The writer Veronica Horwell likes to describe acting as laboratory for human behaviour, and believes that actors try out ways of expressing and inhabiting ideas and emotion. It’s a brilliant idea – acting on behalf of humanity – that I find endlessly helpful when thinking about why we value acting, and how to read it. Messy, imperfect theatre, changing from night to night, may not allow sterile … [Read more...]
Stop all the clocks
Directors have been shuttling between theatre and opera for decades now. Makes sense. Both forms tell stories, establish tension, explore characters and ideas. Ten years after Peter Gelb took charge at the Met, directors with stage cred (Bartlett Sher, Richard Eyre) have become recurring guests, while John Berry, ENO’s departed chief, hired Complicite’s Simon McBurney and Improbable’s Phelim … [Read more...]
Spectator sport
Georgian theatre going was not for the faint hearted. Dandies in the pit, doxies in the boxes, light fingers filching your pockets. If it wasn’t the fire that got you, it was the riots. I could cope with all that, given enough wig powder and beauty spots. But I’d think twice about the visibility. Until the Victorians contrived to lower the house lights and steep the audience in shadow, … [Read more...]
Come for the sex dolls, stay for the protest
The Young Vic is calf deep in sex dolls. Tacky plastic fake-flesh spills over the stage as Measure for Measure begins, a ‘huge peach heap of vinyl orifices,’ as critic Natasha Tripney wrote. Mouths agape, legs akimbo, pneumatic and tumescent, it’s a prospect of everready rut. Officials pick their way gingerly through them: the deputy Angelo (Paul Ready) raising his bible to avoid … [Read more...]
No hope for Hamlet
Benedict Cumberbatch made me cry at Hamlet. Or, more precisely, at the curtain call, with a beautifully feeling, indignant and compassionate appeal for Save the Children’s work in the Syrian refugee crisis. Much of that intelligence and eloquence is in his eagerly awaited prince (the expectancy and rose of the fair state, and then some) – delivered to the most attentive audience in London –but … [Read more...]
Sweet enough for you?
Advance booking for the theatre can backfire. I saw Medea at London's Almeida Theatre yesterday, so missed the UK’s major television event – the final of the Great British Bake Off. Medea was, yeah, interesting and all – but it didn’t produce the swirls of joy and empathetic tears provoked by Nadiya Hussain’s three-tiered victory. I have only just left BBC i-player, my cheeks a lemon drizzle of … [Read more...]
Not the fast car
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...]
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...]