It’s no joke for new shows as classic favourites live on while investment in sitcoms and sketches falters
There is a quip beloved of comedians, when asked if their industry is going down the pan: “Nostalgia? It ain’t what it used to be.”
But for fans of well-worn jokes, and the shows in which they appear, 2024 could be truly a golden era.
Continue reading...Audiences should be ‘shocked and disturbed’ by the impact of theatre, says Schindler’s List and Harry Potter actor
Trigger warnings for theatre audiences should be scrapped because people should be “shocked and disturbed” by what they see, the actor Ralph Fiennes has said.
The warnings are issued before the beginning of a performance to alert audiences to upsetting or distressing content and have become increasingly commonplace in theatres.
Continue reading...A dozen playwrights and directors meet in Kyiv and find comedy can be an important part of their creative process
In a studio theatre tucked into a courtyard behind Kyiv’s main Khreshchatyk Street, six playwrights and six directors were hammering out a fraught question: how to write plays about war, during the war.
One unexpected outcome of their workshops was: through jokes.
Continue reading...Sarah Grochala’s Intelligence follows Lovelace’s attempts to be taken seriously as a scientist in 1840s London
A play about the reincarnation of the Victorian computing pioneer Ada Lovelace has won this year’s Women’s prize for playwriting.
Intelligence, by Sarah Grochala, follows Lovelace’s attempts to forge a career for herself as a serious scientist in 1840s London and being continually obstructed by men.
Continue reading...Theatreland is taking a gamble on a wave of quirky little shows to challenge the big but tired box office beasts
A fresh kind of musical theatre show, set apart by having started life on the fringe or in a small-scale provincial production, is challenging the established order in London’s West End this season.
A wave of new, quirky productions will be taking their places alongside Phantom of the Opera-style classics and all those big, popular musicals that rework a familiar film title or milk a superstar legacy.
Continue reading...Jessica Daley rushed to the rescue after Curve theatre in Leicester put out a call for someone who knew the role
An actor travelled more than 150 miles to ensure the show went on after both the lead and understudy became ill and could not perform in a musical.
Jessica Daley travelled from her home in Middlesbrough to the Curve theatre in Leicester to sing the starring role of Eva Perón in a 7.30pm performance of Evita on Saturday.
Continue reading...The actor, who has played characters on both sides of the debate, says the UK needs a conversation about euthanasia and assisted suicide
About a decade ago, Dame Harriet Walter, the 73-year-old star of stage and screen, decided to make a living will. The will, also known as an advance decision, informs family, carers and doctors of a person’s wish to refuse specific treatments should they become too ill to communicate those choices. (It stops short of requesting help with end of life; euthanasia and assisted suicide remain illegal in the UK.) But, when it came to actually completing the details of her living will, Walter always found something else to do.
“I had the will sitting in my filing cabinet for about three or four years before I got round to it,” says Walter, who made her name in the theatre but has recently had eye-catching roles in the TV shows Succession, Killing Eve and Ted Lasso. “It’s not something you really want to look at, it’s not something you want to think about. But it will be good to know that there’s something in place that you could use when the time comes. Then you close that filing cabinet.”
Continue reading...Artistic director of the Kiln theatre will take over from Rufus Norris in spring 2025
Indhu Rubasingham has been announced as the next director of the National Theatre, marking the first time that a woman and a person of colour has taken on the biggest role in British theatre.
Rubasingham, who has been artistic director of the Kiln theatre since 2012, will take over from Rufus Norris in spring 2025, when his second term ends. She and Kate Varah will also become joint chief executives in a co-leadership model.
Continue reading...In a recording in 2020, the actor made a case for giving ‘human beings true agency over their bodies at the end of life’
• Read more: ‘Push me over the edge’ – Diana Rigg’s daughter Rachael Stirling writes about her mother’s dying wishes
Diana Rigg made an impassioned case to legalise assisted dying in a message recorded shortly before her “truly awful” and “dehumanising” death from cancer three years ago.
The actor’s statement calling for a law that gives “human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life”, published today in the Observer, adds to the ongoing debate on assisted dying, with MPs expected to publish recommendations to the government within weeks.
Continue reading...London venue’s online collection of performances dating back to 1956 will be free to use for writers, directors and the public
The Royal Court has launched a free digital archive of every play performed at the London theatre since 1956 as a resource for writers, directors and members of the public.
Almost 2,000 plays by more than 1,000 writers are accessible on the theatre’s Living Archive, along with lists of their casts and directors.
Continue reading...April De Angelis comedy, to be premiered in Hampstead, explores life of actor at a time when married women were ‘legally dead’
She was known as the Queen of Drury Lane and the first truly respected female actor in theatre, achieving an astonishing level of celebrity at the end of the 18th century.
But despite her notoriety there are no contemporary biographies about Sarah Siddons, who was labelled by her contemporaries as “tragedy personified”.
