Hi, I’m Julie.
I am a retired Principal Lecturer. I continue to research contemporary Shakespeare performances. In retirement, I no longer teach Shakespeare but I now get to visit new places. I love theatre, outdoor swimming and writing about those experiences in my blogs.
I really enjoyed this short piece in the Studio at York Theatre Royal. The play was set in a Call Centre and this seemed like a really good idea because working in sales is like, or even is, putting on a performance. What happens here is that the edges of reality are slightly shifted so we…
Outside in the town of Stratford it was raining every day. Inside, the Courtyard Theatre, there is a promise of sunshine as the sun streams through the doors and windows across a dimmed stage and auditorium. The play will commence in the dusky light of the moment when the day begins to turn to night and will…
Read more Twelfth Night (The Courtyard Theatre, w/c 9th November 2009)
Read more Twitter word cloud – what I’ve been preoccupied with this week..
There will be a change in the Doctor we kept getting told. What did we think before ‘The Waters of Mars’ aired? Possibly that the Doctor will give up and fail to save those he was sent to help. That his failure leads to tragedy on a grand scale and that he feels so bad he just gives up and because…
Read more Doctor Who, ‘The Waters of Mars’ (15th November 2009)
Having just moved Miching Malicho over here to Between the Acts, I have been a little bit more interested in what other Theatre/Culture blogs look like this week. In reading through some blogs I came across Cultural Tales of Two Cities. I really like the way that the blog focuses on the two cities of Manchester and London,…
Over the last two weeks, I have seen two very different English Touring Theatre productions, one a comedy and the other a tragedy. The thing about English Touring Theatre is you do know you’re on safe ground, and the story will come first and I feel with these productions that there is little ambiguity. All of a…
Welcome to Between the Acts. Miching Malicho moves here to Between the Acts, and I will continue to write about Theatre, Literature, Art, Film and TV amongst other things. This space feels like a better space to continue the reflective writing started in Miching Malicho. In the future I would like to return to Miching…
Read more Between the Acts is the new blog for Miching Malicho
Outside Waterstone’s in Newcastle, young women wearing clothes with flashes of pink, are queuing to see Katie Price signing copies of her new novel. The former glamour model, who is also known as Jordan, experiments with different identities, and she could be described as an independent woman making it on her own in the savage and brutal world of a celebrity-focused culture. About 100 yards away from…
Read more As You Like It (Theatre Royal Newcastle, 24th October 2009)
I wouldn’t say that this was gripping theatre and some of the effects were just a little bit cliched. All those flashing lights on the white set with phrases about life in the 1980s such as ‘Greed is Good’ and ‘Material Girl’ and all that music from the 80s that was about power and material items,…
Read more The Black Album (West Yorkshire Playhouse, 21st October 2009)
There are the groups of young women trying to recreate their summer holidays in Ibiza dressed in their short dresses without a jacket or coat, alongside other revellers out to have fun after working hard all week. This is the familiar Friday night in York, but they are joined by the families wrapped up well against the creeping autumnal chill. They all move down…
Read more Illuminating York (York City Centre, 23rd October)
Julie Raby: A Dyslexic Writer 