Theatre Interviews
theartsdesk Q&A: Dramatist Lee HallSunday, 02 October 2011
Like his most famous creation, Billy Elliot, Lee Hall left his native North East to pursue what turned out to be a glittering career in the arts. Although I can’t speak for the fictitious Billy, Hall has certainly never forgotten his working-class roots, which continue to inform and inspire his work. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Mike LeighTuesday, 20 September 2011
There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of the world famously conjured up over a long period of clandestine development in the now time-honoured fashion. Nothing and everything changes in the work of Mike Leigh (b 1943). Read more... |
Q&A Special: On Recreating South PacificSaturday, 13 August 2011
It was early in 1949. South Pacific, the follow-up to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s huge wartime hit Carousel, had entered the try-out phase before hitting New York. Read more... |
Q&A Special: Magician Paul KieveTuesday, 19 July 2011
Hollywood has turned the special effect into a birthright for a generation of movie-goers. “How did they do that?” is no longer a question you hear in the multiplex. In the theatre it’s another thing entirely. Whatever the reception for the show in its entirety, the musical version of The Lord of the Rings did contain one remarkable illusion in which Bilbo Baggins vanished before the audience’s eyes. Even... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Emma RiceSaturday, 16 July 2011
Based in a collection of barns on a cliff top near Mevagissey on the south Cornish coast, Kneehigh theatre company has always looked defiantly away from London and out towards the sea and the wider world. This streak of independence runs right through the heart of the company, which produces extraordinarily inventive, highly visual and sometimes surreal work that has been seen all over the world, from Australia to Colombia to Broadway and, yes, the West End. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer/Director David LelandSaturday, 02 July 2011
David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social mores of English life in films such as Mona Lisa (1986), Personal Services (1987) and Wish You Were Here (1987). However, it was Made in Britain (1982), a television play written by Leland for Channel 4 and... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Actor Nigel LindsayMonday, 13 June 2011
His only previous visit to musical theatre was as Nathan Detroit in the Donmar’s West End production of Guys and Dolls. And now Lindsay sits in the sumptuous dressing room – it feels more like a small flat – at Drury Lane once occupied, he is proud to note, by the likes of Rex Harrison. The first role in which he caught the eye was as Mugsy, the eternally optimistic victim in Patrick Marber’s poker play Dealer’s Choice. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Christopher EcclestonSaturday, 30 April 2011
Christopher Eccleston’s performances have a raw-boned, visceral quality which makes him a sometimes unsettling - but always compelling - actor to watch. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Artist/Dramatist John ByrneSaturday, 19 March 2011
"I’m very hard to categorise,” says John Byrne (b 1940), tugging at his magnificent moustache. A restless, defiant, shape-shifting polymath who was an exponent of multimedia long before computers ruled the world, Byrne's singular career is perhaps doomed to gentle underappreciation simply because he can do so much so well. “If you’re hard to categorise they don’t like that." He peers into his coffee as though looking for something. "Whoever 'they' are.” Read more... |
Q&A: Playwright Nick Dear on Adapting FrankensteinThursday, 10 February 2011
It is one of the most hotly anticipated new productions at the National Theatre in years, for which all but day seats have long since been sold out. Danny Boyle has been lured back to the stage to direct a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Read more... |
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