Billy Elliot audience gives go-ahead to Thatcher song
Tuesday 09 April 2013
Theatre-goers at a West End production of Billy Elliot voted overwhelmingly to keep in a song celebrating Margaret Thatcher’s death hours after she died.
Animated by Gul Ramani with traditional shadow puppets of India. A Gazelle´s Wish is a tale from the ancient Panchatantra. This poetic film tells the story of a Gazelle that gets caught for a prince and is brave enough to speak against her captivity. The original film has a length of 6 minutes.
New Delhi, Apr 8. Puppeteers from seven countries are participating starting today at India’s International Puppet Festival, showcasing an art that emerged in that ancient nation about 500 years before Christ.
The event, that was scheduled to run until April 16th, is gathering national puppet companies from Russia, Iran, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Israel, with works that, according to organizers, join traditional and new techniques.
In the last decade, that art has been combined with others as theater, dance and pantomime, redefining its ancient features for the delight of an increasing crowd of admirers that is not restricted simply to children.
The Festival will have its venue in New Delhi, Gurgaon (a satellite city of the capital and Chandigarh, about 235 kilometers north) with a theoretical section to be held on the 11th and 12th.
According to historians, there were already puppeteers in places like Tamil Nadu (south), about five centuries before the common era. The works were generally inspired by subjects of Hindu mythology.
Interview with Anna Wakulik, a young Polish writer making her mark in Britain, about her new play
In the last decade or so Poland has seen an unprecedented emergence of women playwrights and in this country theatres have tentatively begun to use their studio spaces to test audiences’ receptiveness to what they’ve got to say.
It’s an initiative that has been pretty successful and 24-year-old Anna Wakulik is one of the latest crop to make her mark.
She’s in a philosophical mood – if somewhat worn out – following work on the production of Time To Reap for the Jerwood space at London’s Royal Court theatre and separately at Teatr Polski in Poznan, Poland – an impressive achievement.
The play’s narrative is deceptively simple. In a Poland turned upside down after 1989, a thirty-something Warsaw-based gynaecologist Jan (Owen Teale) is making a mint performing illegal abortions for women who can afford it.
He’s separated from his Catholic wife and viciously contemptuous of a state held hostage by a backward church hierarchy.
He periodically visits a small village in the south of the country where his son Piotr (Max Bennett) makes friends with the local postman’s daughter, the religious if inquisitive free spirit Marysia (Sinead Matthews).
Fast forward a few years and Marysia, now 17, unexpectedly appears at Jan’s Warsaw doorstep. She’s pregnant, jobless and homeless.
Jan falls head over heels for Marysia and takes care of all three problems. The feeling is reciprocated but their relationship is tested when Piotr, who now lives in London where he is supposed to be studying law, returns for a brief sojourn. He ends up inviting Marysia, with his father’s blessing, to London for a fortnight break.
But Piotr has abandoned his studies and leads a hedonistic existence in the upper echelons of the moneyed Brits. A fatal attraction develops – Marysia gets pregnant and when both return separately to Warsaw all relationships implode spectacularly.
The trio, Wakulik explains, embody separate perceptions of and responses to Polish reality. Jan cynically exploits women trapped by oppressive anti-abortion legislation, while the errant Piotr drifts aimlessly – at his father’s expense – and hates having to fly in planes full of Polish labourers.
Meanwhile Marysia sees her ambition of becoming an architect thwarted by her class origins and lack of financial means.
Wakulik equips Marysia with a rich range of emotions, a razor-sharp intelligence and an abundance of side-splitting repartees.
Sinead Matthews inhabits the role with engaging veracity and blistering energy. Her final feminist take on Hail Mary, breathtakingly anguished, is terrifying as a desperate admission of defeat. Teale and Bennett are the perfect foils for her and convincingly nuanced as deeply flawed, selfish and ultimately untrustworthy men.
Time To Reap’s impressive staging owes as much to Wakulik’s perceptive writing as the nurturing direction of Caroline Steinbeis and the admirably seamless translation by Catherine Grosvenor.
