In 1985, 1,300 police clashed with 600 hippy travellers near Stonehenge " and closed a chapter of British counterculture. Theatre director Billy Barrett describes how he staged a zero-budget…
The eyes of many hopeful performers finishing school or sixth-form college in July will be set on that sought-after drama school BA. But deciding to follow a three year degree course after j…
What is the value of art? It’s a question that makers, audiences and advocates of the arts are increasingly being asked, and having to ask themselves, in this age of austerity. But it&…
"It’s about the referendum," says John McCann on his new play, Spoiling, "but it’s not about the referendum." We’re downing coffees between festival shows in Edinburgh̵…
There’s been a lot of shit around lately. In Christian Cresoli’s La Merda, still touring after a ridiculously successful Edinburgh run two years ago, a woman sits naked on a stoo…
Kate Tempest does music now. Not content with shaking our very bones with her epic, intimate spoken word, she’s now released an album, Everybody Down, and gave a stonking set in Latitu…
“Revolt, as I understand it " psychic revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt " refers to a permanent state of questioning, of transformations, an endless probing of appearances.̶…
Latitude’s main theatre spaces hosted some big names last weekend, packing the crowds sardine-style into hot marquees for headline productions, but the Faraway Forest was alive with sm…
Not since Tory socialite Henry Conway’s 2010 election party, for which he dressed as Margaret Thatcher and hired pole dancers (poll tax, geddit?) has the Iron Lady glittered so disturb…
What separates theatre and live art? Marina Abramović, grandmother of performance art and flogger of Adidas trainers, has a quote doing the rounds at the moment: "theatre is fake," she s…
The seeds of Forest Fringe were planted at its namesake " Edinburgh’s Forest Cafe " eight years ago now, but the theatre and live art collective has long since pulled up its roots. "We…
"It could do with a drop of paint," Kathryn Hunter says as she steps out on the Bouffes du Nord stage in Peter Brook’s The Valley of Astonishment. Referring to the theatre’s famo…
Standing in line at a Soho cafe, I see three figures emerge " hair streaming down their faces and pools of water dripping in their wake. Clutching my own sodden map, I’d been approachi…
The weekend of our first same-sex weddings, Dan Phillips started rehearsals for the UK premier of Safe Sex and On Tidy Endings. Harvey Fierstein’s 1987 plays depict a darker chapter in…
The plot of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes (given the French title La Vipère here) is pure soap. Foxes or vipers, the Hubbards are not a family you want t…
David Bobee’s Russian Hamlet is, among other things, a strong argument for age-appropriate casting. While in Britain we like our Princes of Denmark to be ‘accomplished’ act…
“We’ve built a site that manages calls for action,” says Amanda White, Strategic Partnerships Director for IdeasTap. The charity maintains a database of more than 135,000 p…
Bouffes du Nord’s The Raven is like a bad acid trip in suburbia. A sky-blue flat with a window onto a residential street sits in the theatre’s crumbling proscenium " the first si…
Sparing us the po-faced shroud that tends to fall over stagings of Lorca’s rural tragedy, Bouffes du Nord’s The House of Bernarda Alba liberates the text with a joyful force and …
I first saw Scottee at Bestival. Through a hungover haze of September rain and heckling revellers, the thickly made up “low-rent Liberace” appeared on the outdoor stage and decla…
“This is no time for complacency,” says Tess Berry-Hart, “or appeasement, or political apathy.” We’re in a North London cafe with the writer’s husband …
Denied permission to leave the US, actor and singer Paul Robeson famously telephoned in a performance to a Canadian trade union convention in 1952, singing well-known hits down the cable inc…
“People immediately assume it’s you”, says Phoebe Waller-Bridge when I ask about the challenges of performing her own writing. “We had that conversation early on " it…
“I fell asleep during that one and dreamt about a woman giving birth to a pile of clothes,” my friend confesses, feeling a little the worse for wear after our last show of Latitu…
RashDash’s The Frenzy is perfectly pitched for Latitude. Based on The Bacchae, this thirty minute music and dance show was composed by Becky Wilkie, who joins company founders and phys…