| A Look-back and Guide: “To Give Permanence to Something Impermanent” |
Theatre Critic Book |
| Theatre Critics , Wales, Scotland, England & USA , February 21, 2025 |
Books by theatre critics are reviewed below.20 February 2025: Aleks Sierz and Lia Ghilardi “The Time Traveller's Guide to British Theatre” “Assaults on theatre came from different directions. A parliamentary bill “to restrict the number of playhouses” was introduced in 1735 but failed. “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage” (1698) by Jeremy Collier ran to 280 pages. The Society for the Reformation of Manners contended that “the business of plays is to recommend virtue and discountenance vice.” Informants were sent out to plays to write down profanities and lewdnesses. A pamphlet “Players' Scourge” (1757) declared that “Play actors are the most profligate wretches and the vilest vermin that hell ever vomited out. They are the filth and garbage of the world.” * * * * 03 October & 24 September: Mark Fisher “How to Write About Theatre” “In the preface to “Il Conte de Carmagnola” (1819) Manzoni wrote: “Any work of art contains within it the elements necessary to enable anyone to form an opinion on it. In my view they are the following: What did the author set out to do? Was this a reasonable ambition in the first place? Has the author achieved what they set out to do? “Failing to look at every work from this angle and insisting at all costs on judging every piece according to a set of rules (the uncertainty and universality of which is open to question) is to risk taking a wholly wrong approach to a piece of work.” * * * * 02 December 2018: Michael Billington “The 101 Greatest Plays” "On Mynydd Epynt “what we discovered was that Aeschylus from the start had unearthed a fundamental principle of drama: that it should contain moral and political ambivalence and that its meaning should vary according to circumstance.” The same point is repeated 343 pages on in the first line on “the Crucible”. “Great plays change their meaning depending on time and circumstance.” * * * * 01 October 2018: Kalina Stefanova “Who Keeps the Score on the London Stages?” "Lyn Gardner: “good theatre criticism requires space but newspaper editors don't want to give it.” Matt Wolf, an American in London, points to the advantage here: “British critics have just seen more.” * * * * 19 August 2018: Joyce McMillan “Theatre in Scotland. A Field of Dreams” "The Scots playwrights are all here, Byrne, Lochhead, Greig, Burke, Harrower. "When Scottish theatre works its magic over the coming years, I will be there, to try to catch the moment in print, and to tell it as it was. And believe me, on the good nights and the bad ones, the privilege will be mine: to be paid to go looking for joy, and occasionally to find it.” * * * * 30 March 2018: David Ian Rabey “The Theatre and Films of Jez Butterworth” “The Ferryman” is a theatre work of magnificence. Its formal qualities awe, its climax devastates. At the same time magnificence need not necessarily embrace authenticity. Returning to McDonagh, his Ebbing, Missouri is not a study in documentary accuracy. " * * * * 23 May 2017: Kirsty Sedgman “Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales” 22 May 2017 Kirsty Sedgman “Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales” "Here, NTW’s capacity to engage with ideas of local identity was less important than the ability of theatre generally to tap into a kind of essential humanity. Instead, what audiences appreciated was the sense that The Persians had looked beyond Wales to the “universal”...“relevant is an entirely bogus notion in relation to theatre. Just do good stuff.” * * * * 07 July 2016: Jonathan Croall "Closely Observed Theatre” “You seem not to have listened to anything I have told you in the last few days” he tells a member of his group. “You’ve decided to experiment by doing the exact opposite of what I’ve said and you’ve given a real plughole of a performance.” * * * * 27 June 2016: John Lahr “Joy Ride” "A great director, the late William Gaskill, looked to his art with sombreness. “Directing is a terrible profession. It’s lonely and it’s frustrating. It has no real satisfaction in it.” he wrote. “The first night is like death.” “The Homecoming” changed my life” says Lahr “Before the play I thought words were vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defence.” * * * * 29 June 2015: Benedict Nightingale "Great Moments in the Theatre" "His selection spans two and a half millennia of theatre, 458 BC- April, to be precise- to “Jerusalem” in July 2009. The productions run the span of Athens, Paris, St Petersburg, Moscow, Copenhagen, Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin, Dublin, Wexford, New York. London, Manchester, Newcastle, Dorchester, Glasgow, Cardiff. The author was at Cardiff’s New Theatre 26th March 1965. “First there a clatter of seats as the audience flounced out” runs his sprightly first sentence." * * * * 15 December 2013: Lucy Kerbel "100 Great Plays for Women" “100 Great Plays for Women” is a labour of love, three years in its making. Her book marries depth and application with a stamp of individuality. “Whale Music”, Anthony Minghella’s 1980 fledgling piece is “a richly complicated and determinedly non-sentimental analysis of some of the most complex and emotionally contentious of all aspects of human existence.” * * * * 06 September 2012: Editor Anna Fenemore “the Rehearsal” "The other essays in “the Rehearsal” are less convincing. This gives the writing a feeling of evasiveness and lack of commitment. Metaphors are selected with small discrimination. An animal that has an adaptive behaviour of mimicking death is claimed to be indulging in “theatre”- the inverted commas are the author’s. As a metaphor it lacks conviction. The writing is plump with redundancy." * * * * 06 June 2012: Edited David Roesner & Matthias Rebstock “Composed Theatre” "The first chapter provides a stimulating description of the genre’s roots from the generation of Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy and Hugo Ball to Boulez and Artaud. In 1956 Stockhausen is placing groups of loudspeakers around the audience which permit sound’s migration across the space. Georges Aperghis in “Zeugen” uses hand puppets by Klee to texts by Robert Walser. Odin Teatret’s Eugenio Barba is quoted on improvisations “I did not worry about meaning. I wanted to arrange a dance of sensory stimuli which had an effect on my nervous system”. * * * * 10 April & 11 April 2012: The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights “Philip Ridley has a childhood experience similar to many writers. Illness, in his case asthma, dictates long periods of isolation. Roy Williams leaves school at sixteen and manages to make it to the Cockpit Youth Theatre after work in McDonalds, Safeway and various warehouses. Gregory Burke is dishwasher, hospital porter, factory employee before sending “Gagarin Way” to the Traverse.” * * * * 08 April & 06 April 2011: Aleks Sierz “Rewriting the Nation” "What is a theatre looking for amidst the weekly flood of new scripts? RSC literary manager Jeanie O’Hare is here on the attributes of a good theatre writer: “instinctive rawness, linguistic invention and concern with ideas”. The view of the director? Jenny Topper, in a comment on debbie tucker green, lists her essential elements. “She is concerned with ideas, she is concerned with form, and she has the courage to stay true to her intuition and let her own linguistic invention come through.” * * * * 07 December 2008: Robert Brustein “Millennial Stages” "Critics are enjoyed for their consistency of personality. Brustein's aesthetic preferences are clear-cut but not dominant. Description comes first. He is an audience member. He records ticket prices, physical discomfort and an excess of length. He is not charmed by six and a half hours of Mnouchkine. “What it lacks is a reasonable aesthetic, a sense of economy and form, an overarching unity. What it needs, in other words, is a dramatist.” * * * * 05 December 2008: Robert Brustein “Millennial Stages” "Brustein describes an era of “greying audiences, defecting actors, declining taste, second-rate theatre criticism, impoverished school arts programmes, inadequate philanthropic support, moral and political correctness. “My life is not about race. It's about life” says Suzan-Lori Parks on a public platform. “Why does everyone think white artists make art and black artists make statements? Why doesn't anyone ever ask me about form?” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 229 times There are 22 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
