Archives for March 2018

It was Chekhov who defined the essential rule of theatre props. ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall,’ he told a friend in 1889, ‘then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.’ It doesn’t need to go off in predictable ways – Uncle Vanya proves that – but without the bang, it’s just window-dressing. When I saw the emergency axe pinioned high on … [Read more...]