Category Archives: Stage

They have agents, do auditions and can still steal a scene after filling their nappies – meet the baby actors

Posted on by

Rafael, star of The Ferryman, has been paying taxes since the age of one, while Adiya received glowing reviews for her portrayal of Lyra in The Book of Dust. Say coochy-coo to the babies treading the boards

When their son was seven months old, strangers used to ask Kat West and Jaime Vallés if they fed him sedatives. “No, I don’t drug my baby!” West recalls with mock incredulity. “That was the weirdest question.” But it wasn’t: as Vallés reminds West, someone once asked if their son was animatronic.

West and Vallés were subject to this line of questioning because, for about six months in 2019, their baby boy Rafael played Bobby Carney in The Ferryman. Bobby, as you might have gathered, is also a baby – the youngest character in the Olivier-winning Troubles drama by Jez Butterworth. For the show’s production team, and ultimately its audience, a real baby was miles better than a doll. “The live baby added to the verisimilitude of the production,” said Tim Hoare, associate director at the time. During its Broadway run, four different babies became Bobby, with Rafael playing him four times a week.

Continue reading...

This Is Going to Hurt’s Ambika Mod: ‘Whenever I did a caesarean I was buzzing!’

Posted on by

Playing junior doctor Shruti is a far cry from the standup’s ‘really silly’ sketch comedy but her improv background helped her find moments of levity in Adam Kay’s NHS drama

When Ambika Mod was cast in This Is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay’s TV adaptation of his diaries as a junior NHS doctor, it was late 2020 and health workers were facing a new Covid wave. “It felt like, now more than ever, it was an important story to tell,” she says. “I was filled with fear because of the sheer responsibility.”

Mod plays Shruti Acharya, a junior doctor under the tutelage of Adam (played by Ben Whishaw). “It’s so rare to see a well-written, complex, young south Asian female character,” she says. “Her arc is so brilliant.” The character is an amalgamation of people Kay worked with. “I share a lot in common with Shruti,” says Mod. “We’re both young Indian women, we’re both children of immigrants, so Adam was really receptive to my thoughts. I remember him saying: ‘If Shruti doesn’t make sense to you, she’s not going to make sense to anyone.’”

Continue reading...

‘All that Hollywood glamour doesn’t feel like me at all’: Joanna Scanlan on self-doubt, sexism and being the red-hot favourite at the Baftas

Posted on by

After years of great roles in comedies such as The Thick of It and Moving On, the actor is now being feted for her devastating dramatic performance in After Love. She talks about ‘serious’ acting, a breakdown in her 20s and learning to fight for herself

When Joanna Scanlan arrives, she is hidden beneath a yellow raincoat, glasses steamed up, blown through the door as if the gathering storm outside has washed her ashore. “I am so sorry for dragging you out here,” she says, laughing slightly hysterically, as she sheds the layers. Scanlan is filming in rural Wales – she, her husband and their dog are renting a cottage nearby – and this cafe, also in the middle of nowhere, was her suggestion. Even the women who work in the cafe were surprised to be called in. We are the only customers, but there are pots of tea and welsh cakes, and Scanlan is great company, so all is well.

She grew up in Wales, so this job – filming The Light in the Hall, a psychological thriller, for which she has had to learn some Welsh – is something of a homecoming. Being here is also a detachment from London, and everything that goes with her job outside of being on set or stage – the bit, you sense, she could take or leave. And so she’s a bit distanced from the buzz around her Bafta nomination for best actress for her role in the extraordinary film After Love. “When you sit here in Tywi Valley, just learning your lines for tomorrow, it’s hard to take that in,” she says. “I feel very long in the tooth to be coming to this sort of prominence.”

Continue reading...

