Month: May 2013
Theatre of Realism
The Great Gatsby
Joe Evan’s music & lyrics and Linnie Reedman’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’s nostalgic view of America between the wars glistens and sparkles with a destructive glory. The tragic love story of rich girl and poor hero works around powerful themes: loyalty and love, faithfulness and betrayal combines with the individual’s pursuit of the American dream for happiness and economic success. The music is dynamic and story is coherently presented beginning from the moment when the pretty socialite, Daisy, and heroic soldier, Jay Gatsby, are separated by war and circumstances.
Physical Theatre
The Knight of the Sorrowful Figure
The most important thing I want to communicate is that I wasn’t any more clearer at the end of the show why you had chosen such an iconic work as Don Quixote other than to use the work to say ‘the Spanish are a passionate people’. The problem for me was that as an audience member who has experienced Cervantes’s masterpiece in so many different forms – novel, film, original play [Rocinante, Rocinante] – it was impossible for me to accept the novel could be reduced on the simple pantomime plot which was presented in your play.
Into Shakespeare
King Lear
Magnificent from the outset: I was gripped viscerally and imaginatively from the moment the thunderous music catapulted Lear’s savage kingdom onto the stage.
The Elizabethans & Jacobians
Dido, Queen of Carthage
There’s something quite brilliant about the way Ricky Duke deals with the realisation of poetic language in Dido Queen of Carthage. For me, he seems to work with the metaphors that characterise mythical places and peoples with a boldness of approach that is quite breathtaking.
Audience Development
Boy in Darkness
Director Aaron Paterson’s decision to keep to the integrity of Peake’s story, rather than coat it with the spectacle-making stage technologies of flashy lights, projections and other paraphernalia which the digital age makes accessible testifies to a highly disciplined approach.
Black Lives
Gutted
The story around the Prospect boys shows the everyday happenings in their lives: it begins with Matthew, a professional footballer, in a rehab clinic. As the family assemble in the hospital reception area to pick him up and bring him home, where they’ve organised a ‘welcome home’ party, the story moves between the present and the past to reveal to the audience the events which lead to this point.
Musical Theatre
bare
Jon Hartmere’s and Damon Intraboloto’s bare: the rock musical puts sexuality front and centre in the hazardous terrain of young people claiming their adult identity. As a result, the story of youths in their final year of high school at a Catholic boarding school is naturally full of teenage angst.
