Around the Web

To fill the gap in the Civilian Theatre reviewing schedule (taking some respite before the Cultural Olympiad kicks off:

1) For those who like their reviews laced with a splash of acid then those good folk at West End Whingers are more than happy to oblige. They have cast their eye over Bingo and most appropriately have been to the Menier to see Abigail’s Party; a play that Civilian Theatre’s middle-class squeamishness means it cannot be endured:

2) Digital Theatre have been adding to their collection of downloadable plays, and now Much Ado About Nothing (with Tennant and Tate) and the wonderful David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker headed production of All My Sons are both available in glorious HD. Given that top price tickets can set you back up to £65 then how about enjoying it in your own house with a glass of wine for £10?

3) Over at the Guardian, there is an editorial praising Stephen Sondheim to tie in with his lifetime achievement from the Critics Circle. Little needs to be said apart from…West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music. Oh yes and Sweeny Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Into The Woods and Sunday In The Park With George. The last remaining great American lyricist even if his career has slowed down dramatically in the last decade.

Here are a couple of clips from two of his most best-loved works:

4) Webcowgirl over at Life in the Cheap Seats discovers the perils of reviewing student shows. Student + Sarah Kane = Pretension – Original vision. As much as I admire Sarah Kane, there can be few artists that have had such a devastating effect on the originality and interest of drama students.

This week Civilian Theatre has been mostly…

…listening to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (the Jason Donovan version naturally). Don’t judge me, blame the BBC’s fantastic The Story of Musicals, which does everything it says on the tin and more.

…watching Game of Thrones Season 1. Again. It’s all worth it for lines as amazing as…“The next time you raise your hand to me will be the last time you have hands.”

God bless fans with time on their hands

…making my own Salt Beef thanks to Hugh F-W.

The Week Ahead

Well after a month out from the blog – mainly ~~spent drinking cocktails and eating wonderful food in Malaysia~~ investigating the diverse cultural scene and eating wonderful food in Malaysia – its time to cast an eye over the weeks ahead. I had a chance to see Cheek by Jowl’s latest production at the Barbican last week, the enjoyably gory Tis Pity She’s a Whore and staged with the inventiveness that comes as standard with a CbyJ production. A review will be up later in the week.

Next week I will be trotting along with the rest of London’s hipsters too see Zach Braff’s first foray into stage plays, ‘All New People‘. After receiving broadly positive if not ecstatic reviews in America, it has now crossed the pond and looks to be a reliably enjoyable if rather predictable evening.

Also worth pointing out the National Theatre Live series continues with A Comedy of Errors, which will be airing at cinema’s round the country on 01 March. Lenny Henry got very positive reviews on his latest return to the stage and whilst it is not the same experience as watching live, it is a commendable project to bring the theatre to those who do not have the time, money or ability to venture to London at the drop of a hat.

Technical update from the site gremlins

Morning All,

Our gremlins, who work tirelessly to ensure that the site maintains a bare minimum of functionality, are proud to inform all our lovely visitors that they can now follow A Civilian’s Guide to the Theatre on Facebook. If you find the ‘widget’, yep that is the technical term, on the right-side of the page and click on the ‘like’ button then it means that you can be the first to know when we have uploaded any new articles to the site.

Alternatively you can go directly to the Facebook page here –> A Civilian’s Guide to the Theatre

Enjoy

From Stage to Screen: Hollywood Does Theatre

It might be no more than yet another sign of the slow death rattle of Hollywood, the slow, wheezing sound of the balloon deflating as originality continues to be usurped in favour of that most valued of commodities – the ‘sure-fire’ hit, however it never stops being frustrating to go and see a film you loved on stage only to realise that those complex, live-wire characterisations by total unknowns have been replaced by a type-A, blank-eyed, lantern-jawed hero who only ever appear against a backdrop of an elegiac piano-based score while using a script so simplistic it might have been rejected by Dan Brown…

Welcome to Hollywood Does Theatre – an opportunity to see your favourite plays on the big screen: re-scripted, re-cast and re-duced substantially in quality. Well that may not be entirely fair, it can be argued that given the right play with the right cast and a sympathetic director the results can be substantially more enjoyable than the original play. This play went on to do be quite popular as I recall…

The beginning of last year saw the crowning of The Kings Speech, whilst towards the end of the year Terence Davies took on Terence Rattigan in a version of ‘The Deep Blue Sea’. The critical consensus seems to have awarded it the label of solid, if unspectacular. Davies is such a talent and,due to his relative inactivity, under-appreciated master of composition that it could hardly fail to overwhelm the visual but it is also clear that he is a huge admirer of Rattigan and if anything the material is handled to reverently. By the end the audience is left wondering, as splendid as all the constituent parts are, why they are watching a film of a play that felt outdated even at the time of its original release back in 1952. (I mean this was released in 1951 and within moments our obsession with emotional reticence looked about as old-fashioned as our obsession with the Empire:

So what is on the slate for 2012?

