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Following out recent trip to the Old Vic’s revival of The Norman Conquests, we decided to get a second dose of Alan Ayckbourn’s with his own new production of his bittersweet 1985 comedy Woman in Mind. We took over 100 Theatergoers to the Vaudeville Theatre on 26 February 2009 to see the show, which stars award-winning actress Janie Dee.

Following the performance all of out Theatregoers were invited to stay on for an exclusive post show question and answer session with company members including Jane Dee, Perdita Avery, Bill Champion and Dominic Hecht.  Edited highlights of the Q&A will appear in the news section of the site shortly, and are well worth a read as all our participants were happy and willing to chat about issues ranging from Ayckbourn’s directing style to taking on the steep grass staging. (more…)

The Donmar in the West End season took a bright new turn yesterday when Victoria Hamilton was greeted with a bombardment of new designs for Twelfth Night in a collection of old shoe-boxes.

This was part of Donmar Education Week in which junior school children from Covent Garden and St John’s Wood, after a visit to the glorious production at Wyndham’s in which Victoria plays Viola, produced their own settings in the classroom.

They brought their work to the theatre and set up an impromptu design exhibition in the stalls and circle bars of London’s second most beautiful theatre (the Haymarket is the first).

Victoria wanted to know why there were two ships in one of the shipwreck scenes: the second ship had dropped off Sebastian which made total sense — and the actress admitted this with a gasp of realisation — as we see Viola washed up on the shore of Illyria, but we never know how Sebastian got there.

She also liked the big portrait of himself that Orsino had hung on the wall by a huge red throne: “Yes, of course, that tells you a lot about Orsino, doesn’t it, having a picture of himself, on his own wall….”

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The critics have been circulated with a tetchy email from press agent Anne Mayer complaining that the Royal Court has moved its Mark Ravenhill opening “to lie on top of mine for Victory at the Arcola on 6 March.”

So Anne — who used to be the press agent herself at the Royal Court in the Stephen Daldry years — has offered a second press night for critics on the following Monday. Which now happens “to lie on top of” that already designated for the Bush Theatre’s new production of Stovepipe in a shopping centre.

It’s that time of year when the schedule does go a bit bonkers. I’m looking at one Thursday in March when  Nicholas Hoult in New Boy at the Trafalgar Studios is already lying on top of of Kathryn Hunter as Kafkas’ Monkey at the Young Vic and the pair of them are pressing to death a new play at the Finborough.

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Hugh Leonard, who died in Dublin last week aged 82, was largely forgotten as a playwright but ever renowned as a dyspeptic newspaper columnist and fearsome wit in the great tradition of Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

He took no prisoners. The Dublin theatre critic Michael Ross was labelled “a diarrhoeal horse’s backside” and the distinguished intellectual Fintan O’Toole dismissed as an incubus. He greeted the news that his old adversary Ulick O’Connor was in hospital with the remark, “It must have been something he wrote.”

And he loved debunking the image of Ireland as a warm and welcoming tourist destination: “Much disillusionment has been wreaked by travel brochures that rhapsodize over the friendliness of the Irish, when all the visitor is likely to receive is common civility. We keep our distance…the conversation in pubs, say the advertisements put out by the Tourist Board, is sparkling with epigrams. This is fiction. What you get is one monologuist waiting for another monologuist to pause for breath.”

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Edward Bennett received the biggest cheer of  many big cheers last night when he went on stage yet again for David Tennant. The brilliant young actor who played Hamlet twenty-one times in London while Tennant had back surgery, popped up in the middle of the Whatsonstage awards concert at the Prince of Wales to accept the “theatre event of the year” prize.

“David’s very sorry he can’t be here tonight,” he said, “but I kicked him in the back again.”

This was in keeping with the nice edgy tone of the evening during which James Corden, hosting what he called “the whatsies” for the second year with his offstage partner Sheridan Smith, cast aspersions on Pierce Brosnan’s manliness (”like being beaten up by a rainbow”), poured scorn on the very idea of a lighting award (and was immediately plunged into revenge darkness) and cringed in excessive mock adulation in front of pop legends Ray Davis of the Kinks and Bob Gaudio of the Four Seasons.

