Back to Manchester

My short play Manchester is going to get a second outing as part of the Soho Poly Theatre Festival, a celebration of 40 years of the Soho Poly (now the Soho Theatre). Three recent Miniaturists plays have been chosen to contribute to the festivities: Burger Burger Death Burger by Stacey Gregg, The Well-Made Life by Steve King, and Manchester. All plays will be directed by Sophie Motley. Manchester is performed by Tim Pritchett and Zoe Hunn. I was pleased, reading the play back, that it seems, if anything, more pertinent than it did before. I’m very flattered to have been asked

The performances will of all three plays will be at 1.00 and 7.00 on 20th June 2012, at the Soho Poly 16 Riding House Street. It’s free but ticketed. You have to email sohopolyfestival@gmail.com for reservations.

Ridley!

I’m chairing another post-show discussion with the wonderful Philip Ridley after the revived Tender Napalm at the Southwark Playhouse on 14 June 2012. The show is half re-cast but it’s still an extraordinary experience, as I said at the time. Hope to see you there.

Chekhov Music

For the Wellington production of Chekhov in Hell, director Eleanor Bishop commissioned some original music from local musician and composer Gareth Hobbs. There are four pieces, the euphoric dance track ‘Chekhov in Hell theme’, the trancey ‘We’re Lost, We’re Lost, We’re Nowhere Now’, the distantly grinding ‘I Left My Head and Heart on the Dancefloor’, and the twinkling ‘Northern Lights’. A link to them is here.

Interesting that he’s zoned in on two scenes that are named after songs. We’re Lost... takes its title from lyrics of The Secret Machines ‘Nowhere Again’ while ‘I Left My Head...’ is from Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’. (In the Drum Theatre production, the soundtracks for these two scenes were ‘Smash TV’ by Chase & Status and the infinitely sleazy ‘Let Me Think About It’ by Ida Corr vs. Fedde Le Grand.)

Chekhov Reviews NZ

Chekhov in Hell has opened in New Zealand and the reviews and comments are starting to appear. I’ll keep this page updated with links to them.

And, rather excitingly, on Friday 1 June, Billy Connolly came to see the show. No word on what he thought.

Hilarious Ball of Awesome

Publicity is hotting up for Chekhov in Hell in Wellington. There’s a cute interview with two of the actors, Victoria Abbott and Simon Leary, here. And Simon’s got a separate interview here in which he says some nice things about the play (oh okay, ‘It’s a crazy whirlwind that’s funny as hell with brilliant dialogue yet still asks poignant questions’) and also promises that Jason Whyte (pictured) who plays Chekhov is ‘an hilarious ball of awesome’, which is very much what I look for in an actor. Jason Whyte himself gets a chance to talk about his experience working on the play in an article for Capital Times.

And there’s a lovely preview article in The Dominion Post by Tom Cardy, based on interviews with me and Eleanor Bishop, and some impressively extensive research into me oeuvre.

Kant's Cave

This Wednesday, 2 May, at 7.30, I’m giving a talk at ‘Kant’s Cave’ which is the regular meeting/social event for Philosophy for All, a very welcome event that tries to open out philosophy beyond academia and engage a wider public.

The topic of my talk will be ‘What Do We See When We See A Play?’ I’ll be presenting some of the ideas in my article published in Performance Research in 2009 and presenting some further thoughts for discussion.

It’s in the upstairs function room in the Exmouth Arms in Starcross Street, London, NW1 2HR.

The Guvnor

On Saturday 5 May, I’m interviewing the award-winning playwright Richard Bean about his glorious adaptation of Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters as One Man, Two Guvnors at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. We’re going to be talking specifically about his adaptation, the update, how Goldoni works now, and the secrets of comedy. Tickets are available from the Theatre Royal website. The thing starts shortly after 5.45 and you’ll be done by 6.35. Hope to see you there.

Unparliamentary Language

I’ve jus seen that BBC Radio 4 Extra have just been repeating Erskine May, my 2000 play about the building, destruction, and rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in the nineteenth century. Fun to see that programmed on a day of high political drama in parliament. The play was on three times yesterday (I wonder if I get paid for that?) which means it’s available on the BBC iPlayer for a week. Grab it while it’s hot.

Chekhov in Wellington

Some publicity images have just been released for the New Zealand production of Chekhov in Hell. There’s a nice pair of images of the cast in 1904 dress and (left) in more contemporary guise.