The London and Poznan runs have sold out and that demonstrates both the need to open spaces for a better understanding of one of the largest group of economic migrants in Britain and the dearth of a serious public debate on women’s control over their reproductive rights in Poland.
Wakulik is particularly disappointed these issues have not been picked up by Polish reviewers in her native country, who for the most part engage in self-censorship to protect their careers.
She admits to being unequivocally on the left but perceives her role more as an instigator of debate than as a political activist.
A big concern is the lack of job opportunities and growing inequality. Yet when she tells me that half her friends and acquaintances have already left Poland there is optimism in her voice as she explains that she’s a great believer in reason and the empowering might of learning.
It’s ironic though that when Wakulik sends off a batch of grant applications to develop her next play a good few will be posted to addresses abroad.
Time To Reap runs at the Royal Court Jerwood, Sloane Square, London SW1 until March 23. Box office: (020) 7565-5000.
An ENO version of Medea ignores its subversive possibilities as a vision of imperial plunder and betrayal
It’s curious how many operas feature women who are outcasts in some way.
Carmen, Turandot, Violetta in La Traviata and Cho Cho San in Madam Butterfly transgress social norms and have to be punished for it.
ENO presents the first British production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier‘s 17th-century French baroque opera Medea, which has perhaps the ballsiest tragic outcast heroine of them all, bringing intellect and magical powers to the mix.
The action opens in the sanctuary of Corinth after Medea (mezzo-soprano Susan Connelly), princess of Colchis, has helped Jason (Jeffrey Francis) steal the golden fleece in order to restore him to his rightful place as king of Iolcos. She has betrayed her father, killed her own brother and escaped with Jason, bearing him two sons.
Having thus burnt her bridges spectacularly, she is in turn betrayed by the ambitious Jason who falls for Creusa, daughter of King Creon of Corinth.
Thomas Corneille‘s libretto echoes Euripides’s play of the Jason myth, which painted Medea as an archetypal woman scorned, her white-hot fury destroying not only her love rival but also her own sons in order to punish an errant husband.
Its misogynistic message – that powerful women are a devilish disturbance in the cosmic balance – demands questioning.
Coming from the edge of the ancient Hellenic world in what is now modern Georgia, where Asia and “barbarism” begin, Medea would have been a dark-skinned “other” compared to the fair Corinthians.
Mistrusted for the very powers that fulfil Jason’s ambitions and then, as a shamed, humiliated and displaced queen with nowhere to go, her sons would have been no better than slaves. Was killing them an act of mad revenge or one of mercy when all was lost?
The only hint of the latter is in the line buried in Euripides: “If I hesitate now someone else will murder them more cruelly.” Medea’s dilemma is fascinating and beyond any mere domestic upset.
It is therefore a pity that ENO’s production ignores those dramatic possibilities, sticking to the cliche of wrathful harpy aided by the demons of jealousy and vengeance.
Having timidly distilled conflict into blonde versus brunette, the designers stick Medea in a dowdy knee-length skirt suit with white tights that undermine her transformation into a supernatural force. This is a queen of somewhere very dark, not a bank manager.
Played by awesome house-shaking bass Brindley Sharratt, Creon’s fascist impulses (“We must silence all discontent”) are linked to his depraved incestuous desire for Creusa.
But, although the setting is updated to World War II, by failing to subvert the traditional reading of Medea’s motivations, this production misses the chance to do something exciting and different with a murderous tale of imperialist conquest, theft and betrayal.
A moving new play recounts the story of one of Britain’s first black football players whose pioneering life was blighted by racism
Walter Tull was only the second black professional footballer to play in the football league when he made his debut for Tottenham Hotspur in 1909.
Subjected to unprecedented racism both on and off the field, he was shamefully dropped by a Spurs management unwilling to support their gifted player.
Snaffled up by the shrewd Herbert Chapman, Tull went on to play 110 games for Northampton Town.
