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.
Chris Monks on theatre in the round and plans for the SJT
March 30, 2009
In the first part of an extended interview, soon-to-be Stephen Joseph Theatre artistic director Chris Monks tells Simon Walker about his time as composer for the Royal Exchange, the future of the SJT and the importance of children’s theatre
“There was a version of Measure for Measure, in which the character of the Duke was into eastern philosophy, so I wanted an eastern flavour to the music,” Chris Monks begins. “The only place you could go to borrow records was the local library, where the librarians used to look at them carefully to check that you hadn’t scratched them and then put them very gently back into their sleeves, and then you’d take them and listen to some amazing music from the other side of the planet collected by an academic. Read more
Tom Georgeson on When We Are Married and profile of JB Priestley
March 18, 2009
While Tom Georgeson describes acting as a “lovely job” in general, he seems to regard the role of Henry Ormonroyd as a bit of a treat. “Mine is a real bouncy, fun part,” he explains. “He’s the balance in the play – the other voice. It’s been said that he’s JB Priestley’s voice and, to a certain extent, I think that he is, except that he’s pissed throughout the play. I don’t think Priestley would have been pissed, but the fact that Ormonroyd’s drunk enables him to say things that wouldn’t normally be said.”