Latest news with #AnEnemyofthePeople
Chicago Tribune
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
TimeLine Theatre Company announces the first show in its new Uptown space
Chicago's TimeLine Theatre has announced its transitional 2025-26 season, including the first production scheduled for its new home, currently under construction in the city's Uptown neighborhood. The three-show slate includes the fall world premiere of 'Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars' (October to November) by longtime Chicago writer and performer Sandra Delgado, directed by Kimberly Senior and presented at the Lookingglass Theatre Company's Water Tower Water Works, 163 E. Pearson St. This will mark the first time Lookingglass has rented its Magnificent Mile space to an external resident company. The second show, slated for the winter, is the recent Broadway hit 'Eureka Day' (February to March 2026), a satire about a progressive preschool with entitled parents. Jonathan Spector's play will be directed for TimeLine by Lili-Anne Brown and staged at a Chicago venue yet to be announced. The plan changed, but TimeLine Theatre finally begins construction on its new Uptown homeThe third show, the debut of TimeLine's new space, will be Amy Herzog's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People' (May to June 2026), also recently seen on Broadway. Ron OJ Parson will direct a production that TimeLine plans to open in June at the new TimeLine Theatre, a black-box space seating 250 patrons and located at 5035 N. Broadway. Specific run dates for all three shows have yet to be determined.
Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
British theatre needs to start treating the classics with respect
Earlier this week, I witnessed Ewan McGregor's theatrical return in My Master Builder. The 54-year-old actor has not been seen on the London stage in 17 years, and his homecoming has made headlines. The production itself, however, at Wyndham's Theatre, seemed to me the real story. It's an extremely tenuous update of Ibsen's 1892 play Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder), about Halvard Solness, a self-made man whose lack of formal training prevents him from calling himself an architect, and whose life is brought tumbling down by the reappearance of a piquant young woman, Hilda, with whom he was once infatuated. In this tacky new version by Lila Raicek, I cared little for Solness, here a self-satisfied, espadrille-wearing starchitect, and even less for Hilda, now known as 'Mathilde' and played by The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki with all the fervour of a saluki left out in the rain. My Master Builder is being billed as a new play, but it's a thin approximation of a classic that's vivid and psychologically rich. Because this is the thing about Ibsen: like all great artists, he's always contemporary. A really great production of The Master Builder, such as that seen at the Old Vic in 2015 with Ralph Fiennes and Sarah Snook, makes you confront its stark modernity. You don't need a rewrite to make it hit home. But My Master Builder is part of a trend to 'update' theatrical classics – and Ibsen is particularly susceptible. Across town, the Lyric Hammersmith is currently staging a version of Ghosts in which the sickness of Helena Alving's son isn't syphilis but a sort of manifestation of his father's toxicity. And at the Duke of York's Theatre a year ago, I saw Thomas Ostermeier's version of An Enemy of the People, which starred Matt Smith, and I loathed it: Ostermeier turned what should have been a timely tale about freedom of speech and the perils of group-think into a terrible dollop of student agitprop. Ibsen is the most frequently performed European playwright in Britain. After him comes Chekhov, who's treated only a little better than his Norwegian 19th-century counterpart. Recent radical versions of both The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull have managed to convince us that Arkadia, Anya and the rest are very much our contemporaries – though the latter, also directed by Ostermeier, was patchy. But things can go badly wrong: in 2014, I saw a production of Three Sisters at the Southwark Playhouse in which the titular ladies, stranded implausibly in a far-off country, pined for London (when they were all clearly wealthy enough to book the first flight home). We could blame Patrick Marber for all of this. In 1995, his play After Miss Julie transposed Strindberg's 1888 tragedy of desire, Miss Julie, across class barriers to Attlee's Britain. (It was originally directed, coincidentally, by the estimable Michael Grandage, who's also responsible for My Master Builder.) But Marber is a sublime talent and managed to make a new play in its own right, while respectfully teasing out what makes Strindberg so important, not least the overwhelming psychological attrition. I appreciate that part of theatre's duty is to reinvent old works; and the recent success of shows such as Oedipus, starring Lesley