Category Archives: Theatre

‘I felt a sickening pain’: how the ‘first true Hitchcock movie’ almost killed its star

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Alfred Hitchcock described his third film, The Lodger, as the true beginning of his directorial career but it would prove a near fatal screen debut for its leading light June Tripp

December 1925 was a busy month for June. A fixture of the West End stage since childhood, her surname, Tripp, had been excised by the impresario Charles B Cochran because it “sounds a bit comical for a dancer”. She spent the days rehearsing for a musical, Kid Boots, the evenings starring in another, Mercenary Mary, and then would “rush to the studio at midnight”, to act in a horse-racing short film opposite the fading American film star Carlyle Blackwell. The studio was at Poole Street, Islington, in north London, built five years earlier by Paramount but now rented out, most often to a British company, Gainsborough, run by Michael Balcon.

The short, Riding for a King, starred the celebrated jockey Steve Donoghue and had its premiere in January 1926, with June in attendance. Two days later, she collapsed during a performance of Mercenary Mary and shortly after underwent an appendectomy. Daily Express readers subsequently learned that she would “not be able to dance for six months”. By February, she was recuperating on the Riviera. It was there that she received a telegram from her old friend Ivor Novello, who offered film work. “No dancing required. You will act beautifully and we shall have fun.”

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Mystery of the second world war ‘trophy’ and the Royal Court founder

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When George Devine’s family discovered a Japanese battle flag among his belongings, it led to a three-year quest for answers

“I am not a man for soldiering, although I do tolerably well at it in a very minor role. But there is nothing about it that pleases me, and much that offends … It is a corrupter of morals in the widest sense and a gross waste of man’s time and effort.”

These words were written by George Devine, the actor and founding artistic director of the Royal Court theatre, in a letter to his wife from Burma, where he served in the second world war. The views he expressed reflected what his family – and many in the arts world – regarded as his essential humanity and compassion.

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‘You immediately tell your friends to cancel their tickets’ – what’s it like to star in a flop?

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How does it feel to go back on stage night after night in a play that’s been mauled by critics and deserted by audiences? Richard Eyre and other directors and actors relive their trauma

Movies, TV shows and books can all get terrible reviews and small audiences, but the difference when this happens in theatre is that the actors have to go back on stage and remake the work just after critics have declared it disastrous. “It is so crushing for actors to have to go on night after night bearing the weight of failure,” says Richard Eyre, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre from 1987 to 1997. “And that’s one of the reasons actors are such stoics. For directors and writers, there’s a sense of disembowelment you carry round if you’ve had a major failure – but they can just fuck off to Tenerife, and some do. Actors are obliged to soak it up.”

Actor Michael Simkins, who wrote the theatrical memoir What’s My Motivation?, says: “If I had to articulate what it feels like to be in the middle of a play you feel is dying on its arse, it’s a cold sense of dread, like battery acid in your stomach. After terrible reviews, a sort of numbness sets in that is still there for the second night. You haven’t yet fully processed it. The first thing you do is tell all your friends who have booked tickets to cancel.”

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A Fight Against … review – Chilean playwright’s sparky sketches

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Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London
Pablo Manzi’s political scenes, which span several decades and are powerfully performed, could perhaps lead to a future epic

Thirty years ago, the Royal Court introduced a Chilean playwright, Ariel Dorfman, with Death and the Maiden, a much-revived, twistily structured thriller about South American human rights abuses.

While theatre can have a one-hit-and-run attitude to distant politics, the Court has commendably kept an eye on Santiago. Its international programme mentors new writers in an initiative spawning several Court stagings, including Guillermo Calderón’s B in 2017 and now, in sparky English by the same translator, William Gregory, Una Lucha Contra … by Pablo Manzi.

A Fight Against … (Una Lucha Contra … ) is at the Royal Court theatre, London, until 22 January

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‘There’s always been an affinity between Christmas and ghosts’: Mark Gatiss on the joy of festive frights

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The writer and actor puts the ghoul into yule with screen and stage roles reprising haunting classics from Charles Dickens and MR James

Close the curtains. Light the fire. Then prepare to be terrified; it’s Christmas. For although the word “cosy” may be closely tied to festivities at this time of year, so it seems is the word “ghost”.

In northern Europe people understandably cope with the shorter days and darker evenings by drawing in around a roaring hearth, metaphorical or otherwise. Light and warmth: it makes sense. But what kind of stories are told while friends and families gather together? The answer, of course, is the spookier, the better.

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‘We are in limbo’: banned Belarus theatre troupe forced into exile

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Members of Belarus Free Theatre say authorities ‘are more scared of artists than of political statements’

For 16 years, the Belarus Free Theatre has advocated for freedom of expression, equality and democracy through underground performances from ad hoc locations to audiences hungry for an alternative voice to the country’s repressive dictator, Alexander Lukashenko.

