Straight plays “bore everyone” says Graham Norton

by Site Admin on Friday, April 11, 2008
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Celebrity, National, STAC productions, Television

In upcoming STAC production, The Blue Room by David Hare, the character of the Model (Emily Portsmouth) has only been to the theatre to see Phantom of the Opera and says “I only like funny things”. The character of the Playwright (Bob Churchill) asks her, “Have you never been to see a proper play? A serious play I mean?”

Their discussion mirrors the argument between Graham Norton and Kevin Spacey. Spacey has attacked the BBC for airing long-running talent shows (How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, Any Dream Will Do, and I’d Do Anything) which seem to be serial adverts for Andrew Lloyd Webber and various musicals. Norton has defended the BBC as follows:

Maybe [Spacey] should put a musical on and people will go to see that. … I think it would be very bad to do a reality show casting the lead of The Iceman Cometh, called ‘We’d Bore Everyone’.

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The Theatre of War

by Site Admin on Tuesday, April 8, 2008
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National, Newspapers, Online

Michael Kustow, widely experienced man of theatre, writes in the Guardian’s “Comment is free” today, arguing the case for “a radical shake-up” of war as portrayed in theatre.

Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes wrote plays about war while the body bags were still coming home from the war with Sparta that finally sank Athens. They pushed the forms of Greek drama - epic cycle, impassioned debate and convulsive comedy - to breaking point to grapple with war and all its fallouts. In their form as much as their content, plays like The Oresteia, The Trojan Women and Lysistrata broke the mould of theatre. For these dramatists, war was too dehumanising to be left to the chroniclers and historians. Alarms had to be sounded for all citizens through the artifice of theatre.

Today, in the fifth year of the Iraq war and its seemingly endless aftermath, playwrights are beginning to create drama up to the measure of our wartime wasteland.

The whole article continues at Comment is free.