Category Archives: Theatre

Grand Designs

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Today its design. I’ve often thought that in a different life I would liked to have been a theatre designer. Some of the best work I have ever seen has been enhanced or even made possible thanks to the designer.  That’s not say I don’t believe in the power of an empty stage, but when the design is right, it should speak to you in the same way the actors and the play do.

So I’m going to share a few things with you.  Firstly an interview with Tom Scutt, a 28-year-old stage designer who has been taking the theatre world by storm. The above image is from one of his latest creations for a stage version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Scutt gave his interview to ‘The Stage’

Secondly, an article in which theatre critics chose what they consider to be The 10 best theatre designs that have changed the face of modern theatre, from a 1912 Hamlet to Punchdrunk’s immersive Faust.

Thirdly a link to a web site by the stage designer J. William Davies that is full of delicious images and material. Click the image below, which is of his box set for a design for Six Characters In Search of An Author by Pirandello.

And finally my favourite two designs of the last couple of years. The first is by Börkur Jónsson, for VesturPort Theatre Company from Iceland, for their stunning production of Metamorphosis that played in Hong Kong a couple of years ago.  I was lucky enough to have front row seats and breath was taken away by every aspect of the production.

The second is by Ushio Amagatsu who directed, choreographed and designed the butoh piece Kagemi, by the Sankai Juko Company. I was privileged to see this one in Melbourne about 4 years ago. Wow.  The antithesis of my first choice, in its beautiful minimalism.

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Pinteresting

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As a teacher artist, people always ask you questions like who is your favourite actor?, what’s your favourite play?, what’s the best thing you’ve ever seen? and so on and to be honest, I find it hard to answer most of those questions.  It’s not because I am fickle (well not much), it’s because tastes changes, my ideas develop and I’m always seeing new things.

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However, there is one constant, and a question I can answer definitely – Harold Pinter. A master and prolific playwright. I love his work.  It is timeless, universal, accessible, funny, heartrending, and in later life, political, powerful and shocking. He was a Nobel Prize winner for good reason.

Today I offer you a wonderful two part documentary on his life and works, that was made just after his death in 2008. Download it and watch it at your leisure.

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Site-specific? Please be more specific

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My PA students have been creating a series of site-specific pieces and the final showings are coming up shortly. These posts are for Rachel (she was feeling a little left out) and deal with the down-side of SS work – when it just doesn’t work, or fails to use the place in a meaningful context.

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‘Site-specific theatre’? Please be more specific

When site-specific theatre is just too vague

Site-specific work is not just about location, location, location

And I had just to had mention this piece simply because of it’s title, You Me Bum Bum Train!

‘Now cross the Andes.’ In praise of the impossible stage direction

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This is the article I was going to post yesterday, before I got carried away with Romans in Britain.

It’s all about stage directions and how different playwrights do or don’t use them, how they are interpreted by directors and how sometimes they are just plain ridiculous.

.My favorite is Exit, pursued by a bear

Anyway, read Mark Lawson’s article here

 

Turning Japanese

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It’s Research Investigation time for my TA students and two of them are getting excited about Japanese theatre. So, Tim and Clarissa, three fantastic documentaries to get you going.

And a little added extra.  This is the Ningyo Johruri Bunraku Puppet Theatre in Osaka which I visited 6 years ago.  I went on the opening day of the season, thanks to a very helpful concierge at my hotel. I was fortunate enough to see the greatest living japanese master jōruri – a very wizened old man who was just astonishing.

Dennis Kelly: “The Quest for Truth” 3

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The political theatre debate continues. In an article in The Economist, Natalia Koliada is reported as saying

I am always against separating, saying there should be political theatre or social theatre or female theatre, or aboriginal theatre—it is about theatre. It is about going deep into one life, like a total immersion in personality, in a different circumstance.

Click the image above for the full article. What do you think?

