Cognitive Strategies for Analysing & Evaluating Theatre Performances
Josey De Rossi Genre: Drama Venue: Blue Elephant Theatre, 59a Bethwin Rd, Camberwell, SE5 0XT Low Down Lazarus Theatre’s website clearly shows the depth of the young theatre company’s presentation of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and Greek classics. The choice to stage Schiller’s 18th century classic Don Carlos is another milestone for the company. On viewing the … Read more
Does advertising a play as “rarely performed” excite you or raise your suspicions about the play’s entertainment value? I have to say that for me the latter is sometimes true. I’m likely to respond more positively if the play is the work of a respected playwright, either an early or ‘forgotten’ work for example. For this reason, I applaud Make&Bake Production’s choice of Blind Date by Horton Foote & 27 Wagons Full Of Cotton by Tennessee Williams, though Williams is certainly better known that the Pulitzer and Oscar Award winning Foote. Nonetheless, perhaps the full-house I was part of in Studio 3 at Riverside Studios on Friday night indicates how the London fringe is key to widening an audience’s experience of the works of respected dramatists.
As Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming Of The Shrews highlights, the history of gender politics goes further into the past than the history of suffragettes and equal rights. The idea of a ‘shrew’ is steeped in a mythological ancestry in which furies of one kind or another, once provoked, go on their destructive rampage. Arguably, what Shakespeare shows us in Katherine is the shrew in modern terms, when economic power forms a decisive part of ‘love and marriage’ and aggression has feminine as well as male characteristics.
The ground is seen as a surface from where all things originate.
Movements sprout from the soil as a force of resistance in the face of disappearance.
The work reconsiders the shoe beyond its practical function where the object can adopt different
meanings.
Bound Genre: Drama Venue: The Vault, Southwark Playhouse, Shipwright Yard, (Corner of Tooley St. & Bermondsey St.), London, SE1 2TF Low Down ‘My soul has been torn and I am leaving’. These are the first words of the Boundperformance: they resonate in the darkened auditorium as the sonorous voices of the six cast members fill … Read more
Before the theatre is found and a word is spoken for Shiver, the drama has already begun. Getting to the Yard Theatre to watch Theatre6’s rearrangementof Shakespeare’s Tempest is a drama. The theatre is tucked into an industrial factory site at E9 5EN….The stage setting that you encounter of a lagoon – that’s right you read it correctly – a wet and shimmering lagoon on which two ‘islands’ are placed: one created with wooden pellets on which sits an older man and the other rising out of the water (created with scaffolding) like an oil rig platform on which a young woman is stretched out.
Of Mice And Men Genre: Drama Venue: The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre 410 Brockley Road Brockley London SE4 2DH Low Down On seeing students at the matinee performance I attended of the Jack Studio Theatre’s Of Mice And Men, I reflected on Steinbeck’s text in classrooms all around the world: each encounter with … Read more
Cush Jumbo received a standing ovation from many members of the audience at the Etcetera Theatre on the opening night of her one-woman show J’ai Deux Amours: The Josephine Baker Story. There were many good reasons I could see for this: her great singing voice, her versatility in taking on different characters while telling Josephine Baker’s biography and, above all, her engaging energy.
Constance Genre: Comedy Drama Venue: King’s Head Theatre 115 Upper St Islington LONDON N1 1QN Low Down Kate Youde’s article on ‘Oscar Wilde’s Lost Play’ in The Independentin July this year outlines artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s rationale for producing Constance at the King’s Head. The play is a “major discovery” as it is “the only … Read more
The Lost Theatre’s twenty-six-year history of producing its one-act festival marks its importance as a company that has tirelessly supported the development of new writing and young performing artists. The process that begins in March and leads onto the Winner’s Week in September is quintessential ‘fringe theatre’ in its nurturing of young talent.