Archives for 2009

What has Robert Wilson been up to? Well, he's clearly been busy busy busy in recent years, according to his website, but we wouldn't know that here in London. For a while, his work frequently visited the city: it opened the first BITE season at the Barbican in 1997 (with the splashy but dodgy Monsters of Grace, complete with a score by Philip Glass and whizzy 3D glasses. All I really remember is a … [Read more...]

Along with Sir David Hare and other theatre groupies, I've been to Berlin. It's a good place for theatre right now - Thomas Ostermeir's chillingly revelatory Hedda Gabler has toured internationally (his Ibsen explorations continue with what sounds like a mighty John Gabriel Borkman). But I was visiting what was for decades the archetypal German company - the Berliner Ensemble. On the river, its … [Read more...]

The small bones are so fiddly - it's easier to play with something bigger. After looking around for a moment, I spot a fibula and start to twist it. Yes, I'm a critic but, despite popular belief, I'm not actually a serial killer. The bones are made of brown cardboard, and the entire audience is playing with them, standing around tables in groups of ten on the stage at Sadler's Wells. This is You … [Read more...]

I do love a stage auteur. The kind of director - Robert Wilson, Katie Mitchell, David Alden - who has a beady eye for every detail, for every moment on stage, in whose productions every element of a work - performance, direction, movement, design - to work towards a particular vision. The level of theatrical intelligence in their shows is so acute that their productions are never lifeless, but … [Read more...]

Virtually throughout Tusk Tusk, the piercing second play by 22-year-old Polly Stenham, the only characters on stage are 16 and younger. Maggie and her two brothers are kidding themselves that everything will be alright, even though there's no indication that their severely depressed mother will return several days after her unmedicated flit from their new home. They hide from the doorbell, … [Read more...]

The Victorian physician John Conolly, who specialised in care of the mentally ill, urged actresses to visit his London asylum when they approached the role of Ophelia and observe his own patients. This would give them, he believed, a better idea of how to assume the role of a madwoman. In 1870, Ellen Terry took up the idea, but found it of little use - the madwomen, she asserted, were much 'too … [Read more...]

Any readers wondering what London is like at this time of year? Well, you and me both. It's been a strange week, most of which I've spent moaning softly and consumed with self-pity in my bed. And this differs how from the monkey's routine? Well, this time I've been unwell. London seems to have been gripped by some seasonal lurgy, and the bravest and best of our generation have been clutching their … [Read more...]

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...]