REALITY SUCKS the Slump in British New Writing

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

REALITY SUCKS the Slump in British New Writing REALITY SUCKS The Slump in British New Writing Aleks Sierz he distinguished film director David Lean once said, “Reality is a bore.” He was talking about the fashion in 1960s cinema for social realism, for kitchen-sink drama, for angry young men. You can see his point. Ever since Tthe advent of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger—whose fiftieth anniversary in 2006 was celebrated in a rather listless fashion by Ian Rickson, the Royal Court’s outgoing artistic director—British theatre has been in thrall to a mix of social realism and naturalism whose hegemonic power remains a problem even today. So pervasive is this strand in the culture that the title of the Arctic Monkeys 2006 CD is Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, a direct steal from defiant Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s 1960 social-realist film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Today, given the anxieties created by the digital age’s affront to old and established views of reality, and to the ongoing global uncertainties unleashed by the War on Terror, the British public’s desire for reality is more intense than ever—and this is manifested not only in a seemingly insatiable appetite for reality TV, but also in a need to be assured that the best theatre is somehow “real,” explanation enough perhaps for the current vogue for verbatim drama. But the hegemony of social realism and naturalism is, like other hegemonies, not just an innocent preference for one aesthetic over another. No, it’s a cultural mind- set that only works by excluding, by marginalizing, by belittling any theatre that doesn’t obey the right dress code. Like an attack dog, it needs victims. In 2006, for example, director Katie Mitchell staged a new translation of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the National Theatre. Out went all the clichés associated with this master of naturalism: there were no samovars; no chirping birdsong; no melancholic silences. Using a radical new translation by Martin Crimp, which ditched the patronymics and Russianisms so beloved of British audiences, the production was an aesthetic success—and a slap in the face of this flagship theatre’s regular patrons. But one smack can provoke another. Mitchell received hate mail, with one spectator scrawling “RUBBISH” on the program and sending it back to her. A similar confrontation between this director and one part of the National’s audience took place in 2007, when Mitchell staged a rare revival of Crimp’s 1997 masterpiece, Attempts on Her Life. This time both play and production (which saw the actors used as filmmakers who shot parts of the stage action which were then projected onto massive screens) 102 PAJ 89 (2008), pp. 102–107. © 2008 Aleks Sierz Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.2.102 by guest on 30 September 2021 proved scandalous. Critics savaged the production: one called it a woeful example of “Mitchellitis—a dreadful form of directorial embellishment” (Evening Standard) and another “two hours of debasing trash” (Daily Mail), with Crimp’s writing char- acterized as having “an off-putting coldness, and an ironic, self-advertising cleverness that proves ultimately repellent” (Daily Telegraph). Internet message boards, such as What’s On Stage, rang with yobbish snorts of “indulgent theatrical wankery” and “pretentious, insulting nonsense.” These kinds of passionate responses clearly show how central the aesthetics of social realism and naturalism are to British culture. For once, something really is at stake. And, if ever there was an anti-naturalistic play, it’s Attempts on Her Life. With Crimp’s open text, and disregard for the usual literalistic markers of a naturalist play (characters, scenes, dialogue, and plot), the piece positively heaves with potential for imaginative stagings. And, in Mitchell’s version, it came across as a phantasmagoria of video effects, fast-paced acting and visual bravura. It is theatrical theatre par excel- lence. It uses film, but you couldn’t make a film of it. Now, it would be easy to dismiss such events, which are happening at the National Theatre—that bastion of Britishness—as somehow irrelevant to the rest of the country’s live performance. Yet the truth is that this flagship has, under the leader- ship of artistic director Nicholas Hytner, become a trendsetter, a place of innovation rather than conservatism. For example, Hytner associate Tom Morris has champi- oned experimental theatre companies such as Shunt, Kneehigh, Punchdrunk, and Improbable, all of whom have been welcomed into the National fold. And the National has contributed immensely to the recent re-emergence of anti-naturalism: look at Mitchell’s own adaptation, Waves (2006). In this transposition of Virginia Woolf’s modernistic novel The Waves Mitchell found a fragmented stage aesthetic