Archive for June, 2008
london weekend, survived
June 29th, 2008 • penny dreadfuls, research
Exhausting but productive weekend: two Penny Dreadful shows at Greenwich, and a very quick visit to the Hide and Seek festival on the south bank.
A proper update to follow, but here are some production photos for Aeneas Faversham Forever taken by our lighting designer and technical director, Neil Hobbs. For gluttons, my grainy phonecam pictures are over here.
links for 2008-06-26
June 26th, 2008 • links
-
The Chicago Theatre Database passes another milestone..
fringe comedy picks
June 19th, 2008 • comedy
Two recommendations for comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe festival:
1. Firmly at the top of my list is the Pajama Men - Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez - who are back at the Fringe after a year’s break. Go and see them.
I first saw them in the aircraft-hangar of the George Square Theatre back in 2004 when they went by the name of SABOTAGE!, reviewed them and have regretted not giving them 5 stars instead of 4 ever since (yes, wrong venue, but should have forgiven them for that). I hopefully made up for it by taking friend after friend to see Stop Not Going in the Pleasance Courtyard, their 2005 show which won them the Fairtrade Dubble (double? geddit? LOLZ?) Act Award.
Their shows make me grin like an idiot and have sent me away feeling happier about comedy, the fringe and the universe in general. Like many stand-out shows, it’s hard to describe what they do without selling them short: think happily hallucinatory narrative-sketch comedy performed by men in night-wear. They’ve produced the cleverest, funniest material I’ve seen at the fringe, which both sounds like horribly effusive praise and happens to be true. And yes, I dropped the effusive-bomb.
Versus vs. Versus:
“Romance, mystery, and questionably accurate historical references”
Assembly Rooms, George Street: 31st July - 21st August
Book at edfringe.com
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/pajamamen
2. An entirely fictitious wise man of comedy once said that there is only one thing you can do after you’ve spent a fringe pretending to be Johnson and Boswell - i.e. spend the following fringe as Queen Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh. Luckily, this is exactly the opportunity that Stewart Lee’s new comedy provides for Miles Jupp and Simon Munnery.
As a vanishing small claim to fame, I knew Miles through Improverts even before he was an inventor who lived in a pink castle. Now that’s celebrity.
Elizabeth and Raleigh - Late But Live:
“Though I have the body of a woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king, the brain of a dolphin, and the penis of a hippopotamus. All I need now is some glue.”
Underbelly Pasture, George Square: 31st July - 25th August
Book at edfringe.com
not gone, not forgotten
June 19th, 2008 • teaching, theatre
I think have to disagree with Lyn Gardner’s assessment that post-’68 political and radical theatre is undocumented and in danger of being forgotten - not least because the majority of companies she references (Red Ladder, Joint Stock, Monstrous Regiment, Inter-Action and Welfare State) turned up on the course I taught at Glasgow University last semester.
I’ll admit that some of the playtexts concerned are hard to find (as my students will attest) and that the pool of scholarship isn’t as deep as that surrounding other periods of theatre, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into an amnesia amongst theatre practitioners or scholars.
Where to start? Lizbeth Goodman’s formidable Contemporary Feminist Theatres (alongside her series of interviews with women in contemporary British theatre) are both invaluable and gladly still available. You could read John Fox’s Eyes on Stalks, an account of his work as artistic director of Welfare State International.
More recently, there’s Max Stafford-Clark’s Taking Stock, a collection of nine production casebooks which brings together Stafford-Clark’s contemporary diaries with interviews of cast members. Baz Kershaw (currently teaching at Warwick University) has published several books on radical performance from the period - pick up The Politics of Performance or The Radical Performance if you can.
Archives of an increasing number of theatre companies - including Welfare State, the Half Moon Company and Gay Sweatshop - are now accessible, many through institutions within the greater London area.
There is, though, still need for projects like Unfinished Histories. Even with the sources suggested above, the experience of teaching a course on such companies has shown that there’s no danger of a surplus of available material. Oral histories in particular may present an especially valuable opportunity to explore and record the personal relationships between ideology and theatre practice in the period.
But in danger of being forgotten? Not quite yet.
webserver heads south for summer
June 17th, 2008 • scenes from the web
The edfringe.com website is dead in the water, which can only mean one thing: tickets for the Fringe have gone on sale.
EDIT: It’s working now. A temporary problem with the trucks in the tubes, no doubt.
playing with the spore creature creator
June 16th, 2008 • research, spore
I’ve been able to play with an early version of Spore’s creature creator ahead of the public launch tomorrow. It’s an unbelivably fluid and fun creative tool (and pretty much the death of my chances of working today). Here’s my first attempt:
The ingenious aspect of releasing the creature creator ahead of the full game is that thousands - if not tens of thousands - of players will generate the creatures which will populate Spore’s universe via the Sporepedia. I really need to finish some reading and editing so I can justify spending a few hours exploring what everyone else has been creating…