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Several of our youngest and most promising directors have just gone to St Petersburg to sit at the feet of Lev Dodin, director of the Maly Theatre, and mingle with his actors, see productions and observe rehearsals.

Lucky them. The scheme has been put together by the Young Vic’s Genesis project for young directors, and coordinated by Anna Karabinska-Ganev, a London-based Bulgarian producer and translator who works closely with Dodin and his company.

David Lan, director of the Young Vic, is flying out to join them for a few days. He’s entirely supportive of the inititative, as indeed are Declan Donnellan and Katie Mitchell. The only question is: how many more directors do we need?

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Eight time Tony Award winning musical, Spring Awakening, is currently making its European premiere at west London’s Lyric Hammersmith following smash-hit success on Broadway. Last night (9 February 2009), Whatsonstage.com took nearly 100 Theatregoers on an Outing to catch a glimpse of the magic that has had critics falling over themselves to dish out compliments.

Spring Awakening is a vibrant and poignant story about a brilliant young student Melchior, his troubled friend Moritz, and Wendla, a beautiful teenage girl - all on a voyage of personal discovery and sexual awakening. (more…)

Enduring the German play at the Royal Court last night, which outlasted its welcome by about an hour (the running time is an hour), I was still pondering the virtues of the Young Vic King Lear which is fat and generous in its theatricality where The Stone at the Court is skinny and mean-minded.

Director Rupert Goold found his golden boy status under critical scrutiny when this production opened at the Liverpool Everyman last year.

Too many gimmicks, they cried, citing the unweeded football terrace, Goneril’s pregnancy before the sterility curse, the Fool “singin’ in the rain” and the ironic use of Mrs Thatcher’s St Francis of Assisi’s prayer when she took office in 1979: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony…”

I’d heard reports that Pete Postlethwaite was unhappy and that Goold was trimming the show to suit the critics. How pathetic, I thought, where’s your mettle, man? First you re-tread Oliver! wearing Sam Mendes’ boots, now this…

I was wrong. Goold’s cut only the Thatcher speech and everything else seems perfectly AOK. This is a great revival, full of flair and intelligence, not gimmicks, and it’s only ever accessible in the best possible way.

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Danny Boyle’s new film Slumdog Millionaire swept the board at the BAFTAs last night, claiming seven awards. Boyle remembered his roots, quoting playwright Howard Barker — whose Victory he directed at the Royal Court — to the effect that, whatever happens in life, there’s only where you come from to back to. 
 
He also name-checked Max Stafford-Clark for giving him his break as a director in Sloane Square, much to the approval no doubt of Court alumni Stephen Daldry and David Hare in The Reader party which took home best actress gong for Kate Winslet.

Martin McDonagh won best original screenplay for his brilliant In Bruges (almost my favourite film of last year alongside Lars and the Real Girl) while Hare was overlooked in the screen adaptation category for The Reader. Even Sir David must have seen the funny side of his clip in that short-list being one in which no single word was spoken.

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It’s many years since I was a script reader and student stage manager at the Royal Court and used to hang around Sloane Square a lot more than I do now. There is nowhere else in London, or indeed the world, quite like it.

I spent much of yesterday around the place and sensed just as much excitement and activity as ever in our premier new writing venue. In the bar downstairs I found actors — including Jennie Stoller, Ben Kaplan, David Horovitch and Susannah Wise, gathering to rehearse Caryl Churchill’s fund-raiser for Gaza next week, Seven Jewish Children.

And in the Theatre Upstairs I watched a matinee of Alia Bano’s immensely promising new play Shades, set among the young professional Muslim classes, also engaged in a fund-raiser for Gaza — in the form of a fashion show of burquas and bandannas.

In between, I sneaked a glimpse inside the caravan parked in the alley where, next week, Ben Freedman and Mimi Poskitt present their thirty-minute verbatim show about the floods of 2007 to a controlled audience of eight at a time.

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