that matched the original’s experimental and fragmentary character. Her actors used video to show how reality itself can be constructed and how memory is itself fragmentary. Finally, in a stark illustration of how the National has turned the tables on other so-called cutting-edge theatres, you need only compare two versions of The Seagull. At the National, Mitchell’s version was fast, innovative, and shocking; at the Royal Court in 2007, Ian Rickson’s was slow, clichéd, and traditional. With its samovars and moody atmosphere, it was a vision of Chekhov that could have been staged at any time during the past thirty years. Mitchell’s production made you sit up; Rickson’s made you yawn. Hytner has also supported new writing. Of course, it is well know that British new writing for the theatre has been enjoying an unprecedented boom since the mid-1990s. The cult of the new is alive and well. There is now more new writing than at any time before: everywhere you look, both in and outside London, there are new writing festivals, new writing bursaries, new work for kids, and new plays on stage. The whole theatre community is rejoicing in the worship of novelty, and the new writing scene is not immune. What is less well known is that there is an aesthetic struggle at the heart of new writing, a tussle between the literalists and the metaphysicals. On the Encore Theatre Magazine Website, a posting about the SIERZ / Reality Sucks 103 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.2.102 by guest on 30 September 2021 tension between these two great traditions was titled “The Battle Commences.” And the reception of Mitchell’s work is proof that this conflict runs right across all of British theatre. We know all about the literalists. This name refers to the Great British lineage of social realism and naturalism. Its grandparent is George Bernard Shaw and its daddies are John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. It’s a theatre style that Scottish playwright David Greig provocatively calls “English realism.” This new writing genre, which has grown up in subsidized theatres for the past fifty years, shows the nation to itself. What you see on stage is what you get: no more, no less. It voices debates and deals in issues. Its stories are linear and based firmly on a recognizable social context. Its dialogues are convincing and down-to-earth. It is distrustful of metaphor and suspicious of fancy foreign work, which is usually characterized as effete, abstract, and humorless. By contrast, English realism is muscular, earthy, and wry. Its muscles ripple, but it isn’t gay. With English realism, concludes Greig, “the real world is brought into the theatre and plonked on stage like a familiar old sofa.” Does he have a point? Of course he does. Despite the deluge of the new, most new work is written in this familiar English tradition. And there’s a real failure of theatrical imagination at the heart of the whole literalist endeavor. Most new plays in Britain are determinedly literal-minded. They are slices of life, soapy dramas for couch potatoes. Whether they are about “me and my mates,” teen- age angst, or underclass violence, they normally squat on territory that is already known—there’s really little sense of exploration, or experiment, or excitement. The mantra of “write what you know” seems to have banished any imaginative explora- tion of the tentative or of the partially perceived. Boundaries remain unbreached; fantasy is grounded by the twin ballast of naturalism and social realism. New plays are small in every respect: cast, space, and theatrical ambition. And while political theatre has experienced a boom in the wake of 9/11, it too usually returns to the literalist tradition. Think verbatim drama, think docudrama—theatre’s answer to reality TV. As ever, in this genre, often what you see is all there is. If literalism is familiar, metaphysical theatre is not. But it’s a good label because it calls to mind the tradition of metaphysical poetry, which was championed by T.S. Eliot in between the wars, and was the subject of a highly influential book of col- lected poems, edited by Helen Gardner and originally published in 1957, the year after the premiere of Look Back in Anger. In her introduction to these seventeenth- century poets, Gardner stresses their wit, their conceits and their imagination, and argues that they typically expressed “deep thoughts in common language” and “extraordinary thoughts in ordinary situations.” She also contrasts the “strenuous” and “masculine” style of playwright and poet Ben Jonson with the more elaborate conceits of the true metaphysicals, such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell, who (presumably) were more “effete” and “feminine.” Donne, of course, was a “great frequenter of plays,” and Shakespeare—with his mix of wild imagination, philo- sophical speculation, onstage ghosts, epic history, and domestic realism—can easily be seen as the grand old man of the metaphysical tradition.