Manville (and also at Wyndham's Theatre), proves that there's always an appetite for radical takes on the most ancient of stories. But adaptation needs a skilled hand. That latest version of Sophocles's tragedy was adapted and directed by Robert Icke, who has made his name deconstructing classics and bringing out their cerebral nature in surprising and shocking ways. Think of his famous Hamlet with Andrew Scott, first performed in 2017: it kept a lot of Shakespeare's text, but re-ordered it in a fascinating way, making it more urgent, less declamatory. And Icke has made a successful translation of Ibsen, with The Wild Duck in 2018, showing a clear and cohesive grasp of his source material and never forgetting the play's ultimate message: that we're all, ultimately, propelled by self-delusion. The problem is that Icke is bordering on a national treasure, and few can match his level of dramatic erudition. My overriding feeling, looking around at the state of British theatre, is that you should take on rewriting landmark works only if you're certain of living up to the original. I'll be interested to see how a new version of Euripides's The Bacchae – announced by Indhu Rubasingham on Tuesday as a part of her inaugural season as National Theatre artistic director – turns out, not least because it's the first time that a debut playwright (Nima Taleghani) has been let loose on the capacious Olivier Stage. Even if Marber started the trend, I think the 2020s has seen directors cede more and more ground to writers. Dramatists seem compelled to muck around with their source material and make it virtually unrecognisable. It's as if producers were too afraid to proudly present the classics, lest the audience feel they're being forced to pay top dollar to watch old material. And it's particularly frustrating that this is happening when in most other respects, the theatre industry has – like many other creative sectors – become miserably risk-averse. Although I disliked Raicek's play, I didn't want to: she clearly has an ear for dialogue, and she could have been commissioned to write something entirely new. But a wholly new play by a young playwright is becoming increasingly rare. Theatre needs to do two distinct things. One, give those young talents time to write, and produce, new work; and two, revere the greatest works of our past in the way they deserve. They're classics for a reason – and half-baked attempts to make them appealing to modern audiences will only put off the new generation that British theatres need in order to thrive.
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Climate Activists Interrupt New York City Ballet Performance
A small group of climate change activists interrupted a New York City Ballet performance at the David H. Koch Theater in Lincoln Center on Tuesday, the opening night of the company's spring season. The protest occurred shortly before 9 p.m., as dancers and orchestra musicians performed Balanchine's 'Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,' the third ballet on an all-Balanchine program for the opening night, which coincided this year with Earth Day. A woman began yelling from the balcony. Then, she shouted, 'We're in a climate emergency,' and unfurled a banner from a balcony. 'Our country has become a fascist regime, and we are enjoying this beauty,' said the protester, according to videos of the incident. The dancers and musicians continued to perform through the demonstration for about five minutes. Some members of the audience booed the protesters and demanded their removal. The curtain came down, an announcer said the show would be paused because of the disruption and security officers removed several protesters from the auditorium. About five minutes later, 'Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux' restarted from the beginning and the performance did not face further interruptions, City Ballet said in a statement. Activists had also gathered outside the theater before the performance, holding signs reading 'Koch killing the planet' and 'No billionaire ballet on Earth Day,' according to photos posted online. The theater is named after David H. Koch, a billionaire who donated vast sums to support the arts but was for some a polarizing figure because of his campaign to counter the science of climate change. The climate advocacy group Extinction Rebellion, which has organized similar protests, said in a social media post Tuesday night that the demonstration was meant to highlight the Koch family's support for conservative causes and efforts to block policies to fight climate change. The protest follows similar episodes at other high-profile performances. Last year, three climate change protesters disrupted a Broadway performance of 'An Enemy of the People,' starring Jeremy Strong. And in 2023, climate activists interrupted a performance of Wagner's 'Tannhäuser' at the Metropolitan Opera. A protester shouted 'The spring is tainted,' and dropped a banner that read 'No Opera on a Dead Planet.'
