DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL
It’s the thing that makes the theater different from any other art form: it’s time. That ingredient is something you can’t force, you can’t generate. It’s just the benefit of earning the time of doing it over and over and over and over again. If you see a show for opening night and then you see it a month later and a month after that and a month after that, you’re gonna have completely different experiences.
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The answer of course is that we still have theatre for the same reason the advent of the novel didn’t kill the play, and the advent of film didn’t kill both: because humans love to share stories, and each new way of doing that gives us more opportunities for, respectively, escapism from and better understanding of the world around us. Reading novels about people different from us engenders empathy and watching sad films boosts feelings of group bonding: theatre has an added feeling of liveness and shared experience – like a cross between a gig and the cinema.
Sometimes you want to experience art on your own in the bath, and sometimes you want to share that experience with a bunch of strangers in the dark. We live in a busy, complicated world – there’s every chance you’re reading this on public transport, or on your lunchbreak, or in a few snatched minutes away from your emails – and it’s hard to carve time out to interact with most art forms without checking your phone occasionally, or “double screening”. Doing several things at once makes us less efficient at all of them, and is bad for our brains – but theatre demands your complete attention. (Not least because if you do get caught using your phone, Kevin Spacey might shout at you.)
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Greta Gerwig on Theater Acting: “There’s no equivalent in film. It’s so addicting”
Though she’s primarily known as an actress, Gerwig also works behind the camera. She has co-written the screenplays for films like Frances Ha and Mistress America, and she co-wrote and co-directed Nights and Weekends and wrote and directed the upcoming Lady Bird. One of her pieces of advice to actors is to follow that path by creating one’s own content. She says, “Make your own things. Even if it’s just a short play with friends or a movie you put up on YouTube, it helps you figure out how to make things and what you’re good at, and it gives you community quickly. I think you’ll get more from it than it takes from you.”
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Enda Walsh claims working with new directors has forced him to “sharpen” his own directing aesthetic.
In an interview with playwright Simon Stephens, Walsh spoke about collaborating with directors John Tiffany and Ivo van Hove.
Walsh said: “It’s so weird when you direct your own work and then you see someone else’s aesthetic. It makes me sharpen my own aesthetic.”
The playwright co-wrote musical Lazarus with David Bowie and said Van Hove did “a fantastic job” directing the show, calling the production “so bold and so right”.
In the interview, part of a new series of Royal Court podcasts, Walsh said that “to write a work about a man who’s dying while all this shit was going on for David was extraordinary”.
Walsh admitted he could “see now it [Lazarus] is all about him and what he was going through”.
Walsh added: “Two months in he was aware of it [the cancer] and we were working together for 18 months. He was aware of it but brilliant with it, just saying, ‘But that’s the way it is.'”
Lazarus, which runs at the King’s Cross Theatre until January 22, is a musical sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth.
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Paul Farnsworth’s design twinkles exquisitely, as rich and fine as spun sugar: gilt, eau de nil and pink, with light glinting through rows of bottles. In the comic performance of the evening, Katherine Kingsley vamps in layers of scarlet. While her cad lover (nonchalantly powerful Dominic Tighe) flirts with a customer, she cuts a length of ribbon as if she were administering a vasectomy. Scarlett Strallen and Mark Umbers charm as the couple who move from awkwardness to adoration. High comedy and pathos are intertwined in a romantically themed restaurant where trays are dropped as often as kisses are exchanged. Kindness is mingled with anxiety among the scent staff. This bijou evening has no lazy moments.
• She Loves Me is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London until 4 March
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In his new show, comedian Liam Williams gives the panto a postmodern twist. We need a bit of silliness in these austere and divided times, he explains.
Nobody in history has actively wanted to be a pantomime writer, just as nobody has ever wanted to be a urinal designer or composer of the music that plays when you open birthday cards, but pantos will not write themselves. And while some wags may aver that’s a good thing, we’re having none of it. In austere and divided times, we’re embracing silliness and route-one togetherness. Yes, we’re (we hope) mordantly commenting on the international financial centre/ gentrifiers’ theme park known as London, but we’re also just trying to raise a chuckle – whether that’s a down-the-nose-snort or one that’s truly mirthful.
Ricky Whittington & His Cat is at New Diorama Theatre, NW1, 12 December to 7 January
Plans for a £19m theatre in Merseyside are one step closer to realisation, with architects appointed to oversee the project.
Shakespeare North, a 350-seat replica Shakespearean theatre and education hub in Knowsley, was awarded planning permission in April after councillors voted unanimously in favour.
London-based Helm Architecture will design the theatre and Austin-Smith: Lord LLB have been appointed as the supporting architects. Scale models, artists’ impressions and CGI images of the new theatre have been released.
Organisers hope the project in Prescot, a town in Knowsley, will join Stratford-upon-Avon and the Globe in London as one of three key destinations for Shakespeare lovers.
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