1) Warhorse (Released: 13 January)

Unless you had been living in a cave you could scarcely have failed to notice the Warhorse phenomenon that has developed over the last 5 years. Initially a hit as a book for Michael Morpurgo, it tells the story of the relationship between a young soldier and his horse. It is a unashamed tear-jerker and touches on just about every emotional heartstring going. So it is, perhaps, no surprise that it eventually found its way into Spielberg’s mitts. If there was ever a director who has mastered the blockbuster, wide-angle lens camera pan set to a not-too-obvious but vaguely familiar stringed background, then it is the man who directed E.T., Close Encounters and Band of Brothers.

Perhaps more surprisingly is the fact that in between the book and the film came a play that has been both critically lauded and a commercial smash wherever it has played. And each and every review poured praise on the inventiveness and skill of the puppetry of the horse in evoking an anthropomorphic reaction to the creature. At times zyou can barely hear the actors over the sound of sobbing in the aisles. So naturally Spielberg has removed the puppet.

Well it pulls about every Spielbergian trick out the book – it seems you can’t move in his trailers without risking an eye to an errant violinist’s bow. This is movie-making not film-making. It is a statement of intent but a statement that seems to have fallen on deaf ears among the critics that appreciate the quality but feel there is an absence of heart. So Puppets 1: 0 Spielberg.

Click here for the full article

Vaclav Havel (1936 – 2011)

The tragic death of Vaclav Havel (1936 – 2011) earlier this month has sadly robbed the theatrical world of one of the more impressive résumé’s of modern playwrights. Harold Pinter may have been awarded the Nobel Prize for his contributions to literature – an award which contained an inherent recognition of the political aspect of his later writing – but Havel can claim to go one step further; he was a major presence in world politics and also a key figure in the transition from authoritarian communist rule to democracy in the ex-Soviet states. Indeed the gulf between the two can be seen in the fact that it was Pinter who played ‘Vanek’, Havel’s semi-autobiographical alter-ego, in a BBC radio play in 1977.

Following the Velvet Revolution in 1989 Havel was elected, by the Federal Assembly, as the ninth, and as it turned out final, President of Czechoslovakia. He was also responsible for introducing democracy to the country following 40 years of Communist rule, and, despite opposing it, oversaw the movement that led to the eventual split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

In a world where most politicians appear to be motivated primarily by money and power, Havel can be held up as a shining example of a true public intellectual. Whereas many playwrights can write about politics, Havel lived through his beliefs and will remain in the history books as a powerful reminder that the literary world can engage with the political on an equal footing.

The fact that there is a Havel legacy in the U.K, given the generally dire prominence of any modern playwrights who are not Anglo-American is almost entirely down to the marvellous Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. It has become a bastion of Havel’s work, and has been responsible for staging 12 major productions, including the first English translations of many of his plays. In 1977, on the eve of premiering Havel’s work in England, Charter ’77 exploded and the Orange Tree, a tiny theatre above a pub in the heart of liberal London suburbia found itself at the centre of Czech politics. From this moment forward the Orange Tree, an increasingly influential fringe venue, forged a sustained and meaningful relationship with Havel that continued through to his death.

For more on the relationship between the Orange Tree and Vaclav Havel click here.

Ravenhill’s Rise and the RSC

Congratulations to Mark Ravenhill, as it has been announced that he will be the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Writer in Residence for 2012. As a man who is generally held critically responsible for helping to kickstart a new generation of British dramatists with the unexpected popular smash, Shopping and Fucking in 1996, it might come as a bit of a surprise. But as a regular commentator in The Guardian and on Newsnight Review, as well as advising Nicholas Hytner at the National, Ravenhill has been in higher echelons of the cultural elite for a while.

Still this doesn’t detract from what could be a promising year. Hopefully acting as a catalyst to reinvigorate a moribund new writing scene at the RSC since Adrian Noble took the reigns, Ravenhill will also have access to one of the greatest acting pools in the world to take on his work. Whilst it might prove to be a false dawn there is always the possibility, bolstered by a domestic world riven with disputes, that the playwrights may finally reassert their theatrical voice.

For more on Ravenhill, new writing and the RSC in the Guardian, click here.