The cast are: Jason Whyte, Heather O’Carroll, Nick Dunbar, Victoria Abbott, Simon Leary. The show opens on 12 May and it is directed by Eleanor Bishop.

Tickets available here!

Mister Enda Walsh

Tomorrow night I’m chairing a platform with Enda Walsh, the author and director of Misterman, currently playing at the Lyttelton. It’s a wonderful play with a blistering performance by Cillian Murphy. I’ve met Enda a couple of times, particularly when his play Chatroom was at the Cottesloe; he’s a fast-talking, witty, hugely enthusiastic speaker about theatre and writing. I’m looking forward to discussing his wonderful play on the Lyttelton stage. Actually, in front of the Lyttelton stage because he - quite rightly - wants to hold back the reveal of the amazing set. Tickets available at the National Theatre website, talk begins at 6.00.

Big and Small

I’m chairing a post-show discussion tomorrow night with Cate Blanchett and the rest of the cast of Botho Strauss’s Big and Small at the Barbican Theatre. It’s a tremendous production and a great cast (with stand-out performances by Blanchett, Robert Menzies, Anita Hegh, Belinda McClory, and others). Show ends around 10.00, discussion free to ticketholders. And do go see the show. It’s an astonishing and beautiful play.

Censorship

A very very very short article by me is included in this new collection.

Svich, Caridad, ed. Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance. Roskilde: Eyecorner, 2012.

My piece, which I wrote, I think, almost six years ago, is very short (it all fits on p. 34). There are some more substantial pieces by Steve Bottoms, Tim Crouch, James Frieze, Carl Lavery and others. Caridad’s put a good collection together. It’s available in all the usual places.

Quentin Letts Aftershocks

My piece on Quentin Letts’s campaign to get the Lyric’s funding withdrawn went a bit viral in early December. The link got retweeted on Twitter something approaching 1300 times and was shared a few hundred times on Facebook. I was in touch with a couple of newspapers during the day and was due to debate the role of the critic with Quentin Letts on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, but he pulled out.

It was an interesting - and occasionally unsettling -experience, having a piece go viral. I really had not intended to make that kind of splash before writing it. I thought the piece would sneak into the public domain via the blog, be read by a handful of people, and then disappear. But the extent of the rage was remarkable. To me, even more remarkable was that I saw not one single comment anywhere in defence of Quentin Letts. Seriously, not a single one. When something goes viral on Twitter, after a few hundred mentions you always start getting aggressive responses, insults, sneering, but this time nothing but shock and anger at Letts’s campaign.

I don’t suppose it will do much to change his position. As I say in the article, he’s a troll, not a critic, and his position is to stir up liberal outrage and send traffic to the Mail. At least I don’t think I did that, since I don’t link to the Mail anywhere in the article. But he’s just doing his job.

There were a few articles written that touch on the miniature storm.

This piece by Alan White in the New Statesman.
Another by Julie Robinson for lastminutetheatretickets.com’s blog.
And Matt Trueman’s Noises Off column for the Guardian theatre blog covers it well.

Radio Commissions

I’ve just heard today that, after more than nine months of debates and back-and-forth, Radio 4 are commissioning my trilogy of Afternoon Plays, (very) provisionally entitled Negative Signs of Progress.

The idea of the play is to track the response to a kidnapping in the Middle East, from the perspective of the first world, the second world and the third world. I don’t really mean the second world as in the Communist block, instead I’m thinking of the nascent institutions of global governance, the EU, the UN. The first and second plays are probably two-handers, the second a three-hander. Each play unfolds in real time and is connected narratively to the others, though each should stand pretty much on its own.

We have a complicated scheduling process ahead. The plays are intended to be broadcast on consecutive days so that the connections between them can be heard by regular - non time-shifting - radio-listeners. It’s being made, I think, by Radio Wales. They probably want to record in Autumn 2012 which gives me relatively little time to write three plays (132 minutes of radio). This will be fun.

Unpublished Rattigan

For this, Rattigan’s centenary year, Nick Hern has released five new volumes of Rattigan plays. The Spring saw Cause Célèbre and Flare Path, coinciding with productions at the Old Vic and Haymarket. The summer saw the first ever publication of First Episode.