Recommended publications
  • Chapter 36 Harold Pinter: the Dramatist and His World
    Chapter 36 Harold Pinter: The Dramatist and His World Background Nobel winner, Harold Pinter (1930- 2008) was born in London, England in a Jewish family. Some of the most recognizable features in his plays are the use of understatement, small talk, reticence , and silence. These devices are employed to convey the substance of a character’s thoughts. At the outbreak of World War II, Pinter was evacuated from the city to Cornwall; to be wrenched from his parents was a traumatic event for Pinter. He lived with 26 other boys in a castle on the coast. At the age of 14, he returned to London. "The condition of being bombed has never left me," Pinter later said. At school one of Pinter's main intellectual interests was English literature, particularly poetry. He also read works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway, and started writing poetry for little magazines in his teens. The seeds of rebellion in Pinter could be spotted early on when he refused to do the National Service. As a young man, he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but soon left to undertake an acting career under the stage name David Baron. He travelled around Ireland in a Shakespearean company and spent years working in provincial repertory before deciding to turn his attention to playwriting. Pinter was married from 1956 to the actress Vivien Merchant. For a time, they lived in Notting Hill Gate in a slum. Eventually Pinter managed to borrow some money and move away.
    [Show full text]
  • From Free Cinema to British New Wave: a Story of Angry Young Men
    SUPLEMENTO Ideas, I, 1 (2020) 51 From Free Cinema to British New Wave: A Story of Angry Young Men Diego Brodersen* Introduction In February 1956, a group of young film-makers premiered a programme of three documentary films at the National Film Theatre (now the BFI Southbank). Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson thought at the time that “no film can be too personal”, and vehemently said so in their brief but potent manifesto about Free Cinema. Their documentaries were not only personal, but aimed to show the real working class people in Britain, blending the realistic with the poetic. Three of them would establish themselves as some of the most inventive and irreverent British filmmakers of the 60s, creating iconoclastic works –both in subject matter and in form– such as Saturday Day and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and If… Those were the first significant steps of a New British Cinema. They were the Big Screen’s angry young men. What is British cinema? In my opinion, it means many different things. National cinemas are much more than only one idea. I would like to begin this presentation with this question because there have been different genres and types of films in British cinema since the beginning. So, for example, there was a kind of cinema that was very successful, not only in Britain but also in America: the films of the British Empire, the films about the Empire abroad, set in faraway places like India or Egypt. Such films celebrated the glory of the British Empire when the British Empire was almost ending.
    [Show full text]
  • University of Pardubice Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Angry Young Men
    University of Pardubice Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Angry Young Men in British Drama: Analysis and Comparison of The Entertainer and The Kitchen Bachelor Thesis 2020 Karolína Jeníčková Prohlašuji: Tuto práci jsem vypracovala samostatně. Veškeré literární prameny a informace, které jsem v práci využila, jsou uvedeny v seznamu použité literatury. Byla jsem seznámena s tím, že se na moji práci vztahují práva a povinnosti vyplývající ze zákona č. 121/2000 Sb., autorský zákon, zejména se skutečností, že Univerzita Pardubice má právo na uzavření licenční smlouvy o užití této práce jako školního díla podle § 60 odst. 1autorského zákona, a s tím, že pokud dojde k užití této práce mnou nebo bude poskytnuta licence o užití jinému subjektu, je Univerzita Pardubice oprávněna ode mne požadovat přiměřený příspěvek na úhradu nákladů, které na vytvoření díla vynaložila, a to podle okolností až do jejich skutečné výše. Beru na vědomí, že v souladu s § 47b zákona č. 111/1998 Sb., o vysokých školách a o změně a doplnění dalších zákonů (zákon o vysokých školách), ve znění pozdějších předpisů, a směrnicí Univerzity Pardubice č. 7/2019, bude práce zveřejněna v Univerzitní knihovně a prostřednictvím Digitální knihovny Univerzity Pardubice. V Pardubicích dne 14. 4. 2020 Karolína Jeníčková ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Mgr. Petra Kalavská, Ph.D., for her kindness and valuable advice during writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank my family for their support throughout my studies. ANNOTATION This bachelor thesis focuses on The Entertainer (1957) by John Osborne and on The Kitchen (1959) by Arnold Wesker, the plays written by playwrights referred to as the Angry Young Men.