Now the banned company has taken the momentous decision to relocate outside Belarus, saying the risk of reprisals against its members is too great for it to continue its cultural resistance under the Lukashenko regime.

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On my radar: Adjoa Andoh’s cultural highlights

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The actor on her hopes for Brixton’s new theatre, an offbeat western and the sophistication of African art

Adjoa Andoh was born in Bristol in 1963 and grew up in Wickwar, Gloucestershire. A veteran stage actor, she starred in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre and in the title role of an all-women of colour production of Richard II at the Globe in 2019. On TV, Andoh plays Lady Danbury in Bridgerton, which returns next year, and she will appear in season two of The Witcher on Netflix from 17 December. She lives in south London with her husband, the novelist Howard Cunnell, and their three children.

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Mel Brooks on losing the loves of his life: ‘People know how good Carl Reiner was, but not how great’

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From best friend Carl Reiner to wife Anne Bancroft, the great comic has had to face great loss. But even in the middle of a pandemic, the 95-year-old is still finding ways to laugh

In February 2020, I joined Mel Brooks at the Beverly Hills home of his best friend, the director and writer Carl Reiner, for their nightly tradition of eating dinner together and watching the gameshow Jeopardy!. It was one of the most emotional nights of my life. Brooks, more than anyone, shaped my idea of Jewish-American humour, emphasising its joyfulness, cleverness and in-jokiness. Compared with his stellar 60s and 70s, when he was one of the most successful movie directors in the world, with The Producers and Blazing Saddles, and later his glittering 2000s, when his musical adaptation of The Producers dominated Broadway and the West End, his 80s and 90s are considered relatively fallow years. But his 1987 Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs, was the first Brooks movie I saw, and nothing was funnier to this then nine-year-old than that nonstop gag-a-thon (forget Yoda and the Force; in Spaceballs, Mel Brooks is Yoghurt and he wields the greatest power of all, the Schwartz).

I loved listening to Brooks and Reiner – whose films included The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains – reminisce about their eight decades of friendship in which, together and separately, they created some of the greatest American comedy of the 20th century. The deep love between them was palpable, with Brooks, then 93, gently prompting 97-year-old Reiner on some of his anecdotes. It was impossible not to be moved by their friendship, and hard not to feel anxiety about the prospect of one of them someday having to dine on his own.

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The stars with Down’s syndrome lighting up our screens: ‘People are talking about us instead of hiding us away’

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From Line of Duty to Mare of Easttown, a new generation of performers are breaking through. Meet the actors, models and presenters leading a revolution in representation

In the middle of last winter’s lockdown, while still adjusting to the news of their newborn son’s Down’s syndrome diagnosis, Matt and Charlotte Court spotted a casting ad from BBC Drama. It called for a baby to star in a Call the Midwife episode depicting the surprising yet joyful arrival of a child with Down’s syndrome in 60s London, when institutionalisation remained horribly common. The resulting shoot would prove a deeply cathartic experience for the young family. “Before that point, I had shut off certain doors for baby Nate in my mind through a lack of knowledge,” Matt remembers. “To then have that opportunity opened my eyes. If he can act one day, which is bloody difficult, then he’s got a fighting chance. He was reborn for us on that TV programme.”

It’s a fitting metaphor for the larger shift in Down’s syndrome visibility over the past few years. While Call the Midwife has featured a number of disability-focused plotlines in its nearly decade-long run – actor Daniel Laurie, who has Down’s syndrome, is a series regular – the history of the condition’s representation on screen is one largely defined by absence.

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Stephen Sondheim: a daring and dazzling musical theatre icon

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The American composer and lyricist, who has died aged 91, shaped the musical artform with his wise, witty and extravagantly clever work

Stephen Sondheim achieved such acclaim – for deepening the content and extending the lyrical ingenuity of musical theatre – that, from the age of 50, each major birthday was celebrated with tribute concerts in London, New York or both.

Watching the composer-lyricist of Sweeney Todd and Follies at such events – taking a bow, with his wry smile – it was impossible not to reflect on our luck in coinciding with the life of someone who would clearly stand in the history of the genre alongside such geniuses as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Weill, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein.

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Stephen Sondheim: master craftsman who reinvented the musical dies aged 91

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Scoring his first big hit with West Side Story at 27, the US composer and lyricist raised the art form’s status with moving and funny masterpieces including Follies and Company

‘His songs are like a fabulous steak’: an all-star toast to Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim, the master craftsman of the American musical, has died at the age of 91. His death, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, on Friday has prompted tributes throughout the entertainment industry and beyond. Andrew Lloyd Webber called him “the musical theatre giant of our times, an inspiration not just to two but to three generations [whose] contribution to theatre will never be equalled”. Cameron Mackintosh said: “The theatre has lost one of its greatest geniuses and the world has lost one of its greatest and most original writers. Sadly, there is now a giant in the sky. But the brilliance of Stephen Sondheim will still be here as his legendary songs and shows will be performed for evermore.”