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ghosts review – gasps and laughter greet this modern revamp of Ibsen's shocker
When Henrik Ibsen published Ghosts in 1881 – plays then were often released as texts with no production scheduled – the content (sexual transgression, venereal disease, suicide) so shocked many booksellers that they banned it. The book was reviewed in newspapers but with such fury that no Norwegian theatre would stage it; Chicago hosted the world premiere the following year. The playwright was so shaken that he wrote a great drama about ostracism, An Enemy of the People. Almost a century and a half later, and with anything going in most areas of life, it's tough for a modern production to still deliver a Ghosts spooked by taboos. But Rachel O'Riordan's staging of Gary Owen's new version achieves it. 'Complete silence would, in our opinion, be the most fitting reception for this work,' said one late 19th-century media critique. Turning this into a compliment, the 2025 theatre was filled with intense attention, broken by loud gasps at plot twists and laughter for dark jokes implicit in the original but spoken louder here. Owen and O'Riordan memorably relocated Euripides to modern Cardiff in Iphigenia in Splott and similarly update Ghosts. Helen Alving becomes Helena, still the guilt-haunted widow of a local hero, though honouring him not with an orphanage but a hospital funded by private equity. Her troubled artist son, Oswald, turns into Oz, an actor short on auditions. The Alving's maid, Regina, and carpenter father, Jacob, retain their relationship and roles, though she goes by Reggie. In the most striking modernisation, Pastor Manders, the creepy priest, becomes an agnostic management consultant, Andersen, whose church is Zoom and his bible workplace guidelines. The original contains (1881 plot-spoiler) a strand about assisted dying that is hotly topical now. Owen boldly jettisons that and the VD theme but still constructs a shocking plot around guilt, consent and, drawing audible shock, a plot line overlapping with season three of HBO's The White Lotus. The play's theme of terrible familial and social inheritance survives in jagged dialogue that gives 'home' and 'safe' dark new meanings. Ghosts exemplifies Ibsen's creed that the key events of a play take place before it starts: everyone is either hiding, or having hidden, something from them. The actors grippingly chart the negotiation of these secrets and suspicions. Victoria Smurfit's Helena shows how the greater agency of a modern Mrs Alving has not prevented moral compromises but also allows her contemporary solutions. Callum Scott Howells as Oz is sassy, sarcastic but ecstatic at the prospect even of dangerous love. Patricia Allison's confident, rebellious Reggie movingly becomes the story's core of common decency. Rhashan Stone plausibly makes a corporate fixer the equivalent of a sanctimonious cleric and Deka Walmsley's Jacob trails the exhaustion of a man who has kept quiet to survive. Crucially, this Ghosts, retaining the toxic power of the original, will grip whether you know the play or don't. At Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 10 May
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Ghosts' Review: The Sins of the Father, Visited on Everyone
As if under the weather, Jack O'Brien's production of 'Ghosts,' the 1881 Ibsen drama about medical and moral contagion, coughs three times to get started. First, as work lights illuminate a handsome study representing the home of Helena Alving, the cast arrives in rehearsal mode: Lily Rabe carrying a slouchy bucket bag and Billy Crudup a copy of The New York Times. Levon Hawke grabs a mint-green script from the library table as Hamish Linklater and Ella Beatty run the opening lines of the play — tonelessly, as if feeling all of its 144 years. Then comes a restart. Now the scene between Linklater (playing Engstrand, an alcoholic carpenter) and Beatty (playing Regina, Mrs. Alving's maid) seems less perfunctory. They look at each other a little, instead of just their lines. Finally, as the work lights disappear into the flies, the scene is repeated and we are given the real, often remarkable, thing. The play's opening argument — for Regina is not just Mrs. Alving's maid but Engstrand's estranged daughter — is now fully polished: lit, costumed and performed, in the Lincoln Center Theater manner, to a high upper-middlebrow sheen. I don't know why O'Brien chose to place such a stock contemporary frame around the timelessly alarming 19th-century action. (The device returns briefly at the end of the show.) Perhaps he means his version of 'Ghosts,' which opened Monday at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in an adaptation by the Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, to honor the process of repetition and refinement by which old ideas become new