I'm Looking Through You

I gave a paper at the Alternative Victorians and Their Predecessors: New Directions in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Performance Research conference at Warwick University, co-organised by  Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film & University of Warwick.

It's part of the Naturalism project. I'm trying to think through what the 4th wall idea might have meant in its specific historical context. To that end the paper tries to argue for the historical specificity of the 4th wall (distinguishing it in the 1880s from certain potential precedents for it). I then try to make the invisible wall visible, by trying to say what the 4th wall would actually have looked like if we could see it. In the process that reveals some interesting things about the nature of Second Empire architecture, the separation of private and public space and of private and public morality. And finally I then try to think through what its invisibility might have meant in context and that takes me further into Haussmanization and the Commune.

I think it's an interesting piece and I hope to develop it further for TaPRA this year. Baby permitting.

Theatre 2016

Theatre 2016 is the biggest UK theatre conference ever, apparently. Organised by BON Culture and its partner organisations, it ran at the Piccadilly, Lyric and Arts Theatres in London over 12-13 May 2016. It had something like 1000 delegates. I was asked by the excellent David Brownlee (cofounder of BON Culture) to give the opening keynote, presenting our British Theatre Repertoire 2014 report (of which David was a co-researcher), but also a report by BON & partners on the 'Hopes and Fears' of the theatre sector for the state of the industry now and over the next decade. I was pleased with how it went, given that I was a bit sceptical that what the theatre industry wanted to kick off their conference was a lot of pie charts, but they liked the jokes and actually gasped at some of the facts. That's particularly satisfying, given that I think this data is rather remarkable but it can be quite tricky to get people excited about facts and percentages. In addition, I think we made some excellent connections with some other industry bodies to build this dataset and make it something even more comprehensive a picture of what happens on British stages.

British Theatre Repertoire 2014

Last year, David Edgar and I (for the British Theatre Consortium) produced a much-cited report, British Theatre Repertoire 2013, gathering together and analysing the most extensive set of data ever assembled about what happens on Britain's stages. Well, we've done it again, producing  a comparable report on the British Theatre Repertoire in 2014. Again we've been supported by Arts Council England and the report was researched and written in collaboration with UK Theatre/Society of London Theatre and with David Brownlee of BON Culture. Its findings were launched at a plenary session of the Theatre 2016 Conference, on 12 May 2016.

The main headline of the report is that the transformation ofBritish theatre repertoire which reported last year has remained firmly in place. New work still dominates the repertoire, and London the theatrical landscape. British theatre continues to defy austerity: in 2014, British theatres made over a billion at the box office.

This is the second report so while we can begin to establish the consistent patterns, it is too early confidently to describe trends (with only two years of data, it's not possible to tell whether a change is a genuine trend, random statistical variation, or the product of one anomalous year). We hope the funding will be continued. With another couple of years of data, we should be able to see a dynamic picture of where the theatre is going.

However, some changes can be seen.

• Within new work, new writing has slightly declined and devised work markedly increased. In terms of attendances and box office, London has pulled further away from the rest of the country. 
• Wales seems to be experiencing a surge in theatregoing leading the country in percentage of potential attendance and box office.
• Classical revivals are dominated by Shakespeare and women’s revivals by Agatha Christie.
• More than half of the National Theatre's and RSC's new plays were by women.

The full report is embargoed until Thursday May 12 - at which point you'll be able to read it HERE.

Sarah Kane article # 2

On the heels of Sarah Hemmings' article, there's a good piece by Andrew Dickson in The Guardian today looking back at the premiere of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis (on the eve of an operatic version of the play).

I'm not specifically mentioned in the piece which I am absolutely fine about. I had a phone conversation with Andy to help with the research for it and he begins the piece talking about the day I got Sarah over to Royal Holloway - about which there is much else on this website.

What I like in this piece is the sense that the dust is settling a bit on Sarah's reputation. We're not so bowled over by the intensity and the violence and the shadow of her suicide has shortened. We can even note that, while this does not exhaust the play by any means, 4.48 Psychosis is in part a suicide note of an unusually rich and complicated kind. I also love the comment by Sarah's brother, Simon, that 'Mental illness is so often sentimentalised, or portrayed as madness – I hate that word. Sarah wanted to convey that while it may be pathological, it isn’t necessarily illogical'  which seems to me exactly right about the play..

Zola Award

The BBC has an internal radio award ceremony, the Radio Awards. I was nominated once before but didn't win, to the Corporation's unending shame.

