Latest news with #Goold
Time Out
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Rupert Goold will end his tenure at London's Almeida Theatre with a monumental 18 months of programming
We've known for a while that Rupert Goold – the man who transformed the Almeida from chintzy backwater to London's most important theatre – would be stepping down to take over at the Old Vic, and that he'd be taking his chief lieutenant director Rebecca Frecknall with him. What we've had no idea of is a timeframe. Until today (May 28). The bad news is that Goold is definitely off, and that he'll direct his final production for the theatre early next year, with Frecknall bowing out in the summer. The good news is that if you've enjoyed the last 12 years of his programming then there's still quite a lot more to come: today's final announcement takes us right up to the end of next year, encompassing ten productions. Although we will presumably find out who Goold's successor is fairly soon, there's clearly no rush: their first show seems unlikely to run any sooner than January 2027. It's almost too big to call 'a season', but this final tranche of shows looks pretty mouthwatering, combining the sense of zeitgeist and event that's always dominated Goold's programming from the off with the embrace of writers and directors of colour that was learned on the way after some initial criticism of his Almeida as a white boys' club. Without further ado, then! The first show to be announced is a smaller one: 81 (Life) (Aug 21-23) is a community theatre show by playwright Rhianna Illube and 81 people from the Islington community. It's billed as part poem, part game-show and part play, and follows 60 strangers invited to a park at sunset, each grappling with something big. The first full run comes from the visionary Alice Birch, her first original play in years. The inscrutably titled Romans: A Novel (Sep 9-Oct 11) is an examination of masculinity and how male narratives have shaped the world from the nineteenth century to the present that will star Andor 's Kyle Soller in his first stage performance since the pandemic. The rather opaque description includes the lines 'He is up by 4am for weights, cardio, ice bath. He is recording a podcast. He is living as a badger'. It's directed by Sam Pritchard. Expect brilliance. Next up and massive name director Michael Grandage returns to the Almeida for the first time this century to direct Jack Holden's adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's landmark depiction of Thatcher's Britain The Line of Beauty (Oct 21-Nov 29). Rising star playwright Sam Grabiner got his big break at Soho Theatre with his play Boys On the Verge of Tears, for which he managed to bag big name director James Macdonald. The two reunite for Grabiner's new play Christmas Day (Dec 9-Jan 10 2026), a dark comedy about a north London Christmas family gathering on… Christmas Day. Goold's final show will be a revival of his 2013 production of Duncan Sheik's musical adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's provocative yuppie satire American Psycho (Jan 24-Mar 14 2026). It's an interesting show to bring back: its original incarnation starred Matt Smith at the height of his immediate post- Doctor Who fame, but never transferred to the West End (reportedly because Smith wasn't up for it). It opened on Broadway in 2016 with a different cast and tanked fairly hard. Could Goold's hope here be to finally secure it a hit West End run? We'll probably know better when we find out who has been cast as murderous banker Patrick Bateman. The brilliant actor Romola Garai has popped up at the Almeida a couple of times during Goold's tenure, in the coruscating The Writer and recent West End smash The Years. She'll star in Ibsen's proto-feminist landmark A Doll's House (Mar 31-May 16 2026), in a new production by leftfield director Joe Hill-Gibbins, adapted by Anya Reiss. Following that, another rising star Carmen Nasr will adapt British-Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari's acclaimed psychological horror Under the Shadow (Jun 2-Jul 4 2026) in a production by the excellent former Young Vic associate Nadia Latif. It'll star Leila Farzad. Frecknall's final show will be a revival for Sarah Kane's monumental work of love and torture Cleansed (Jul 21-Aug 22 2026), which will run ten years after Katie Mitchell's National Theatre production gained infamy for the volume of fainting audience members (though Frecknall has an altogether more conciliatory style). Actor Josh O'Connor will make his first stage appearance in 11 years to star in director Sam Yates' revival of the great US playwright Clifford Odets's Depression-era classic Golden Boy (Sep 8-Oct 31 2026) about a gifted young violinist who becomes sucked into the world of professional boxing. Still with us? Okay: the last show of the Rupert Goold era will be another American classic, a revival of Eugene O'Neill's sultry Greek tragedy rewrite Desire Under the Elms (Nov 10-Dec 19 2026), with Brit actor Zackary Momoh starring. And that's that, era over. It's obviously quite a lot of shows and many of them won't go on sale until next year. It seems likely – if not a given – that Goold's first programming at the Old Vic will be in autumn 2026 and probably not announced for some time; his successor at the Almeida is likely to be named soon, but we're probably a year away from a programming announcement. In the meantime – we've got plenty to go on! Romans: A Novel and The Line of Beauty will go on general sale June 10. 81 (Life) will go on sale in the summer, and Christmas Day and American Psycho
