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It’s not easy to produce a convincing Macbeth; what is simply breath-taking on the printed page may well come across on stage as simply breathless. Beginning with a semi-prologue that barely lasts a page and a half, I can’t help but always feel jolted into the play. The reading eye can pass over the suddenness […]
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Could you tell us a bit about yourself? I’m an actress from Nottingham, which is also where I trained as an actor at the Television Workshop and where I went to university to read English at the University of Nottingham. After my undergraduate degree, I went to Oxford University to do a PGCE in English and […]
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The National Theatre’s production of Terrence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea is an emotionally overwhelming and thought-provoking play. Set in London during the 1950s, it follows the love triangle of Hester Collyer, her husband Lord Collyer and boyish war hero, her ‘darling Freddie’. On the surface, the play follows the turmoil of a toxic relationship […]
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✮✮✮✮✮ When confronted with a production of this calibre – so absorbingly relevant, so in tune with our society’s downward-spiralling patterns of destruction – it can come as a shock to remember that Medea was written by a man, Euripides, in the 5th century BC, to be performed by men for an exclusively male […]
Continue Reading✮✮✮ ‘Great Britain’ is currently playing at the National Theatre in London, and has just announced a West End run to follow. A new piece written by Richard Bean (author of ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’), the play is not strictly factual but definitely draws on recent events. It depicts a web of corruption linking the […]
Continue ReadingHilary Mantel adaptation Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies has been a smash-hit with the critics, garnering four and five stars with the Telegraph and Guardian respectively. The Guardian also features an interview with lead actor Ben Miles, who refers to Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell as the ‘first working-class hero.’ Speaking of which… The director of the […]
Continue Reading✮✮✮✮ Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce stakes a serious claim to being the most unreadable novel of all time. Written in a lawless idioglossia that relies as much on inane puns and silly wordplay as it does on actual language, it combines T.S Eliot’s rich network of highbrow allusion with Beckett’s dead-end Absurdism, throwing […]
Continue ReadingPROPOSITION: Tommo Fowler makes a play to get state sponsoring for the stage Theatre can be roughly split into two categories: commercial and subsidised. Commercial theatre fuses art with the rampant Capitalist machine, while its subsidised cousin relies upon state handouts partially bankrolled by the hundreds of thousands of people who probably have no interest […]
Continue ReadingChristopher Marlowe’s Edward II is a play that ends where it begins, with the death of one king and the succession of another – but what happens in between is a powerful portrayal of court politics gone wrong and the disorder of deposing a king. Joseph Hill-Gibbins directs an eccentric production whose visual boldness and […]
Continue ReadingSince 2009, National Theatre Live has been transmitting live performances to cinemas around the world, bringing the theatrical into the more accessible realm of the cinematic. Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth looked as if it were made for the big screen, the opening battle sequences and the grittiness of the production as a whole […]
Continue Reading2012 marks fifty years since St Catherine’s became a college and this momentous occasion was celebrated in true Oxonian style: with a series of lectures delivered by prestigious alumni and guests. One of the discussion panels commemorated and explored St Catz links with the arts, in particular theatre and television, and brought together some well-known […]
Continue ReadingA top performance sheds light on the manic world behind a restaurant kitchen’s closed doors.
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