How do you dance a midlife crisis? Hofesh Shechter is one of Britain’s most popular choreographers – someone who tugs non-dance fans into the theatre, drawn by the meaty savour of whomping percussion and pulse-tingling sequences of elastic, stomping movement. His work is brainy, full-blooded, unafraid of an argument. It rocks the Royal Opera House and plays by gig rules. As he turns 40, … [Read more...]
Archives for 2015
Road movie
London Road should never have worked on stage. It really shouldn’t work on screen. It's a musical about a horrible news story – a series of murders of prostitutes in eastern England committed by Steve Wright, who was convicted in 2006. The writer Alecky Blythe, who has developed a morally telling form of verbatim theatre that preserves her interviewees’ vocal quirks and stumbles, paired up with … [Read more...]
Act of worship
Status update: Waiting for Godot and I have decided to stop seeing each other. I guess it won’t come as a surprise. Things have been pretty bad for a while. Looking back, I can’t remember when we were last happy. Or even interested in each other. In my head, I have a perfect version of Samuel Beckett’s play: not in the details of staging, just one that has some of the effect I’ve had when … [Read more...]
Second act
Sylvie Guillem and the changing shape of a dance career The options for a dancer when the plié turns to rust have conventionally been restricted. Teacher, family or ballet mistress. Some became choreographers or artistic directors; others, it was rumoured, were lured behind the opera house with the promise of fresh pasture and sugar lumps and never heard from again. Sylvie Guillem changed … [Read more...]
The old story
The death of a child – in theatre – is tragedy. The decline of a parent, perplexity. Most western theatregoers don’t live in melodrama, but in the mess of every day, inching forward in anxiety. Theatre can offer the consolation of an underexplored situation being known: it’s something to be seen. Three times recently I’ve wandered out of the theatre almost in a daze, hollowed out by productions … [Read more...]
Trouble in mind
Woolf Works How do you dance consciousness? The play of thought, memory, imagination? Maybe you find someone who explored how to write thought – to put the process of reflection and remembering, how they scud and deepen and feel, into words. That writer might be Virginia Woolf. Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s exceptional new piece – his first full-length for the Royal Ballet, where he is … [Read more...]
Election night at the theatre
You might as well spend the evening of a national election at the National Theatre: it should be, among other things, somewhere where a nation can speak to itself. So that’s where I went. Rufus Norris’ first programme as artistic director offers a spread of voices arguing about how humans should act towards each other: environmentally (Everyman), maritally (The Beaux’ Stratagem) and … [Read more...]
Fight and flight
‘It’s a jungle out there.’ Alexander McQueen’s voice emerges from a garble of colleagues and observers at the beginning of Savage Beauty, the mighty survey of the fashion designer’s work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Much has been made of how he designed with his sisters in mind – provoked by a need to protect them. Yes, it’s a jungle out there. But it’s also a jungle in here – in … [Read more...]
Tralalalala
What’s the most haunting moment of Carmen? The rousing toreador’s song? One of the stompy dances? Carmen’s own teasingly lush habanera? Maybe. Or maybe it’s the wordless, taunting snatch of melody with which Carmen taunts Don José – the soldier already in thrall to her, dick and epaulettes caught in a hopeless struggle. ‘Tralalalala,’ she hums, as if to herself. ‘Tralalalala.’ It the perfect, … [Read more...]
Almost invisible
It has taken me a while to work out why I often have a problem with immersive theatre. In theory, it’s marvellous – upending the staid conventions of bourgeois propriety, escaping the proscenium’s gilt and plush, the middle class’s guilt and hush. Opening the theatre to the world. Letting the world into the theatre. Yep to all that. That’s not my problem. The problem is that, once you let in … [Read more...]