The Guardian
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Hamlet; Much Ado About Nothing; Richard II
In an extraordinary week, three of Britain's most authoritative male directors make Shakespeare quake and reverberate. Rupert Goold commands the Stratford stage with a maritime Hamlet. A broiling sea. A tilting deck down which bodies slide on a fast chute to hell. Swirling darkness and glaring, blue-tinged light. A mesmeric prince in Luke Thallon. Goold has set the action in 1912, compressed the timescale and made Elsinore not a castle but a boat. Illuminated by Jack Knowles, Es Devlin's magnificent design sets the action under a wooden ceiling like an elongated shield; Akhila Krishnan's videos of unremitting waves and ship machinery roll in the background; Adam Cork's soundscape booms mournfully. The transplantation is not such a huge stretch. A few words – references to sea, instead of earth – are shifted, but Hamlet, in part the tale of a ship of fools, is in any case a play of ocean expeditions, meltings and drownings: 'too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia…' There are overeggings: some nudges towards the Titanic – lifejackets! – are distracting, and onstage digital clocks are now so familiar they look like a nervous tic(-tock). Jared Harris should listen to the players's speech and become a less expostulating Claudius. Yet the great sweep of the evening, on a stage that tilts more and more vertiginously, is not merely bold: it pushes excitement into importance; it does not cramp its cast. I have long admired the way Thallon disappears, chameleon-style, into his parts: skittering in Present Laughter; inscrutable in Patriots. He offers a Hamlet dismantled by sorrow, constricted by thought – though I wish he would not occasionally shout isolated words. He is truly complicated, both open and mysterious. He seems not to be putting his stamp on the part but to be emerging from it. It is as if his character is swimming up into his face. Thallon is amid a finely inflected cast. Elliot Levey is a subtly weaselling Polonius. As Gertrude, Nancy Carroll is denied the speech about Ophelia's drowning (Goold is no shyer with his cuts than his additions) but gains one from Richard III: finely detailed in her maternal irritation, she is heart-shaking when her poise becomes tremulous. As both Ghost and Player King, the beautifully modulated Anton Lesser drifts through the tumultuous evening like a sea mist. After the grey shipwreck of his Tempest, Jamie Lloyd continues his Drury Lane season with confetti and clubbing and pink pink pink. His production of Much Ado About Nothing – set in an approximate late 1990s – does not touch every note of melancholy that can be heard in this comedy of sparring lovers, but it seizes almost every opportunity for joy. Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston have long been stage performers as well as Marvels. Cardboard cutouts of their movie characters are winkingly wheeled on at one point, but their performances as Beatrice and Benedick are full-on fiery and fleshy, making sexy sense of a couple who are often more shrivelled and sour, moving easily from wildness to serious romance without dropping a beat of the verse. Atwell – who proved herself commanding just before lockdown in Ibsen's Rosmersholm – is candid and clever, roaring in a tawny jumpsuit. Hiddleston, who I first saw 18 years ago in Chiwetel Ejiofor's Othello making the small part of Cassio remarkable, and who was subsequently a blazing Coriolanus, startlingly expands his Shakespearean range. He persuasively cajoles the audience, lollingly unbuttons his cerulean shirt to seduce his Beatrice, proves a swivel-hipped executor of embarrassing dancing and a nimble physical comic. Soutra Gilmour's design opens up the capering possibilities of the production, which is invitingly fuelled by Mason Alexander Park's throaty disco singing. The stage is dominated for long periods by an enormous rose-coloured balloon in the shape of a heart, an apparently useless object that turns out to be a handy hiding place for our hero, who also apparently vanishes through a trapdoor (hard to see from the stalls) and is certainly buried in a mound of rose-coloured confetti. Even Hiddleston's doggy carnival disguise (big furry head on one side, lolling tongue) is disconcertingly expressive. Lloyd has ruthlessly excised the comic subplot involving Dogberry the bumbling constable, and instead suffused the entire stage with humour: Tim Steed is particularly funny as the pissed-off villain. Here is a buoyant lesson in how to put on popular Shakespeare: clear, noisy, direct and infectious. Even the ushers are raving in the aisles. Sleek and tailored as one of the dark suits worn by its plotters, Nicholas Hytner's production of Richard II moves steadily across the stage to minatory music by Grant Olding, which evokes the theme tune of Succession. The parallel with Jesse Armstrong's lethal Roys is neat but not finally