    [Show full text]
  • A Character Type in the Plays of Edward Bond
    A Character Type in the Plays of Edward Bond Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Frank A. Torma, M. A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2010 Dissertation Committee: Jon Erickson, Advisor Richard Green Joy Reilly Copyright by Frank Anthony Torma 2010 Abstract To evaluate a young firebrand later in his career, as this dissertation attempts in regard to British playwright Edward Bond, is to see not the end of fireworks, but the fireworks no longer creating the same provocative results. Pursuing a career as a playwright and theorist in the theatre since the early 1960s, Bond has been the exciting new star of the Royal Court Theatre and, more recently, the predictable producer of plays displaying the same themes and strategies that once brought unsettling theatre to the audience in the decades past. The dissertation is an attempt to evaluate Bond, noting his influences, such as Beckett, Brecht, Shakespeare, and the postmodern, and charting the course of his career alongside other dramatists when it seems appropriate. Edward Bond‟s characters of Len in Saved, the Gravedigger‟s Boy in Lear, Leonard in In the Company of Men, and the character in a number of other Bond plays provide a means to understand Bond‟s aesthetic and political purposes. Len is a jumpy young man incapable of bravery; the Gravedigger‟s Boy is the earnest young man destroyed too early by total war; Leonard is a needy, spoiled youth destroyed by big business.
    [Show full text]
  • THE BIRTHDAY PARTY by Harold Pinter Directed by Ian Rickson
    PRESS RELEASE – Tuesday 6th March 2018 IMAGES CAN BE DOWNLOADED HERE @BdayPartyLDN / TheBirthdayParty.London Sonia Friedman Productions in association with Rupert Gavin, Tulchin Bartner Productions, 1001 Nights Productions, Scott M. Delman present THE BIRTHDAY PARTY By Harold Pinter Directed by Ian Rickson CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED 60th ANNIVERSARY REVIVAL OF THE BIRTHDAY PARTY ENTERS FINAL WEEKS AT THE HAROLD PINTER THEATRE STRICTLY LIMITED WEST END RUN STARRING TOBY JONES, STEPHEN MANGAN, ZOË WANAMAKER AND PEARL MACKIE MUST COME TO AN END ON 14TH APRIL Audiences now have just five weeks left to see the critically acclaimed West End production of playwright Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. The company for the major revival, which runs 60 years since the play’s debut, includes Toby Jones, Stephen Mangan, Zoë Wanamaker, Pearl Mackie, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Peter Wight, and is directed by Ian Rickson. Stanley Webber (Toby Jones) is the only lodger at Meg (Zoë Wanamaker) and Petey Boles’ (Peter Wight) sleepy seaside boarding house. The unsettling arrival of enigmatic strangers Goldberg (Stephen Mangan) and McCann (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) disrupts the humdrum lives of the inhabitants and their friend Lulu (Pearl Mackie), and mundanity soon becomes menace when a seemingly innocent birthday party turns into a disturbing nightmare. Truth and alliances hastily shift in Pinter's brilliantly mysterious dark-comic masterpiece about the absurd terrors of the everyday. The production is designed by the Quay Brothers, with lighting by Hugh Vanstone, music by Stephen Warbeck, sound by Simon Baker, and casting by Amy Ball. For more information visit TheBirthdayParty.London -ENDS- For further information please contact The Corner Shop PR on 020 7831 7657 Maisie Lawrence [email protected] / Ben Chamberlain [email protected] LISTINGS Sonia Friedman Productions in association with Rupert Gavin, Tulchin Bartner Productions, 1001 Nights Productions, Scott M.
    [Show full text]
  • Stephens Plays: 2: One Minute; Country Music; Motortown; Harper
    Simon Stephens Plays: 2 One Minute, Country Music Motortown, Pornography, Sea Wall One Minute: ‘Set in London in the aftermath of the disappearance of an eleven-year-old girl, One Minute brings together the girl’s mother, an unreliable witness, a student/barmaid and two investigating officers . the writing cleverly suggests how much the characters would like to connect but never really can.’ Guardian Country Music ‘spotlights four fateful moments in the life of Jamie Carris, an engaging but violent south Londoner. The play unfolds in a series of tightly focused two-handers, set before, during and after the prison sentences he has served for glassing one man and for killing another.’ Independent Motortown: ‘Danny – a squaddie who has served in Basra – is bringing the war back home [to] an England where the “war on terror” has become a war waged using the tactics of the terrorists. It is also a place of dubious moralities, small-time arms dealers and middle-class swingers and anti-war protesters. A searingly honest play written with a deadly coiled energy.’ Guardian Pornography: ‘Set in July 2005, between the announcement that London had been awarded the Olympics and the July 7 bombings, it tells seven entwining stories, including the imagined story of one of the bombers journeying towards London to commit an act of terrorism.’ Guardian Sea Wall: ‘A quietly gripping monologue about grief and belief . this play is like a deceptive calm blue sea beneath which lurks a ferocious riptide of sorrow.’ Guardian Simon Stephens is a British writer whose theatrical career began in the literary department of the Royal Court Theatre where he ran its Young Writers’ Programme.