But Animals - episode 1 of series of of Émile Zola: Blood, Sex, & Money - was nominated and tonight it won.

I couldn't make the ceremony, being in Paris, so I haven't seen the award itself though it seems to be made out of a slate from the original roof of Broadcasting House, which is, goodness me, what a thing. And what a day, having my 4th Zola episode go out live this afternoon and having the first one win in the evening.

It's a prize for Best Drama Production (or reading), which means that the award is absolutely shared with Pauline Harris (producer) and Steve Brooke (sound designer) and, of course, an extraordinary cast that included Glenda Jackson, Robert Lindsay, Ian Hart, Fenella Woolgar and many more.

The judges citation reads: 'The judges said this was a gripping, entertaining piece of drama which conveyed the turbulent times of the Second Empire through the personal lives of its players. It was wonderfully well paced and varied, setting the tragic alongside the comic, interweaving the heroic with the grotesque and the pathetic.'

Routledge Drama Anthology

A few years ago (2010), I contributed to a big old textbook about Modern European and American drama published by Routledge under the title The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. I handled the section on Naturalism and Symbolism, offering a long introduction and overview to these movements and also translating Maeterlinck's Interior and 'Tragedy in Everyday Life' and Pierre Quillard's 'On the Complete Pointlessness of Accurate Staging' . Well it's gone into a second edition. My section hasn't changed but much of the rest has. And it's got a slightly snappier title. If you want a one-volume guide to some of the most exciting movements in experimental western theatre, you can't do better.

Gale, Maggie B., John Deeney, Dan Rebellato, and Carl Lavery. The Routledge Drama Anthology: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. 2nd ed.  Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.

Royal Holloway and the Performing Arts

The QS World University Rankings produce annual league tables of university institutions broken down by subject. They are measuring reputation and impact and they ask the opinions of other academics and employers and gather data about the impact of research based on citations and other measurements.

Very pleasingly, my institution, Royal Holloway, has been voted 14th in the world for Performing Arts and 6th in Britain.

1. Royal College of Music
2. University of Oxford
3. Royal Academy of Music
4. Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
5. Guildhall School of Music and Drama
6. Royal Holloway, University of London
7. University of Cambridge
8. King's College London
9. University of Southampton
10. University of York

The rankings reflect the strength of Drama and Music at Royal Holloway but you'll note that all of the institutions above us on the list are either conservatoires or academic institutions that don't teach Drama (Oxford), so of institutions that teach an academic degree in Drama, we're first. (Not that it really works like that.)

This is particularly pleasing because we've done a lot of work focusing our research activity, rebuilding the research staff, raising the profile of the research and creative practice, and reshaping the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. This already had a strong impact on our REF score last time and this is further evidence of our growing reputation.

Local Hero

Rebellato, Dan. "Local Hero: The Places of David Greig." Contemporary Theatre Review 26, no. 1 (January 2016): 9-18.

I gave a paper at Lincoln for a symposium on the work of David Greig a couple of years ago and a revised version of the paper has now come out in Contemporary Theatre Review. You'll probably need institutional access (unless you have wisely chosen to take out a personal subscription). It's part of a special issue on Greig's work, which I thoroughly recommend.

The first fifty of you can download the article HERE.

Sarah Kane article

There's a nice profile of Sarah Kane by Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times today, with some great contributions by Katie Mitchell, Vicky Featherstone, Alistair McDowall and others. It coinciding with Sarah Kane's premiere at the National Theatre with Katie Mitchell's production of Cleansed. I've written a programme note for that which I'll stick on here in due course.

But for now, here's the article:

• Sarah Hemming 'A ‘long overdue’ debut for Sarah Kane' Financial Times 12 Feb 2016

Home Economics

I've written a short play for Radio 4 and it's on this evening, Saturday 6 February 2016, at 7pm. It's in the From Fact to Fiction slot, which is intended for short, punchy plays that address topical issues. Mine looks at austerity economics. It's directed by the brilliant Polly Thomas and has a tremendous cast of Frances Grey and Sion Pritchard.

Link here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06zh291

It's repeated tomorrow at 5.40pm and it'll be in the iPlayer for a month after that.

Katie Mitchell & Cleansed

I'm doing a National Theatre platform, talking to Katie Mitchell about her production of Sarah Kane's play Cleansed. The platform is at 6pm on 2 March 2016. We will try to avoid spoilers so you can see the production that evening. Katie is always fascinating talking about her work and this looks set to be a remarkable production of (IMHO) Sarah Kane's greatest play.

