28th June 2013
… when we think about The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable?
Which is, of course, the latest immersive extravaganza from Punchdrunk, co-presented with The National Theatre (until 30 December). For background see Andrew Dickson’s feature for the Guardian. You are asked to don a mask and enter the world of the ‘legendary’ Temple Studios (just by Paddington station), which supposedly
… was established in 1942 as the British outpost for major Hollywood studio Republic Pictures. For a brief period during the 1950s it was a prolific powerhouse producing films across a variety of genres including period dramas, musicals, historical epics and intimate thrillers. In the early 1960s the output of the studio waned and employees were sworn to secrecy about the studio’s projects. Little is known about the films in development at that time. In October 1962 the studio was closed overnight. The dramatic events that led to the building being condemned have been a closely kept secret ever since.
The show is mystifying and eerie and engaging and delightful and weird and spectacular and, right at the end, a bit irritating. It is distinctive and original, and yet at the same time draws on and echoes a galaxy of influences, a list of which I began to compile as I wandered around. This is my list of 23 so far… read more »
26th June 2013
Gentles all, put your hands together, please, for Mr John Lyly. We’ll come to he actually was in a moment, but first consider this: on Thursday the Illuminations team is filming a scene from his celebrated drama Sapho and Phao; then over the weekend his play The Woman in the Moon is being presented at Glastonbury. Early in August another Lyly drama, Gallathea, is to be given at Wilderness Festival. And sooner than you can say Mother Bombie (yet another of his plays) a new full-length study of the man and his work, John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship, is to be published from the pen of Dr Andy Kesson. Still no wiser? Well, he is almost certainly the most significant sixteenth-century playwright that almost certainly only a few of you will have heard. But you will, you will – especially if you read on. read more »
24th June 2013
I want to tell you a story. It’s short and, I hope, a bit quirky. Maybe it has connections with #Dream40 this weekend, but if it does those links are quite oblique. Rather, take it as a little fable about a time long ago. Sixteen or seventeen years back (yes, really that long ago) Illuminations was making a lot of cutting-edge digital media. We had produced four series of the BBC Two series The Net; we had – so I adamantly maintain – first used the word ‘internet’ on British television (in my 1993 programme MeTV: The Future of Television); we had made one of the earliest, if not the first, television show with an e-mail address in the closing roller; and we had set up one of the very first programme-related web pages. By 1997 we were experimenting, with BT, Nottingham University and others, with live television produced from within an online 3D social space. read more »
23rd June 2013
Sometime after midnight: ‘Sweet friends, to bed.’
The rain stayed away, the moon shone bright, Act V was played for us, and the iron tongue of midnight tolled on cue.
‘So, good night unto you all.’ read more »
23rd June 2013
So this is the easy bit. Easy to experience, that is, if you are in Stratford-upon-Avon, are lucky enough to have an invitation, and are prepared to be awake and alert at 2am. It’s most certainly not easy to create, but it is, in its way, also easy to understand and to appreciate. We know, give or take, what theatre is, and sitting in a lofty rehearsal space as a group of wonderful actors play out the central scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream just inches from us is most definitely theatre. Thrilling theatre. Revelatory theatre. Played upon a stage for some fifty of us. What’s not to like? But this is Midsummer Night’s Dreaming, a Royal Shakespeare Company collaboration with Google, and there is a good deal more that is not nearly so easy. read more »
21st June 2013
Monday sees the latest live cinema broadcast of a production from the Royal Opera House. The opera is Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana which has just opened in a new staging by director Richard Jones. (Reviews include Andrew Clements 3*s for the Guardian, Rupert Christiansen is similarly ambivalent for the Telegraph, while Michael Church is more positive for the Independent.) I’m very much looking forward to watching this in the Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse, and all the more so because it’s an opera with which I have a good deal of history. Back in 1999, with my colleague Shaun Deeney, I produced for Illuminations and the BBC Phyllida Lloyd’s film of her staging for Opera North. (The image above is of our star, Dame Josephine Barstow, during the shoot.) The result is available for purchase as an Opus Arte DVD and it remains one of a handful of films to which I am deeply proud to have contributed. It also won an International Emmy. So what follows are reflections on and recollections of making ‘our’ Gloriana. read more »
18th June 2013
(There is quite a bit of cooking and gardening too.)
