actors
Mark Kidel
Theatre, particularly tragedy, can pack a terrific punch when things are kept simple – even if the themes evoked are enfolded in layer upon layer of complexity. Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, a play with three characters, each of whom takes to the stage alone, explores in a multifaceted way the life of an itinerant Irish healer who plies his trade along the backroads of the Celtic fringes of Britain.It is as much a meditation on the business of moving the spirit and effecting spiritual and physical change in an audience as it is a complex exploration of the shifting borderline between fiction Read more ...
carole.woddis
Do Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg have a lot to answer for? Or can we place the blame, if blame it is, elsewhere? I’m referring to the steady, insidious advance of theatre mumbling. You may have noticed it at a theatre near you. It’s the art that disguises itself in “naturalism”, a kind of quasi “Method” style of acting.It’s not always easy to detect. At first you think you may be mistaken. Isn’t this “great acting” I see before me, the eyes furrowed towards the floor, the voice low, even a little seductive? You blink – and blink again. You wait for something to happen on stage. But wait a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Toby Jones’s cameo in Notting Hill – he was cast as an over-eager fan of Julia Roberts - was deposited on the cutting-room floor. Most actors would have chalked it up as one of life’s bum raps. Jones, who while on set for his short scene was also failing to rent a flat in Notting Hill, fashioned a drama out of a double crisis. To perform Missing Reel he obtained permission to show the suppressed material. Anyone attending the play, or listening to it on Radio 4, would have laid long odds against the actor once cast as a stalker of stars eventually landing the lead in a Hollywood film Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Episodes may prove to be the zenith of television’s obsession with making television about making television. It was certainly a handy primer for anyone who fell asleep around 2000 (perhaps during My Hero; you are forgiven) and missed all the dominant strands of TV comedy emerging over the next decade. We hadn't simply been here before; Episodes was incubated in the post-ironic, multilayered comedic landscape in which we all now live. The success of the US version of The Office was referenced within the first five minutes. I’m surprised it took so long.Episodes seems to want to have it all: Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Pete Postlethwaite, who has died from cancer at the age of 64, was an extremely amicable man whom Hollywood had down as a lugubrious baddie. It happened in Aliens 3, in The Usual Suspects, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.You could see Hollywood's point. His greying itinerant preacher's hair flailed behind him wildly. His green irises blazed bright around pupils the size of pinpricks. And then there were the cheekbones jutting beneath them. "They are quite whopping, aren't they?" volunteered their owner when I met him. "Who was it said, 'He looks like he's got a clavicle stuck in his mouth Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Eileen Atkins (b 1934) acquired long-overdue fame with her performance in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Her desiccated spinster was the indisputed star turn until death did us part. It’s taken a while. Aside from half a century’s commitment to the classics and new plays, unlike the other more celebrated DBEs she has had a parallel career as a writer. There have been two plays about Virginia Woolf, as well as a screenplay of Mrs Dalloway. With Jean Marsh she also created Upstairs, Downstairs which is returning to British television in an updated revival. This time round Read more ...
carole.woddis
Seems we’re living through a silly season. There are rumours afoot that our PM’s Big Society is nothing other than a fig leaf for a chaos theory of how to run society, ie let the devil take the hindmost. And in the arts we’ve got theatre’s esteemed trade paper declaring, in a much-publicised puff - organised through a star-studded panel of the Great and the Good and “hundreds of readers voting from a list of 10 actors” - that Dame Judi Dench is The Greatest Stage Actor of all time.Well, good on The Stage. Nothing like stirring up debate to draw attention to yourself, and heaven knows Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The double standards in opera are amazing. If heldentenor Johan Botha - a man the size of a small Eastern European country - had been a woman, he would have been refused re-entry to the stage till he'd had a gastric band fitted. But his size was the least of our worries. For those of us who vainly cling to the idea of opera as a viable dramatic art form, Botha's return to Covent Garden as Tannhäuser was one of the most profoundly depressing experiences of my life.For most of the first two acts Botha might as well have been a stuffed bear on wheels. He paced from stage right to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This bit was at the end, but it might as well have been at the beginning. Or, really, just bannered across the bottom of the screen all the way through: "I am a performer. That is my life. That is what I am. That's it."Thus Joan Rivers explained her continuing compulsion to keep finding stages to perform on at the age of 75, whether it was a dingy club in the Bronx at 4.30 in the afternoon, the Comedy Central Roast where she was pelted with "hilarious" insults by fellow comics, a gig for the Betty Ford clinic in Palm Springs, or somewhere in frozen Wisconsin reachable only by the kind of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Let's face it, the rom-com has an image problem. Too often, this genre is tainted by either sugar-sweet sentimentality or crashing cliché, or both. Often, there’s something more than a little oppressive about the whole idea of romance, as if love’s natural idealism is too weak to withstand a cold dose of reality. But there are exceptions. And this show is one of them. It’s great to be able to welcome D C Jackson’s new play, which he calls a “non-rom-com”, and which arrives in London having first enjoyed a successful outing at the Edinburgh Festival in August.We start off in the land of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Many theatregoers will be familiar with Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! which was given a recent revival both in the West End and on Broadway, or film-goers with his screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Some will know his backstage drama The Country Girl (written in 1950) from the 1954 film version starring Grace Kelly, playing opposite Bing Crosby and William Holden, for which she won an Oscar.The Country Girl hasn’t had a major London revival for nearly 30 years. Back then it starred Martin Shaw as the cocky young director Bernie Dodd and now in this slick production he plays the Read more ...