Theatre

Sean Matgamna's second reply on "Perdition"

As always, Tony Greenstein doesn't debate the issue in dispute. He worries around the edges of it, quibbling over secondary details and evading the questions he is supposed to be dealing with. The "Perdition" Affair The chunks of Perdition I quoted were not from 'early drafts' (where would I have got them?) The version just published in book form was the fourth. The one I quoted from was the second. This was the one scheduled for production at the Royal Court Theatre, and it got some circulation, initially when the Royal Court sent out copies to theatre critics. The third draft was, I...

The snob theories about Shakespeare

Many years ago I read with riveted fascination a big book on the history of the “who wrote Shakespeare” controversy: Shakespeare’s Lives, by S. Schoenbaum. The controversy has more than a little interest for citizens of a socialist movement that has reduced itself to a sprawling archipelago of self-sealing, self-intoxicating, self-blinding sects. The dispute about “Who wrote Shakespeare?” has raged for well over 100 years now and rages still. Shakespeare wrote "Shakespeare", you say? Very little is known about William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon. What little is known about “the...

Arts funding slashed

The government has cut the budget of Arts Council England (ACE) by 30%, or £118 million. Some projects have had their Arts Council funding withdrawn completely. Theatre companies in particular have been hit badly. Some are criticising the cuts because the “cultural industries” are apparently vital to the British economy. The director of the Serpentine Gallery was quick to criticise the cuts from this point of view in the Evening Standard : “In an HSBC survey, 57 per cent of entrepreneurs thought that the UK’s primary focus should be ‘world class creative industries.’” We need to guard against...

Stones or ideas?

In the dark of the Crucible Theatre’s studio, a light is cast on a tall, middle-aged, middle-class Englishman. He is benign, slim, the curve of his spine slightly hunched, hair longish and auburn, dressed in understated shirt and navy blue trousers, his glasses large and round. His voice chants a Received Pronunciation through the room, artful and perfectly suited to the stage. He is David Hare; and he is performing a reading of “Via Dolorosa”, a monologue on Israel and Palestine, something between play, political essay and poetry. “Via Dolorosa” is about Hare’s visit to Israel and Palestine...

Private Peaceful

Stephanie Ann Cooper (age 10 years) went to see Private Peaceful at the Greenwich Theatre (now on tour). This is a story about a boy called Tommo Peaceful. It’s about the First World War and about how young working-class men in Britain were taken for granted by their bosses and expected to kill young German working-class men. All these people were innocent, it was not their war. Tommo is the only person in the play. There are lots of characters whom Tommo acts out while in a prison cell waiting to meet the firing squad who are going to kill him the next morning. The firing squad is not the...

Revolution set to music

Click here to download pdf. Discussing the new popularity and impact of musicals.

'Danton's Death': learning from their mistakes

Georg Buchner wrote Danton’s Death in the Vormarz (“before March”) period of German literature and politics leading up to the failed March 1848 revolution. Set in the last spring of the French revolution (1794), Buchner’s play examines the split in the Jacobin party between the moderates led by Danton (Toby Stephens) and Desmoulins (Barnaby Kay) and Robespierre’s radical group. That split in some ways foreshadowed the divisions which have occurred in future revolutions as the desire for rapid change meets the paranoia of opposition. Danton’s group were not “moderates” in the normal definition...

Trevor Griffiths: from stage to screen and back again. An Interview

The screenwriter, director and playwright Trevor Griffiths is 75 this year. His latest play, A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine, was produced at the Globe Theatre in 2009, while The Wages of Thin, his first stage-play, was revived in London this spring. He spoke to Pat Yarker about his background, his enduring political concerns and his current work. Trevor Griffiths worked as a teacher, a liberal studies lecturer and a further education officer for the BBC before becoming a full time writer in 1970. His best-known stage play was Comedians (1975). For his film Reds, co-written with Warren...

Who's the poshest of them all?

Laura Wade’s ‘Posh’ caused this reviewer more than a little discomfort and unease. I watched it from within the environs of the Royal Court in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea — notable for being the launch-pad for social realism and gritty, working-class “kitchen-sink” dramas such John Osborne’s 1956 'Look back in Anger'. In 'Posh', The story of 10 Oxford undergraduates, all members of an elite dining society, The Riot Club (not too dissimilar from The Bullingdon of George Osborne, David Cameron, Boris Johnson et al.), begins in the private dining room of The Bull’s Head. Four of...

Was Brecht a misogynist and fraudster?

Bertold Brecht is well known for his plays, poems, short stories and contributions to theatre theory and practice. His influence is also extensive in the films of Lars von Trier, Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa, Oshima, Ritwik, Ghatak and Jean Luc Godard. Yet since the publication of John Fuegi’s biography of Brecht in 1994 — Brecht and Company — a debate has raged about whether Brecht was a fraud, with perhaps as much as 80% of “his” writing being the work of others, most notably three women — Elisabeth Hauptmann, Greta Steffen and Ruth Berlau. Fuegi’s central argument is that Brecht had neither...

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