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- Interview: Joe Hill-Gibbins. The director talks to Philip Fisher about his cracking revival of Martin McDonagh's 1996 debut, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Young Vic). He also looks back at his controversial debut, Wallace Shawn's A Thought in Three Parts, and forwards to his upcoming production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Recorded at the Young Vic.
“What sets it out from so many plays is that the storytelling and more specifically the plotting is just magnificent. It’s what makes it really powerful in front of an audience.”
- Recording Date: 29-Jul-2010
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- Interview: Polly Findlay. The director talks to Carole Woddis about her current revival of Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (Arcola), her 1976 play about the radical ideas that surfaced during the English Revolution of the 1640s, as well as about the James Menzies-Kitchin Young Director Award, which she won in 2007. Recorded at the Young Vic.
“At the time, women were taking up roles that they otherwise wouldn't have done so it seemed appropriate to have female actors playing men.”
- Recording Date: 23-Jul-2010
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- Alternative theatre special (1/2): Director Mike Bradwell talks to Aleks Sierz about his new book, The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre (Nick Hern), which tells of his early experiences of making contemporary theatre, and his memories of East 15, Joan Littlewood, Living Theatre and Mike Leigh. Expletives not deleted.
“It seemed to me that what Joan Littlewood said and did just chimed with what I felt: I wanted popular entertainment that meant something.”
- Recording Date: 13-Jul-2010
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- Alternative theatre special (2/2): Director Mike Bradwell talks to Aleks Sierz about his new book, The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre (Nick Hern), which tells of his experiences of making contemporary theatre with Hull Truck, which he founded in 1971, and at the Bush, which he headed 1996-2007, and with Ken Campbell. Expletives not deleted.
“We were doing social satire, looking at our contemporaries across a wide class spectrum from public shoolboys to people on the dole.”
- Recording Date: 13-Jul-2010
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- Interactive special: BAC's joint artistic director David Jubb talks to Matt Boothman about the venue's One-on-One Festival, the first ever of intimate theatre which plays to audiences of one person at a time, and then with practitioners Emma Benson (You Me Now) and Sheila Ghelani (Nurse Knows Best). Recorded at BAC (Battersea Arts Centre), including in the noisy foyer.
“One-on-One work is becoming increasingly important because it engages with what is central to theatre - live exchange.”
- Recording Date: 10-Jul-2010
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- Interview: Davina Elliott. The dresser and theatre novelist chats to Philip Fisher about her two novels, Chewing the Scenery and Climbing the Curtain (Puck Books), as well as giving insights into twenty-plus years of dressing the stars, including for Wicked (Apollo).
“There are some amazingly horrendous things that go on backstage that the audience don’t know about, and I have tried to keep everything as accurate as possible in the novels.”
- Recording Date: 09-Jul-2010
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- New writing special: Paul Robinson and Tim Roseman, artistic directors of Theatre 503 in London, tell Aleks Sierz about their theatre's work with new playwrights, including their contribution to the current Latitude Festival. They also discuss Nimer Rahsed's Wild Horses, Porn the Musical, and Urban Scrawl, as well as their upcoming projects. Recorded at RADA.
“Recently, there has been a feeling that writers were no longer at the heart of new writing theatres: we want to change all that.”
- Recording Date: 09-Jul-2010
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- LIFT special: Mark Ball, the new artistic director of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), introduces Carole Woddis to this year's programme highlights, discussing site-specific theatre and new audiences, and presents his vision for the future. Recorded at the ICA.
“The theatre sector has been slow to understand the digital revolution, and the new digital culture which has transformed society over the past 15 years.”
- Recording Date: 09-Jul-2010
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- New writing: Dennis Kelly. The playwright gives a career overview to Aleks Sierz, talking about his plays, Debris (2003), Osama the Hero (2005), After the End (2005), Love and Money (2007), Taking Care of Baby (2007), and Orphans (2008). Recorded at Narrative in Drama, the 19th Annual Conference of the German Society for Contemporary Drama in English, held in Paderborn. Substantial extract. Expletives not deleted. (Edited transcript available as ‘Narrative in Contemporary Drama (Dennis Kelly in Conversation with Aleks Sierz)’, in Merle Tönnies and Christina Flotmann (eds), Narrative in Drama (CDE 18), Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011.)
“I wanted Love and Money to shift every time you come to a new scene so that you feel that there is something different happening all the time.”
- Recording Date: 06-Jun-2010
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- Interview: Howard Brenton. The playwright talks to Carole Woddis about his three current productions: his new play, Anne Boleyn (Shakespeare's Globe), his adaptation of Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Liverpool/Chichester) and his version of Georg Buchner's Danton's Death (National). Recorded at Shakespeare's Globe.
“Sartre said that some writers write for God, some writers write for themselves and some writers write for others - I'm a writer who writes for other people.”
- Recording Date: 28-Jun-2010
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- Athol Fugard special: as the Arcola Theatre stages a mini-season of the South African playwright's work - The Road to Mecca (1984) and Coming Home (2009) - actress Linda Bassett (who stars in The Road to Mecca) talks to Heather Neill about working with the playwright. Recorded at the Arcola. More info: www.arcolatheatre.com.
“We've tried every which way of working with the accent, and we just do our best, but you do worry about the South Africans in the audience.”
- Recording Date: 22-Jun-2010
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- Tony Awards 2010: London critics Mark Shenton and Matt Wolf shuttled over to New York to watch the Tony Awards, at which British-originated productions triumphed, with a total of 10 wins out of a possible 26. Here they deliver their verdicts on the whole shebang. More info: www.tonyawards.com
“I feel sorry for David (Babani) but I think they should have realised in advance that in no award do three people get a chance at the podium...”
- Recording Date: 18-Jun-2010
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- Focus on feminist theatre: Theatre researcher and curator Susan Croft talks to Carole Woddis about the How the Vote Was Won: Art, Theatre and Women's Suffrage exhibition (Museum of Richmond), which she curated with Irene Cockroft, as well as about her book She Also Wrote Plays (Faber) and the Unfinished Histories project, which she co-founded with Jessica Higgs. More info: www.susan.croft.btinternet.co.uk.
“The suffrage campaign is so contemporary in its commitment, energy and inspiration, and in its effects on all the arts.”
- Recording Date: 18-Jun-2010
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- West End Review: Mark Shenton (Sunday Express) and his guests Kate Bassett (Independent on Sunday), Charles Spencer (Daily Telegraph) and Matt Wolf (International Herald Tribune) discuss Arthur Miller's All My Sons (Apollo), Simon Gray's The Late Middle Classes (Donmar), Terence Rattigan's After the Dance (National), Drew Pautz's Love the Sinner (National) and Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly (Almeida). Recorded at Dewynters, London.
“The Late Middle Classes is a play whose history is rather renowned, though very few people saw it, which is that it was supposed to move into the West End, to the Gielgud - instead the Gielgud booked a boy band musical, called Boy Band, The Musical...”
- Recording Date: 21-Jun-2010
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