Theatre director also had career in medicine and was member of Beyond the Fringe
Sir Jonathan Miller, the writer, theatre and opera director, and member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy team, has died at the age of 85.
In a statement his family said Miller died “peacefully at home following a long battle with Alzheimer’s”.
Continue reading...She was photographed by Warhol, and Dalí wanted to paint her; the first films she made were Death in Venice and Cabaret. So why did she walk away?
Most people, says Marisa Berenson, “tend to live in my past. Which is fine.” She smiles, well aware of the fascination. “But I tend to live in the present and in the future.” A 2001 profile of the model/actor in the New York Times described her as a “Zelig of the zeitgeist … popping up in the right place at the right time”. And there is certainly something magical about her life and the people who have passed through it. As a child (she is now 72) she was taught to dance by Gene Kelly. Greta Garbo came to her parents’ parties; Salvador Dalí – a friend of her grandmother, the designer Elsa Schiaparelli – wanted to paint her. The legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland pushed her to become a model – Yves Saint Laurent would describe her as “the face of the 70s” – and she was photographed by giants such as David Bailey, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Andy Warhol photographed her wedding.
She discovered meditation in India alongside George Harrison and Ringo Starr, was at Bianca Jagger’s Studio 54 birthday party – the fabled night of the white horse – and attended Truman Capote’s famed Black and White ball. Although she continues to work in film, she hasn’t made a huge number of movies – but the biggest, early in her career, were Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
Continue reading...Crucible, Sheffield
Tobi Bamtefa gives a swaggering, thundering performance as the dictator Idi Amin, but this adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel is stodgy and plodding
Swaggering and lumbering, fickle and childish, Tobi Bamtefa thunders between laughter and malice as the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in this adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel, directed by Gbolahan Obisesan. The president’s greed and gruesome misogyny glisten like beads of sweat under the weight of his charm and bravado. But even this confident lead performance can’t rescue a stodgy, overwritten script and humdrum production in which tensions fizzle, plot holes reign and actions lack consequence.
Daniel Portman plays Nicholas Garrigan, a fresh-faced Scottish doctor thrown into the position of Amin’s personal physician. A chirpy, stuttering romantic, he chooses to see the new president as a beacon of hope for the country. But Garrigan’s intentions are never clear. With Amin’s charm so immediately overshadowed by his brutality in Steve Waters’ altered timeline, we don’t understand why the wilfully ignorant and quickly complicit doctor is so enamoured with the president; he has to turn a blind eye so fast he’s left spinning on the spot for the rest of the show. With his ethics bludgeoned too soon, his cowardice is amplified and our sympathy for him is significantly reduced.
Continue reading...Lin Hwai-min has spent 46 years tackling revolt, repression and rice in his fast-changing homeland. Now he is handing over his dance-theatre juggernaut to a former slipper seller
It’s a hot, humid evening and I’m sitting on the ground with around 50,000 other people, all about to watch Cloud Gate Dance Theatre give its annual outdoor performance in Taipei. The atmosphere in Liberty Plaza is extraordinary. I can’t think of another dance company in the world that could draw so large and so festive a crowd. Most of the audience have brought picnics, many enduring a day of rainstorms to bag a position close to the stage. Yet, although this is a special performance – one of the last before Cloud Gate’s founding director Lin Hwai-min steps down – such devotion has been normal for the company almost since it was formed.
Cloud Gate was named as the outstanding company at the British National Dance awards last year and is a headline attraction of the new Sadler’s Wells season. Lin’s success in turning a small experimental dance company into a national icon and international brand is a remarkable story. Now 71, with a fierce energy and a huge crinkled smile, Lin acknowledges that he had almost no experience of professional dance when he staged his first programme back in 1973, and discovered that he’d sold 3,000 tickets for just two shows. “I almost had a nervous breakdown,” he says. “I thought, ‘My god, now I have to learn how to choreograph.’”
Continue reading...Mark Lewisohn knows the Fab Four better than they knew themselves. The expert’s tapes of their tense final meetings shed new light on Abbey Road – and inspired a new stage show
The Beatles weren’t a group much given to squabbling, says Mark Lewisohn, who probably knows more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he plays me the tape of a meeting held 50 years ago this month – on 8 September 1969 – containing a disagreement that sheds new light on their breakup.
