Category: theatre

“Neil Armfield is, says actor and director Robyn Nevin, our only true auteur now that Barrie Kosky has gone to Berlin. Yet Armfield, 55, has nothing of the flash and imperiousness of the younger man. He is a quiet, shambling, famously vague figure, with a fondness for crumpled Hawaiian shirts.”

“In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life — to see ‘Spider-Man’.”

Says Nick Asbury, one of the company members who gave the house a test run last week, “I came offstage and the first thing I said to Michael Boyd [the artistic director] was ‘it works’. I came in booming. I found I had to drop it down. You can, finally, be subtle.”

The Isango Portobello troupe, co-founded by director Mark Donford-May and soprano Pauline Malefane, achieved international fame with its reinterpretations of Bizet’s Carmen, Mozart’s Magic Flute, and The Mysteries (Yiimimangaliso). Company members “arrived at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town yesterday to find the doors locked against them.”

Mike Kenny: “I’m getting so sick of people telling me there’s a boom in theatre for children. Where is it? This is the time of year when theatre remembers the children’s audience exists. There’s panto, but, can we agree for a start that panto doesn’t count, it is to theatre what karaoke is to music.”

“The news that the most recent David Mamet revival, A Life in the Theatre, is set to close in New York next Sunday (28 November) after poor ticket sales has led people to ask a previously unthinkable question: has Broadway fallen out of love with Mamet?”

“The Russian owners of the Menier Chocolate Factory have unveiled ambitious plans to expand the London venue, adding a 300-seat theatre and restaurant in an adjacent complex that will also feature offices and a rocket-shaped, multi-storey apartment block.”

In their upcoming Josef K, Tom Basden and Tim Key are trying, says Basden, to “embrace the daftness of Kafka’s book. Its atmosphere is obviously menacing, but it’s also incredibly funny. Seeing it in nightmarish terms isn’t always useful – and it certainly isn’t what’s true about it now.”

“The successful young playwright who doesn’t take time off to work on a TV series is the exception. Cable networks like HBO, AMC and Showtime now provide a kind of second education for our best theater writers.”

“The Royal Shakespeare Theatre will boast a new 1,000 seat “thrust stage” auditorium, where the audience will be wrapped around three sides of the stage, designed to bring the actors and audience closer together. It will also feature a newly-built 36 metre-high tower.”