Category: theatre

Who says the theatre hasn’t been political? To Michael Billington’s surprise, over the past few weeks London theatre has been “startlingly repoliticised and has confronted, directly or obliquely, the conflict in Iraq.

Playwright Nilo Cruz has had a good week. “Over the weekend, at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Cruz, a 42-year-old Cuban-born New Yorker, was awarded $15,000 by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust for his play ‘Anna in the Tropics,’ which had been anointed by the American Theater Critics Association as the best play of last year not to have been produced in New York City. Then on Monday Cruz won this year’s Drama Pulitzer – in a “rather large surprise in the theater world.”

Nilo Cruz’s little-known play “‘Anna in the Tropics” wins the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, triumphing over high-profile Broadway competition – Edward Albee’s “The Goat or Who is Sylvia?” and Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out.” “Anna” was born when Cruz got the idea of writing a play about a cigar-factory tradition brought years ago from Cuba to Florida.

There have been plenty of plays this season on Broadway, but only a few musicals – and none besides “Hairspray” (and maybe “La Boheme”) – have emerged as genuine hits. Why?

Michael Attenborough, the new director of London’s Almeida theatre, says that when the theatre reopens in May it should be constantly “causing surprise” and that “musicals, classical and new theatre will be part of his ‘eclectic’ long-term vision for the revamped venue.”

“Sir Ian said the complexity of the sexuality in Shakespeare?s comedies with their cross-dressing and disguises was immense’. We don?t really know for sure if Shakespeare was gay and it is not especially that important. But was he interested in the variety of human sexuality? Absolutely. Did he know about it? Better than anybody.”

A new study says that fog used in theatres and in movies is harmful to actors’ health. “Compared to the control group, the entertainment industry employees had lower average lung function test results and they reported more chronic respiratory symptoms: nasal symptoms, cough, phlegm, wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath on exertion, and current asthma symptoms, even after taking other factors into account such as age, smoking, and other lung diseases and allergic conditions. The entertainment industry employees also had increased rates of work-related phlegm, wheezing, chest tightness, and nasal symptoms.”

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can really kill you. Words, metaphors, stories, can convince complete strangers that they have an obligation to disembowel you. Before anyone makes a smart bomb, they have to be persuaded, by smart words, that they should. Words create what Shakespeare called an “imaginary puissance” that can have lethal consequences. An imaginary garden, with real tanks. If you doubt that literature can ‘cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’, consider four words enshrined in every library in the English-speaking world: ‘God fought for us’.”

“The artistic power of cinema has had beneficial effects on theatre – in, for example, a greater economy and fluidity in writing and staging – but the dark side has been that stage productions now seem to be apologising for not being films, like someone changing their appearance to look like a rival in love. Modern art has encouraged the use of ‘mixed media’, but the extended use of video in theatre always feels like a defeat. The point of theatre is that the performance is created as we watch.”

Irish playwright Gary Mitchell finds that it’s difficult getting his plays performed because they’re set in Ireland, and they include political themes. “There are political reasons that prevent certain plays and films from being performed. Would a script about Jesus written by a born-again Christian be produced today? Would a political play written by a member of the Monster Raving Loony Party or the Conservative Party be turned down because it was dreadful – or would it be because the politics of the piece were not popular, or conflicted with the sensibilities of the theatre’s board, or the agenda of the artistic director?”