They’ve wrapped up the recording of Abbey Road, which would turn out to be their last studio album, and are awaiting its release in two weeks’ time. Ringo Starr is in hospital, undergoing tests for an intestinal complaint. In his absence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison convene at Apple’s HQ in Savile Row. John has brought a portable tape recorder. He puts it on the table, switches it on and says: “Ringo – you can’t be here, but this is so you can hear what we’re discussing.”
Continue reading...The Enron playwright talks about retelling the murder of the KGB whistleblower, our surreal political era, and how Billie Piper helped her through dark times
Lucy Prebble operates an “elephant in the room” method when it comes to writing plays: she tries to take on the biggest overlooked ideas that shape our world.
“In theatre there is always a lot of very tasteful, refined work,” she says. “I wouldn’t be dismissive of that. But it doesn’t feel very representative of life at the moment, which feels to me quite ugly and lacking taste and unrefined. Rambunctious.”
Continue reading...Songs in the Key of Cree, Deer Woman and Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, three shows by Canada’s Indigenous artists, are presented at the Edinburgh festival
This summer, Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls revealed “staggering” rates of violence and lay the blame at “persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights violations and abuses” . For decades, Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing and, for decades, the problem has been ignored.
The scandal is shocking in its own terms, but for many of those affected, it stands for an even broader malaise. They see the abuse as an expression of colonialism and link it not only to the excesses of capitalism but also the resultant climate emergency; all are about taking what doesn’t belong to you.
Continue reading...Park theatre, London
A mother’s fierce love lies at the heart of Tuyen Do’s nuanced portrait of a family forging a new life in the UK
A light Vietnamese dish served at a family’s restaurant? Or a sneaky spliff rolled by their unruly daughter? Double meanings lie at the heart of the intriguing Summer Rolls by Tuyen Do. It’s an intimate domestic drama, sketched with compassion and steely honesty, about a family who have left war-torn Vietnam and are struggling to forge a shared future in the safety (or is that boredom?) of Essex.
The shifting dynamics – as slippery as the language that young Mai’s parents struggle to adopt – are fascinating to observe. At the centre of the home (coolly lit by Jessica Hung Han Yun) is the mother, otherwise unnamed and played with a brittle ferocity by Linh-Dan Pham. She is the family’s fulcrum: the one who sets the tone (tense), who holds together the family sewing business (fragile), who later runs the restaurant (success!) and who still, when desperately ill, commands the family with a blazing love that is both frightening and comforting.
Continue reading...She is the go-to soprano for world leaders, royals and Broadway directors – and she even sang in elf language for Lord of the Rings. The great barrier-buster relives her biggest breaks
She sang at the inauguration of Barack Obama and at the diamond jubilee concert thrown for the Queen. She also performed at senator John McCain’s funeral and at Prince Charles’s 70th-birthday bash. Yet here’s Renée Fleming today, sitting in a dowdy London studio, eating salad from a cardboard box and feeling somewhat daunted.
“It is terrifying,” she says, of her part in the Tony-winning musical The Light in the Piazza. “There’s so much dialogue, which is not a skill I’ve practised much. But I’ve always had a voracious love of musical adventure.” Fortunately, her friend John Malkovich has given her some advice. “He told me, ‘You just have to put in the hours.’ That made me feel better.”
Continue reading...Wild parties, stunning performances, silhouette erections and marrying Patrick Stewart twice. As the actor turns 80, friends including Derek Jacobi, Janet Suzman, Michael Sheen, Bill Condon and Stephen Fry pay tribute
Ian has been been very important in my life, even before we became good friends. When I was a young teen I remember watching Walter on the TV and being hugely affected by it. Then at Rada in the early 90s, I finally saw him live, in Richard III at the National. I was blown away. I remember him doing the opening speech while lighting a cigarette one-handed. It was brilliant, so understated. It exemplified his mastery – and his work ethic. To do something so difficult and complicated and make it look so easy. Ian has an innate sense of theatrical audacity, something I think he shares with Olivier. They both did things that would make the audience gasp self-consciously.