On hearing the cynical call to defend the empire from one of Kitchener‘s recruiting sergeants, Tull immediately enlisted in the 1st Football Battalion.
Yet despite incredible bravery, racism dogged Tull’s military career. He died in France in 1918 but even in death his colour debarred him from receiving the Military Cross.
Phil Vasili’s moving play follows the extraordinary life of Tull from childhood in an orphanage to his cruel death on the battlefield of the Somme.
Vasili mixes fact and fiction by speculating on a relationship between Tull and his landlady Annie Williams, a radical suffragette and anti-war activist.
There is no evidence to support that this actually took place but it is an interesting device to explore discrimination and class politics in the turbulent years of the early 20th century.
Ciaran Bagnall’s clever set design transforms the stage into an arena, creating both a theatre of war and a theatre of dreams and, in eschewing costume and props, director David Thacker gives a nod to 1970s agitprop theatre.
Like Tull, actor Nathan Ives-Moiba turns in an exceptional professional debut as the troubled young footballer and there is a sympathetic portrayal of the great Herbert Chapman by John Branwell.
In a moving closing speech, he expresses the belief that Tull will pave the way to a better life for future generations of black footballers.
This video shows Chekhov’s plays The Bear and A Marriage Proposal, in English.
Chekhov lived from 1860-1904. So, he died one year before 1905, the first twentieth century attempt at revolution in Russia. Yet, tensions in Russian society which would ultimately explode into revolution, are reflected in Chekhov’s work. The orchard, Chekhov’s last play, is about conflicts between aristocratic landowners, capitalists and peasants.
Governments sometimes try to paper over internal conflicts by wars, trying to focus all anger on external enemies. In the beginnings of wars, accompanied by waves of “patriotic” hysteria, they may succeed in this. However, in the long run, governments starting wars often undermine themselves. When Chekhov died in Germany in 1904, the Russo-Japanese war had already started. One year later, that war ended in defeat and revolution. The imperial autocracy barely survived it, for the time being.
World War I, started in 1914, in the end drove away rulers like the emperors of Russia and Germany who had started it. During the war, ultimately the internal fault lines, superficially papered over in 1914, sharpened. Not only the fault lines mentioned in Chekhov’s Orchard. Also fault lines within the ruling aristocracy itself.
A conspiracy of court nobles including Prince Felix Yusupov in 1916 murdered Rasputin, adviser (and, maybe, lover) of the empress.
The first two Chekhov plays of 15 February, both written in 1888, are about conflicts between noble landowners; though not about people as high on the social pyramid as the imperial court. At the end of both plays, it is probable that a man and a woman will marry each other. Throughout most of these plays, however, the future married couples have sharp, potentially even lethal, conflicts. It leaves spectators with the question whether the marriages will really resolve the quarreling.
The first play was A Marriage Proposal. A thirty-something landlord thinks it is time to marry, and asks his neighbour for his daughter’s hand. Soon, the prospective bridegroom gets in noisy tumultuous quarrels with his prospective in-laws, about the border between their properties, about hunting dogs, etc. However, the daughter fears becoming an “old maid” with the social stigma sticking to that in aristocratic circles, even more than marrying a man she disagrees with sharply. And landlord Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov fears the male equivalent of this stigma (though maybe a bit less than future bride Natalia). So, the play ends with conflicts papered over by an engagement to be married.
The second play was The Bear. Again, one of the two main protagonists is a young woman on an aristocratic estate. This time, her male antagonist is not her neighbour; also not her father, or her husband (she is a widow), but a short-tempered creditor landlord. Their quarrel on the money escalates to the point where they stand back to back with loaded guns for a duel to death. Just before the deathly exchange of bullets, the creditor realizes he really is in love with his debtor.