    [Show full text]
  • Harold Pinter: the Dramatist and His World
    Harold Pinter: The Dramatist and His World Background Nobel winner, Harold Pinter (1930- 2008) was born in London, England in a Jewish family. Some of the most recognizable features in his plays are the use of understatement, small talk, distance, and silence. These devices are employed to convey the substance of a character’s thoughts. At the outbreak of World War II, Pinter was evacuated from the city to Cornwall; to be wrenched from his parents was a traumatic event for Pinter. He lived with 26 other boys in a castle on the coast. At the age of 14, he returned to London. "The condition of being bombed has never left me," Pinter later said. At school one of Pinter's main intellectual interests was English literature, particularly poetry. He also read works of Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway, and started writing poetry for little magazines in his teens. The seeds of rebellion in Pinter could be spotted early on when he refused to do the National Service. As a young man, he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but soon left to undertake an acting career under the stage name David Baron. He travelled around Ireland in a Shakespearean company and spent years working in provincial repertory before deciding to turn his attention to playwriting. Pinter was married from 1956 to the actress Vivien Merchant. For a time, they lived in Notting Hill Gate in a slum. Eventually Pinter managed to borrow some money and move away. Although Pinter said in an interview in 1966, that he never has written any part for any actor, his wife Vivien frequently appeared in his plays.
    [Show full text]
  • Welcome – Secondary English
    Welcome – Secondary English Welcome to the National Theatre Collection. Here you can find the best of British theatre available for you and your students to watch whenever you’d like. Our unique collection presents high-quality recordings of 30 world-class productions, giving you the best seats in the house from the comfort of your classroom. The collection enables students to see and understand text in performance and understand how a play can be interpreted in different ways. You’ll find an incredible selection of productions, with something suitable for all students from Key Stage 3 through to Key Stage 5. Many of the productions featured as part of the Collection are GCSE and A-Level set texts for English. We hope that you might also use the Collection to introduce your students to plays that you might not have thought of exploring before, expanding their theatrical language and literacy. Key Stage 3 and above • Introduce students to the Windrush generation and their experiences in post-war • Introduce Shakespeare with productions Britain in Small Island, Helen Edmundson’s of Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel. Tale, specially adapted for younger audiences. These productions use Shakespeare’s original text, but are only Key Stage 5 an hour long so are very accessible for younger students. • Explore A-Level set text Shakespeare plays in full, looking at the director’s interpretation • Explore a novel brought to life on stage and how this is realised on stage. You with Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of watch and analyse productions of Othello, Treasure Island.
    [Show full text]
  • Jimmy Porter Our Contemporary
    Jimmy Porter Our Contemporary Subhadip Pal1 The 21st century has become an age of chaos. It is not solely because of the corona pandemic, the reasons behind it are numerous. The corona pandemic has only aggravated the gangrene further which was already prevalent in hamlets, cities, countries and continents. Before the induction of the corona pandemic, people were fuming with rage, growing impatience with the rules, regulations and norms of society around the globe. The entire human fraternity was tremored and nonplussed with fear, seeing a mad race for procuring destructive nuclear weapons, growing tensions in the middle east, sabotage and bullying of Iran, China's rise and aggressive policies, India and Pakistan's confrontation on the fringes, gross human rights violations in Palestine and many others. While the main agendas of the entire world should be the eradication of poverty and upliftment of the poor, preservation of human rights, conservation of nature , and economic betterment of every dweller on earth. To add insult to injury the corona pandemic has left no stone unturned. People are losing their lives, loved ones, jobs and homes on a regular basis to this pandemic. In John Osborne's Look Back in Anger we get an identical picture of a war-ravaged society filled with dissatisfied, discontented and disappointed 'angry young men'. Taking a cue from Polish writer Jan Kott's title of a book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1961), my paper titled “Jimmy Porter Our Contemporary'' will relocate Jimmy porter, his anger, his desires, and aspirations in the post-pandemic era. Keywords: Jimmy Porter, anger, angry young men, pandemic, contemporary time Look Back in Anger is a kitchen sink drama written by John Osborne at the age of 26 during the post-world war era.
