Monday, August 1, 2016
I’ll be seeing a lot of theatre over the next two weeks, and I’m badly out of practice in writing about shows — it’s been almost a year since I last did a proper revi…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 12:09PMThursday, June 2, 2016
Three weeks ago I had what seemed like a fun idea at the time: I’d live-tweet a steady stream of my responses to Brian Vickers’s — sorry: Sir Brian Vickers’s &…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:15PMWednesday, May 18, 2016
I suspect that my generation of theatre historians will look back on this day as a game changing moment: the Curtain has been dug up in Shoreditch, and it’s nothing like what we expect…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 02:50AMSunday, January 10, 2016
I wrote this rather grumpy short paper for a roundtable on “Pedagogical Shakespeare: Text, Performance, and Digitalization,” organized by Bradin Cormack and Elizabeth Harvey at t…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:55AMTuesday, December 29, 2015
This autumn, I directed a show. It’s something I’ve wanted to do again for a long time — there was a period in my life when I thought I wanted to be a director, and when I …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 05:34PMTuesday, November 10, 2015
I saw the second preview of this, so held off posting until after it had opened (and what follows are my off-the-cuff responses jotted down right after I saw the show and not really reconsid…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 03:23PMSaturday, October 24, 2015
I should have hated this Medea. After all, I was massively annoyed by the National Theatre production last year, not just because of Ben Power’s pedestrian adaptation, but mostly becau…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:43AMThursday, October 22, 2015
A set reminiscent of the dilapidated stately home that Alex Eales designed for Katie Mitchell’s Alles Weitere Kennen Sie aus den Kino in Hamburg, except more vast: its wide stretch fil…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:27AMWednesday, October 21, 2015
Very quick & short off-the-cuff review. Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Turgenev’s play (directed by Marber himself) is slick, smooth, professional, superficial, and extremel…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:27AMFriday, October 16, 2015
You have the best arts coverage of all our Canadian newspapers. You have some excellent reporters. During this election campaign, you published a number of serious, well-considered, forceful…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 07:10PMSunday, September 6, 2015
I was born in West Germany. In my late teens, after the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of the two Germanies I’d grown up with, I spent much of my spare time organizing prote…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:05AMTuesday, August 18, 2015
Tim Carroll has been appointed as the new Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival. When the news was announced last week, my instant reaction was that “this may be the weirdest and most…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:03PMTuesday, July 28, 2015
This is the most self-serving of posts. This week, the new third edition of the Norton Shakespeare finally came out. It’s a total overhaul of this widely used text: unlike the first t…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:14PMTuesday, June 30, 2015
Things that don’t happen as often as I would like: seeing shows in Toronto that assure me that theatre remains a vital art form here; seeing shows that only make sense as theatre, and …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:51AMWednesday, May 20, 2015
I have been trying to figure out and describe what exactly is so special about German theatre. In some ways, especially from the perspective of the English-speaking theatre world, it may see…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:01PMSaturday, May 16, 2015
Jette Steckel’s production of Arthur Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land at the Deutsche Theater makes no efforts to reinvent much of anything. It’s a very well done, moderately in…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:01PMWednesday, May 13, 2015
An empty stage, sliced diagonally in half by dolly tracks running from downstage right to upstage left; on those tracks, a grand piano on a cart, equipped with a microphone for the player. T…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 11:19AMTuesday, May 12, 2015
I should be writing about the two Woyzecks I’ve seen this week, and about Karin Henkel’s fantastic John Gabriel Borkmann. But the other thing I’ve been watching, other than plays, is Q…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:02PMFriday, May 8, 2015
(Off the cuff and short.) My evening in the Volksbuehne: Frank Castorf directing The Master Builder. 4 hours of Ibsen. Well. 4 hours of Ibsen and a lot of other stuff. 4 hours of nine life-s…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:02PMBerlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, under the new artistic leadership that took charge last season, has quite aggressively redefined itself as what they call a post-migrant theatre — b…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:33PMSaturday, May 2, 2015
What happens when a German theatre hires a French Canadian choreographer to direct a play by Shakespeare? Something very Canadian. Dave St-Pierre’s staging of Macbeth at the Schauspiel Fra…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:05AMSaturday, February 14, 2015
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen as rigorous, as complete, and as compelling a piece of theatre on a UK stage as Ivo van Hove’s take on Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridg…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:26PMTuesday, February 3, 2015
Today, the Berliner Festspiele announced the jury’s selection of the most “remarkable” German, Swiss, and Austrian theatre productions of 2014, the shows that are being inv…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 02:59AMSaturday, January 17, 2015
Making good on my new year’s resolutions: going to more Toronto theatre and writing about shows on the blog rather than on Facebook. So this is rough and quick and off the cuff and rel…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:57AMSunday, January 11, 2015
I got into a bit of a squabble on Facebook today with Kelly Nestruck about Stratford and what I described as its unwillingness to hand over substantial, youthful parts to youthful, perhaps i…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 03:35AMFriday, January 9, 2015
I’ve decided to go through my many Facebook posts about theatre from last year and collect all my instant reactions to shows as I saw them — fragmentary, brusque, overly enthusia…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 12:23PMSaturday, January 3, 2015
I’ve decided to go through my many Facebook posts about theatre from last year and collect all my instant reactions to shows as I saw them — fragmentary, brusque, overly enthusia…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 04:24PMPeter Stein, in 1981, on acting: Actors — all actors — naturally tend to protect their characters. As far as I’m concerned, an actor who wouldn’t do that would be ser…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 03:52PMI’ve decided to go through my many Facebook posts about theatre from last year and collect all my instant reactions to shows as I saw them — fragmentary, brusque, overly enthusia…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 02:30AMI’ve decided to go through my many Facebook posts about theatre from last year and collect all my instant reactions to shows as I saw them — fragmentary, brusque, overly enthusia…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:24AMThursday, January 1, 2015
As quiet as it’s been on here lately, and although I have seen all of three plays in the last two months, 2014 was actually a pretty exciting year in theatre for me: Still: there are…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:10PM 
