A comment on the Guardian’s review of The Testament of Mary, currently at London's Barbican, described Fiona Shaw’s performance as ‘19th century’ in style. I’m not sure the term fits such an arrestingly contemporary performer – I suspect they just meant ‘big’. Which it no doubt is. Shaw, like Simon Russell Beale, whose King Lear in London was recently broadcast in the NT Live series, is a singular … [Read more...]
But where’s the dinosaur?
Is there a tougher crowd in the world than a roomful of toddlers on a Sunday morning? So, this happened. A shipwrecked girl has crawled from the waves, and nervously approaches the cave of a weird, rabbitty scavenging creature. It’s a tense moment. My nephew has a question. ‘Will she have a dinosaur with her?’ he asks. He seems disappointed when his mother whispers that, no, there’s no … [Read more...]
Little hawks
Polite. Agreeable. Well-behaved. These are not terms that should come to mind when you evoke the seamy edges of Jacobean drama, but they were the impression left by The Malcontent, John Martson’s swingeing tragic-comedy, originally written for a company of child actors, and now revived by Shakespeare’s Globe Young Players. Marston was 26 at the play’s premiere. He was enmeshed in the combative, … [Read more...]
Get real
From your mouth to the director’s ear – that has been one idea of verbatim theatre. Using the words, experiences and sometimes the very inflections of interviewees as the basis for a production, verbatim has often seem to offer theatre a bracing hit of ‘pure’ reality, a window into authentic documentary material. But like all theatrical forms, verbatim is a shape-shifting beast. Last … [Read more...]
Silence by Shakespeare
The challenge with basing a ballet on Shakespeare isn’t, oddly, watching the words fall away. That’s a given. It’s how you mine the silences, the telling moments in which ambiguities cluster and on which the story turns. Christopher Wheeldon’s fascinating new ballet (for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada) of The Winter’s Tale – the first recorded of that brilliantly strange late … [Read more...]
*sorry face*
An actor looking to real life to research their next apology face might be disconcerted by Maria Miller. On Thursday, the UK government Culture Secretary was forced to make a public apology in the House of Commons for having (technical term) diddled her expenses. She could have wept with sorrow for misdeeds rightly punished; blushed because she’d been censored for having obstructed the inquiry; … [Read more...]
What did you do in the war, mummy?
How do you stage warfare? In a year commemorating the centenary of the First World War, the conflict resists direct dramatisation. Naturalism struggles to capture the scale, and bathos might demean the dead. Dance embodied yet abstract vocabulary, a wordless form offers an opportunity to articulate the unspeakable. The choreographers in Lest We Forget, English National Ballet’s profoundly wrought … [Read more...]
Candy-coloured world of stupid
Musicals should have jokes and tap dancing. There, I’ve said it. I’ve long thought it, sitting in the dark while leather-lunged belters lay about with coshes made of bombast and earnestness. Jokes and tap dancing, people. Jokes and tap dancing. Most musicals I see are for review, rather than on my own dollar. Partly that’s because that dollar doesn’t take you very far at West End prices (I will … [Read more...]
Speak, memory
How do you imagine your memory? As a rheumatic showgirl going through her old paces; a disembodied mouth yabbering its hoard; a frolicsome performance troupe or a whirring tape machine, speaking into the void? Memory is the story the mind tells itself about itself, the unreliable biography that is all we’ve got. We build it up and then it starts to fall through our fingers. But how do you put … [Read more...]
Diversity? Just do it
At the Royal Opera House, ethnic diversity is usually more apparent among the ushers than the audience, but Ballet Black attracts a more varied crowd than the swanky home company can manage. This was evident in the ROH’s Linbury Theatre last night. And it was a rather good evening – two serious short pieces and, by Arthur Pita, the most deliriously enjoyable dance work of this short year. But … [Read more...]