Continue reading...Kathy Burke and Daniel Kaluuya among alumni of her London school, credited with making stars of often working-class students
Tributes have been paid to Anna Scher, an influential drama teacher who taught actors including Kathy Burke, Daniel Kaluuya and Adam Deacon, after the announcement of her death on Sunday, aged 78.
Scher, who had taught children in north London to act for more than 50 years, has been credited with creating numerous stars, and was known for championing people from a working-class background. The Anna Scher Theatre (AST), which started as a drama club in January 1968, has a long list of well-known alumni, including Pauline Quirke, Linda Robson, Martin Kemp, Natalie Cassidy, Patsy Palmer, Sid Owen, Jake Wood, Reggie Yates and Brooke Kinsella.
Continue reading...The Hollywood star will appear alongside Andy Serkis and Louisa Harland in David Ireland’s black comedy
Woody Harrelson is to return to the London stage in a new production of David Ireland’s controversial black comedy Ulster American this winter.
Harrelson will star as a hotshot American actor in the satire, with Lord of the Rings’ Andy Serkis playing an English theatre director and Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland taking the role of a playwright from Northern Ireland whose drama about a violent Protestant activist the trio are about to stage.
Continue reading...Coogan will follow in Peter Sellers’ footsteps to play multiple roles in stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical war film
Steve Coogan is to star in Armando Iannucci’s stage adaptation of the satirical war film Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The play, set to open in London next autumn, reunites the pair who worked together more than 30 years ago on the BBC radio comedy On the Hour, in which Coogan played Alan Partridge, and on subsequent Partridge projects.
Continue reading...National Theatre and Royal Ballet among 21 groups to receive grants from new fund
Vogue World will donate £2m to London-based arts organisations through a newly established fund, Condé Nast has announced.
The star-studded event at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane on Thursday night was masterminded by the Vogue editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, and the Bafta- and Olivier-winning director Stephen Daldry. Its aim was to celebrate London’s heritage as a cultural powerhouse and to raise money for the UK’s cash-strapped performing arts scene.
Continue reading...Rest of audience applauds after people causing ‘disturbance’ removed from Dominion theatre on Saturday
Theatregoers were escorted from a London performance of Grease the Musical by police on Saturday night, to cheers of approval from the rest of the audience.
Footage posted online shows eight police officers and staff from the Dominion theatre lining the stairway in the balcony as audience members chant “out, out, out!”.
Continue reading...Younger audiences may not recognise people comedians are impersonating but some performers say there’s still plenty to work with
“If I see somebody become famous, and they’ve got tremendously predominant mannerisms and they speak a certain way which is unusual, I go for it right away,” the veteran impressionist Mike Yarwood once said of the public figures he mimicked.
But in the decades since Yarwood drew up to 18 million viewers to his BBC shows – with his impressions of the likes of Harold Wilson and the football manager Brian Clough – the cultural touchstones that once defined celebrity have exponentially shifted. With traditional TV viewership continuing to decline among younger generations, impressionists are faced with a new challenge – today’s digital natives may not readily recognise the people they are impersonating.
Continue reading...Actor and writer posted yesterday after performing her show Sunsets to one audience member
An actor who went viral online after she posted a tearful tweet about performing her one-woman show to an audience of one at the Edinburgh festival fringe has played to a sell out crowd only 24 hours later.
The actor and writer Georgie Grier received messages of support from comedians including Jason Manford and Dara Ó Briain when she posted on Twitter on Thursday afternoon: “There was one person in my audience today when I performed my one-woman play, ‘Sunsets’ at #edfringe. It’s fine, isn’t it? It’s fine …?”
Continue reading...Gillian Slovo’s play at National Theatre uses words of survivors of 2017 fire at west London tower block
People must be jailed for what happened at Grenfell Tower, the award-winning author Gillian Slovo has said, as her play about the disaster prepares to open at the National Theatre in London.
Slovo, who gained international recognition with her novel Red Dust, set in South Africa’s post-apartheid truth and reconciliation commission, has used dialogue gleaned verbatim from interviews with 10 of the survivors for the play, which has left actors in tears after preview performances. In an interview with the Guardian she said: “Without jail time, how’s it going to stop anybody else doing this in the future?”
Continue reading...The I Should Be So Lucky singer will play a ‘specially created character’ in the touring show which will feature a string of pop hits by the songwriting trio
Kylie Minogue is to step back in time for a new musical featuring the songs of Stock Aitken Waterman that shot her to chart success in the late 1980s. The Australian singer, currently enjoying a summer hit with Padam Padam, will “digitally appear” throughout the tour of the show, playing what is described as “a specially created character unique to the musical”.
I Should Be So Lucky: The Stock Aitken Waterman musical is written and directed by Debbie Isitt whose series of Nativity! films also inspired a stage musical. The show uses more than 25 numbers created by the songwriting and production trio Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman, including the title song from 1987 which brought Minogue her first UK No 1 hit.
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