New Rattigan editions

As part of the centenary celebrations for Terence Rattigan, Nick Hern is publishing several more single editions of his plays with, as usual, introductions by me. The first two out are Flare Path and Cause Célèbre, the former in a tie-in edition with the production currently running at the Haymarket. They’re lovely looking editions, I think, and as for the introductions, well! Such pleasures as have rarely been conceived in the world shall you find in these pages.

Chekhov Recasting

Simon Gregor, our wonderful first Chekhov in Plymouth, is unable to play the part in London because he’s, rather ironically, in a Chekhov play at the Arcola. So we’ve been seeing actors this week and last. A great shortlist - everyone I saw we could have happily cast - but we’ve gone for Simon Scardifield (above). He’s an actor and translator, fiercely clever, very funny, and I think he’s going to be great.

McTheatre

I’ve written a short think-piece for the Guardian about the megamusical (in part drawing on the material in my book, Theatre & Globalization).

You can read it here

Chekhov in Soho

Confirmed today: Chekhov in Hell is transferring to the Soho Theatre, London, in April next year. It should open on 21 April and close on 14 May. This is excellent news.

The only sadness is that Simon Gregor won’t be able to move with the production. He’s already committed to playing Astrov in, ironically, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Arcola. But, touch wood, we’ll have all the rest of the cast.

New Commission

I’ve been commissioned by the Drum in Plymouth to write another play. I have a good idea of where this play may go but it’s going to need some development time and research too. The beginning of a play, always daunting and yet full of possibility.

The Unread Bestseller

As an trailer to the documentary on John Wyndham that I’ve made and is on today, I’ve written a blog on Wyndham for the Guardian blog, the books page, not the theatre page this time. It suggests that the price Wyndham has paid for his great fame and sales is that his books haven’t been read closely enough to see their subtlety and indeed subversiveness.

You can read it here.

Beachy Head Cast

The Beachy Head tour for January-March has now been cast.

Amy Mitchell Katie Lightfoot 
​Stephen Mitchell Dan Ford
​Joe Powell Matt Tait
​Matt Wells Neal Craig
​Dr Rachel Sampson Sarah Belcher

It’s a great cast. Look forward to seeing the show take its next evolutionary step in their hands.

Beachy Head to be published

Pleased to hear that Beachy Head is going to be published, again by Oberon, to coincide with the tour in the Spring. And even better, I had to do nothing: our producer, Ric Watts, did it all. It should be out in February 2011.

John Wyndham

I’ve been working on a BBC Radio 4 documentary about John Wyndham, whose The Midwich Cuckoos, I adapted some years ago. The documentary will cover his life and work and is due to be broadcast shortly before Christmas this year. I've been to his old school, the place he lived most of his life, and Kew Gardens... It’s designed to mark the 60th anniversary of The Day of the Triffids’ first publication in 2011.

Beachy Head Tour

Finally, the Arts Council has come through and Beachy Head is touring in the late winter:

27 Jan Frensham Heights, Farnham (preview)
​2-5 Feb Drum Theatre, Plymouth
​7 Feb The Junction, Cambridge
​9-12 Feb Jackson’s Lane, London
​15 Feb Unity Theatre, Liverpool
​17 Feb The Showroom, Chichester
​19-20 Feb The Lowry, Salford
​23 Feb The Castle, Wellingborough
​24 Feb Lakeside Theatre, Essex
​25 Feb Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham
​1 Mar Theatre Basel, Switzerland
​3 Mar The Hat Factory, Luton
​4 Mar Stag Theatre, Sevenoaks
​7 Mar Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff
​9 Mar Brewhouse Theatre, Taunton
​10 Mar Wickham Theatre, Bristol
​11-12 Mar New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich
​14-16 Mar Harrogate Theatre
​19 Mar Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal
​21 Mar Paisley Arts Centre
​22 Mar York Theatre Royal
​23-24 Mar Aberystwyth Arts Centre

It’s a good tour. I’m particularly pleased that it’s opening at The Drum, which will be, slightly incredibly, my fifth show to play there. The show will have a new cast, to be announced in December.

Arvon

Next week, I’m co-teaching a course on Radio Drama at Totleigh Barton in North Devon with Annie Caulfield. The Arvon courses are residential, from Monday afternoon to Saturday morning. The site at Totleigh Barton is an old farm building with, I understand, no mobile phone signal nor internet access. It’s going to be cold turkey from all that but a very exciting chance to meet - as you always do at Arvon - exciting, promising, committed and talented people with a passion for writing and for radio. Students learn, live, sleep and eat on the premises so it has the quality of a monastic retreat about it, which is always conducive to writing for me.

Rewriting Chekhov

Just published a new piece in the Guardian about the habit of playwrights to rewrite Chekhov’s plays and even his life. It has, of course, inflamed the comment-boxers, but that’s to be expected. You can read it here.

Chekov in Print

Chekhov in Hell is now in print. It’s a very beautiful edition, I think. The cover is a kind of pastiche of those iPod adverts, this time with Chekhov gloomily listening through the white headphones. The main colour is a strong blue wash. Inside - after much back and forth between me and the publishers - the text is set elegantly and clearly. As always with Oberon, the book feels well-bound, with good paper and a pleasing design. It is available in all good bookshops, though I know some bad ones are keen to get in some of the action, so you might be in luck.

