Lyn Gardner and the dark art of search engine logic
Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance. The backbone of new media is not the content but the code.
Group authored publication covering theatre and the performing arts in London and beyond
Reviews
The Glass Mountain
As yet unfinished, but already roughly enchanting, The Glass Mountain looks set to be a hopeful, heartfelt and most rewarding journey.
The Mountaintop
More than just a reverent character study of Dr. King, The Mountaintop presents a history with an immediate bearing on the modern world.
The Moon The Moon
The Moon The Moon is many overlapping things, but never feels like collage; its elements complement rather than contradict one another.
Articles
Between Gallery and Performance: Punchdrunk & Tim Crouch
What do Punchdrunk’s Tunnel 228 and Tim Crouch’s England have in common? They rethink the relationship between artwork and gallery space through interdisciplinary performance.
Wall - a response
In Wall, David Hare conjures a vision of the future; drawing on history that is being written as we speak, his journies make faraway lands feel less distant, less foreign than we’d have them be.
Theatre and the Internet - a brief history
How has the theatre responded to the last two decades of Internet growth?
Videos
Interviews
Fairground
I stood there with the camera to my eye, watching, waiting, lowering it from time to time to check the screen.
Mike Tweddle on directing Hippolytus
They’re such brilliant, simple stories, these Greek stories’, he continues, ‘but they often get clouded in a mist of incomprehensibility.
The Glass Mountain
Stephe Harrop
(More info)
In a coach ploughing its way across a darkened continent, a young baker fantasises about his future in a new country. A girl scrambles up a ladder to the top of a glass mountain, perched precariously between one life and another. The Glass Mountain, a work-in-development from Trestle Theatre, mixes the outline and images of a traditional fairy tale with the stories of modern-day Polish migrants. Combining half-abstracted physical storytelling,…
The Mountaintop
Matt Boothman
(More info)
In this imagining of Martin Luther King Jr’s last night alive, award-winning young American playwright Katori Hall boldly combines hard historical fact and in-depth character study with a comparatively barmy supernatural twist. It’s a volatile concoction that could corrode the credibility of a lesser play, but which instead provides an already dynamic production with a surging second-stage boost.
The man in the King’s shoes is David Harewood, who seems to…
S-27
Stephe Harrop
(More info)
Winner of the 2007 Protect the Human Playwriting Competition, S-27 by Sarah Grochala is inspired by the experiences of photographer Nhem En, painter Van Nath, and the testimony of Khmer Rouge survivors. In what was once a classroom, teenager May photographs prisoners. Starved and brutalised, they enter by one door and leave by another, beyond which lie inescapable horrors.
Oddly, however, the set of Stephen Keyworth’s production contains no practical doors.…
The Moon The Moon
Matt Boothman
(More info)
The Moon The Moon explores, with harrowing psychological realism, our ability to harm one another even with the best of intentions. Attempting to cure the Man (Jon Spooner, who also directs) of a suicidal malaise, the Young Woman (Suzanne Ahmet) and the Older Man (Tim Chipping) progress, always with a genuine desire to do good, from an over-anxious suicide watch to drugging, incarceration and worse.
The Moon The Moon explores, with…
Ajax
Stephe Harrop
(More info)
Ajax is a tragedy of aftermaths, beginning the morning after a furious and devastating bloodletting. Enraged by a slight to his honour, Ajax attempts to murder the Greek military commanders camped outside Troy. But maddened by Athena he instead turns his sword upon their sheep and cattle, and then, in humiliated shame, upon himself.
The First World War setting of Jack Shepherd’s naturalistic production makes it all seem frighteningly possible. In…
All’s Well That Ends Well
Matt Boothman
(More info)
All’s Well That Ends Well is supposedly one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, though you wouldn’t guess that from Marianne Elliott’s production at the National (the third of this year’s Travelex £10 ticket plays).
Apparently, the play’s usual flaw is Bertram, the male romantic lead. When the King of France forcibly weds him to Helena, in return for her curing him of a fistula, Bertram’s reaction is one of extreme distaste. He…
Werter, Werter
Diana Damian
(More info)
Playful, macabre and inventive, Werter, Werter is an interpretation of Wolfgang Goethe’s famous autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther; created and performed by Ján Mikuš of The Janacek Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, Czech Republic.
Written in the form of letters from Werther to his friend Wilhelm, the novel recounts the tragic downfall of a young artist consumed by unrequited love and driven to suicide. Ján Mikuš…
Rotating in a Room of Images
Matt Boothman
(More info)
If you’re interested in audio-instructed performance, Battersea Arts Centre is the place to go. Their Forest Fringe Previews allowed a few lucky participants to experience Rotozaza’s then-unfinished GuruGuru, and their BURST festival, running until 30 May, includes not only more Rotozaza work but also Rotating in a Room of Images by Swedish artists Lundahl and Seitl.
In audio-instructed productions, unrehearsed members of the public are given headphones that deliver prerecorded…
Wondermart
Matt Boothman
(More info)
When I described Rotozaza’s Wondermart to a friend, his reaction was: “That’s not theatre, that’s creating a public nuisance.” The production continues the company’s work with audio-instructed performance and develops the site-specific element introduced in Etiquette. The site: the ASDA down the road from Battersea Arts Centre.
Participants wired up with headphones and mp3 players are released in pairs into the supermarket, where a voice guides them gently through the aisles…
Between Gallery and Performance: Punchdrunk & Tim Crouch
Diana Damian
(More info)
The smell of the river rises from the damp brick walls and wet ceilings. The floors are uneven and a misty light makes the size of this space hard to grasp. My ears pick up sounds, soft and shrill, from all around. I step closer to a mausoleum of diffracted light, it’s Luke Montgomery’s Heaven on Earth - I discover later on.
The deeper I go into this cavern, the more…
Sort posts by
Main contributors
Connect with LTB
- @pcmcreative Absolutely. But it's poss that in a not so distant future remote connections = normative + sufficient for human social needs. in reply to pcmcreative 5 days ago
- @pilot_theatre Agreed - that is at least until simultaneous video cast management can deal with large gatherings. Videotars in SL... in reply to pilot_theatre 5 days ago
- @pilot_theatre could this entire event have taken place online? A carbon neutral conference? in reply to pilot_theatre 5 days ago
- More updates...
Resources
Practical and scholarly theatre links, podcasts, blogs, cheap tickets and more.
See resource page »
Recent Comments
Saw this play a couple of months ago and loved it. James Lance...
John T
Marcus Markou: Theatre & Entrepreneurship
Sleeping Beauty’s castle, a forlorn and decaying backdrop and the...
Georgina Lansbury
All’s Well That Ends Well
In all honesty I only remember those pieces that i found particularly interesting...
Walter Chesterton
Midnight Matinee
‘What does Helena see in Bertram?’ you ask! I think its...
Luke Robson
All’s Well That Ends Well
I saw this play in Leicester a few weeks ago and loved all the performaces. The music is...
Brian Brown
The Moon The Moon