theatreVOICE

Never mind the actors, what does it take to survive a marathon? Yesterday’s trilogy at the Round House was an endurance test for audiences as much as it was for the company themselves. I think they came off better. Where do they get their energy from? Nine hours, even when cut up into three hour […]

Sunday April 27, 2008 turned out to be a bit of a red letter day. At The Drill Hall in Chenies Street, temporarily rescued from last year’s Arts Council cull, women theatre artists, many of whom played the Drill Hall as performers, gathered to remember some of the good times and celebrate what many now […]

I’m in New York on a flying visit and happened to catch the Manhattan transfer of Boeing-Boeing, as revived by Matthew Warchus on its opening night at the Longacre Theater, on Sunday. With so many British contenders for the dwindling American buck on the Great White Way (Goold’s Macbeth, Eyre’s Mary Poppins, Macdonald’s Top Girls […]

Six shows in six days in six different towns in the east Midlands. This leg of the tour has taken us from a 17th-century pirate ship (‘The Last Beginning’), via a country house thriller starring an amnesiac Frenchman (‘The Riding Weekend’) and a bloodbath in the backwoods (‘Appalachian Mountain Tragedy’), to Edwardian London, where a […]

One of the perils of the critic’s life -along with a bad back and an ability to relate to emotion only if it comes in a neat two-hour package - is a deadening of the senses to the live theatre experience due to over-exposure. As a form of self-medication, I have of late been taking […]

The Continuing Chronicle of ‘Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories’ on tour… www.cartoondesalvo.com
Six months ago I couldn’t do this; tell a totally different improvised story every night (incorporating live music). Now I can rely on something strange happening between the three of us and the audience every time we step out: from a shared starting […]

I read in the Daily Mail, in Baz Bamigboye’s Friday showbiz pages - filed from New York - that Stephen Daldry has vowed that he won’t tame the language in Billy Elliot - the Musical when the show opens on Broadway in October. Producers apparently asked him whether he could get rid of the swearing but he […]

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It finally dawned on us this week, why over the course of the last year, when we’d told people of our intentions to produce four full-length theatre productions simultaneously, the general response had been wry smiles and raised eyebrows. Unlike every other festival we know of, HighTide is not a forum of curated art. We […]

The Continuing Chronicle of ‘Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories’ on tour… www.cartoondesalvo.comÂ
I just found myself texting Cecile, a colleague who is organising our website, about some work I have to do next week. And the text ended: ‘Last night we were transported convicts. I married a bare-breasted native queen’. The show was in rural […]

I’m in Liverpool today, covering Matthew Kelly’s turn as Hamm in Endgame at the Everyman for the Times, so I don’t have much time to blog. But I’m urging everyone I meet at the moment to get down to the Barbican Pit, to see Molora - an extraordinary piece of work that transposes The Oresteia to […]