Tickets for the platform are available here.

Writing Writing

Two years ago I went to Hong Kong to give a talk. I may even have told you at the time. In fact I did. Anyway, I gave a talk there which I later buffed up and puffed out and sent them and it's now been published in this:

• 甄拔濤 (編)。(2015) 《躍動的交鋒：閱讀新文本》。香港：國際演藝評論家協會(香港)分會及前進進戲劇工作坊。

Okay, here's a reference in English in case your Cantonese isn't as awesome as mine.

• Rebellato, Dan. "Writing Writing: British Playwriting in the Twenty-First Century." A Leaping Battle: Reading New Writing. Ed. Yan, Pat To. Hong Kong: International Association of Theatre Critics & On and On Theatre Workshop, 2015. 128-78. Print.

Mine is actually the only English-language contribution in the book. As it's for a Hong Kong readership, it begins with a survey of waves of British playwriting since the second world war. I then talk about British playwriting in the twenty-first century, which I suggest has not been characterised by a single movement. Instead I talk about some trends across the last fifteen years: Big Plays, Small Plays, Collaborative Writing, Verbatim, and Playing with Authorship.

This last section is probably the most original part of it. It builds on the argument in my article for Vicky Angelaki's book but tries to get under the skin of the peculiar nature of the performance text, something neither/nor both/and performance event and literary text.

Anyway, I'm not sure how you'll ever get to read it so alas my extraordinary powerful insights will, for now, only work their magic on the theatre communities of Kowloon. Maybe I'll scan it and put it up here after a decent interval

PS. My Cantonese is not awesome. It is non-existent..

Naturalism Panel

To coincide with the current production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf at the Almeida (and the forthcoming production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya), I'm speaking on a panel at the Almeida on Naturalism, its historical meaning and significance for us now, alongside David Eldridge who did such brilliant versions of Ibsen and Strindberg for the Donmar and Royal Exchange. The excellent Andrew Haydon is chairing. And there are other guests, still to be confirmed.

You can book tickets at the Almeida website.

UPDATE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND REPLACED WITH A RECORDING SESSION; THE RESULTING PODCAST WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE ALMEIDA WEBSITE..

Bruntwood Prize

The Brentwood Prize is ten years old and it's the biggest playwriting competition in the UK. It's awarded prizes to 17 playwrights in that time and the work of these writers has been seen in 28 venues across the country. Playwrights who have been discovered through this process include Phil Porter, Duncan Macmillan, ben Musgrave, Vivienne Franzmann, Fiona Peek, Andrew Sheridan, Alistair McDowall, Janice Okoh, Anna Jordan, Luke Norris, and Chris Urch.

I was very pleased and flattered, then, to be asked to write a short piece for the 2015 Brentwood Prize Award Ceremony programme. The piece is above. Click on the pick for a bigger version.

Zola Feedback

Radio rarely gets reviewed, alas, but we're getting a few positive write-ups for the Zola season.

Gillian Reynolds in The Telegraph gave us this superb review: 'unmissable radio ... Nowhere  else in the world is radio drama as good as this'.

We were on Pick of the Week on Sunday 22 November and they played a good long clip of Pierre and his Dad's Army guys preparing to defend the town (and another clip from Pauline Harris and Glenda Jackson's documentary).

Really good response on Feedback (4.11.15) with a lot of listeners saying it was good. A couple resented it taking over the airwaves for a week and someone else, slightly incredibly, complained about Northern accents.

Nice piece in the Spectator, mainly praising Glenda.

Another good piece in the Telegraph, really about Zola but with some lovely asides about the adaptations.

There's a review of Listen-in-the-Dark event that Polly and I went to at Cardiff University.

We're in the Telegraph's 5 Best Radio Moments of the Year.

Hello Goodbye

A radio play of mine from 2011, My Life is a Series of People Saying Goodbye, is getting another broadcast on BBC Radio 4Extra on Monday 23 November at 11.15am. It's an attempt to do something quite experimental with the form of radio and create something moving, strange and beautiful. You can find out whether I managed on Monday.

With all my Zolas on Radio 4 and this on 4Extra, I will have 4¼ hours of drama being broadcast on BBC Radio over the next week or so. I think this entitles me to describe it as THE BBC REBELLATO SEASON.

Zola Previews

My radio series, Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money, airs in just over a week and the publicity machine is cranking up.