I had seen this play before, long ago. I think that the actor playing creditor Smirnov then did not play anger and misogyny as convincingly as the Oostpool actor. There were, if I remember correctly, slight differences in the translation. At one time, Smirnov asks sarcastically: “How am I supposed to address ladies correctly? Maybe in French?” From the earlier performance, I then remember the sentence “Je suis très enchanté [I am very delighted] that you are not giving me my money!” On 15 February 2015, I did not hear the “très enchanté” sentence.
The third play by the Oostpool theatre group was the monologue On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco. The only role is not an aristocrat, but an elderly man from the petty bourgeoisie, Chekhov’s own family background. The protagonist is supposed to lecture on the harmfulness of tobacco, though he smokes himself. During the play, he says hardly more about tobacco than that it is “basically a plant”. Instead, he decries his own failed, miserable life.
After the third play, the audience gave the players a standing ovation.
Director explains why her film on ‘local’ living highlights universal issues of migration and regeneration
When I first saw Michael Rosen‘s play for voices Hackney Streets in 2008 I was so moved by this collage of voices and lives which moved across time and space that I wanted to engage further with it.
So I had the idea of taking Michael’s original piece of writing and making a textured, audio-visual art piece with it – a “film-poem,” as it’s been called.
I started making Under The Cranes – the title is a line from the final poem in the film – at the beginning of 2009 and continued to work on it over a two-year period.
My background is in radio and I had never made a film before, so I just jumped in before I had a chance to scare myself out of the idea.
The film evolved as I worked on it with a tiny team, recording voices, researching the archivex, shooting on super-8 and 16mm film, finding music, editing and recording and creating the sound track.
Under The Cranes premiered in April 2011 at the East End Film Festival in Dalston. With this new run of screenings, I am delighted that we continue to find new audiences for a not-for-profit film like Under The Cranes. This is largely a testament to the power of its engaged, poetic writing.
One of the film’s main themes is the question of “regeneration.” This has become a global phenomenon and yet, as an idea and a fact on the ground, it can only be interrogated locally.
Under The Cranes is indeed “local” but what it looks at is happening or has happened in places like Paris, Detroit and Berlin.
The pattern is nearly always the same. There is an area of dilapidated, derelict property in the inner city which comes to be squatted or there are local people trying to use it for shops, cafes or workshops.
The city authorities get hold of it, sell it off to a developer who moves the local people out and “regenerates” the area by putting up blocks and bringing in the multinationals to sell coffee.
The other local-global theme that the film explores is migration, showing some of the struggles – fighting racists, if necessary – that people go through to secure a place for themselves but also how migration brings diversity and the seeds of renewal.
Again, this can only be interrogated meaningfully at a local level though of course it’s a worldwide phenomenon which any audience can relate to their own experience and family background.
In the film I have tried to approach the subject in an artistic way, defamiliarising what we’re asked to look at and inviting the audience to see the places and spaces they live and work in, in a new way. At the very least it invites them to ask questions about how these places are appropriated, owned, used and changed.
I’ve tried to contrast the lives lived by real people across generations with the way in which developers try to get in and make money out of the built environment “in the moment.”
For me, Under The Cranes is an expression of feeling about place and home and the beauty to be found in an urban site, which is why you see in the film the work of three painters who depict the urban landscape – Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon – just as I have tried to do with the camera.
Under The Cranes is being screened at the Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2 at 7pm tonight, March 6 at Stratford East Picturehouse, May 9 at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green and May 12 at the Brighton Festival.
is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and indeed, A Doll’s House is the world’s most performed play.
Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in 1868. It marks a transition in his writing. It is Ibsen’s last play in verse. Before that, all his plays were poetry. They were inspired by Shakespeare; mainly about ancient Norwegian history. Peer Gynt marks a transition to Ibsen’s later work, mainly about contemporary Norwegian social issues. In the play, there are many allusions to Norwegian and world issues; easy to understand for Ibsen’s contemporaries; more difficult for twenty-first century audiences,
Though Ibsen is called “the father of realism”, especially in Peer Gynt there is a mixture of reality and fantasy.
