Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play is the epitome of cool. From the outset is oozes stylistic panache, but by curtain call, there’s a sense that it falls short of the theatrical intensity it aims to achieve. And it is not for a lack of important questions that The Last Days of Judas Iscariot fails to convince. [...]
Written by Andrea Donovan on 10-05-08
I saw a stand up act the other night that I can only describe as beautiful. It’s obviously an unusual word to associate with someone standing on stage telling jokes, but what I witnessed was such a rare experience that it rightly deserves this unusual title. I was performing my act at a regular monthly comedy [...]
Written by Stephe Harrop on 08-05-08
The Cows Come Home from Zeb Fontaine is a complex, sensuous fusion of myth and space and bodies and sounds. Someone’s looking for truth, a crime has been committed, a devastating plague grips people and cows, and the gods, perhaps, are watching. Half-muffled voices grope after miracles, and forgiveness, and the air is thick with [...]
Written by Stephe Harrop on 04-05-08
The Only Girl in the World is a poignant three-hander, telling the story of Joe and Mary, who fall in love and fall apart, while a serial killer stalks the streets of Whitechapel. Alex Clifton’s seductive revival moves with a fluidity that matches the shifting rhythms and moods of Glyn Maxwell’s skilful, colloquial verse. [...]
Written by Stephe Harrop on 02-05-08
Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft is definitely a play of its time. Ghosts and witches, mysterious figures stalking a stormy moor, duels and revenges and an eleventh-hour tale of piracy all feature in this quintessentially Romantic yarn. A child’s unexplained illness gets fatally entwined with love and jealousy as rumours of witchcraft spread through a Scottish village. [...]
Written by Stephe Harrop on 30-04-08
Cannibalism, it seems, is very chic this spring. There are certainly some grisly goings-on in Lucy Kirkwood’s Tinderbox, a bloodthirsty black comedy of climate-change, meat, and perverted old Englands of the imagination. In a convincingly grubby Bradford of the not-too-distant future, an illegal immigrant artist washes up in a butcher’s shop, and ends up embroiled in [...]
Written by Stephe Harrop on 18-04-08
Tony Harrison is a great stage-poet, who knows that the theatre is a place for straight talk, open eyes and hard truths. Fram is a show that very palpably does things to its audience, which is made to laugh, talk back, shout out and confess to its collective lack of competence in ancient Greek. It’s [...]
Written by Stephe Harrop on 27-03-08
London Theatre Blog is delighted to welcome a new contriubtor it its front page today, Stephe Harrop is a theatre practitioner and academic who kicks off here with a sharp review of the Orange Tree Theatre’s latest offering. The Orange Tree’s latest rediscovery, Chains of Dew by Susan Glaspell, is a bit of a slow-burner. Actually, [...]
Written by Lilly Dominic on 26-03-08
Are the Olivier awards still relevant? With audience numbers breaking new records and a theorised new era in theatre approaching due to the ever growing presence of new marketing techniques linked in with TV, there was a surprising lack of interest in last night’s annual Olivier awards. You could be forgiven for not realising they [...]
Interesting article on Performance Prompt by Russian-based documentary film maker, Michael Craig, discussing Meyerhold’s Biomechanics and the making of a documentary. The article includes some fascinating photos from the project and a 10 minute video excerpt from the film. Check out ‘Meyerhold and the Russian Avant-garde‘.
The number of open public archives appearing on the Web of late is astounding. Here is another notable entry developed by the University of Oxford called The Great War Archive. The aim of the site is to collect material related to the First World War held by members of the public. Artefacts include transcripts of letters, diaries, photographs, drawings, postcards, recordings (film & sound), poems and souvenirs. Fascinating project.
We’ve entered an era of free and open information on the web, partly due to current revenue models and user trends but partly because the old institutions of knowledge cannot survive offline. (more…)
Written by Jens Peters on 11-05-08
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