PLAYlist

Derek Bond runs a recurrent theatre event at Theatre503 called PLAYlist. It’s theatre in the form of a mixtape; each playwright chooses a song and then writes a play inspired by the song, to the same length as the song. He’s dojng a Christmas edition and he’s asked me to contribute. This sounds like fun.

I’ve chosen ‘Santa Claus in Coming to Town’ by The Crystals. My play’s called He Knows When You Are Sleeping and concerns a couple whose discovery that Santa is coming prompts them to interrogate their own lives to see whether they’ve been naughty or nice. It’s funny, I think.

The event is due to run 14-22 December.

Miniaturists

Declan Feenan, who I met when we were both on attachment at the National, is curating a Miniaturists event. The Miniaturists was set up in response to the Monsterists’ demands for a space for large-scale main-stage new writing; the Miniaturist plays are ten minutes long and performed in fringe venues. He’s asked me if I want to do one.

Stephen Sharkey set the thing up and he did asked me to do one last year but I couldn’t make the dates work. This time I’m glad to be able to say yes.

Not completely sure what I want to do yet, but I have a theatre idea with the stupid but maybe fun title That’s A Nice Hat. It is a sort of theatrical game, because it asks questions about the relationship between the theatrical representation and imagined fiction. Might be too slight, might be too po-faced, not sure. I’ll write it and see.

It’s going to be part of the Miniaturists event on 12 December 2010, 5pm and 8pm at the Arcola.

Chekhov in Hell cast

Chekhov in Hell has been cast and I couldn’t be more pleased. Simon Gregor has the title role and the ensemble company handling around 40 roles between them comprises Jonnie Broadbent, Ruth Everett, Emily Raymond, Geoffrey Lumb, and Paul Rider.

Initially I had thought - and told Simon so - that this play needed to be performed by comedy actors, maybe even comedians. I was kind of proved wrong in audition where it became clear that the parts needed some careful balancing between attraction and repulsion, between satire and sympathy, and it was always the actors who saw that.

It’s a really hefty cast of serious, funny, smart, immensely likeable people and I’m beside myself with impatience and excitement to see the thing on its feet.

Two New Books

Two books that I contributed to have arrived within days of each other. And they look pretty handsome, I’m pleased to say.

The first is The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, which has a handful of entries by me, mostly on contemporary British playwrights. It’s a pretty great-looking volume, I think, and it’s certainly the one I’ll keep on my shelf for reference. It’s an abridgement of the rather unwieldy two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance that came out in 2003. I hope there will be a paperback edition of the Companion because it really is the book for literary editors, drama students and informed theatregoers to have to hand.

The second book I made a rather more substantial contribution to. It’s the Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. I wrote the introduction to the section on Naturalism and Symbolism. I also translated Maurice Materlinck’s Interior, his essay ‘Tragedy in Everyday Life’ and Pierre Quillard’s letter ‘On the Complete Pointlessness of Accurate Staging’. I loved writing that introduction; just love that period in theatre history, the budding excitement of the independent theatres, the emergence of Modernism, the battles in the press, the booing, heckling audiences, and more. My original draft of the introduction was twice as long as it was meant to be and was cruelly - okay, necessarily - cut down. I may post up the ‘writer’s cut’ in a few months; it has some more intriguing curlicues.

Very pleasing the see these books out and I’m proud to have contributed to both.

Oxford Companion

Just picked up my complimentary copy of The Oxford Companion to Theatre & Performance, edited by Dennis Kennedy. I wrote several entries for the original two-volume edition, published in 2003. The new publication is an abridgement and an update of the earlier volume. I mainly wrote entries on post-war playwrights, including Osborne, Rattigan, Priestley, Fry, Sherriff, Coward, Brenton, Barker, Stoppard, Kane, Ravenhill, Greig. I also wrote pieces on the Royal Court, naturalism and the well-made play. Something like 35 entries in all. For the new edition, I’ve updated the relevant entries and added Martin Crimp, Dennis Kelly, Joe Penhall, Simon Stephens. It’s a nice-looking volume and is refreshing for its focus on performance.

Blood and Gifts platform

On Wednesday 15 September, at 6.00, I’ll be interviewing J T Rogers about his play Blood and Gifts, a docudrama about the American involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Weirdly, I’ll be interviewing him on the set of Earthquakes in London. Who knows how that will work out but I’m sure it’ll be fine.

I plan to ask about political theatre, the value of documentary, the personal obsessions that lie within it, the differences between British and American politics and theatre culture and the question of research. Should be very interesting - and I’m greatly looking forward to meeting the man.

In Praise of the Proscenium

I did another piece for the Guardian’s stage blog on the merits of the proscenium arch model of the theatre auditorium. You can see it by following this link.

The argument is that while there is a great deal of interest in site-specific, promenade, immersive and other forms of theatre, the risk is we simplify and take for granted the proscenium arch. Not only - I argue - are most of the things said about it untrue but it also has kinds of power that should not be ignored.