Over the course of a celebrated career spanning more than 60 years, Sondheim co-created Broadway theatre classics such as West Side Story, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, all of which also became hit movies. His intricate and dazzlingly clever songs pushed the boundaries of the art form and he made moving and funny masterpieces from unlikely subject matters, including a murderous barber (Sweeney Todd), the Roman comedies of Plautus (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and a pointillist painting by Georges Seurat (Sunday in the Park With George).

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Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Doing Hamilton every night saved me. It kept my head from getting off the swivel’

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When his Broadway show became a global phenomenon, the rigours of daily performance kept the actor and songwriter grounded. Then Disney and Hollywood came calling. Now, the ‘musical theatre fanboy’ has returned to his first love


About halfway through Tick, Tick ... Boom!, the new movie directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the patrons of a diner in 90s New York all turn to the camera and sing. The movie, Miranda’s directorial debut, is based on the autobiographical stage show of the same name by Jonathan Larson (creator of Rent) and tells the story of Larson’s late 20s as a struggling writer and waiter. Andrew Garfield is extraordinary in the lead, but it’s the people around him who make this particular scene; as the number unfolds, it becomes apparent that every extra in the diner is a legend of musical theatre, from Bernadette Peters, to Brian Stokes Mitchell (a veteran Tony award winner), to Roger Bart (original cast, Tick, Tick ... Boom!), to Jim Nicola (former artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop) to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Joel Grey, chasing the waiter for the bill. “I don’t know that I’m the guy you hire to make your next Marvel movie,” Miranda says, speaking via video from his office in uptown New York, “but I am the guy you hire to make this musical about a guy who wrote musicals.” It is simultaneously funny, moving and monstrously self-indulgent – or, as Miranda puts it, “about as musical theatre nerdy as it can get.”

Imagining Miranda as the steward of an alternate Marvel universe – Comic-Con, but for musical theatre geeks – restores him to what, prior to the opening of Hamilton in 2015, was his quieter role in the cultural landscape: as the champion of a much-loved, much-mocked art form that rarely troubled mainstream popular culture. Hamilton changed all that. The show not only won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer, and more than $850m in box office receipts, it conferred on Miranda a singular status, variously crediting the 41-year-old with reanimating history, diversifying Broadway, and provoking children all over the world to memorise large chunks of lyrics about America’s revolutionary politics, some of them concerned with the restructuring of the national debt. (“Hey yo, I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwing away my shot” – still being hammered out at a million barmitzvahs). The most surprising thing about all this, perhaps, is that Miranda, appearing today in his customary flat cap and goatee, has the boundless enthusiasm and apparent absence of cynicism of the aspiring artist still untouched by success.

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‘We’re taking the man out of the myth’: the musical reclaiming Rumi from Instagram

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A new stage production aims to tell the Sufi poet’s story beyond his aphorisms – and challenge assumptions about Islam and the Middle East in the process

He is everywhere and nowhere. The words of Jalal al-Din Rumi are found on sunset images pasted on Instagram and coffee mugs sold on Etsy; his poems have been featured in recordings from Madonna and Coldplay and he is reputed to be the bestselling poet in the US. Rumi’s observations and aphorisms on life may be endlessly cited – “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop” – but few in the west know him as anything more than a bearded Sufi mystic.

“Rumi has become a mystical, almost deified figure,” says Nadim Naaman. “The reality is that he was the opposite of an untouchable deity.” Naaman, a British Lebanese singer, actor and writer, has collaborated with the Qatari composer Dana Al Fardan to create Rumi: The Musical. “Our approach was to take the man out of the myth,” says Al Fardan, “and to present him as human being.” This is the second time Naaman and Al Fardan have brought a beloved Middle Eastern poet to the London stage. Their 2018 show Broken Wings, which is returning to London in the new year, was based on a novel by the Lebanese poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was the success of that production that convinced them there may be an appetite for a musical that delved into the life of Rumi.

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On my radar: Damon Albarn’s cultural highlights

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The musician and composer on a magical performance by Udo Kier, a west African drumming app and where to find a taste of Palestine

Damon Albarn was born in east London in 1968. Interested in music from a young age, he studied at East 15 Acting School and then Goldsmiths, where he co-founded the band that helped kick off Britpop. As well as recording eight studio albums with Blur, Albarn also co-created Gorillaz and the Good, the Bad & the Queen, spearheaded the collaborative organisation Africa Express and has scored stage productions including Monkey: Journey to the West and Dr Dee. He lives in Notting Hill, west London, with his partner, Suzi Winstanley. On 12 November, Albarn releases his second solo album The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows on Transgressive Records.