This Autumn we’ve released Love in Idleness/Less Than Kind and Who is Sylvia?/Duologue, bringing the total number of volumes in the series to twelve. Both of the new volumes include never-before-published plays. Less Than Kind is a earlier and very different draft of Love in Idleness, much more serious, much more left-wing than the final draft. My introduction takes the reader through the long process of writing and revision and considers the relative merits of both versions, based on new archival research. Duologue is a stage adaptation of his 1968 television play All On Her Own and is published here for the first time. Who is Sylvia? is a curiosity in Rattigan’s canon; usually seen as a light comedy at a time when he should really have given up writing light comedies, it is actually, I think, an experiment in subjective fantasy and play construction, designed to address both Rattigan’s own and his father’s promiscuous sexual desires.

In researching the introduction, I found - for the first time I believe - his first, abandoned draft of the play, as well as several pages of detailed notes on construction and the intended meaning of the play. I think I’m the first person to look at this document because it had been miscatalogued by the British Library as something much less interesting, so no one - certainly not his biographers - bothered to look in the file, and everyone took Terry at his word that his tore that first draft up.

Between the five volumes this year, they represent around 35,000 words on Rattigan and, I hope, offer a substantial addition to academic writing on this terrific playwright.

Higher Education for Profit

I’m proud to be one of the 500 signatories on this letter in today’s Telegraph, urging that the Coalition’s plans to aggressively open up Higher Education to private providers be scrapped. The text of the letter is as follows:

SIR – We are deeply concerned about the Government’s proposals for higher education, which would give private, for-profit companies substantial access to publicly subsidised loans and would allow companies, including private equity firms, to acquire struggling universities.

The record of private equity firms in delivering public services is exemplified by the recent debacle at Southern Cross. In the United States (the higher education system the Government is now trying to emulate), the private sector is well established, with students and taxpayers suffering the consequences.

For-profit companies offer derisory graduation rates, crushing levels of debts and degrees of dubious value. According to the US Education Trust, only 20 per cent of students at for-profit colleges complete a four-year course and the same proportion of those who do finish default on their loans within three years.

American companies recruit just 10 per cent of students, but consume 25 per cent of government-backed loans. To allow institutions driven by the pursuit of short-term shareholder value to get a foothold in higher education will be to condemn generations of students to a similar future, while the taxpayer will pick up the cost.

The Deep Blue Sea

Nick Hern Books have just republished my edition of The Deep Blue Sea with my general introduction and a special introduction by Sean O’Connor, the producer of the new film adaptation, written and directed by the wonderful Terence Davies. O’Connor is also the author of Straight Acting: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan, which drew on a couple of my early Rattigan editions, so that nicely completes a circle. It’s a lovely-looking edition, with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston smouldering icily on the front.

Conor McPherson

I chaired a platform this evening with Conor McPherson on the set of his new play The Veil, which he also directed in the Lyttelton at the National Theatre.

Conor was a great interviewee. At first quite shy, I thought, but he seemed to enjoy the questions. My favourite question was ‘do you believe in ghosts?’ to which he gave, it seemed to me, an interestingly agonised answer. The moment where the play really lit up for me was when he said that the play was a picture of an individual mind portrayed as a haunted house. This has already sent me back to the play with fresh eyes.

Good house, 500 or so people, and, apparently, a long, long queue for book signing afterwards.

Andrew Jarvis

This coming Saturday, 22 October at 12.30, I’m interviewing the distinguished actor, Andrew Jarvis, currently playing Gonzalo in Trevor Nunn’s production of The Tempest.

Andrew’s career has spanned almost 40 years and he’s played in everything from new plays to classics, Richard III to Peter Pan. He is probably best known for Shakespearean roles and spent nine years at the RSC.

Andrew will be discussing his career and the pleasures and challenges of acting Shakespeare. Tickets available from the Haymarket website.

On Walking Out

I’ve written another piece for the Guardian, after a few months’ silence. This is a response to Stuart Jeffries’s article on why he walked out of Top Girls. I thought Jeffries’s piece was interesting and appropriately provocative. But what surprised me was that he didn’t just talk about the pros and cons of walking out but also felt informed enough to explain what the play was about. My article is really an attempt to unpick what I think is the mistaken view of theatre involved in that statement. It’s here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage

Inevitably, alongside some thoughtful debate, it’s already attracted a handful of hilarious and outraged combatants. Hold my coat, I’m going in.