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Post by peelee on Oct 4, 2018 15:39:18 GMT
We've got tickets for this on Sunday though booked them without knowing there might be problems of a practical nature. As it's now not that new a theatre, it's a shame that problems of comfort, spacing, etc., haven't been seen to. Presumably audience members can bring cushions for their comfort.
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Brexit
Sept 25, 2018 19:32:49 GMT
Post by peelee on Sept 25, 2018 19:32:49 GMT
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Post by peelee on Sept 22, 2018 19:54:12 GMT
He was so distinct an actor, a memorable presence whether on TV or film. I bet he was good on stage.
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Post by peelee on Sept 22, 2018 19:53:04 GMT
He was so distinct an actor, a memorable presence whether on TV or film. I bet he was good on stage.
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Post by peelee on Sept 21, 2018 14:52:58 GMT
I mentioned here on August 19 that I had tickets for this and as things turned out I was glad I got to go. What a lovely venue the Theatre Royal Bath is.
The set for this play was quite something, but tricky to take it on the road for what would be a welcome tour wherever it stopped en route. But if there is a possibility of the production being staged at somewhere like the Wyndhams, presumably for a few months, then reconstruction of the set would be fairly straightforward and worthwhile. As for the cast, if it is as it was for Bath then it'll be a play to savour. This deserves more than just a few week-run at a regional theatre that was astute enough to see the possibilities. London would be a good location for a medium run, yet if it settled at Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich or wherever it'd surely attract good audiences for a healthy run.
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Post by peelee on Sept 18, 2018 10:16:30 GMT
"Does anyone, still wear, a hat?"
Hat's Entertainment
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Post by peelee on Sept 17, 2018 17:59:23 GMT
I recommend the production of poet Tony Harrison's verse-based Square Rounds that opened recently as a revival at the Finborough Theatre in Earls Court, which work some regard as a not-a-play but which at a Saturday matinee I found to be sit-up-and-take-notice theatre. Its staging here anticipates the approaching centenary of the end of the First World War, and shows that the centenary four years ago of the opening of the War had, artistically, not said it all. I did not even know of the existence of Square Rounds, let alone that it was staged at the Olivier at the National Theatre in 1992.
The all-female cast of six play characters like munition workers, war victims and mourners, although mostly focus on notable inventors, of scientific processes and industrial products that had peaceful uses and intent yet which were also used/misused in warfare in time for 1914-18 and years well beyond. Fertilisers, gases, machine guns, nuclear physics, X-rays: here woven into poetry.
How could this be entertaining? Yet the quality of Harrison's writing and this talented cast, ably assisted by director and designers, make this a serious, lively, often funny, informative and thought-provoking audience experience. It's one of the best things I've seen in a while. And not for the first time, here is a production in which multiple roles played by a handful of actors in a tight space and with very limited resources, knock spots off outfits with time, space and money to spare. Here is the spirit of Oh! What a Lovely War at Stratford East, of Major Barbara at the Orange Tree marking a Shaw anniversary, and of a brilliant Light Shining in Buckinghamshire as staged at the Arcola when still in Arcola Street. Read the reviews whether resentful or trying to be indifferent to Square Rounds through to those praising what Proud Haddock have staged, and consider seeing the kind of thing you don't usually get the chance to see and hear even on the fringe.
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Post by peelee on Aug 21, 2018 23:07:44 GMT
The Arcola Theatre, Dalston, recently staged The Daughter-in-Law for several weeks and it was much praised. The play is to return early in 2019, with booking opening in a couple of weeks. If you like something interesting and well acted, you might like this early play of Lawrence's. Characters set in a coal mining community speak a dialect that is nonetheless fairly easy to follow, so don't be deterred. It is a drama about marriage, social class, industrial conflict and the pressures on family life. It's the work of someone who seems to have known what it was he was writing about. If this involves the same cast as in May-June, it'll be done well. www.arcolatheatre.com/event/the-daughter-in-law/
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Post by peelee on Aug 19, 2018 18:54:23 GMT
i saw this at the Finborough a few years ago but had only vaguely remembered it until I was reminded that it included an early scene about an exhibition of photos from the Great Depression in the US. Work inspired by Studs Terkel, famed for his Chicago radio programmes and various books about all sorts of topics based on his recordings of Joe and Josephine Public.
Once again, well done to the Finborough for being adventurous enough to stage this at the time. I've seen lots of productions there down the years, whereas only twice have I attended the Old Vic whose distinction I don't doubt — The Duchess of Malfi and The Crucible. In each case of using these theatres, habits I've got into or never got into.
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Post by peelee on Aug 19, 2018 18:31:09 GMT
I saw No Villain a few years ago when it was staged at the Old Red Lion, London, and was pleased we got tickets. As said about this play from 1936 by the 20 year old Miller at the time of its 2015 revival, it included several of the concerns and themes that Miller's other and better known works developed. Not a great play but really interesting all the same.
