

~ Posted by Samantha Weinberg, March 12th 2012 read more »

THE DEBT WE OWE THE GREEKS

Robert Butler — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:18:28 +0000

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 20th 2012 read more »

CATE ON THE COVER

Tim de Lisle — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:36:57 +0000

~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, February 17th 2012

The new edition of Intelligent Life is on the streets now in Britain and across Europe. It’s our 20th issue, and the first to feature something that is commonplace, verging on compulsory, at many magazines: a cover photo shoot with an actress—Cate Blanchett, probably the first leading lady to turn her back on Hollywood to run a theatre company.

When other magazines photograph actresses, they routinely end up running heavily Photoshopped images, with every last wrinkle expunged. Their skin is rendered so improbably smooth that, with the biggest stars, you wonder why the photographer didn’t just do a shoot with their waxwork.

It’s a supreme example of having it both ways. Publishers want a recognisable person on the cover, with a real career; but they also want an empty vessel—for clothes and jewellery and make-up, which often seem to be supplied by the advertisers with the most muscle. (One cover shoot we spotted this week even had a credit for a fragrance. You would hope that the readers smelt a rat.) The actresses end up playing two conflicting roles: both modern women and throwbacks, both something to aspire to and something to negate.

Cate Blanchett, by contrast, appears on our cover in her working clothes, with the odd line on her face and faint bags under her eyes. She looks like what she is—a woman of 42, spending her days in an office, her evenings on stage and the rest of her time looking after three young children. We can’t be too self-righteous about it, because, like anyone else who puts her on a cover, we are benefiting from her beauty and distinction. But the shot is at least trying to reflect real life. It’s a curious sign of the times that this has become something to shout about. read more »