Thursday, 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 06:10PMThursday, November 20, 2014
I just remembered this essay, which I wrote a few years ago but never managed to get in sufficient shape for publication. It still isn’t quite right, and I’ve mostly moved on to …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:46PMSunday, November 9, 2014
Generally, I think of the posts I write on my blog as related to but separate from my academic work. With the exception of a few conference papers and a handful of other pieces, what I publi…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 08:51PMSunday, October 5, 2014
Bloody Family is the kind of show I ought to love unreservedly. It’s a new performance based on an old — perhaps the oldest — play, it’s committed to its own theatric…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:27PMThursday, September 25, 2014
What is the Factory Theatre up to now? It seems that for their season opener, Adam Lazarus and Guillermo Verdecchia’s The Art of Building a Bunker, the Factory will not invite critics …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:23PMSunday, August 10, 2014
I’m working on a longish thing about Jamie Lloyd’s quite brilliant Richard III and won’t have time for a proper write-up of this much-anticipated Streetcar Named Desire (st…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:40AMThursday, August 7, 2014
This was the most disappointing piece of theatre I’ve seen at the NT in quite a few years. Almost as bad as Frankenstein, and without that show’s mildly worth-it first ten minute…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:20PMI still have to write things about the Munich Residenztheater Faust, and about the RSC White Devil, and perhaps about the RSC Two Gents, but the backlog is getting out of hand, so I’ll…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:02PMWednesday, July 30, 2014
“This American Life” host Ira Glass went to Central Park to see King Lear with John Lithgow in the title role. He thought Lithgow was “amazing.” He also, a bit more controversially, …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 07:40PMFriday, July 25, 2014
“Original practices,” a phrase coined, apparently at Shakespeare’s Globe, in or around 2002, refers to concerted efforts to explore, in a theatrical setting, “certain stage conventio…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 07:44PMThursday, May 15, 2014
The theatre trip I’m on right now is as exhilarating as it is exhausting, and I have nowhere near enough time to write about what I’m seeing. I’ll probably do a short-form …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:31AMFriday, May 2, 2014
The curtain opens, and I think I’m in the Lyttelton. No way this is a German set. The proscenium is completely closed off — a picture frame around a photo-realistic replica of th…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:52PMWednesday, April 30, 2014
There is a conviction that haunts the English theatre: that proscenium stages create distance. That they create a fourth wall. That they are ultimately, somehow, undemocratic. And that all t…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 08:31PMFriday, April 25, 2014
I’ve just embarked on another marathon in German theatre. This year, I partly want to see just how marked (if at all) the difference are between theatre in Berlin and the rest of the c…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 09:29AMWednesday, March 26, 2014
This is a set of thoughts and questions I produced for a workshop on (performance) Practice-as-Research (organized by Andy Kesson and Stephen Purcell) at next week’s Shakespeare Associ…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 10:33PMMonday, February 17, 2014
The Lyric Hammersmith’s “Secret Theatre” project has been much discussed, praised, and derided, and I won’t try to recap the project itself – my knowledge of what the company has b…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 07:27PMA really quick post, because I’m not really competent to write anything like a serious piece on a Beckett play. Three bits I can say: 1. I can’t recall the last time a play made …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 05:53PMSaturday, February 15, 2014
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe’s new indoor space, is really as small as all the reviews say. I thought the critics were exaggerating, but no: it’s tiny, a mere 40 by 55 …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 08:49AMSunday, February 2, 2014
I saw the original production of London Road at the Cottesloe in 2011, was blown away by it then, and wrote about the show in the early days of this blog. It remains one of my favourite piec…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 03:17PMSunday, January 26, 2014
A couple of days ago, Howard Sherman, a US “arts administrator and producer,” “communications, marketing, and branding consultant,” and “theatre pundit” p…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:19PMTuesday, January 21, 2014
It may be a bit contrary of me to say that Rylance is the single most remarkable — really, the only remarkable — thing about the current Broadway productions of Twelfth Night and Richard…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 05:06PMFriday, January 17, 2014
Three of the shows I saw in New York had something in common: all were remarkable and memorable although none of them took an especially interesting, inventive, innovative, least of all radi…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 04:27AMTuesday, January 14, 2014
Needless to say, this is a spoilerfest. I had my problems with all of Season 3 of Sherlock, to be honest. “The Empty Hearse” was overstuffed with endless montages of swooping sho…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 04:33AMWednesday, January 8, 2014
One of the most striking aspects of my current New York theatre binge: the programs theatres hand out around here. Or rather, don’t hand out. Judging from the standard-issue brochure, …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 01:17PMSaturday, January 4, 2014
Visually, this is a stunning production. The Polonsky Shakespeare Center, opened this season, is a remarkable space — a broad and deep thrust four stories high, configurable with all s…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 02:50AMFriday, November 29, 2013
A fairly hasty post, but if I don’t write it now, I won’t have time to write it at all, and I’d like to write it. This morning, Michael Wheeler published an interesting pie…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 03:20AMMonday, November 25, 2013
This isn’t a post so much as a call for responses. In some of the comments on my “Youth Problem” post, both on the blog and on Facebook, a thread was emerging that suggeste…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 12:54AMSaturday, November 23, 2013
First things first: Red One Theatre’s production of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie, directed by David Ferry, is pretty great. It’s gritty, intense theatre, unafraid and …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 04:05AMFriday, November 1, 2013
A couple of weeks ago when I was in Vienna, attending a congress celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Burgtheater’s current home, an utterly over-the-top theatre palace and one of …
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 06:22AMWednesday, October 30, 2013
For your delectation, a small collection of trailers, reports, and cast interviews from a fairly rich array of recent productions of Romeo and Juliet, mostly from English- and German-speakin…
SOURCE: www.dispositio.net at 12:33AM 
