He’s come to spread the good word. two men the old KING and the young HUME meet and mirror in ‘68. a great and ghastly year, where fiery passion came to burn out their nations. a baptist preacher a papist college teacher with language to make...
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Nationalism proved the constant takeaway from 7 May’s local elections. Nationalist parties won in Scotland, Wales and, most perceptively, in England. The clinging gains made by the SNP and the groundbreaking upsurge of Plaid Cymru shot nationalist First Ministers to power, mirroring a similar upsurge from the nationalist Sinn Fein majority in Stormont. One can look at the political makeup of the UK now and...
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Scowling. Squinting. Decaying jowls. A reptilian, piano key smile. A dirty jacket and hat. In the prologue to the RSC’s production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mark Gatiss creeps into the titular role. His entrance, introduced in the middle of the prologue, comes as stark. Moments earlier, we...
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I walk here, on a early Warwickshire morning, with frost tipping the tress around me, in my grandfather’s shoes. They are large shoes. Owned by two men I never knew. Many stories I’ve been told, Have kept them around, milling about, in my head. They’re the shoes of a whole...
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In Willy Russell’s two-hander play Educating Rita, there is a monologue where the main heroine talks of her desire for more. She speaks of being in the pub with her family and friends, all singing some song from the jukebox, turning round and seeing her mother crying. “I said ‘Why...
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“When the sun stands at its zenith, he is at one with our shadow; then, in the hour of incandescence, history begins.” – Heiner Müller The old, short man takes a few steps. History is moving. Beaten into a pulp, he gets up again. A man with no legs, keeps...
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For when did a play deliver any justice? He wrote in a drunken daze – a long-faced father writing a gigantic storming tragedy, pulled out from his own smallness. This story moves through the dark times. Some total regime. Lear’s union, strung together by brutish greed. Where’s there’s nothing you...
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Euphoria, ecstasy– an abundance of amoral goodness is what comes to mind when I think of The Bacchae. Euripides’ last play is like many final works; radical, disjointed and at some points lacking the fire that earlier successes once had. The central anti-hero Dionysus pokes, prods and gouges out the...
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Roald Dahl is experiencing a rebirth in British theatre, albeit in widely different ways. I saw Mark Rosenblatt’s biographical drama Giant last summer. That was one of the most powerful plays of the last twenty years, a detailed expose of a complex, utterly fascinating writer. After watching John Lithgow’s Dahl...
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It’s a bright, chilly Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in the rehearsal room for WUD’s newest production: The Bacchae. Euripides’ swan song, originally performed posthumously after his death, is a play that was made to rattle an audience. It’s amoral, it’s cynical, it’s dialectal, with the central demigod Dionysius seducing...
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A chest up for it, with broad steel beam Shoulders, eyes searching for some good Breath at the coalface. Wraiths that were young fellas. Hands that got bent into No good blunt tools. Carving out a contour in time. This door, this shiny mirror precious stuff that makes the world spin ...
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For a show featuring a bleak story, coupled with an indie rock score, Next to Normal sounds like it would be a tough sell. However, it has shown, over the years, it’s staying power. Brian Yorkey’s 2008 family drama musical has hopped from off-Broadway, to tours, to West End runs, to...
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There is a memorable moment, from the 2012 Summer Olympic opening ceremony. Isambard Brunel (played by Kenneth Branagh), holding a book to his chest, stands in front of a crowd of industrialists, their black top hats striking against the “green and pleasant land” of rural folk. He starts his speech...
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