‘The sober fairy gave me one more chance!’ Glee’s Jane Lynch on alcoholism, ambition and the return of Mrs Maisel

Posted on by

The 61-year-old scene-stealer and gay icon is back! She talks about her triumph over sexism, shame and self-doubt

Not so long ago, Jane Lynch was walking her dog, happy as could be, and she paused and said out loud to herself: “God, I love being Jane Lynch.” She laughs at herself. “As if ‘she’ were something outside of me.” But things do seem pretty good: she recently finished her run of cabaret dates with her friend, the actor Kate Flannery. There’s a reboot of the underrated sitcom Party Down coming, and a fourth series of the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is about to start. Lynch won an Emmy for her role as Sophie Lennon, a bawdy superstar comic housewife from Queens (in reality, an upper-class Manhattanite, slumming it for financial gain and self-expression). This year, Lynch takes to Broadway, to be in Funny Girl, the fulfilment, at the age of 61, of a childhood dream. Last year, she got married for the second time. “I live in this really cute house in a little beach town,” she says. “I’ve got a beautiful dog, a fantastic wife.” She seems to marvel at it – she doesn’t sound remotely boastful, just grateful.

Things haven’t always been so good. Lynch has been through divorce and alcoholism – giving up alcohol for the second time only fairly recently, after slipping back into addiction. As a teenager, she carried deep shame about her sexuality. Well into her 30s, she felt lonely and alienated, and it wasn’t until her 40s that her career took off. Lynch might be the perfect embodiment of the idea that It Will Get Better.

Continue reading...

Maria Friedman: ‘Sondheim was a kind man, but God, he could be very direct’

Posted on by

The musical theatre star on her new tribute show to Stephen Sondheim, her unconventional upbringing, and her happiest song…

Maria Friedman, 61, is a singer, actor and director who has a natural musicality (her parents were classical musicians) and knows how to get inside a song and make it her own – and ours – with emotional precision. An eight-time Olivier nominee (she has won the prize three times), she is known for her interpretations of Stephen Sondheim’s songbook, and is about to celebrate him and the composers Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand in Legacy, a show at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. Friedman is married to the actor Adrian Der Gregorian and has two sons.

Tell me about the first time you met Stephen Sondheim…
I was in my early 20s and in a gala as a replacement for a singer who had flu. I had two days to learn Broadway Baby [from Sondheim’s Follies]. The lyrics fitted me like a glove: it was about a girl with aspirations who wanted to land a great job and not work in cafes or live in a bedsit with no money. Everyone considered Broadway Baby Elaine Stritch’s song [she was also on the bill that night]. The music started and a spotlight went on to the middle of the stage. I took a deep breath and was about to start my song when, from the top of the gods, someone shouted: “Get off, we want Elaine!” I had tears in my eyes but dug really deep into those lyrics. It’s what I have done ever since. Sondheim’s work is extraordinary: when you trust it and live in it, it keeps you safe. The place went berserk. Sondheim was in the audience; at the party afterwards he asked: “Who was that girl?”

Legacy is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, 3-20 March

Continue reading...

‘There’s a truth to it’: RSC casts disabled actor as Richard III

Posted on by

Arthur Hughes says decision for 2022 production will allow lived experience to be ‘shown properly’

He is one of Shakespeare’s most reviled characters, distinguished by his “deformed, unfinish’d” figure. Now, for the first time, the Royal Shakespeare Company has cast a disabled actor in the title role of Richard III in a new production opening later this year.

For Arthur Hughes, it is a “dream come true” although his first reaction to being cast as the 15th-century king of England was disbelief. “It’s a part I’ve always wanted to play, it’s a very complex role, and it’s the biggest thing I’ve done,” said Hughes, 30.

Continue reading...

James McAvoy: ‘Play Hamlet? Nah – he’s always seemed a bit of a moaner to me’

Posted on by

He came blazing out of Glasgow like a rocket, scoring hits and acclaim. As he returns to the stage in a hard-rapping, homoerotic Cyrano de Bergerac, the star talks about partygate, snout size – and tackling Lear when he hits 100

James McAvoy is talking about Cyrano de Bergerac, the long-nosed, lovestruck poet he first played on stage in 2019, and is now about to reprise. But every now and again he interrupts himself with off-piste observations that have nothing to do with 17th-century libertines and doomed love triangles. It slowly becomes clear that he is inside his car, which is parked at the stage door of the Harold Pinter theatre in London, ready to jump into rehearsals after our chat.