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Mark Gatiss: ‘I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English’

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The former League of Gentlemen star on his love of low-budget British spinechillers, his loathing of Brexit and a slew of projects opening this winter

Mark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights.

This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9.

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Mark Strong on acting, insecurity and life without a father: ‘I got angry as I got older. It took years to fix’

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After three decades on the stage and screen, the star is still worrying about where his next job will come from. Meanwhile, at home, he frets about letting down his family

Mark Strong has a good face for villainy – spare and inscrutable, with thin lips and “eyes like tunnels”, as Arthur Miller might have put it. On camera, he gives a sort of fractional disclosure, expressions altering in tiny increments, so that watching him perform is often an exercise in judging how much good can reasonably be seen in the bad. He specialises in antiheroes and authority figures, from gangsters (Kick-Ass, The Long Firm) to heads of intelligence (The Imitation Game, Body of Lies, Zero Dark Thirty). His latest incarnation – as a surgeon who operates in the criminal underground in the TV drama Temple, now in its second series – melds these roles as he crosses and recrosses the line between conscientious and cruel.

Although highly regarded for his work across stage, film and TV, Strong is not a big winner of awards (though he earned an Olivier for his outstanding portrayal of Eddie Carbone in Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2015). He comes across as somehow outside the system. He is reputable rather than starry, plays parts rather than leads and has retained the air of a jobbing actor. Surely at 58, after 30 years of nearly constant work and more than 100 screen credits, with a voice so sonorous and distinctive it draws you to the depths, he deserves a bigger breakthrough. Is he frustrated by the lack of leading parts?

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Little Amal in Britain: giant puppet of Syrian refugee reaches Folkestone – video

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The giant puppet representing a nine-year-old Syrian girl has reached the UK, making her first stop in Folkestone, Kent, after walking thousands of miles across Europe.

Choirs sang and children greeted Little Amal on the beach on Tuesday. She had made the same cross-Channel journey taken so far this year by more than 17,000 people seeking refuge from conflict, hunger and persecution.

On the last leg of her journey, Little Amal will visit Canterbury, London, Oxford, Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield and Barnsley before the extraordinary and complex 14-week travelling street theatre production ends in Manchester on 3 November

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‘People felt threatened even by a puppet refugee’: Little Amal’s epic walk through love and fear

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From being pelted with stones in Greece to receiving a papal welcome in Rome, the giant girl’s migrant trek from Syria to Manchester provoked powerful responses

In Greece, far-right protesters threw things at her as she walked through the streets, local councillors voted to ban her from visiting a village of Orthodox monasteries, and protests in Athens meant her route had to be diverted. In France, the mayor of Calais raised objections to her presence.

At times, the 8,000km journey across Europe of a 3.5m-tall puppet child refugee highlighted the hostility experienced by refugees who have been travelling along the same route from the Syrian border to the UK for years. Elsewhere, this ambitious theatrical project has triggered the scenes of welcome its artistic directors hoped to inspire when they embarked on this walk in July.

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‘There is a reason why famous people are often screwed up’: Tim Minchin on quitting comedy

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The Australian composer has returned to performing after a 10-year break. He writes about fame, failure and his surprise comeback

In 2003, I booked a tiny venue for Melbourne fringe festival, to perform a show I had tortuously titled Navel: Cerebral Melodies With Umbilical Chords. It was a sort of dark, ridiculous cabaret, and a desperate attempt to shake off the pain of all the rejections I had been getting (agents/record companies/the dude who approves small loans at the bank), by showcasing my various “talents”, which arguably included unusually clear diction, considerable manual dexterity, and a love of cheap double entendre. (Which is to say there were some outstanding jokes about fingering.)

Navel was a gamechanger for me, because I knew I had an unusual toolkit, and although I knew I had a tendency to play the clown, I didn’t by any stretch think of myself as a comedian. But that night, everything changed: the 30-odd weirdos perched on bar stools and chaises longues laughed. A lot.

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Netflix’s Diana: The Musical is the year’s most hysterically awful hate-watch | Stuart Heritage

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The filmed Broadway show has crash-landed early on the streamer with hilariously awful songs, a musical mess to rival Cats

Logically, it makes perfect sense that Diana: The Musical should exist. After all, Diana, Princess of Wales lends herself extraordinarily well to musical theatre. Hers was a story of wealth and betrayal, of high camp and tragedy, plus she also happened to be an enormous fan of the medium. If you built a time machine and used it to tell Diana that she would one day get her own Evita, she would be absolutely thrilled.

However, Diana died a quarter of a century ago and will never get to see Diana: The Musical. Some people get all the luck.

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