Also, because the title character, the Norwegian farmer’s son Peer Gynt, has trouble distinguishing between truth and fantasy.
The play begins in the Lake Gendin region in Norway. Peer Gynt tells a tall tale about riding on the back of a reindeer after a hunt gone wrong; which his mother calls lies.
In this, Peer Gynt reminds one a bit of Dutch’s children’s book hero Dik Trom, often depicted riding a donkey in an unorthodox way.
When I was in Norway, along the touristic trail, the Peer Gynt Vegen, there were everywhere signs of Peer Gynt on the reindeer’s back.
Also everywhere, there were wooden trolls sold as souvenirs. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt helped to make trolls world-famous: from Tolkien‘s novels to Internet trolls (not welcome on this blog).
In Ibsen’s play, also as performed by Het Zuidelijk Toneel, Peer not only rides (or: claims to ride) on a reindeer; but also on a pig, together with a troll king’s daughter.
Peer Gynt has some characteristics in common with Askeladden. Askeladden is a character in Norwegian fairy tales: typically a farmer’s youngest son, at first sight a never do well, getting into many adventures.
Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play is not just the youngest son, but eldest as well, being an only child. There is also a difference that while Askeladden’s adventures often have happy ends, Peer Gynt’s do not.
This is a video with an interview about the play by the Zuidelijk Toneel director, Matthijs Rümke.
And this video is also about Peer Gynt by the Zuidelijk Toneel.
In the course of the play, roughly about the years 1817-1867, Peer ages from twenty years old to seventy. Two different actors play old Peer Gynt and young Peer Gynt. On the other hand, several actors play more than one role. For instance, one actress plays Peer’s mother Aase; and also a parson, and the director of the Cairo lunatic asylum. These two professions were anathema for women in Ibsen’s times.
Peer Gynt has a tendency to run away from trouble. That lands him from Norway to Morocco; where he becomes a businessman trading in slaves. Later, he goes to Egypt. According to het Zuidelijk Toneel, Ibsen sharply criticizes colonialism, capitalism and West European supremacy ideology.
Finally, Peer Gynt returns to his native region in Norway, where he dies.
At the Leiden performance by Het Zuidelijk Toneel, there were electricity problems, making the pause longer than planned. They do not play this long work completely. For the sake of time, the director made the play shorter. The three milkmaids in Ibsen’s text are still on stage, dancing; but their longish dialogue is gone. The director removed some roles from the play, like the Memnon statue in Egypt. And, earlier, Helga, the sister of Solveig, Peer’s lover.
Another lover of Peer is the troll king’s daughter. In the original, she is dressed in green. In the Zuidelijk Toneel performance, she is dressed in white.
At the end of the play, the audience gave the players much applause.
Savage arts cuts, actively promoted as a means of saving the British economy, are costing jobs, opportunities and economic success.
Such attacks, reinforcing a lack of confidence in one of Britain’s most profitable sectors, can only mean reduced access to arts and culture for us all.
Four hundred jobs are at risk in the DCMS and 117 have already gone from the Arts Council, so the idea is to pass the cut down again to arts organisations as quickly as possible.
Arts Council chief executive Alan Davey said that the “arm’s-length” body’s grant-in-aid budgets for arts organisations and museums from central government will go down £3.9 million in 2013/14 and £7.7m in 2014/15.
DCMS’s argument? The quicker the cut, the more time there is to adjust.
But in the 18 months since arts and culture took a 30 per cent funding cut, 25 arts organisations supported by public investment closed.
Among them is Sound It Out Community Music, which provides programmes, training and mentoring to vulnerable children, the elderly, ex-offenders and isolated groups.
Many more are shedding staff to fend off closure and others are returning to their core activity. Museums, galleries and theatres are dropping education and outreach projects in order to pay the bills.
The Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster lost so much to the cuts it was forced to cut two shows a year and rely on project funding for anything else.
Cuts meant Bolton Museums had to sell 36 paintings to raise funds, including pieces by Picasso, Hutchinson and Pugin.