One of the biggest coups was getting Glenda Jackson in to play Adelaïde Fouque, the matriarch of the Rougon and Macquart families, and our narrator. And, happily, this is getting a lot of coverage for the series. There was a flurry of coverage when the autumn season was announced and I listed some of it here. But I'll populate this page with coverage as it appears.

Glenda was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Front Row on 9 November about the series and her career as actor and politician and you can listen to that below:

Start the Week on Monday 16 November was recorded in Paris, looking at the legacy of Zola in modern France. Andrew Marr was interviewing Agnès Desarthe, Robert Gildea, and Karim Miské. It was recorded before the horrific events of Friday 13 November, but its discussion of France's identity and its threats are unnervingly apposite. You can listen to that below:

Glenda Jackson presented a documentary, recorded in Paris, exploring Zola's work, interviewing the great Zola scholar Henri Mitterand, Zola's great-granddaughter and more, visiting Paris, Médan, and Aix-en-Provence. It was first broadcast on Monday 16 November and then repeated twice on Tuesday 24 November. You can listen to that below:

There are some audio clips that the BBC have put together:

• Glenda Jackson as Aunt Didi welcomes you to the story
• Writers Olly Emanuel, Martin Jameson and me discuss adapting the books
• David Tobin talks about the music he and his fellow composers have written for the series

There's a long interview with Glenda Jackson in the Radio Times (21-27 November, pp. 120-121, 123), the season is the top pick of the week and episode 1 is a choice of the day, with a very appreciative write-up by Jane Anderson. We're pick of the day in the Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent, Independent on Sunday, i, Daily Mail, Times and probably more...

I've written a couple of short things for the BBC website.

• A short piece looking at seven of his political, artistic and literary battles, from Manet to 'J'Accuse...!'
• A prose version for people who are less excited by Buzzfeed-type lists.

I did a substantial interview with Thomas Oléron Evans for the Little Written podcast series. 

There are lots of great-sounding clips from the episodes here and a very nicely designed family tree here.

And there's a really nice trailer doing the rounds too. This is it from Today on 19 November 2015.

There's an interesting article by Sue Roberts (overall series producer) and Sophie Zurawski (composer) about commissioning and writing the music for the series, with links to the isolated music tracks.

Gillian Reynolds and Pete Naughton previewed season 2 very favourably in their podcast for the Telegraph.

There's a nice interview with Glenda Jackson in The Telegraph, in which she admits that on the first day she was nervous. Well I was there and I can tell you the room was in awe...

From Fact to Fiction

Radio 4 has an occasional topical drama slot, called From Fact to Fiction. A writer chooses a news story on Monday and writes a short play about it over the next couple of days. It's cast on Wednesday, recorded at the end of the week and broadcast on Saturday. It's a rather mad tightrope walk where you have to trust that you'll find a sympathetic story and that the writing will happen. And that's what I will be doing in February 2016.

If anyone would like to do something eye-catching and drama-worthy near the beginning of February (no murders please), that would help me immensely.

Listen in the Dark: Zola - Trains

Emile Zola: Blood, Sex and Money is about to begin broadcasting. This is the large-scale adaptation of the Rougon-Macquart novels on which I've been lead writer. I've written three episodes of the first week.

If you're in Cardiff, you can get a preview of one of these episodes at the next of the university's BookTalk events. These are free and open to the public. We will preview episode 9 of the first series, which is the climax of the first season. It covers the second half of La Bête Humaine (which you might like to read, but we'll fill in what's happened so you can follow it, in case you haven't). This will be followed by a discussion with Kate Griffiths of Cardiff University (academic consultant on the series), Polly Thomas (producer/director of the episode), and me (writer).

It begins at 6.30pm with a drinks reception at Cardiff University’s School of Optometry and Vision Sciences, Maindy Road, Cardiff CF24 4HQ.

More information HERE including a link to book your FREE place.

UPDATE: and HERE's a review of the event written by Caleb Sivyer.

Pomona Platform

A couple of weeks ago I chaired a post-show discussion at the National Theatre's Temporary Space (formerly known as the Shed) with writer Alistair McDowall and director Ned Bennett talking about their fantastic show Pomona, about which I have bored you all previously. It was a good chat. Alistair wonderfully voluble, Ned Bennett precise and clear about the show. 

Pleasingly, it was recorded and the National have made it available as a podcast. You can hear it at the link below:

• https://soundcloud.com/nationaltheatre/pomona-post-show-discussion