11 Thursday Jun 2020
Posted in Theatre
So – are we back yet?
A little hard to tell. I mean, theatres are opening again next week. Opening with all sorts of restrictions, as was to be expected – like playing with gloves whenever there are props to be touched, and masks when the actors need to go near each other, and keeping safe distances in the audience, and onstage, and backstage… As I said, nothing truly unexpected, but it will be hard to get used to… Continue reading
14 Thursday May 2020
A few days ago, on the phone, Nina the Director asked how how I would like to adapt for the stage a certain, very famous ghost story.
“Oh,” I said. “That one. I’ve had it on my Kindle for ages, and never quite mustered the courage to read it…” Continue reading
02 Thursday Apr 2020
Posted in Theatre
I think I told you how, back in December, at the dress rehearsal for A Christmas Carol, we had the benefit of a row of rows, complete with screaming match in the green room between Nina the Director and Mrs. Cratchit. It was explosive enough to scare children, upset dressers, and perplex casual viewers – but, as is the case with most of these things, it evaporated quite quickly, and with little or no visible damage. Continue reading
19 Thursday Mar 2020
Giorgio was our Lighting Man. Ah well, he was much more than that. He was a pillar of the Company – had been for five decades. Head Electrician, administrator, Council member, computer wizard, box-office man, prop supervisor… there was little in the day-to-day running of the Company and the Tiny Theatre where Giorgio didn’t have a hand… Continue reading
23 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Poetry, Scribbling, Theatre
Robert Stewart Sherrif
I love Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great – and by that I mean the first of the two parts. It may be rougher around the edges than his later work, but it’s breathlessly fiery. With his blank iambic pentameter, with the historical subject-matter, and his unpunished bloodthirsty hero, the boy (all of twenty-three at the time) was breaking ground in many ways – and knew it well. Continue reading
02 Thursday Jan 2020
Posted in Theatre
And so the second run of our CC is nearing its end: four more nights now, and we’ll be done for the season.
And you know what? I’m going to miss it terribly. It’s been an intense and very successful affair, sold out from the beginning, with the box office besieged with calls well after all the seats were gone (why, one particular lady called last Saturday, during the show – begging for eight seats, no less…), ticket-less people turning up every night, queuing in hope of a last-minute seat, and a number of very good reviews… Continue reading
06 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in Theatre
Tags
A Christmas Carol, Backstage Life, Charles Dickens, dress rehearsal, first night, Shakespeare in Love
The second run of “my” A Christmas Carol” opens tonight – and let me boast a little: we’re sold out all the way to January. There is no way on earth to call it anything else than a huge hit, and I’m inordinately proud.
That said… Continue reading
14 Thursday Nov 2019
I’ve always loved the idea of tableaux vivants. Enacting a painting, or a scene from a story – in one long frozen moment complete with props and costumes… Half theatre, half illustration. It appeals very much.
I remember reading Behind a Mask, one of Louisa May Alcott’s gothic stories, during a mostly sleepless overnight train ride… Continue reading
07 Thursday Nov 2019
Posted in Theatre
I think I told you in passing that I parted ways with the Squirrels… It happened earlier this year – around March, actually – and there were Reasons. It was a hard thing to do, after a decade with them, and a much longer time, if on and off, with Gemma the Director – but I had choices to make, and… Reasons.
It was a mostly civilised affair: I explained, and teared up a little, and they were mostly quite nice about it, and some of them actually teared up in turn. So I came away, and exchanged calls and emails with Gemma now and then, but never acted on the standing invitation to go and sit through rehearsal with them – because… well, I’d come away. I’d come away, and I had Reasons, and I didn’t want to tag along unofficially – much less to be dragged in again “just this once”… Continue reading
10 Thursday Oct 2019
Gordon Craig in The Dead Heart
In 1859, as A Tale of Two Cities was being first serialized in weekly instalments in Dickens’ own magazine, All The Year Round, a play by Watts Phillips, called The Dead Heart, made its stage debut at the Adelphi, to much success.
Phillips, a novelist and playwright, had had little luck lately, because he insisted on writing serious, near-austere pieces that pleased the critics (and, apparently, the Queen) more than they did the melodrama-loving general public.
The Dead Heart, though, a stirring tale of the French Revolution, filled with thwarted love, howling injustice, epic struggles, evil abbés, heroic sacrifice, and so on, was a different matter – all the more so because very soon people started to notice the close resemblance between the play and that new novel by Mr. Dickens… Continue reading