To the pleasing Picturehouse in Stratford-upon-Avon for Pompeii Live. This is a live-to-cinema broadcast from the British Museum blockbuster and yet another offering in the increasingly crowded ‘alternative content’ marketplace. The idea is a private view of the show, minus the crowds and with the added pleasure of curators and experts as guides. Slick and smart it most definitely is, with Peter Snow and Bettany Hughes presenting and guests appearances from curator Paul Roberts, classicist Mary Beard, archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Italian chef Giorgio Locatelli (with the super-ritzy Locanda Locatelli name-checked in his lower-third) and gardening expert Rachel de Thame. I enjoy it in a slightly low-key kind of a way, although on Twitter you can find expressions of near-ecstasy appended to #PompeiiLive (along with the wry reflection – above – from another eminent historian and television presenter). But what I muse on most as I sit through the 85 minutes is (a) what makes this ‘live’ (very little, I conclude), and (b) what difference is there between this and television (ditto). read more »
16th June 2013
On Monday afternoon at BFI Southbank I am introducing two early films by Robert Vas (1931-1978) together with a television obituary of Vas made by Barrie Gavin and colleagues. (The obit is on YouTube but – frustratingly – the embedding function is disabled.) Barrie will be present this afternoon, I believe, along with others who worked with and admired the filmmaker. For I am far from alone is believing that Vas is one of the greatest documentarists to have worked in Britain. He stands alongside Humphrey Jennings, Philip Donellan, Mike Grigsby, Marc Karlin and others, each of whom in their own way forged a distinctive film poetry from reality. Do please watch the film and read Byrony Dixon’s BFI ScreenOnline piece to get a sense of Robert Vas’ work. Yet as I noted in my 2008 post Robert who?, the director is all-but-unknown today and not one of the major films that he produced for the BBC is legally available. (The early films Refuge England, 1959, and The Vanishing Street, 1962, can be found on the invaluable BFI DVD set Free Cinema.) The inaccessibility and consequent invisibility of Vas’ work is – simply – a subject of scandal and concern. read more »
10th June 2013
21:52 Going to bed now, but I’ll try to post some more considered thoughts once I’ve slept on it.
21:51 Andy Dickson at the Guardian says they are hoping to make the stream available on demand tomorrow – I hope they do that with the ones to come as well.
21:50 The question Mark Ravenhill asked was ‘What is your “ideal theatre”‘?
21:49 Rather engaging hearing peoples’ chat in the auditorium when I’m certain they don’t know they can be overheard on the stream…
21:48 The others were April de Angelis, Tim Crouch, Chris Goode, Zinnie Harris, Ella Hickson, Gregory Motton, Philip Ridley, Simon Stephens.
21:45 And with ‘Everyone breathes easier when there’s a cat in the room’ we’re out. Applause and – roll credits. There is a list of the playwrights whose views are included but it went through too quickly for me to catch it. Howard Barker was one.
21:44 Maybe you have to be there – and certainly the audience in the house seems to be having more fun than I am at home – but it’s coming across as slightly banal to me.
21:43 People making guesses about who said what: Caryl Churchill? Lucy Kirkwood?
21:42 Now we’re on the audience at The Royal Court, and the possible fire-bombing of – some laughs on offer here.
21:40 and from the chat stream… “o”: ‘has this a plot? or has it lost it?’
21:37 We don’t seem to be in the theatre now, or hearing about the theatre – we’ve moved onto transgression and onto male and female subjectivities – although it does spin back to the ‘ideal theatre’ – sort of.
21:34 My stream, which has been immaculate to this point, is struggling a bit at the moment.
21:33 181 viewers.
21:32 Twenty-five minutes in and I’m feeling a bit… ho hum.
21:31 Apparently this is called Cakes and Finance – the Royal Court has just revealed this in a Tweet.
21:29 It does feel as if Mark Ravenhill is enjoying this now, at least more than he was at the start – it’s become more of a performance, with more pleasure in the language and less focus on the (unremarkable?) ideas.
21:25 Some love on the chat stream for “RobertElkin”, enthusiasm for that last comment.
21:24 more from the chat stream… “RobertElkin”: ‘How can you not be enjoying this? It’s a variety of voices airing their thoughts on the one thing that’s brought us all here to this website.’
21:23 Tweet from @andydickson: ‘Trying to guess the voices being done – who’s the playwright who can only contemplate October …? (Quite agree btw)’
21:20 from the chat stream… via “e”: ‘ah. click..its the other playwrites verbatim opinions on their ideal theatres!’
21:19 Down to 198 viewers now, which feels quite modest, although this is also being presented via the Guardian.
21:17 Visually, this is just a single unchanging mid-shot. It’s smart and sort-of funny, but I think I’m a little underwhelmed so far.
21:16 The lecture is parcelled out in sections by a female off-screen voice speaking brief headings.
21:15 The slides include patisserie, cityscapes, architectural details.
21:14 So if @DanRebellato is right and this is a ‘verbatim meditation’, does that mean that these comments about theatre are quoted from others. If so, who? Does it matter?
21:12 Interesting to see the chat window alongside the Royal Court stream, although the comments so far are pretty unremarkable.
21:12 The Royal Court stream says it currently has 211 viewers at http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/opencourtlive/
21:10 @DanRebellato tweets (having seen this earlier in the evening): ‘Tonight’s Surprise Theatre @royalcourt was a brilliant, funny, and oddly inspiring verbatim meditation on ideal theatre by @markravenhill ‘
21:07 It’s a kind of a lecture, about an ideal theatre, about the qualities of an idealised space. It’s not clear if this is a lecture or a performance, or both.
21:06 He says that audiences crave the provocative and the challenging and the unexpected…
21:05 Mark Ravenhill is at a podium, with slides being projected behind.
21:03 I wasn’t actually planning to blog the first surprise theatre from the Royal Court, but then I thought I would, so here I am.
