“Theatre can change people’s lives” - especially with free tickets

by Site Admin on Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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National

Culture secretary Andy Burnham announced at the Labour Party conference this morning that £2.5m of public money will be made available to give 18 to 26-year-olds free tickets to plays at 95 publicly funded venues. These include the Birmingham Rep, the Young Vic and the National Theatre, though sadly there is no word that Worcester’s Swan is on the list.

Mr Burnham spake thus:

“Theatre can change people’s lives, it can give them new insights, it can broaden their minds and help them achieve their potential.

“The Tories regard this as a luxury for those who can afford it.

“There was a period in this country when, sport, culture and arts were seen as add-ons. [But t]his is what gives people quality of life.”

See the Guardian: Government to provide free theatre tickets for young people.

Nintendo-inspired theatre

by Site Admin on Monday, August 11, 2008
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National

Here’s one we’ve unfortunately missed: a play based on the life and times of Princess Zelda and her heroic often-time rescuer, Link, both characters from the long running Zelda series on multiple Nintendo gaming platforms.

The production by the Foolhardy players, entitled Liink & Zellda (do you think the misspelling will protect them from copyright infringement? - or is that why the play is now closing? I can’t think of any other possible reason why its run is over already) updates the fairy tale, finding the troublesome twosome no longer living in domestic bliss.

Liink and Zellda do what they always do to obtain the Tryforce. She gets into trouble and loses it. And he saves her and gets it back. But, after Liink and Zellda come to blows, they part ways to decide what’s best for them – can they survive alone?

Unfortunately, Liink and Zellda closes tonight in London.

(Via BoingBoing.)

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.

Protest the Derby Playhouse closure

by Site Admin on Wednesday, December 5, 2007
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National

The famous regional theatre, Derby Playhouse, is in administration, as of last Thursday. Their website is displaying a closure notice with all other content ripped from the site.

See:

• Derby Playhouse official site
• Save Derby Playhouse protest site
• Facebook Group: Save Derby Playhouse

• Guardian: Derby Playhouse closes its doors after council refuses pleas for emergency funds
• Lyn Gardner on Guardian Unlimited: It’s time to rethink regional theatre
• BBC: Cash crisis closes theatre doors

Residents are up in arms at the closure. The board argues that audiences were hit by major regeneration works ordered by the council, but the council refused to provide any additional funding to run the theatre over the Christmas period, which would have seen it collect on £200,000 worth of sales for their seasonal production, Treasure Island.

One comment on the Lyn Gardner blog at Guardian Unlimited said:

What is most telling is that the cast, crew and staff proceeded with their swansong of Treasure Island against the board’s wishes. I believe such dignity and resilience should be rewarded, Derby deserves a great theatre and the Playhouse deserves a chance for redemption.

Sixty to seventy people directly employed by the theatre lost their jobs without warning.

The last, lost Ayckbourn comedy rediscovered

by Site Admin on Friday, November 2, 2007
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National, Newspapers

Someone must be doing a thorough search through the British Library! Only this summer came news of the discovery of a long lost Noel Coward play (the Swan Theatre Amateur Company will be performing another Noel Coward comedy, Private Lives, in February). And now — only weeks after STAC’s production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking — an early Ayckbourn thought lost forever has been rediscovered in the national archives. Love After All was the popular playwright’s second ever script.

The Guardian reports:

The only gap in the canon of works by Britain’s most successful living playwright, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, has been filled by the discovery of a play which was thought to have been destroyed nearly half a century ago.

Briefly staged in 1959 at Scarborough, the writer’s long-standing base, the comedy Love After All was never performed again and even at the time consisted of only a handful of typed scripts for actors and stage staff.

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Comment: The phantom crescent strikes The Phantom Crescent

by Bob Churchill on Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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International, National

The relative liberalism to which theatre is treated in the UK is not universal. A play satirising the “hypocritical” exercise of Sharia law in Nigeria was banned last week… by a Sharia court.

A hisbah Sharia enforcement squad, accused of human rights abuses, and a particular target of Shehu Sani’s The Phantom Crescent

It is sometimes easy to forget — in a middle-class theatre in Middle Britain — that as well as providing entertainment, the theatre is a traditional organon of dissent and advocacy.

There have been some (mainly religious) highly publicised objections to some dramatic content in the UK in recent years (such as the Christian Voice-orchestrated protests against Jerry Springer The Opera, which resulted in significant loss of sponsorship and some tour dates, and the violent Sikh protests against Behzti in Birmingham, which resulted in the theatre halting the run). However there is little government control (the Tricycle Theatre was able to stage Called To Account in April this year which pointedly asked whether Tony Blair should be indicted for the Iraq War, for example).

But criticism of the ruling elites and their enforcement squads in Nigeria has landed one playwright in court, his performances outlawed and his book banned.

Selected text from allAfrica.com, “Kaduna Sharia Court Bans Book” follows below.

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Noel Coward’s lost play

by Site Admin on Monday, September 17, 2007
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National, Newspapers

With auditions only just undertaken for STAC’s February 2008 production of Private Lives, another of Noel Coward’s comedies of manners and morals has surfaced in a dusty archive at the British Library.

The playwright’s estate has confirmed that the script is probably the sole surviving copy of The Better Half, a play only previously mentioned in one list of performances for a London theatre. The only copy is complete with annotations by the theatrical censor. (The censor objected to hints that the female characters may have actually had their own sex drives. Shocking, of course.)

The full text The Better Half will be published in November.

See “Coward’s long-lost satire was almost too ‘daring’ about women” from the Guardian.

Two ancient Greek plays in modern Edinburgh

by Site Admin on Monday, September 10, 2007
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National, Newspapers

The Guardian has had two interesting articles by directors in the last few days, both giving the director’s view on interpreting Greek plays for modern audiences at Edinburgh this year.

Euripides’ The Bacchae, directed by David Grieg, sees a lusty cross-dressing Alan Cumming in the role of sublime Dionysus, the sexually charged god of wine, dance, music, “otherness” and “release”. And Aristophanes’ Lysistrata — in which women of different ethnicities stormed the Acropolis and withheld sex from the male husbands and lovers — is updated as Lisa’s Sex Strike by Blake Morrison.

Theatre and film star, McKellen, attacks Singaporean anti-gay law

by Site Admin on Friday, July 20, 2007
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Celebrity, National, Newspapers

Currently on tour in Singapore with the RSC’s King Lear, the popular actor Ian McKellen, also widely respected for his forthright stance to upholding gay rights, has blasted the host country for its laws which outlaw gay sex — an “offence” of “gross indecency” which carries no less than a potential ten year prison sentence. The criticisms are said to have stung Singaporean authorities trying to improve the image of the country.

McKellen has become something of a poster boy for British theatre. He perhaps entered the true mainstream with a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his role in the acclaimed Gods and Monsters, and has since starred as Gandalf in the global success Lord of the Rings trilogy, before triumphantly returning to the theatre.

The text of the Independent article follows below.

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