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 Frank…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Peter 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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
I 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…
"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, thought …
"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 conventions of la…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…