Category: theatre

Scottish theatres fear they will have to close under a new public arts funding scheme. “For 7:84, which has in the past received around £250,000 a year from the arts council, “core” funding will run out in August. It will be able to apply for funding for individual projects that run from March 2007 onwards, but with no guarantee of getting anything.”

One of the Shakespearean legends that has sprung up over the centuries is the existence of a lost play, The History of Cardenio, based on Don Quixote and lost to the mists of time since at least the 18th century. No one is certain what became of the original, but one scholar from Florida has been working feverishly to reconstruct the play from what little source material remains. It’s a controversial project, since the reconstructed play can never hope to be authentic, but some scholars say its worth some inaccuracy to get a glimpse of what Shakespeare might have written.

Much has been made of the troubles, both financial and artistic, plaguing Dublin’s historic Abbey Theatre. “The Abbey’s fortunes, sputtering for some time, went into a nose-dive during its centenary year in 2004. What should have been a triumphant celebration, marking the theatre’s role in forging the Irish nation and shaping a world-class dramatic canon, proved a shambles fit to make its hallowed founders, WB Yeats and Lady Isabella Gregory, spin in their graves.” Meanwhile, the Abbey’s closest rival, the Gate Theatre, is thriving, pulling in big stars and record crowds. Yet somehow, the Abbey continues to receive ten times the amount of federal funding that the far more responsibly managed Gate takes in.

“A New York theatre company has put off plans to stage a play about an American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza because of the current “political climate” – a decision the play’s British director, Alan Rickman, denounced yesterday as ‘censorship’. James Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, said it had never formally announced it would be staging the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, but it had been considering staging it in March.”

“The launch night for the National Theatre of Scotland on Saturday could hardly have sent out a stronger signal that ‘National’ will mean ‘national’. A total of 10 happenings across Scotland, from remotest Shetland and Stornoway to Dumfries, put together by artists working under the thematic banner of ‘Home’, spelt out the intention that this theatre, possessing no big building, ensemble or bureaucracy, will be daringly, inclusively nomadic. Whether Scotland was picking up on the collaborative spirit of the occasion is another matter.”

“The stage version of Billy Elliot has won four prizes at the Laurence Olivier Awards, including one shared between three of its young stars.”

It takes a lot of people to mount a Broadway show – not just actors. So who makes the industry work?

Can’t get your play produced? Allan Katz tried a suicide note. “The few theaters willing to read my suicide note had all too familiar reasons for passing: it wasn’t dramatic enough; it was too dramatic; it was similar to something they had just produced; it was dissimilar from something they had just produced; they liked everything but the ending; they liked the ending, but nothing before it; they liked the middle, but wished it had come first — or at the end — or both.”

Success and profitability are quite different things in the cutthroat world of New York theatre, and achieving one is no guarantee of making headway towards the other. “What exactly makes the business so tough? Well, expenses, which keep growing, and audiences, which don’t.”

“Sweet are the uses of perversity in the theater. Throw a kink, a curve, a warping twist into a time-honored dramatic formula and tried-and-true suddenly looks eye-poppingly new and unsettling. The spring season in New York is, happily and atypically, plump with demonstrations of such genre bending, with entrancingly wicked shows that extract the profane from the sacred and the rot from the pillars of society.”