Features
theartsdesk
In July we launched a competition in association with The Hospital Club to unearth talented young critics. We were clear about what we were looking for: “We want to read reviews that make us think – provocative, entertaining writing that gets under the skin of the art it addresses, that dares to ask uncomfortable questions and offer new answers. We’re looking for a review we wish we’d written ourselves. Surprise us, shock us, enrage us.”Entrants, who had to be between 18 and 30, had a month to submit a review of 500 words. It was very pleasing to see young critics writing about all the art Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Sky’s Head of Drama Anne Mensah puts it, her ambition is to “stay local but look global”. This might serve as a motto for television in its entirety, as technology swallows the planet and TV is increasingly shaped by coalitions of international broadcasters and production companies. Internet streaming services have abolished national boundaries far more effectively than the European Commission ever could.The roster of programmes that Mensah has supervised for Sky’s various channels is an index of this process, making her an obvious nominee for the h.100 Broadcasting award. She has brought Read more ...
David Kettle
Increasingly, the Lammermuir Festival is – one audience member whispered conspiratorially to me – what East Lothian music lovers are switching to alongside the Edinburgh International Festival. It’s insidious to compare, of course – but still, you can see the attraction.In this part of the world, during August and September listeners are spoilt for choice. And with performers of the calibre of the Quatuor Mosaïques, Steven Osborne, Tenebrae, Alban Gerhardt, John Butt and more – all of whom appeared at this year’s event – Lammermuir is undeniably snapping at the heels of its far vaster, elder Read more ...
Jonathan Dove
When I first read Mansfield Park, some 30 years ago, I heard music. That doesn’t always happen when I read, and it certainly didn’t happen when I read other novels by Jane Austen. There is something about this particular book that provoked musical ideas.Of course, music is often involved in Austen’s stories: there are dances and private concerts, many of her heroines play the piano (as did Austen herself) and some of them sing, while in Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford plays that dangerously romantic instrument, the harp.But while I was reading the novel, what elicited music was not the literal Read more ...
Annabel Arden
The first day of rehearsals for The Little Greats was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure: the casts of six shows, the whole chorus, all the creative teams and management milling around and talking nineteen to the dozen in the big, reverberant Linacre Studio at Opera North. Old friends, new colleagues – it was like a mixture of freshers’ week and a first night party. The noise was stupendous.As I write, I’m in Leeds directing two out of the six short operas making up Opera North’s varied and exciting new season. Opera does not come in only two flavours, comic or tragic. As in any Read more ...
Blake Morrison
Is there anything more terrifying for a playwright than the first day of rehearsals? For months, even years, you’ve been working and reworking the text, saying the words aloud to yourself in an empty room and imagining the actors saying them to a packed auditorium. Now at last you’re here, for the read-through, with the cast, director, costume designer, choreographer, lighting man, deputy stage manager, etc, arranged round a big table. It ought to be exciting. It is exciting. But also scary. The dialogue, in others’ mouths, sounds different from how it sounded in your head. Less crisp, less Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theatre artist, political agitator, cultural advocate: Sir Peter Hall was all these and more in a career that defies easy encapsulation beyond stating the obvious: we won’t see his like again any time soon. He helped shape my experience and understanding of the arts in this country, as I am sure he did for so many others. “We don’t stand high in the world in many things,” he memorably told a room full of American journalists at a luncheon some 30 years ago, speaking of Britain at the height of Thatcherism, “[but] we stand high in the arts.” What he didn’t add was at every turn apparent: that Read more ...
Tanya Moodie
Trouble in Mind, written by Alice Childress, the black actress, playwright and novelist, first opened at New York’s Greenwich Mews Theatre in November 1955. The show made Childress the first African-American woman to win an Obie Award for an off-Broadway production. Based on her own professional experiences, the play focuses on Wiletta Mayer, an actress who challenges the racial stereotypes she is always given to portray.Even though Trouble in Mind had its British stage premiere at the Tricycle in 1992, I hadn’t heard of it until I was urged to read it by a playwright colleague. I immediately Read more ...
Rachel Trezise
I’ve always written alone. As a novelist, that’s what you do. Sit around in your pyjamas composing sentences that come almost entirely from your own imagination. It’s difficult sometimes to conjure the self-discipline required to complete a draft in a satisfactory period of time, but it is always safe. The first draft is supposed to be dross. Nobody’s going to see it. My first play was written that way, too. I wrote three drafts of Tonypandemonium in my spare room over two years, occasionally allowing the then artistic director at National Theatre Wales to read them and offer suggestions Read more ...
Philip Hoare
A dark star explodes. I cannot remember the future. A figure appears on the beach. We're always reaching out. It's always just over there. We're always dreaming. The grey rocks, the red sand, the blue sea. Everywhere, the sea. Everything you ever wanted to be. Torbay arches around the south Devon coast like a proscenium arch, a natural arena echoing with the past, present and future. From Torquay's white villas to Paignton's promenade and Brixham's fishing village, these holiday destinations, known as the English Riviera, conceal countless stories behind the resort's veneer: the real lives of Read more ...
Maggie Bain
When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.The script Bruce handed me was a photocopy of a typewriter copy he had been emailed by the National Theatre Literary Department; faded, smudged and with some of the bottom lines cut off, I had to Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Art, design and craft is such a broad category that it is no surprise – even less a criticism – that most of the nominees comfortably inhabit just one of these areas of endeavour. Nominated principally in recognition of The Caged Bird’s Song, made in collaboration with Chris Ofili over a period of two and a half years and the star of a recent exhibition at the National Gallery, Dovecot Tapestry Studio is unique in answering happily to art, design and craft and can genuinely claim its place as a leading light in each.Designed by one of our most celebrated contemporary artists, The Caged Bird’s Read more ...