You can’t look glamorous when eating a fried egg. Or tragic, or sombre, or noble. Can’t be done. As Hester, the anguished heroine of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, Helen McCrory is all of those things for much of the evening. But not when she’s forking down an egg. (If you fear that knowing when McCrory eats her egg, or why, may spoil it for you, best come back in a few weeks. Let’s meet up … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the sock in Phaedra(s)
British audiences are no longer scared of European theatre. It has taken us years – decades – to feel relaxed about non-representational stagings, actors stripped of plummy tones, the fourth wall not only breached but blown to smithereens. Ivo van Hove and Thomas Ostermeier are our adorable foreign uncles who visit every couple of years with cool gifts. Katie Mitchell, Simon Stephens and Lyndsey … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the invisible chairs in Boy
Our chat before Boy began was all about the travelator. The Almeida Theatre has been reconfigured for Leo Butler’s play to allow a moving walkway to snake around the space. Actors were already sitting, gliding past and waiting for something to happen (the play opens in a GP’s waiting room). But how are they sitting? It took us a minute to realise that there were no chairs on the travelator. … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the mop in The Flick
No one selects a mop for its glamour. The mop that appears in the second half of The Flick is dowdier than most – a disconsolate tangle that once a day swabs the stickier kinds of refuse in a failing Massachusetts movie theatre. I don’t know if the mop I saw at the National Theatre had appeared, like actors Louisa Krause and Matthew Maher, in Sam Gold’s original New York production (photo above … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the cake in Kings of War
A good prop isn’t a decoration or a bystander but a player. The cake that dominates the stage picture midway through Ivo van Hove’s Kings of War is never mere set dressing. It’s the closest thing to a UN peacekeeping mission in this production of Shakespeare’s fractious history plays: glistening with promise yet ultimately doomed. When the Duke of York seizes power, he remodels the war room in … [Read more...]