resonant. True, the man who pushes Richard off the throne is his cousin (Royce Pierreson is a steady, persuasive Henry Bullingbrook); true, in one of the most tellingly staged episodes, the two men engage in a bitter, nursery-style fight, tugging on the crown like toddlers on a teething ring. Yet Bullingbrook, a more or less accidental regicide, looks like a reasonable claimant, given the title-holder's vacillating unfitness. Unless of course you believe in the divine right of kings. Shakespeare probably did; on the whole, most British citizens probably don't – though who else but He can sanction the position? Richard II is one of Shakespeare's richest plays, enclosing both nationwide despair at the condition of 'this sceptr'd isle' and intricate meditation as the king moves from self-absorption to reflection. Our Richards – who have included a mercurial David Tennant with frightening hair extensions and, groundbreakingly, 30 years ago, a riveting Fiona Shaw – are as significant as our Hamlets. Jonathan Bailey, who, post Wicked and Bridgerton, has been instrumental in selling out the production, is elegant and lucid but overdoes the antic volatility at the beginning (would he really push poor old John of Gaunt off his walking frame?). His big speeches seem to jet in from nowhere, at first to rending effect but strangely flatly in the crucial prison scene. Not for the first time, the political weight of the play is carried by an apparently subordinate role. As the Duke of York – a more nuanced character than the present incumbent – Michael Simkins intricately mirrors conflicting loyalties, wanting to cleave to the king, but maddened by his frolics: he draws his hand across his face in the age-long despair of experience looking at youth blowing it. Star ratings (out of five) Hamlet ★★★★Much Ado About Nothing ★★★★Richard II ★★★ Hamlet is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 29 March Much Ado About Nothing is at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, until 5 April Richard II is at the Bridge, London, until 10 May
Telegraph
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Hamlet, RSC, review: Luke Thallon proves he's got real star quality
All is indeed out of joint in Rupert Goold 's bracing production of Hamlet for the RSC, down to the very elements themselves. It takes place at sea, aboard a large grand boat buffeted in Akhila Krishnan's dominating video design by foaming black waves, rather like Shakespeare as conceived by Herman Melville. Wrenched from its standard topography of castle battlements and the physical trappings of the Danish court, the play takes on a teetering, vaguely amorphous quality in which existential precarity in the face of what cannot be dreamed of within our philosophy is built into its very landscape. At least one presumes that's the idea. Luke Thallon, making his RSC debut, bears a degree of comparison with Ben Whishaw when he played the role in 2004, in that while he has notched up several acclaimed credits on stage, he's still a relative unknown and Hamlet is his first Shakespeare role. Tall, angular, undernourished, he strikes a barefoot, black-suited modernity in stark contrast to the complacent old world order of Jared Harris 's fusty Claudius and Nancy Carroll's socialite Gertrude whom, Goold's Titanic-inspired production encourages us to imagine, are the sort to sip on cocktails while the ship goes down. His is a thrillingly wired, self-mocking Hamlet consumed to the bone by a near unbearably exquisite self-doubt, and whose febrile performance becomes both an extended death note and in the final utterance, a reaching towards salvation. It's a cliché to say the best Hamlets think in the moment, but while Thallon's stuttering lopsided delivery won't please the iambic pentameter purists, he speaks as though testing each thought out for size, in a way that conveys with jolting force the whirring confusion and despairing clarity of his mind. For Goold's masterstroke is indeed to harness the air of sea-sick delirium as a manifestation of both Hamlet's addled psychology and the disordered state of Denmark itself. In an inspired move, Anton Lesser plays Old Hamlet, the Player King and one of two 'gravediggers', in ways that both appear to mock the inescapable power of Hamlet's grief and his obsessive thoughts of heaven and earth, and also hell – in the opening scene Hamlet follows his father's ghost into the very bowels of the ship, which glow an ominous red. Moreover Goold's choice of setting is both specific and expediently abstract – that forever tilting deck serving as both the boat's exterior and interior but with the main visual conceit the hungry cosmic blackness of the surrounding sea. Yet there is an awful lot of coming and going in Hamlet the play that even the most judicious tweaking of the script can't resolve. Goold sets the action over the course of one night, an anachronistic digital clock counting out the hour, but it creates a bit of a rod for its own back when it comes to the arrival, say, of the Players, or the sudden return of Laertes in the middle of the night. Most problematic of all, the burial by sea of Ophelia (Nia Towle) comes minutes after Gertrude reports her death by drowning. It may feel churlish to worry over logistics given the production's