“What’s this guy doing?” he says, in his meta commentary of people-watching. “Oh my God. There’s a labourer walking down the road and he doesn’t have any trousers on. He’s just in long johns and he has got the biggest penis I think I’ve ever seen.” Wait, how can he tell? “Because he’s wearing long johns! And he’s packing a nine-inch –”

Continue reading...

Butt of the joke: Bette Midler fires back at West Virginia governor Jim Justice

Posted on by

Actor and activist says ‘dog’s ass would make a better governor’ after State of the State speech stunt goes viral

Bette Midler had harsh words for the governor of West Virginia after he showed his dog’s backside at the end of his State of the State speech, in a bizarre rejoinder to the actor, singer and activist.

Responding on Thursday to a tweet in which Midler called West Virginia “poor, illiterate and strung out”, the Republican Jim Justice said she could kiss his dog’s “hiney”.

Continue reading...

‘The godfather of alternative comedy’: Eddie Izzard, Paul Merton and more on Spike Milligan

Posted on by

He was the shellshocked genius who channelled his anarchic brilliance into The Goon Show. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman explain why they’ve written a play about Spike Milligan – while comedians remember a legend

The tortured lives of comedians form a biographical genre all of their own; there’s always an audience for the tears of a clown. No wonder Nick Newman and Ian Hislop chose Spike Milligan as the subject of their new play. Milligan, who died 20 years ago next month, is the troubled comedy genius to end them all. Shellshocked in the second world war, repeatedly admitted to hospital for mental ill health, subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, and increasingly embittered as his career failed to deliver on early promise – the Spike Milligan sad-clown drama writes itself.

“But we didn’t want to do that,” says Newman. “We wanted to ask: how did he come to create these brilliant things?” Their play – a cheerful act of ancestor-worship by by Private Eye’s editor and its eminent cartoonist – is about the first three years (1951-54) of The Goon Show, as its chief writer Milligan battles the BBC to get his vision on air. “It’s: will he survive the fallout from the war?,” says Newman, “and will he crack radio?” And, “spoiler alert!,” chimes in Hislop. “Milligan wins! We just wanted to have a play where he wins.”

Continue reading...

‘Her thunder would not be stolen’: Damian Lewis speaks about loss of Helen McCrory

Posted on by

Actor uses National Theatre tribute event to talk publicly for first time about wife, who died of cancer

Damian Lewis has spoken publicly for the first time about the loss of his wife, Helen McCrory, who died last year from breast cancer aged 52.

During an evening of poetry dedicated to McCrory at the National Theatre, Lewis paid tribute to the “one person whose thunder would absolutely not be stolen”.

Continue reading...

From Billy Elliot to Spider-Man: how Tom Holland won the world’s heart

Posted on by

The British actor’s ascent to Hollywood stardom via gymnastics and dance was not always a given

Tom Holland was obsessed with Spider-Man as a boy. Growing up in Kingston upon Thames, he came to own more than 30 Spider-Man costumes and cherished his Spider-Man bedsheets.

And, unlike for most, his childhood obsession paid dividends later in life: he would eventually get to play his hero, landing the role that has made him the most famous young British actor in the world.

Continue reading...

Blackhaine: the bleak, brilliant Lancashire rapper-dancer hired by Kanye West

Posted on by

With references ranging from drug users to the Japanese avant garde, Tom Heyes has transcended a dull life in the north-west through explosive choreography and streams of consciousness

First emerging as a surrealist reaction to the horrors of the second world war, the Japanese art of butoh incorporates violence, sacrifice and bodily mutilation: a captivatingly intense form of performance described by its founder Tatsumi Hijikata as the “dance of utter darkness”.

For a teenage Tom Heyes, growing up in dreary, small-town Lancashire, it was an escape from the abject mundanity of his life. “When I was first starting out I didn’t really view it as performance art. It was just me being fucked up in my bedroom,” he says, reflecting on his early interpretation of the craft which drew as much from donk (the north-west’s spin on hardcore dance) as it did the Japanese avant garde. Often he would be left bruised and bloodied from these punishing dance routines, “but those ones back then were the most raw shit ever”, he insists.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.”

