theatreVOICE

How often have you heard the claim that a playwright has “found the universal in the specific”? It often seems as if such an observation is the highest form of critical praise; as if finding “the universal in the specific” is the greatest achievement a playwright could make. Â
   However, it seems to me that this obsession with the seemingly boundless […]

Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories is also kind of a band.  We’re a beardy-weirdy folk band, and each night we play tunes inspired by the Jug Band tradition of the American South on random select, only live.  Then we ask three audience members to pick three tunes from our repertoire, and we work them […]

A couple of weeks ago, The City opened at the Royal Court. It’s the latest play by top Brit writer Martin Crimp in a production by Katie Mitchell, without doubt one of the country’s most distinctive directors. You’d think that critics and audiences would be falling over themselves in admiration. Not a bit of it: […]

Does West End theatre feature on Boris Johnson’s list of mayoral priorities? Right and proper as it is that he’s devoting immediate attention to dealing with knife crime and the troubling state of lawlessness on the capital’s streets, there’s nothing trivial about focusing some energy, and swiftly too, on the shoddy state of London’s commercial […]

The recent Europe Theatre Prize (held in the Greek city of Thessaloniki in April) forced audiences, practitioners and critics to negotiate the often treacherous territory where politics and aesthetics meet.
The many Greek and international guests of the programme were in Thessaloniki to see work by a variety of European companies and artists, including the winner […]

The touring part of this engagement is drawing to a close now, temporarily. After tonight’s show in Brighton, we’ll face the different challenge of performing a new show every night in the same venue, as we start a three-and-a-half week run at the Lyric Hammersmith.  It got me wondering how much of our material has […]

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 […]