theatreVOICE

Throughout history, new technologies have seemed to threaten theatre — until we got over it, and embraced them. So while at first the digital world — from mobile phones to Twitter — was an irritant to many theatre-makers, new technology is now being increasingly used to record performances, and to make them available to a […]

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to miss Urban Scrawl.

Every week for the past year (give or take the odd break, when co-editor Aleks Sierz has stepped into the breach), I’ve had the privilege to upload and assign a new play to the site. And every time, there’s always been something to hook […]

As Dominic Cavendish asked me to put the text up on the website, I’ll renege on my announcement not to write another blog and am posting as the last one for the road a short speech I gave when awarded the journalism prize of the Anglistentag at Klagenfurt this week:
When I still thought […]

Trends in Edinburgh this year were more or less self-indulgent autobiographical ramblings, a mind-numbing tendency to camouflage by meta-theatrical devices that you didn’t have much to say in the first place and a predilection by some dramatists to venture onto the territory of the musical.
With David Greig’s Midsummer and Che Walker’s Been So […]

When German critics write about new British drama they almost invariably only refer to the Royal Court. This is partly due to the strong exchange ties between the Court and the Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. The latter’s Thomas Ostermeier in an interview went as far as to proclaim Patrick Marber a product […]

In the German theatre currently there is an unfortunate tendency for interpolations. One young director is on record maintaining: “I let the actors speak text of their own which is true to the core of the play and often far more beautiful than the author’s words.” Accordingly when she directed Gregory Burke’s Gagarin […]

Stand by for a slice of audio with Felix Barrett and Adam Curtis on the new Punchdrunk show: It Felt Like A Kiss. In the meantime, here’s a feature on this ground-breaking event that ran in the Daily Telegraph but never made it online:
It looks like the sort of office-block Manchester’s answer to David Brent […]

Jürgen Gosch was the most important German director of the decade. He trained as an actor in the former GDR and left the country after his early productions there were met with official hostility. Particularly contentious was Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena” at the Berlin Volksbühne in 1978 which was staged as an artistic and poetic […]

British dramatists are not exactly fêted in the German-speaking theatre at the moment. A notable exception is the way the Volkstheater Vienna accompanied the German première of Lee Hall’s “The Pitmen Painters” with a whole series of events. Not only did they bring over the team of the successful original production at Live […]

Next week I’ll be off to Vienna for the German-language première of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters which I translated. As the director is Max Roberts who already did the first production at Live Theatre Newcastle, moving on successfully first to the Cottesloe and then to the Lyttelton, I am rather optimistic. Hopefully […]