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A Dress Rehearsal for Pär Lagerkvist's Dvärgen - The Dwarf - at Stadsteatern (Gothenburg City Theatre)

10/02/2019

I have been to a lot of plays over the years but not that many dress rehearsals. The ones I have been to have been pretty much the same as going to see the play. That was what I expected at the dress rehearsal for Pär Lagerkvist's Dvärgen, The Dwarf, at Gothenburg City Theatre on September 19th. That is not what we got. After one hour, the director Askhan Ghod stopped the performance, "That's enough. We will stop there." And then he and the sole actor in the play, Jesper Söderblom spoke to us about the development of the script, the acquisition of the rights to perform the play and the preparations for it. The first thing that the audience sees is the grotesque drawings of Prince Leone, his wife Teodora, their daughter Angelica, Teodora's lover Don Riccardo, the Prince's arch enemy il Toro among others. The powerful are symbolically large and gradually it becomes apparent that their images reflect the sentiments of the little person at the center of th

David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado about Nothing (2011)

9/15/2019

Filmed in 2011 at the Wyndham Theatre in London. Source: digitaltheatre.com When the men sing "Hey nonnie, nonnie" in Much Ado about Nothing in the production directed by Josie Rourke at the Wyndham Theatre in London in 2011 , it works better than any adaptation I have seen in a long time. It is not just a space filler, it becomes interwoven with the plot and part of the delivery of male social character in the production. The choice of having the men sing the song about the inconstancy of men works as it underlines a self-ironic sense of masculinity. It is done with humour and unselfconscious silliness. Perhaps this is, in part at least, due to the choice to set the play in 1980s Gibraltar. The glam and diva posing of the disco era and love (okay, sex) machinations of charter vacations works well with the intent of Shakespeare's text - to make the audience laugh at the human folly in love. We pretend not to want what we want. We gossip and attempt to help and obs

Polly Stenham’s play That Face (2007) and Tennessee Williams

9/14/2019

Simon Edge in The Daily Express in 2008 compared Polly Stenham to Tennessee Williams, a playwright that I have a particular fondness for in part because he is brilliant at constructing dark naturalist plays where you still somehow feel sympathetic towards the wounded agents that populate the stage. (I use the term agents rather than characters because I like to pay homage to Aristotle who actually distinguished character as the moral facet of the agents and distinguished it from their relationship to Thought and diction. This distinction is useful in thinking about dramatis personae and how they are scripted and eventually come alive on stage). I am also partial to Williams for a more personal reason; my grandfather’s brother, Sven Barthel, was responsible for the first translations of Williams into Swedish. The most recent Williams play that I have seen performed was Sweet Bird of Youth in 2013 with Kim Cattrall as the fading actress Alexandra del Lago at London’s Old Vic

A Response to Milling and Ley (2001) on Boal vs Aristotle: Or When is Tragedy Coercive Theatre?

9/14/2019

Augusto Boal was a cultural activist and a revolutionary. Aristotle was a 4th century BCE philosopher and arguably conservative, setting public life above private life. He considered anything that concerned the polis , the city, politics, in the sense that it mattered for order and his conception of the natural hierarchies between men, men and women, and men and slaves. Men who were citizens were naturally meant to be the rulers over men who were not, over women and over slaves. He explains all of this in some detail in his treatise Politics . This difference between Boal and Aristotle is relevant to their theories about the theatre and its function. A baseline for looking at the politics of art in relation to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is his conception in Poetics that the artist “must of necessity imitate one of three objects, - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be” (1997: 53). These possibilities cover reali

Willful Ignorance and Histrionics in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (Young Vic, 2012)

9/05/2019

Filmed live for Digital Theatre at the Young Vic in London on the 17-18th of July, 2012. Director: Carrie Cracknell. It's hard to find a male role that calls for more willful ignorance than Torvald in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1876). His arrogance, paternalism and self-righteousness make his self-deceptions believable. Dominic Rohan's performance captures these qualities and personifies the type of man that does not ask himself about his financial situation and how he and his family can afford to go to Italy when he becomes ill from exhaustion; he lacks curiosity about his wife's activities and doesn't see her economizing or realize that she hides in her room to work to pay back a loan; he doesn't even seem to realize that he is married to a woman with a mind but instead seems content to believe that she thinks of nothing but shopping, his pleasure and running his house. He appears never to have asked her what she thinks or wants, and feels

August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888): The lioness that must be defeated

9/04/2019

"Life is not so foolishly and mathematically arranged that the great always devour the small. It happens equally often that a bee kills a lion, or at any rate drives it mad." - August Strindberg's Preface to Miss Julie (1888) This is a playtext review. Julie in Strindberg’s eponymous play does not drive anyone mad. She is driven mad. She is driven to suicide in this class play that is also a gender power play. It reflects Strindberg's contempt for young aristocratic women and lack of faith in their ability to fashion themselves or their lives into something worthwhile. Miss Julie represents a modern woman in the late 19th century; independent and full of a would be kind of agency, based more in desire and will than in politically or ideologically sanctioned power. She wants to make her own choices in life and love. Yet, she lives in a world that demands of women a fortitude and vision that Strindberg does not give her. The tragedy of Miss Julie is made out in Stri

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