A weird but inescapable fact— making theatre is to cause a huge group of artists with a huge variety of skills and creative drives to come together to produce a single, comprehensive, cohesive piece of art. It’s a miracle that not more blood is spilt over it.Read More →
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler I was reading an article about the 2014 film “Selma”, a Black rights film. The director was saying that the release of his film could not have been more timely, with the latest round of civil unrest regarding violence against black people in America. The Black Lives Matter movement had by then caught the attention of American and world media. He did not claim to have designed the film to coincide with the tumult,Read More →
There’s revenge. Served hot from anger. There’s revenge served in cold measure. Then there’s revenge served neither hot nor especially cold. We call it justice. I’ve heard this play being described in various places as a dark comedy, a murder ballad, a riff on ancient myths, and a performance poem. It’s all those things. Bleeding clever clogs Cerini.Read More →
“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” —Anton Chekhov, 1860-1904 Good Old Chekhov’s Gun Theory. It mostly works on the principle that everything within a story should be necessary to the telling of it. Gun on stage?—someone gets shot for sure.Read More →
So, ok, you’ve got yourself a dramaturgical appointment—with a reputable dramaturge who has clean ears and a clear mind, hopefully— but just what are you supposed to do? Read More →
“Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty” —UK dramatist, William Archer. (Don’t worry, I’d not heard of him either. A largely unsung Scottish drama critic, playwright and dramaturge of the late 19th/early 20th century. His big claim to fame is his English translations of Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. But with this statement, he gets promoted to first-class genius. )Read More →
Watching movies should count as study time for writers. Along with reading novels, going to see plays and listening to radio drama. That is if you take the time to deconstruct your experience of them. And, good news, you don’t have to be a lit major or a dramaturg to gain insights.Read More →
Hotly pursuing my 2017 resolution to read more plays, I’ve chivvied out a play by Joanna Murray-Smith, perhaps the most produced Australian playwright. But then there’s that David Williamson. But surely she’s the most produced female playwright. Good on her, I say.Read More →
I’m a Scandi TV addict. Ok? I am. Everything Nordic, no matter what the topic—and let’s face it, it’s usually the topic of crime—I’m on it. I watched Midnight Sun, smorgasbord-style, all I could eat, back-to-back episodes, could not help myself, in one sitting. I will gorge myself, without a shred of guilt, and also without a shred of regard for how badly written some of this stuff is.Read More →
So I read Private Lives by Noel Coward. It was everything I thought I might be. And less.Read More →