Continue reading...Hungarian singers allegedly signed paper to bypass stipulation of all-black cast
The Hungarian State Opera has come up with a dubious way around a stipulation that George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess be performed by an all-black cast: it is allegedly asking its white, Hungarian singers to sign a paper saying they identify as African-American.
The company first put on the opera a year ago, leading to a spat with the Gershwin estate, which stipulates the opera should only be performed by a black cast.
Continue reading...Trafalgar Studios, London
In his funny and perceptive two-hander, Godber and his wife play a quarrelsome couple on a tandem trip to Europe
Although it dominates our lives, Brexit has so far made surprisingly few appearances on stage. It is, however, a key topic – along with grief and cycling – in this humane, funny and perceptive two-hander written by John Godber and performed by him and his wife, Jane Thornton. This is certainly the first play I’ve seen that seeks to explain why so many people voted leave.
It presents us with an odd couple brought together by loss and a love of bikes. Don, an ex-miner and now a porter at Pontefract hospital, is grieving over the death of his wife. Carol, a teacher and would-be artist, is a widow haunted by the passing of her architect husband. But, after a chance graveside encounter, the two of them discover they have a shared passion for cycling. Rashly they set off on a bike-and-train trip to Florence on the day of the 2016 referendum, only to realise that they are on opposite sides of the argument about Europe.
Continue reading...As an actor and storyteller, I always felt that I was an extremely sympathetic person. That was a source of pride. But a couple of years ago I realised my sympathy was, in fact, pointless. It was devoid of any value whatsoever. My sympathy allowed me to merely sit as a spectator in the arena of human struggles. It achieved little for others. What I needed was to re-engage with something I had forgotten how to do: empathise.
In 2014 I found myself travelling along the West Bank on a coach with about 30 young Palestinians. This journey was full of music and dance. Darbukas and dabkes. And I was involved. It was impossible not to be. That is what empathy is. Feeling with others and not for them. But along this journey, that empathy turned quite suddenly to sympathy. Our bus had to pass a roadblock guarded by Israel Defence Forces soldiers. Guns were pointed at our driver and he was forced to halt the bus, throwing the younger members of the group 10 feet down the aisle. As we all scrambled to our seats, I immediately sat next to a young Palestinian boy of 13.
Continue reading...Protesters picket French university, which says actors were wearing masks according to ancient theatre practices
A row over alleged racism and attacks on freedom of expression has erupted in France after students prevented a Greek tragedy featuring actors using black masks from being performed at the Sorbonne, claiming it was “Afrophobic, colonialist and racist”.
Demonstrators who picketed the prestigious Paris university to stop actors entering the theatre said the play, The Suppliants by Aeschylus, was being performed with blackface and was offensive.
Continue reading...The French writer-director talks about his highly personal new show, a ‘dance of the dead’ that pays tribute to artistic heroes including Jacques Demy
Director Christophe Honoré still looks pained at the memory of the protests against gay marriage that rocked France seven years ago. The adoption of same-sex marriage in the country, a flagship policy that President François Hollande had campaigned on, was supposed to have been a smooth process. It became law in 2013, but only after a protracted backlash that saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets – more overall than the recent gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement.
“I realised there was still a cloud of suspicion hanging over gay citizens,” says Honoré, best known internationally for comedies and musical films including 2007’s Love Songs. “I felt hurt, but also responsible, because in my work I’d never thought that gay visibility might still be important. I felt like I’d failed, like I’d deserted the fight the generation before me had led.”
Continue reading...More than 300 actors, directors and designers accuse Abbey of wreaking ‘devastation’
The Abbey theatre in Dublin has staged some of Ireland’s greatest plays but it is now at the centre of an unwanted drama after it was accused of wreaking artistic “devastation” on the country’s theatrical community.
In an open letter published on Monday, a roll-call of Irish talent including the actors Aidan Gillen and Ruth Negga said the country’s national theatre had gutted its domestic industry by scaling back in-house productions in order to buy in and co-produce shows.
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