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.

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.)

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’.

It is true that it’s harder to whip up interest for “straight” plays. Does this tell us more about “boring” plays, or about the image of straight theatre, or about audience culture? Television is increasingly filmed in quicker and quicker scenes, with the camera always moving. Can modern audiences simply not cope with more involved drama, if it is stripped of attention-stirring frequent scene changes and without the added glitz of familiar music?

Well… at least The Blue Room has a jazz trio accompanying the action!

For an old-skool night out at a “proper” play, The Blue Room is showing from 29th April until the 3rd May. Worcester Live box office: 01905 611 427.

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.

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 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.

So what is Love After All?

Love After All was his second play, based loosely on The Barber of Seville. A contemporary social skit with many of the hallmarks of Ayckbourn’s later work, it tells the story of a father trying to marry off his daughter to a rich husband, with true love triumphing in the end.

The discovery of the play apparently completes the Scarborough archive of Ayckbourn plays.

No news yet on whether or when Love After All will be re-published. Could it be a future STAC production…?

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.

An Upper Sharia Court in Tudun Wada, Kaduna, has banned the sale, staging or any form of distribution of The Phantom Crescent, a play published by a notable civil rights activist and poet, Shehu Sani. [...The play] allegedly lampoons the implementation of Islamic legal practice in Northern Nigeria.

[...] The work of fiction is based on the circumstances surrounding the implementation of Shari’ah in an unnamed state by the lead character known as Governor Yerima and the social imbalance that followed it. Governor Yerima is portrayed in some scenes selectively approving amputation and stoning to death one Buba Jangebe and Safiya, respectively, while sparing Bala Dan’inna, deputy chairman of the governor’s party.

In the end, there is a revolt led by Aminu, leader of the Redemption Front, who tells his excited followers: “They said it is against Sharia to take alcohol, while most of them take it. They said it is against Sharia to patronize prostitutes while most of them do it. They said it is illegal to engage in gambling while most of them do it. They said we cannnot listen to music or dance, while most of them do. Today is the end of their hypocrisy.”

And presumably many of them claim to exercise enlightened Ijtihad, but such an infantile decision against a theatrical artwork belies any such claim.

Apologists for the censorship are justifying the decision to ban the play by rumouring that it was the spearhead of a plot “aimed at discrediting certain public officers in the state”, a plot “hatched to coincide with the end of the Ramadan period” and so stir up negative religious sentiments.

And what if it was a plot? — one might ask. If a satire sticks in the throat then it has done its job. If it is so false as to be ridiculous, so mischievous that it misses its target, then why ban it? Allow it to be performed, so that everyone might see the folly of the playwright.

Also see:

• Theatre Without Borders: Nigerian Court Bans the Phantom Crescent
• Javno: Nigerian sued over play
• Ocnus.net: Sharia and Human Rights in Nigeria
• Al Arabiya: Nigerian sued for mocking Sharia law “abuses”

—

If you are a friend of member of the Swan Theatre Amateur Company and you would like to submit a comment piece for inclusion on the website, please contact STAC at the usual address.

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.

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.

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.

McKellen attacks Singapore for laws against homosexuals
By Cahal Milmo

Sir Ian McKellen may have agreed to keep on his underpants to avoid upsetting Singaporeans when he performs as King Lear today. But when it comes to the Asian city state’s ban on homosexuality, he is naked in his displeasure.

The celebrated actor, who appears in the nude in his critically acclaimed role but was forced to cover up for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s visit to Singapore this week, launched a withering attack yesterday on the enclave’s continuing criminalisation of gay men.

In comments that will cause discomfort for Singaporean legislators who have sought to modify its image as a strict patrician society, the Academy Award nominee, 68, said he found the law - introduced under British colonial rule - “personally offensive”. He added: “As a gay man invited here with the full cognisance of the government, how can they not notice that my right to have sex is inhibited by the country?”

The legislators said they would not advocate changes to the law, which classifies gay sex as “gross indecency” and is punishable with up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

“McKellan attacks Singapore for laws against homosexuals”

Also see Reuters, which reports Q&As from a press conference.

Q: You seemed to have stepped into a local debate about decriminalising homosexuality. Why did you do it?

A: “It would be impertinent of me to comment on Singapore society but this happens to be a law that I find personally offensive and I don’t think it should be on the statute books because it inhibits my free behaviour as an openly gay man.

“I feel free to comment on behalf of people who do have to suffer laws which the British empire invented and left behind.

“It’s easier for a foreigner to come in and speak to truth as he sees it.”

Q: Were you aware that Singapore senior statesman Lee Kuan Yew has said it would be difficult to repeal the law on sexual acts between men because of popular opposition from the country’s conservative majority.

A: “Yes. Then he must expect gay people not to come here, he must expect gay people to emigrate, he must expect no company to have their gay employees work here. Under that pressure he will change the law, I guarantee you. I’ll take a bet.”

Q: Do you think the public pays too much attention to what celebrities think?

A: “The press like to talk to actors. They mustn’t be surprised when actors talk back to them. We are privileged that we have access to the media and our opinions sometimes are reported and I appreciate that. But I only speak on things that I am an expert on…You won’t hear me talk about my politics, you won’t hear me talk about my vegetarianism, you won’t hear me comment on the Iraq war. You’ll only hear me talk about being gay and being an actor. I am just public on those two issues.”

And there’s some more good news for McKellen or Tolkien fans:

Q: A film version of Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” has been stalled because of a dispute between “The Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson and film company New Line Cinema which holds the film rights to the book. Has there been any movement on the film development?

A: “I detect that there is movement and it’s movement in the right direction. I’ll be seeing Peter (Jackson) when we tour (New Zealand) next month. I hope it will happen.”