Category: theatre

“Willful directors can either enliven or distort. Enliven, if they accept the gulf between a playwright’s time and immediate intentions on the one hand and the sensibilities of today on the other, and set up a critical dialogue between past and present, text and audience. Distort, if they just lay a simple-minded, ideologically monolithic interpretation on a multi-faceted play. The temptation to distort is particularly powerful in a climate that discourages the new, like commercially cautious Broadway or the West End today.”

Michael Feingold writes that it’s time for the role of director to be redefined. “I’m afraid it’s time for the theater to get rid of directing. Now don’t panic. I said directing, not directors. I’m talking about a specific kind of directing, fairly common these days, that functions only as an interference to the work being performed. It’s become a fashion in Europe, and in certain academic circles, where various theoretical excuses have been made up for it. And, as lovers of great theater music know to their dismay, it’s widely prevalent in opera—so much so that directors coming onstage for their curtain call at premieres are shocked when they don’t get booed.”

“That directing has, for a time, replaced writing or acting as the primary force in theater is only an understandable phase in stage history. Soon it will undoubtedly have run its course. While the phase lasts, we can relish its virtues and groan over its defects. But that the director should replace the performance as the object of interest is a physical impossibility, since that would make the whole occasion lose its point.”

New York’s Fringe Festival has become a theatre-feeder. “When the fringe began in 1996, it was a countercultural event. Now, it’s a risk-free development workshop for theater producers, not to mention development types in film and television. And in turn, a lot of shows have hired publicists to exploit their properties and build attention. ‘There’s a total new focus on exploring the fringe. It’s all about buzz – which shows are going to rise above the crowd.’ The New York press has a lot to do with that. And since the Fringe Festival operates during the dull, dog days of August (arts-wise), there are plenty of editorial holes to fill.”

Scotland’s new culture minister says more support for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival might be on the way. He “said the Fringe was a product others would kill for and could be enhanced by strategic funding of its infrastructure. In a clear shift in the Executive’s position, Frank McAveety acknowledged an investment in the bricks and mortar of the event – its venues, accommodation and transport – was something which could be pulled together”.

After years of delay, it looks like the Scottish government is ready to fund a National Theatre. “This is a very significant moment in Scottish culture. There is a paradox in Scottish culture, which a national theatre can bridge. On the one hand, the Executive have been supporting events like Scotland at the Smithsonian, which took Scottish culture to America. But almost immediately afterwards, we stage these great festivals which offer no real focus. If the Executive is serious about presenting Scottish culture, it needs a champion like a national theatre.”

Politicl theatre has made a big comeback at the Edinburgh Fringe. “A lot of this much-vaunted new political theatre has, admittedly, suffered from the problems that administered a lethal injection to the genre 20 years ago. Way, way too much of it has been designed solely to massage the lazy prejudices of its audiences. One more routine about how Americans are all obese imbeciles, and I think my head might have burst; one more person howling at some smugly inactive audience that “children are dying, children are dying”, and I might have lapsed into a coma. But from this sea of predictable, knee-jerk tedium, two stunning (and very different) new voices have risen.”

The BBC will broadcast a performance of Richard II live from London’s Globe Theatre. “It is thought to be the first live screening of a theatre play: while operas and concerts are often broadcast live, the theatrical community is far less willing to let in the cameras.”

“With virtually every one of our companies — big and small — facing a distressing number of empty seats, it make sense to ask why the under-35s aren’t more devoted playgoers. I think it comes down to two things: For most of them, conventional theatre costs too much and means too little. It’s not that they hate the art form. Far from it. All you have to do is hang out at the Fringe or Summerworks to encounter hundreds of people who wouldn’t be caught dead at Stratford, Shaw or CanStage.”

“London theatre is succumbing to a frenzy of price-cutting wheezes that don’t so much offer customers a healthy, free-market range of bargains as lead to a muddle, which will confuse everyone as to the real cost of a ticket and create resistance to the standard price.”