I'm pleased to see this thread, as it draws other towns' and cities' attention to The Price featuring David Suchet and Brendan Coyle which I see has been well reviewed and reads like it deserves a tour of whatever duration. I was delighted to have my tickets for Theatre Royal Bath arrive recently, and having been intrigued to see a UK premiere production of a play I'd not heard of, Switzerland featuring Phyllis Logan as writer Patricia Highsmith, got tickets for that in the nearby Ustinov Studio while we're down in Bath from London. I've been away from London in late August before and wherever it has been has usually had nothing on stage either because near-bank holiday days made it not worth a theatre's while or some production or other was not yet due in from that month's Edinburgh Festival, or a university town was missing staff and students at holiday time. So you can imagine how pleasing it was to see two such special-sounding productions still available as the end of the month approaches.
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Post by peelee on Aug 16, 2018 16:30:32 GMT
Troilus and Cressida, by the RSC at Hammersmith Studios, is a sentence that will disturb memories of those of us who saw it and shook our heads, clock-watched until the interval and then in a number of cases just toddled off regretting the £10 bargain price we'd each paid per ticket. Was it Steppenwolf involved in the co-production? It was dreadful to behold.
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Post by peelee on Aug 16, 2018 16:20:29 GMT
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Post by peelee on Aug 9, 2018 14:41:16 GMT
I'm nearing the end of The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre by Charles Duff, published by Nick Hern Books in 1995. It takes the career of actor, producer, director Frith Banbury and his various working and personal relationships as the organising idea for consideration of both well known and now less remembered plays, writers actors and producers of the 1940s-1960s in London's 'theatre land'. This probably makes it a bit lopsided—it is certainly not a text book—yet within its set limits it is systematic but also anecdotal, and I've learned something from it.
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Post by peelee on Jul 23, 2018 16:59:22 GMT
Reading reviews this morning, I am tempted to travel some distance to see this play at the Minerva, Chichester.
That said, I hope that it tours and comes into somewhere in London where tickets and seats amount to a good deal and could be acquired without difficulty.
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Post by peelee on Jun 10, 2018 22:19:13 GMT
"What were the additional bits?" you ask. IIRC it included the film crew shifting equipment and also the director Roger Michell commenting on the filming of the dames and his attitude towards them. I don't recall the Arena-framed opening music and floating bottle for the TV broadcast having any part in the longer version cinema screening.
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Post by peelee on Jun 10, 2018 15:46:19 GMT
Ian Price was in that production of Under Milk Wood, as was David McKail.
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Post by peelee on Jun 10, 2018 15:35:39 GMT
It was at the pre-refurbished Shaw Theatre, www.shaw-theatre.com/about-us , just along the road from Kings Cross, that in 1974 I saw a fine production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood featuring Frances Cuka among others. Does anyone here remember who else was in the cast? There was this fire at the Shaw a few months ago, I see, though I can't say I'd seen anything else there since my trip in 1974: www.thestage.co.uk/news/2018/londons-shaw-theatre-damaged-after-firefighters-tackle-blaze/Anyway, good luck to Nicholas Hytner if he's up for opening a new theatre at Kings Cross. Good location. Not so many years ago, I saw a good production of Brian Friel's The Faith Healer in what was an old bus garage at Kings Cross, while the Almeida was being refurbished.
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Post by peelee on Jun 10, 2018 12:07:53 GMT
I didn't like the ending this production gave to Brian Friel's play. It was forced and not even accurate in the current news terms of an issue it raised visually. So it seemed a melodramatic note to close what was written by Friel in Translations as a more thoughtful piece of work.
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Post by peelee on Jun 10, 2018 11:59:30 GMT
I saw Nothing Like A Dame at a local Picturehouse cinema a few weeks ago. The version shown recently on BBC TV ran 77 minutes. I've just checked and what I and some others in the cinema audience saw lasted 84 minutes. As the credits had got rolling most of our local audience got up and left, which meant they missed the additional minutes that I think might get offered as part of a DVD that eventually goes on sale. A few of the films I've seen these past two or three years have continued to show action, photos and often additional comment once the closing credits get underway, yet still some people leave thinking that the film closes with the first credits that come up on screen.
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Post by peelee on Jun 8, 2018 19:49:02 GMT
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Post by peelee on May 25, 2018 11:41:18 GMT
"When the audience/critics have to rely on programme notes to give a real flavour of what the play is aiming to be "about" then I think the play has probably failed to do it on its own terms..."
I didn't need to rely on 'programme notes'. I was absorbed by the play and followed what was going on, but only read the programme a day or so later. I remarked on how interesting to me were two articles in the programme, and I did so because they led to awareness of the existence of a writer whose work I didn't know and which indicated to me why she was attuned to something like Norris's plays and books. See book reviews of her much praised Romantic Moderns. Norris's article interested me because it expressed his concerns about the kind of people and places he has known, that have had a bearing on other things he has written some of which I have seen and read. From what I could pick up, he and I think differently about some contemporary issues though I share other of his concerns, things that have concerned me for longer than he's been alive. There are other comments and excerpts of poetry in the programme, that all taken together enhanced my appreciation of the play. That other theatregoers do not want to read the theatre programme or the play text, is fine by me and presumably by them.