Also in The Economist recently is Mohammed Al Attar,  an acclaimed young Syrian playwright who, given the appalling situation in his country, is talking about play-writing as a tool of protest:

I think theatre is political by default. But I do not directly write statements or propaganda

Again click the image above for a very different take on what is ‘political’ in theatre.

Five Truths

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What are the differences between five of the most influential European theatre practitioners of the 20th century – Constantin Stanislavski, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook? How would these five directors work with the actors playing Ophelia in the famous mad scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet? What would they ask the actors to do and how would they ask them  to behave?

A video installation called Five Truths commissioned by a theatre and a museum was created by a group of contemporary theatre makers lead by stage director,Katie Mitchell, looking at these questions. The Multi-screen installation brings together five interpretations of Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet. and consists of ten short films (2 for each of the practitioners) suggesting possible variations in what you might see. Ten screens of varying sizes simultaneously play films of Ophelia interpreted dramatically through the lens of the Big Five..

I love this project and it is a viewing MUST for any performance student.  You can get to the  five podcasts on iTunes by clicking the image above, or watch them on Youtube, the first being Stan the Man:

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Shannon Murphy takes the cake

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As a drama and theatre teacher, you are always proud of what you ex-students go on to achieve, be it a doctor, a lawyer, working in PR or in business…..the list is long and gratifying. However, you always have a soft spot for those that have the will, determination and talent to keep going and make it in the cut-throat world of professional theatre. Yesterday, on Facebook, there was a post on my timeline from my old student and friend Shannon Murphy. It was an interview with her in TimeOut Sydney. So with great pride and a wry smile on my face it is my post for today.

Meet a Sydney director with an unquenchable artistic appetite. Darryn King tucks in with a true theatrical omnivore

Shannon Murphy arrives at the Time Out photo shoot with her entourage in tow: a couple of tittering blonde starlets, a man in a coat and tails and top hat, a grinning performance artist duo…

Murphy is used to keeping diverse and colourful company. For Sydney stages in 2011 she directed the warm-hearted romantic comedy This Year’s Ashes right after directing Trapture, a psycho-surgical freak-out of a show that featured live urination and a pig’s heart barbecue. Before that she directed two young teens and a seven-year-old (in Tusk Tusk) and before that she directed three women in a trio of grisly poem-monologues (Crestfall).

Even in primary school Murphy was a theatre-maker of bold vision. “I wanted to direct the nativity play but was told my ideas were too radical,” she says. “All I wanted was the angel Gabriel on roller blades.”

It’s possibly her international upbringing – Murphy was born in Africa, raised in Hong Kong, primary schooled in Melbourne, college educated in America – that makes her so comfortable navigating disparate theatrical worlds. “Sometimes people find it tricky when they can’t define an artist,” she says. “But I just love continuously expanding. I always try to find something new every time that keeps stimulating me – in the form or the style of the work or the writing of the work or whatever it is. It’s got to be really different from anything I’ve done before because otherwise I get bored.”

Given that, it’s not surprising that Murphy is now considering joining her partner, actor Dan Wyllie, in pursuing a career off-stage. “I would really like to look at film and TV, a completely different form,” she says.

In the meantime, though, Murphy is working on two back-to-back theatre productions. She’s currently in rehearsals for the angsty sex comedy Porn.Cake for Griffin. “It’s about this idea of Saturn’s return, reaching 40, seeing things anew – and wondering whether you will ever find the pure and simple happiness you felt pashing someone for the first time or finding a click beetle in your party bag…”

And, after Porn.Cake, Murphy bounds straight into rehearsals at the Ensemble Theatre for Circle Mirror Transformation: a play set in a community centre drama class. It’s a glimpse, Murphy says, of what it feels like in every rehearsal room. “What starts off with drama games ends in people’s lives being changed, in a way.”

When our photo shoot gets underway, we get a glimpse of what it must feel like in Murphy’s rehearsal room in particular: Murphy’s actor buddies bunch up close for the camera, laugh, clown and take turns pawing at her face.

Our photographer asks one of them, “Can I get you to lick her face again?”

She obliges. Murphy doesn’t even blink.