Best of This Week’s Theatre Blogs – 26 Jun 2009
Welcome to another new regular feature on Whatsonstage.com. Every week our theatregoer reporter Corinne Furness trawls the web to find some of the best gems from the myriad theatre-related blogs and condense them into one easy-to-read “Best of the Blogs” round-up each Friday.
This week it was officially time for New York Times critic Ben Brantley to decamp to London for a month and blog his way through London theatre – first up was the re-working of A Doll’s House at the Donmar.
There was feminism of a very different sort after the release of research in America that suggests it is women who might be discriminating against female playwrights; New York blogger 99 Seats suggested that we might need to look beyond the headlines.
Back in London it was the National Theatre’s screening of Phedre on cinema screens around the world that was causing excitement. Performance Monkey opened up the blog debate whilst Interval Thinks did the same on twitter, asking what it might mean for the future of theatre. In the excitement of it all the National Theatre became somewhat twitter-happy.
Finally West End Witch brought us firmly back to on stage action with her reflections on taking part in West End Live – and having the honour of being introduced by Christopher Biggins…
Postcard from London: The Marathon Begins
“In London, far more than in New York, theater has a way of bending itself into a mirror of the day’s news. And in the current production at the Donmar Warehouse, starring Gillian Anderson as the child-like Nora, Ibsen’s landmark drama of one woman’s rebellion has been hammered and resurfaced into newly topical-mirror-like form by the playwright Zinnie Harris.”
A Thought About Bias
“Chances are that woman is going to have to answer to a man, either an artistic director or a board chair or somebody, since most of those positions are held by men. And when she does, she’s got to make damn sure that there’s no whiff of “I chose this play because it’s by a woman.”
Geurilla Criticism (Twitter)
“NT’s Phedre live ushering in a new age of sports like coverage of live culture?”
Sickness in the Royal Blood
“Many have welcomed big-screen opera, live and in high-definition. But theatre is a new development… The National’s inaugural productions aren’t cosy choices – next up is Shakespeare’s problematic fable All’s Well That Ends Well. And Racine is a notoriously tough nut to crack for Anglophone theatre.”
West End Live
“The sound was a bit am-dram, but apart from that, everything went well. Alli Harding did a great job of standing in for Julia Sutton, despite our concerns that she might repeat her performance at the press launch when she forgot the words and sang four lines in what can only have been Gaelic.”
