Category: theatre

The actor was on his way to the West End for his performance on Saturday when he strained his calf, rendering him unable to kneel or carry Cordelia. The show was canceled, but to make it up to audience members as they queued for refunds, he took questions and spoke to them from the stage.

Several critics have objected to a scene in David Ireland’s Ulster American, now running at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in which two male characters talk about which well-known females they would rape. “The rape conversation is not just thrown in to give the audience a good laugh, it is there for a reason. Actually, many reasons,” writes Gardner. “It may be extremely discomforting to watch, (there were several moments when I realised that my jaw was hanging open) but I don’t doubt that everyone involved interrogated every single one of the decisions they were making. Very carefully.”

“Sinha, who has a Radio 4 show and is a regular contributor to ITV’s quiz show The Chase, labelled Scottish writer Kate Copstick a ‘sociopathic bully’ after she responded angrily to being refused entry to his show. The Scotsman critic wanted to see his show’s only preview night in the city.”

And we’ve got it: In Jamestown, NY, “the city is hoping to expand its reputation for humor with the opening this week of the National Comedy Center, a museum devoted to, as its website says, ‘telling the vital story of comedy in America.'”

There’s been a lot of art about this – and much more may be coming in the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. “Acting’s demands are personal as well as technical. Actors often have to perform a role badly, over and over and over again, before they can perform it well, which is embarrassing and exposing. This conspires to give a director or teacher or coach a lot of power and an actor — unless that actor is a star — very little.”

He was trying to fix an issue with diminishing royalties from his novels, but when Guy Domville was produced in London, chaos ensued: “James made it backstage for the closing minutes. He heard both the sneers from the gallery and the enthusiastic applause from the stalls. When Alexander took his curtain call, Henry’s friends in the audience began shouting ‘Author, author!,’ and the unnerved actor took James by the hand and led him onstage. A civil war ensued.”

The word that came to mind as I watched each of these shows was dislocation – each seems to change the viewer’s place in the hierarchy of society and of theatre. Each work uses entirely different techniques and achieves different effects, but they serve as harbingers of how audiences entrenched in 20th century theatremaking may feel in 25 years.

American history and politics are centre stage at this year’s Edinburgh festival. Alongside five shows with “Trump” in the title, from comedy to musicals, several fringe productions are interrogating troubling aspects of US culture.

“As a new award seeks to give casting directors overdue recognition for their key role in shaping productions – not to mention actors’ careers – leading practitioners in the job tell Nick Clark what they believe makes a good casting director, how they started their careers, and what actors can do at auditions to impress them.”