Continue reading...

‘We had the Spice Girls’: the two comics unpicking ladette culture

Posted on by

Shaparak Khorsandi and Esther Manito both came of age during a time when women were expected to conform to male stereotypes. To reflect, they did what they do best: wrote comedy shows about it

When Shaparak Khorsandi’s teenage son recently discovered 90s music – the Shamen’s Ebeneezer Good, Pulp and more – he had questions for her. What did Jarvis Cocker mean when he sang “I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire?” Were they singing about ecstasy? Did she go raving, too?

Khorsandi was in her teens and 20s in the 1990s, and being swept along in ladette culture. Used by the lads’ mag FHM as early as 1994, “ladette” came to describe bolshie women who could out-party and out-gross any hardened lad. Sara Cox, Denise van Outen and Zoe Ball were the media favourites: often pictured binge-drinking and out on the town. Ladettes went hand-in-hand with 90s lad culture, where Britpop, banter and sport collided in a blizzard of hedonism. These “new lads”, posited one researcher, were retreating into a more simplistic masculinity in response to the Spice Girls’ concept of Girl Power; and middle-class boys were co-opting the dress and behaviours of working-class men.

Continue reading...

Ricky Gervais on offence, anger and infuriating Hollywood: ‘You have to provoke. It’s a good thing’

Posted on by

He has made a career out of winding people up in everything from The Office to his Golden Globes speeches – but is the comedian’s bark worse than his bite?

Ricky Gervais’s assistant leads me past a huge, empty room to the top floor of an office above a shop on a swanky London high street. Gervais is sitting behind a desk at his computer in another huge, empty room, and looks as if he’s just squatted the place. There is nothing that suggests this is his office, except for the branded mugs sitting on his desk; one shows his face, the second says Tambury Gazette, the fictional newspaper where Gervais’s character, Tony, works in his hit Netflix series After Life.

As soon as he sees me, he swings his legs off the floor and on to the desk. I expect him to say, “Right, shoot”, as his fabulous fictional creation David Brent might have done, but he reins himself in. It’s 20 years since Gervais made his name with The Office, and it’s often been difficult to know where Brent ends and Gervais begins.

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.”

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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

Continue reading...

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

Posted on by

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.

Continue reading...

David Baddiel and his daughter on his social media addiction: ‘it can reward and punish you’

Posted on by

Despite the abuse and anger, the comedian spent hours a day online. But then his daughter Dolly became dangerously drawn in. Was it time for a rethink?

Over the past 30 years, I have read and heard David Baddiel’s thoughts on many subjects, including sex, masturbation, religion, antisemitism, football fandom, football hooliganism, his mother’s sex life and his father’s dementia. “I am quite unfiltered,” he agrees, “mainly because I am almost psychotically comfortable in my own skin.” But today I have found the one subject that makes him squirm.

How much time does he spend on social media a day? “Oh, um, too much,” he says, his usual candour suddenly gone. What’s his daily screen time according to his phone? “It says four hours, which is a bit frightening.”

Continue reading...

Hannah Gadsby – Body of Work: a joyful guide to blasting Netflix and messing with Christian bakers

Posted on by

Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
The Australian comedian has opted for a feel-good show, but without any easy sentimentality

What better way to symbolise your favourable turn in fortune than with adorable bunnies, the sign of good luck? Comedian Hannah Gadsby has marked her return to the Sydney Opera House with four rabbits across the stage, though you will probably first notice the one in the Joan Sutherland theatre that functions as a lantern, a beacon of hope.

Of course, none of these rabbits are alive, which turns out to be apt, given the desecration of one unlucky bunny that hopped into the middle of the performer’s toxic relationship with an ex she struggled to shake off and another that emits a high-pitched squeal of terror as it crosses paths with Gadsby, her new wife and producer, Jenney Shamash, and their two dogs, Douglas and Jasper, on an outdoor stroll.

Continue reading...