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Post by peelee on May 24, 2018 10:22:37 GMT
I saw this on 7 May and liked it a lot. While straining to hear some initial exchanges from backstage between two characters as a pipeline supplying energy was being tampered with in order to be shared with this farm, things soon moved closer and became easier to hear. I wondered whether the stage could have been set up to capture speech a bit better.
A small domestic drama, on the face of things, yet with an epic quality. All four in this cast play their parts well and from a slow start each character's intertwined dilemmas are revealed and yet not easily to be solved. It was all plausible and much of it true enough. Taking power from an energy company, and a farm owing money to a bank that wants repaying — the ironies that operate in contemporary Britain and the pressures such organisations exert on so many people form the wider context for the play. Two articles in the theatre programme, by the playwright Barney Norris and by author of Romantic Moderns, Alexandra Harris, underline the significance of what the play is about and which only Libby Purves, reviewing the play on Theatrecat website, seemed to sense the importance of.
Beautifully written, well acted, all characters making mistakes yet having a point, this important play could be just the kind of thing that college and university theatre clubs consider staging in their own right, and just as tempted into staging it will be local dramatic societies.
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Post by peelee on May 21, 2018 20:23:55 GMT
Quality production. Well done to all involved.
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Post by peelee on May 21, 2018 20:12:05 GMT
I don't see shows in the West End of London so don't pay whatever it is that gets charged for programmes there. But wherever I do see a play, I'll get the programme or, if it comes to a choice between the two, I'll buy the play text provided it's about half the £10 or so cover-price. I'll even pay a quid or two for a flimsy programme that's for a theatre where funds are likely very limited, as it helps them while not robbing me.
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Post by peelee on May 8, 2018 11:03:05 GMT
"..his Wikipedia entry is currently claiming he died last week but it seems to be the only place making that claim.."
MB was at the theatre last night, looking alive enough, and good for his 78 years.
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Post by peelee on May 8, 2018 9:04:07 GMT
I see there are a few such front row seats for this evening's play.
And a few for Nine Night in the Dorfman. Is that any good? Worth seeing?
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Post by peelee on May 7, 2018 16:27:59 GMT
I recall this play from a TV version of it years ago that featured a Judi Dench much further into her adult acting career than is Kate Fleetwood now. TV tightened it up time-wise and also the TV cameras were able to focus tightly in some scenes with other variations in other scenes. So make allowance for that, especially if you watch the Judi Dench-led version on CD.
In theatre-stage terms it's not a great play but it is historically a significant play, and the fact that it didn't have much of an initial run before being pulled is neither here nor there. For bear in mind early John Osborne at the Royal Court, or Harold Pinter at the Lyric Hammersmith, and long before them, Arthur Miller with just four performances allowed in New York to his The Man Who Had All the Luck in the mid-1940s. Admittedly, though, this is not by now a new play, and it has always been a controversial play, although this production has critics for other reasons.
I like the play, and I liked this production. I can see why Rodney Ackland set it when and where he did, and he was inspired in doing so. I can see why Terence Rattigan backed it financially, and then why Binkie Beaumont was outraged by and helped undermine it. I'm not gay and suspect he and I would not have the same political view of the world, but I rather admire Ackland for what seems a pattern in his various plays' subject matter and for his intellectual courage, and am sorry he was marginalised and impoverished for so long until a late-life career revival. In this play his characters are well-drawn even if there are so many a number don't get a lot of speaking time individually, but I was amused and intrigued by the characters and the NT ensemble, I thought, portrayed them well. And I admired how the director did his job in keeping things moving, whether characters or where the audience focuses, while the set design was so apt and really did assist this play.
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Post by peelee on Mar 19, 2018 9:14:53 GMT
Rowling's post-Harry Potter book, The Casual Vacancy, was far better than the Sunday night TV series confection of it with different ending. It was her first adult novel and, in grittier more perceptive style than TV managed, it showed more of her range.
I have read the first two of the 'Robert Galbraith'-written novels and liked them, though (having missed the first TV adaptation of them) I didn't much care for the recent TV adaptation of one of the later novels. It felt so squeezed and seemed to leave subplots hanging or characters unexplained with the over-all story, as if what had been scheduled as three episodes had been cut back to a two-parter.
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Oscars
Mar 5, 2018 17:18:56 GMT
Post by peelee on Mar 5, 2018 17:18:56 GMT
I'm glad that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri won in best actress and best supporting actor categories, so that'll look good on the film posters along with mention of its other nominations. Also pleased that Dunkirk won Oscars for three of the technical categories: editing, sound mixing and sound editing, plus it had other nominations. Congratulations, too, to Gary Oldman for the best actor award.
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Post by peelee on Mar 5, 2018 15:56:57 GMT
I'm pleased this new play by Alan Bennett is to be staged at the Bridge Theatre.
I liked People, though unlike some upthread I like people, and saw it on a cinema screen where from an audience standpoint it worked well. And The Habit of Art was interesting enough for me to see it twice at the National Theatre. As Bennett is naturally funny and thought-provoking, even if that seam of melancholy in his writing-mind remains as thick as ever, this forthcoming play of his may well have all that in it as well as some laughs.
I checked last week and tickets seemed available for various dates and times, so I'll be buying two or three for myself and friends in the next few days.
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