    [Show full text]
  • “Working-Class Hero Is Something to Be”, John Lennon Sings, and He Might Mean
    FROM ANGRY YOUNG SCHOLARSHIP BOY TO MALE ROLE MODEL:THE RISE OF THE WORKING-CLASS HERO SEBASTIAN MÜLLER Abstract “Working-Class Hero is something to be”, John Lennon sings, and he might mean: “at least something.” Thus it becomes understandable that the “original angry young men” Jimmy Porter (John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger) and Joe Lampton (John Braine’s Room at the Top) fall back on this mythologically charged mode of subcultural subject formation. And a closer look reveals that both are not only in a class, but also a gender conflict. Both of them produce themselves as typical working-class heroes, a subcultural male subject form that gains further influence through protagonists like Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton (in his bestselling Saturday Night and Sunday Morning). As a consequence, the working-class hero slowly but unstoppably steps out of the depths of his former realms into the light of social attention, becoming a male role-model to believe in, and thus becoming some- thing to really be. In a modern or postmodern world of shifting identi- ties, the working-class hero provides a very simple but effectively re- affirming mode of male identity formation; a mode of subject for- mation that, as we shall see, even gains global influence through one outstanding and very specific product of mass media representation: James Bond. When John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 8th, 1956, and Kenneth Haigh hit the stage as a “working class Hamlet”1 Jimmy Porter, a new era for 1 This phrase is used on the back cover of the current Penguin paperback edition.
    [Show full text]
  • Studies in International Performance Published in Association with The
    Studies in International Performance Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations. Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the pan- oply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces ‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternative, and treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson THE THEATRES OF MOROCCO, ALGERIA AND TUNISIA Performance Traditions of the Maghreb Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (editors) VIOLENCE PERFORMED Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS Christopher B. Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Matthew Isaac Cohen PERFORMING OTHERNESS Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952 Susan Leigh Foster (editor) WORLDING DANCE Karen Fricker and Milija Gluhovic (editors) PERFORMING THE ‘NEW’ EUROPE Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline
    [Show full text]
  • UNCLE VANYA by Anton Chekhov
    PRESS RELEASE – 18 OCTOBER 2019 IMAGES CAN BE DOWNLOADED HERE Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: @UncleVanyaPlay www.unclevanyaplay.com Sonia Friedman Productions Gavin Kalin Productions, Rupert Gavin, Patrick Gracey/Scott M. Delman, 1001 Nights Productions, Tulchin Bartner Productions in association with Len Blavatnik, Eilene Davidson Productions, Louise & Brad Edgerton present UNCLE VANYA By Anton Chekhov In a new adaptation by Conor McPherson Directed by Ian Rickson Rosalind Eleazar, Aimee Lou Wood, Anna Calder-Marshall, Dearbhla Molloy, Peter Wight and Ciarán Hinds will join Toby Jones and Richard Armitage in a major new production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Sonia Friedman Productions today announced further casting for Conor McPherson’s (The Weir, Girl from the North Country), new adaptation of Uncle Vanya directed by Ian Rickson (Jerusalem, The Seagull). Rosalind Eleazar (The Personal History of David Copperfield, Deep Water, The Starry Messenger), Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education, Downstate), the Emmy Award-winning Anna Calder-Marshall (LOVE, Evening at the Talk House, Male of the Species), the Olivier and Tony-award nominated Dearbhla Molloy (The Ferryman, Dancing at Lughnasa, Juno and the Paycock), Peter Wight (The Birthday Party, Hamlet, The Red Lion) and Olivier Award-nominated Ciarán Hinds (Translations, Game of Thrones, Girl from the North Country) will perform alongside the previously announced Toby Jones and Richard Armitage. The production will run for sixteen weeks at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 14th January 2020 with Opening Night on Thursday 23rd January 2020. Tickets are on sale now. In the heat of summer, Sonya (Aimee Lou Wood) and her Uncle Vanya (Toby Jones) while away their days on a crumbling estate deep in the countryside, visited occasionally only by the local doctor Astrov (Richard Armitage).
    [Show full text]