As a child, I was never afraid of the dark. I don’t mean actual nighttime (you don’t achieve inky darkness in light-spilling London). But cruelty, sorrow, isolation: these thread their way through many of the best children’s books, reaching out a hand to the solitary reader in his ladybird dressing gown and first pair of glasses. That doesn’t mean gloom-drenched stories. Quite the reverse. My … [Read more...]
New old, same old
The Beggar's Opera and Dead Dog in a Suitcase The world has grown old. There are no new stories, no new songs. We stick to what we know. Comfort-binge legends of sweet romance and poetic justice. Inarguable hard truths of self-serving cruelty. This is the genius of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, and of Dead Dog in a Suitcase, the inspired new version by theatre company Kneehigh. Gay, writing … [Read more...]
War games
It was more than weird to come home on Wednesday night and find MPs voting on British military action in Syria. I had just seen scenes from an earlier conflict, mediated through the giddy solemnity of toy theatre. The Battle of Waterloo by JH Amherst, an improbable meeting of reportage and melodrama, was staged in London in 1824. An eye-popper with real horses and highly painted scenery, it was … [Read more...]
This is what we know
What will your death be like? Probably not like this. Blank, seen in the Bush Theatre’s recent RADAR Festival, is a semi-improvised piece by Nassim Soleimanpour. A one-time-only performer receives a script full of blanks, the key words are missing. Some blanks the performer fills; others are solicited from the audience; and a volunteer is selected to add details from their own biography. When I … [Read more...]
Experiments in humanity
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...]
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...]
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...]