again as they are brought to life by succeeding generations. Certainly his casting suggests that. Rabe is the daughter of the playwright David Rabe, whose work has frequently been produced in this building. Linklater, her partner, is the son of the theatrical vocal coach Kristin Linklater. Hawke's father, Ethan, played Macbeth and Hotspur here; his mother, Uma Thurman, played Mrs. Alving at Williamstown. Crudup has been a house star since 'Arcadia' in 1995. And if Beatty's connection to the company is less clear, well, she's a daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Enough said. But productive inheritances are the opposite of Ibsen's story. Written just after 'A Doll's House' and before 'An Enemy of the People' — each recently revived on Broadway — 'Ghosts' is in some ways the most unsparing, neither offering its heroine escape nor, in the end, leaving her a heroine at all. Instead, it dramatizes the moral turpitude that, with the dour assistance of church and society, represented here by Crudup as the oily Pastor Manders, is passed inescapably from parent to child, pulpit to pew, century to century. Even Mrs. Alving, who in Rabe's riveting performance is a fierce advocate for freethinking, is ultimately, and with Ibsen's apparent approval, brought low by it. The scandalous books on her library table — 'Madame Bovary,' 'On the Origin of Species' and, anachronistically, the 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' — cannot protect her from the kaleidoscope of ambient hypocrisy we call convention. Give her credit for trying, though. Forced as a girl to marry a wealthy pillar of the community who was secretly an incurable reprobate, she finally, as a widow, freed herself from his grip. His money she has diverted to an orphanage being built in his name, as if to forever perfume his reputation. Their son, Oswald, has likewise been diverted; she sent him abroad when he was 7, thus sparing him his father's depravity. Or so she thinks. But as the play begins, Oswald (Hawke) has returned, now 25, with the depravity having found him anyway. Knowing nothing of his father's infidelities, he has inherited their fruit in the form of congenital syphilis. Oswald is thus one of the play's living ghosts, restless and doomed. But even with just five characters, Ibsen invokes many others, spun out in an astonishing feat of dramatic construction. Oswald falls for Regina, Regina rebuffs Engstrand, Engstrand all but blackmails Manders, Manders blames Mrs. Alving for everything. Incest, euthanasia and fire insurance come into it. Some of this tips dangerously close to melodrama. But especially in the scenes between Manders and Mrs. Alving, the crackling argumentative heat of Ibsenism dries out any dampness. That you root for her and disdain him, even as you learn of their own secret past, does not make the fight feel unfair. He has the weight of society on his side; she has merely her wits. Saying things like 'I think you are, and will always be, a great baby, Manders,' she voices something we still want voiced today, if less to priests than politicians. Except that she doesn't say it here. That line, from the first English translation of the play, by William Archer, is fatally softened in O'Rowe's adaptation as 'You have such an innocence in you, Pastor.' Nor is that example an outlier. Of society's rigid, stifling morals, O'Rowe has Mrs. Alving complain, 'You only have to pick up the paper and there they are confounding and blinding and overwhelming us.' Though I don't read Danish, I do read English, and Archer's version is much richer: 'Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea.' That O'Rowe's is a prosy 'Ghosts,' avoiding even the word 'ghosts' itself, might not have mattered on its own. But in favoring the play's (iffy) logic over its (haunting) poetry, and denying Manders the vigorous invective of a petty tyrant, it creates an imbalance that Crudup can only finesse. Rabe's Mrs. Alving is clearly the winner on points, even if Ibsen undermines her in the final scenes, suggesting that she, not her husband, brought disaster upon everyone, by prioritizing her will over the world's. Distasteful though that is, it's good drama, and 'Ghosts' remains a provocative, engrossing work, to which O'Brien's production does justice. It also does justice to the idea of provocative, engrossing work in the first place. 'Ghosts' is the 14th and presumably final collaboration between O'Brien and André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater's producing artistic director, who is stepping down at the end of this season after 33 years with the company. Their notable productions of Hellman, Stoppard, Shakespeare and others have earned them this warm valedictory moment. And yet not totally valedictory. As 'Ghosts' demonstrates, men's imprints do not fade so easily. And nothing is ever as haunted as a stage.
