Chris Monks on Moonlight and Magnolias
April 17, 2009
In the second part of an extended interview, Chris Monks tells Simon Walker about his first production as artistic director of the SJT
Chris Monks’ choice of Moonlight and Magnolias for the opening production of his reign as artistic director of Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre is soaked in meaning. “Because it’s based around Gone with the Wind, I thought, ‘Here’s something to tap into, because this theatre used to be a cinema’,” he remembers. “It was an Odeon cinema in the 1930s, when Gone with the Wind was produced and the play is set, so I thought, ‘I can do something here that’s sort of site-specific’. It’s part of a three-pronged representation of the theatre’s past through the three plays in the main house this season. This one sort of represents the building’s past when it started; then we’re going to have a revival of an Alan Ayckbourn play that hasn’t been revived by him for forty years, which represents its nearer past; then my musical adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance represents where I want to take it.”
Preview: Northern Exposure
April 16, 2009
Simon Walker guides you through this year’s season of new plays by northern writers at the WYP with the help of authors Boff Whalley and Tom Wells
The West Yorkshire Playhouse’s seventh annual Northern Exposure season is now imminent. A programme of new writing from “the North” (meaning, you’ll be pleased to hear, chiefly God’s Own County), it supplies a platform to promising local writers, and therefore complements rather than overlaps with the WYP’s commissions to more established local playwrights like Mike Kenny. This year’s collection, the largest yet, consists of three productions by northern theatre companies, one of which premieres at the WYP, and a double bill of short plays by three writers that each took its So You Want to be a Writer? course (SYWTBAW) in 2007.
Andrew Quick on Kellerman
April 10, 2009
Eric Fischl is a 60-year-old American painter and sculptor famed for his paintings of suburbia. So what possible connection could he have with Kellerman, a new work by a British experimental theatre company, which opens at West Yorkshire Playhouse on April 22? The answer: 10 years ago, a group of Lancaster University’s Theatre Studies students wished to build on the success of their production of Einmal ist Keinmal at the National Student Drama Festival at Scarborough by setting up a more permanent company. Searching for a name, they decided that Fischl’s paintings reflected the sort of the theatre they were creating: “Realistic, but with a surrealistic edge, scenes of suburban life, comfortable on the outside, but with a dark interior,” according to Andrew Quick who, as lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster, directed Einmal ist Keinmal.
Review: When We Are Married
April 9, 2009
Date reviewed: 8 April 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
From the outset we feel on safe ground with the West Yorkshire Playhouse/Liverpool Playhouse production of When We Are Married, JB Priestley’s classic comedy of West Riding mores. Colin Richmond’s set is solid, but transparent: the 1908 sitting room is the image of Edwardian respectability, with hall, staircase and (occasionally) dining room half-visible, the gateway to that strange world where servants rebel and photographers fall into drunken sleep. And the brass band plays – predictable, but wholly appropriate.
Profile: Daniel Evans
April 9, 2009
Simon Walker tells you a little about the man who will shortly take the helm in Sheffield
New Sheffield Theatres artistic director Daniel Evans’ distinguished acting career provided his fairly recent route into directing. Since graduating from Guildhall School of Music and Drama with a BA in Acting in 1994, he has received three awards and six further nominations; worked with companies including the RSC, Donmar, the National Theatre and the Old Vic; and performed under eminent directors such as Michael Grandage, Trevor Nunn and Matthew Warchus.