Published in The Stage November 5, 2020
“No day but today, no day but today.” The last lines of Jonathan Larson’s 1993 musical Rent have surely never felt quite so applicable: opening night here is also closing night.
Continue reading “Review: Rent, Hope Mill Theatre”Kae Tempest has added one more string to an already crowded bow: On Connection is the first nonfiction work by this Mercury prize-winning musician, Ted Hughes award-winning poet, acclaimed playwright, novelist, and chief creative chronicler of the last decade.
“I had this anxiety that I would just be extremely rusty,” says Tinuke Craig, with an apologetic smile, when I ask how it feels to be back in a rehearsal room. The director is thrilled to be preparing for a socially distanced production and live stream of Sarah Kane’s stark, poetic play Crave at Chichester Festival Theatre.
Running the NT is always going to be a public-facing role, but the amount of political advocacy in 2020 has been unprecedented. And attempting to steer one the UK’s largest arts organisations through months of turbulence has frequently proved “horrible”.
Last summer, the Observer profiled a group of newly-appointed artistic directors – a fresh surge of talent taking its place at the top of six of our best-loved theatre companies. No one predicted the cataclysmic changes they would all have to reckon with in their first year.
What’s in a pen name? A whole heap of patriarchal oppression, if we’re to believe a recent publishing endeavour.
It’s hard to overstate just how influential Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman was when published in 2011 – and how far we’ve come since. Nine years on and the feminism she had to advocate for has become thoroughly, totally mainstream.
We often hear about break-up albums – but there’s also a lesser-recognised musical phenomenon: the putting-yourself-back-together record.
Antkind is the debut novel of Charlie Kaufman, the Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York film-maker, and its premise is incredibly, well, Kaufmanesque.
Artists are making work that uses the technology to enhance the streamed theatre experience: from interactive performances on Zoom to plays written to be watched on Facebook.