Cuts to drama in schools coupled with a shortage of new teachers is fuelling the problem, warning that a decline in the number of drama teachers at secondary level will result in the sector becoming less diverse in the long term. Statistics from the Labour Party’s Acting Up inquiry into working-class actors in 2017 confirmed the decline, revealing there were now 1,700 fewer drama teachers in UK schools than in 2010.”
Category: theatre
Young People Value Theatre As Much As Older Ones, Though They Do So Differently, Researchers Find
Theatre management professor Anthony Rhine looks as the results of three recent studies on engagement.
‘My Ideal Theatre’: Playwright David Hare Dares To Dream
For a start, “the ideal theatre – let’s call it the Playhouse – will not be in the centre of London. It will be in a place where people actually live. That means either a regional city or a residential district in the capital.”
‘Quite Simply The Greatest Theatrical Poem Ever Written’: Michael Billington On ‘Macbeth’
“If Macbeth continues to obsess us, it is because it seems both modern and timeless. We see all around us today the corrosive folly of overweening ambition and the insecurity that breeds tyranny. But Macbeth can never be reduced to a set of moralistic, crime-does-not-pay platitudes. It … has a language that eats into the soul.”
If Digital Life Is Getting You Down, Get To A Live Theatre Show, Fast
Playwright Ayad Akhtar: “I am not hopeful about where we are as a nation — as a species (if I can be so presumptuous). I’m not hopeful, because I am increasingly of the mind that even my hope is being monetized. That which is most enduring, most noble, most human about me — my urge for something brighter, more vivid, more loving, more alive — all of this is being used against me.”
What’s Theatre Like In Right-Wing Hungary After A Cultural Crackdown?
Frankly, it’s a bit more boring – and less dangerous in an overt sense, though it’s certainly dangerous for some of the theatre-makers. “Independent-minded leaders of scores of theatres and other cultural organizations across the nation have been replaced by apparatchiks—including at the emblematic National Theatre, where popular actor-director Robert Alfoldi was sacked in 2013 after being outed as gay and decried for ‘treason’ and ‘inciting and discrediting Hungarians.'”
George C. Wolfe And Joe Mantello Talk About Directing
“George C. Wolfe and Joe Mantello go back to the 1990s, when Mantello, as a young actor, starred as Louis in Wolfe’s Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. In the years that followed, Mantello found himself acting less and directing more. Now, they’re formidable colleagues in their prime, as well as great friends, to boot. In the latest edition of TheaterMania‘s Artist to Artist series, Wolfe and Mantello discuss what their successes and failures mean to them, how they approach actors in the rehearsal room, and what it takes to maintain a level of joy that carries them through adversity.”
As Broadway Has Become More About Tourists, Musicals Have Crowded Out Plays
For decades, the theaters of Broadway — now numbering 41 — were the moneymaking breeding ground for these plays. But what was once the rule on Broadway is now the rare exception. And the traditional for-profit, new Broadway play is disappearing almost as surely as the dodo.
How Billy Crudup Plays 19 People In A One-Man Show
In a New York Times Acting Class video, “[the actor] explains how he becomes 19 characters in David Cale’s play Harry Clarke, which follows a shy Midwesterner as he reinvents himself as a Cockney Englishman.”
‘Relentless’ Playwriting Prize Goes To Script Whose Title The Times Won’t Print
The American Playwriting Foundation’s $45,000 Relentless Award, funded by a libel settlement from The National Enquirer for a false story about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death and given for an unproduced script judged blind, was won by Gracie Gardner for a play whose title — well, we’re too squeamish to print it, too. (Cool fact: all eight semifinalists were written by women.)