Sold to private buyers, many of those works will have been taken out of public hands.
In London, the British Library has lost 180 jobs and staff are fighting more redundancies and changes that make firing them easier.
A similar battle is being fought at the London Transport Museum, where 15 jobs are at risk and an education programme that works with children in deprived areas has been massively scaled down.
At this point in any good show there would be an interval. Arts organisations would have time to find a way through the trials and emerge triumphant in the final act.
But the arts are caught in a perfect storm. Audiences do not have money in their wallets to spend and the government’s promised philanthropy drive bore minimal fruit.
The threat of local authority cuts is looming large over the sector like a puppet Voldemort – or not. Faulty Optic, with its quarter century of experience in mechanical theatre and puppetry, closed this year.
Newcastle City Council is threatening to cut its entire arts budget, which means most of the city’s 18 libraries will be closed down or given to community groups.
Arts organisations affected include the Theatre Royal, Side Gallery and Live Theatre. The latter is the company Lee Hall wrote The Pitmen Painters for, and where it first pulled in the punters before transferring to the National Theatre and then on to Broadway. It risks losing £86,000.
Newcastle is a test case. If the council succeeds, others will follow.
Shadow media, culture and sport minister Dan Jarvis was right to describe the situation as “catastrophic” at the end of the year.
It is affecting arts and culture of all shapes and sizes. Kidderminster Library Gallery, a much-used purpose-built community performing arts space, is being reappropriated by the council as office space to save money. West Sussex County Youth Theatre closed after 23 years working with local 14-25 year olds. Battles for libraries are raging on.
In response, the Lost Arts project has been established to catalogue everything arts and culture have lost because of cuts to public funding.
It was set up by eight unions as a record of what is lost and what we want back and as a reminder of what arts and culture achieved when funded properly and what can be achieved again with proper funding.
It is a campaign too, raising awareness of the real impact of cuts and providing a platform for local campaigns and people who love the arts to shout about them.
Losses already on the list include jobs, opening hours, shows, performances, training programmes and outreach activities that create jobs and opportunities.
The idea is not to blame managers or the arts council or to claim that arts and culture is more important than education or health, even though creativity is fundamental to both.
It is to make sure the results of arts cuts, made without any real understanding of the social and economic value of arts and culture, are recognised for what they really are.
Maddy Radcliff is the co-ordinator for Lost Arts and can be contacted at maddy@lost-arts.org.
Laura van Dolron is a Dutch comedian. She calls herself a stand-up philosopher. Her last show before her present New Year’s Eve show was about French philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre.
This video is about Laura van Dolron’s New Year’s Eve show.
Laura van Dolron was born in 1976. Then, and earlier, every 31 December, there was a famous New Year’s Eve show by comedian Wim Kan. In the fifties, millions of Dutch people listened to it on the radio. When, in the 1970s, the show went on TV, millions watched. The theme of the show was mainly Dutch and international politics.
Audiences often expect comedians or clowns to be funny all the time, also in their private lives. Often then, there is a discrepancy between what people expect of these entertainers, and how these entertainers really are as human beings. Wim Kan in his everyday life and in his diaries was often somber.
Laura van Dolron said that, for Wim Kan, there was an extremely big discrepancy between what others expected of him, and how he really was. That is not just Wim Kan’s problem; he was an extreme example. Laura said that she herself should be careful not to become alienated from herself too much by conforming to audiences’ expectations.
Now, at the end of 2012, Laura van Dolron asks herself what has changed since 1976. In this show, she has things in common with Wim Kan. She wears white tie clothes similar to him. However, contrary to Wim Kan, she does not want to hide things which she feels bad about from her audience behind jokes.
So, a big part of Laura’s show was about relationships between men and women going wrong. Another difference with Wim Kan, Laura said. As Wim Kan loved his wife for half a century. During World War II, Kan was a prisoner in a Japanese camp. He desperately missed his wife, and wanted her back.