overarching conceptual grandeur, but they stand out because the Danish court itself feels relatively thinly sketched. Carroll's brittle Gertrude conveys a growing sense that she is increasingly out of her depth, as befits a reading in which an almost biblical sense of retributive destiny is built into the play's trajectory, but she isn't given enough to do. Harris meanwhile displays flashes of psychotic fury but again, feels underused. More fun is to be had within the supporting roles: Elliot Levey is reliably excellent as an amiable duffer Polonious; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two callow wet-behind-the-ears Americans in striped blazers and two-tone brogues. If Goold's concept ultimately works it's thanks to Thallon's exhilaratingly commanding performance which in the final instance pulls off the trick of Hamlet as less a tragic hero than as one ultimately transcendent.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists Take Major Step Towards Creating Synthetic Life
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." For the first time ever, a synthetic eukaryotic genome has been created. By taking yeast cells and rebuilding their genomes, scientists were able to create a yeast that more resilient and produced more spores—something that could mean more food on a much larger scale Creating synthetic genomes could eventually make sustainable manufacturing processes that use eukaryotic bacteria more efficiently. While the concept of creating synthetic life from nothing is still firmly in the science fiction category, synthetic genomes are now reality. Researchers—led by synthetic biologist Hugh Goold of Macquarie University in Australia—have created the first synthetic eukaryotic genome for a species of yeast. Previous experiments had been done on prokaryotes (single-celled organisms that lack a nucleus), but a full synthetic genome had not been reconstructed for any single-celled eukaryotic organisms (which have a nucleus and organelles with distinct functions). This synthetic genome tech means that life-forms can be customized depending on what aspects need to be enhanced. As part of the Sc2.0 Project, for example, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae was redesigned and reconstructed to produce more spores and keep from mutating (since this yeast is prone to spontaneous mutations) as it grew. This genomic makeover was a decade in the making. Also known as brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae has a long history of being used in brewing, winemaking, and baking. Reconstructing its genome would not only give it the qualities it needs to resist disease and survive climate change, but allow it to yield a higher quantity and quality of food while maintaining sustainability. 'The technology of synthetic genomics can help to secure supply chain in future situations where changing climates, further global pandemics, and conflict threatens the availability of critical and conventional feedstocks of food and pharmaceuticals,' the researchers said in a study recently published in Nature. To create a specific synthetic chromosome within the synthetic genome, Goold started with several strains of S. cerevisiae, which had already had synthetic pieces of DNA inserted. These were backcrossed—a process which involves mating genetically different parent cells to create hybrid offspring, which are then mated with the parent cells. Backcrossing may sound like inbreeding, but actually makes it easier to isolate any characteristics that may require a closer look. The strain with the newly created synthetic chromosome, SynXVI, suffered impaired growth and often mutated. More backcrossing allowed the team to identify which areas of SynXVI were glitching. Why were there issues with a genome that was supposed to be version 2.0 of the original? It turned out that errors in placing genetic markers—genes or short sequences of DNA that are used to identify genes and chromosomes inside a genome—sometimes interfered with the function of yeast cells. Genetic glitches in the chromosome were identified and edited with CRISPR D-BUGS (which sounds like some sort of futuristic pest killer) and other genetic tools that were able to zero in on specific areas of the genome and correct them. Boosting yeast growth and resilience meant getting it to grow on glycerol (a carbon source) to absorb the carbon it needed at a certain temperature. It turned out that one section of the genome was causing a deficit of copper, but this was easily solved by adding copper sulfate to the glycerol. Despite the glitches, this technology opens up opportunities for creating more than better crops. Eukaryotic microbes already used in sustainable manufacturing processes could be modified to become even more efficient. 'S. cerevisiae holds great potential in libraries of new chromosomes,' the researchers said in the same study, '[including] neochromosomes, and genomes for subsequent transfer into cells to create life forms tailored to humankind's needs.' Someday, maybe even artificial mammalian genomes could be created, But for now, just one yeast is offering so many possibilities. You Might Also Like Can Apple Cider Vinegar Lead to Weight Loss? Bobbi Brown Shares Her Top Face-Transforming Makeup Tips for Women Over 50
