23rd February 2011. The RSC are coming home. There is no fanfare or long speeches, but there is an energetic buzz moving across the audience for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first night in the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This was what they called a soft opening. Nearly 7:15 pm Edgar (Charles Aitken) is already on stage. I…
Read more The RSC comes home
I really liked this exhibition and the way it was curated. I liked the fact that you could go back into rooms you’d already visited without feeling you were going the wrong way round it. I didn’t know what to expect so it was really helpful to go back to things and take them in…
Read more Gabriel Orozco (12th February 2011, Tate Modern)
The National Theatre’s production felt like it was a GOOD polished clean production, without some of the roughness that makes a production not just a good, but an exciting and thought-provoking one. It was the kind of production that didn’t leave me disappointed, on the other hand it didn’t leave me thinking about the text in ways that I…
Read more Twelfth Night (National Theatre, 12th February 2011)
I was really sorry to hear that Kathryn Hunter had resigned from the RSC midway through the Roundhouse run. I realise that she had not had some good reviews with some reviews being really cutting, but I had thought that her work with the current RSC ensemble had been really thought provoking. Her two performances…
Read more On Kathryn Hunter leaving the RSC ensemble
I thought that this was really amazing. Here is Jonjo O’Neill singing in the foyer of the Roundhouse only about 15 minutes before a performance of the RSC’s As You Like It. He is due on stage in 15 minutes. It made me think about Simon Annand’s book The Half: Photographs of Actors Preparing for the Stage…
Read more Jonjo O’Neill ‘The Half’ before As You Like It