Category: theatre

This summer in London and Edinburgh, the 21st century’s most famous refusenik theatre company is presenting its first production in a foreign (to them) language – Trash Cuisine, which argues that the execution of criminals by the state just fosters more violence in the wider culture.

“It’s easy to forget that the latter-day dominance of the small-cast play is a fairly recent development in theatrical history. Large casts used to be the rule, not the exception. Indeed, most of the best-known American plays of the 20th century called for performing forces that would now be seen by penny-pinching producers as insanely extravagant.”

“The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property published a lengthy statement on its website in which it called the play” – Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary – ‘blasphemous’. … The group also noted that the play is written by ‘an avowed homosexual’ and ‘is being performed and directed by open lesbians, namely, Irish actress Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner’.”

“After all, actors on screen have been changing shape before our eyes – whether from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, or from Lon Chaney Jr. into the Werewolf – for almost as long as there have been moving pictures. … In theater, on the other hand, something as rudimentary as an instant change of costume makes grown-ups gasp.”

“I’ve lost track of the language of our art. … It’s been trumped by meaning-deplete, market-aping clichés of our professional shoptalk–branding, innovation, entrepreneurial–and by the hollow repetitions of grant-speak that have sucked the specificity out of such essentials as, ‘community,’ ‘vision,’ ‘values.'”

The Kabuki-za in Tokyo’s Ginza district was torn down in 2010 because it was too vulnerable to earthquakes. Now rebuilt and temblor-proofed, the theater has kept its traditional layout but added such items as a 54-foot-deep pit and portable screens displaying subtitles.

In the letter to one group of subscribers, Tim Sanford of Playwrights Horizons “tap-dances between expressing understanding for those who found the play not to their liking and a carefully marshaled argument for its merits. He expresses affection and support for the play repeatedly, but also seems to back away from it at other points.”

“It would be easy merely to dismiss the [very mixed bag of] reviews as an irrelevance, but they were utilised as another consciousness-raising weapon in the Mormon armoury while the real work was being done by Twitter and Facebook missionaries who have been advocating on the show’s behalf for months.”

Maybe it would be a kind of theatre-by-the-pound, in which you put your money in and go to whatever plays you wanted, wherever…

The National Theatre production has been recognised across eight categories, including best new play, best director for Marianne Elliot, and best actor for Luke Treadaway’s lead performance. Closely following Curious Incident [is] new stage musical Top Hat with seven nominations.”