Latest news with #Rhinoceros
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Wallace & Gromit' Studio Aardman Partners With France's Foliascope On Cross-Border Stop-Motion Training Program
Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep animation studio Aardman is joining forces with France's Foliascope and training expert Rhinoceros to launch a cross-studio training initiative in France and the UK to advance the skills of professional stop-motion animators. Oscar-winning Bristol-based studio Aardman and Foliascope, the credits of which include features such as Leonardo da Vinci biopic The Inventor, host some of the largest and most advanced stop-motion sets in Europe and are currently expanding their production slates. More from Deadline Annecy Revs Up For 2025 Edition; Kicking Off With Michel Gondry & Matt Groening Honors & Shorts Selection Featuring New 'Stars Wars: Visions' Title Gkids Takes North America For Cannes & Annecy Title 'Little Amélie Or The Character Of Rain' Nickelodeon Acquires Animated Kids' Show 'Mr. Crocodile' From Joann Sfar's Magical Society & Mediawan Per a release announcing the program, the partners recognizing their need for highly skilled animators, decided to work with Rhinoceros to offer the cross-border program. The four-week intensive course will begin with two weeks at Foliascope Studio in France, followed by two weeks at Aardman's training facility, the Aardman Academy in the UK. The training will focus on enhancing animation technique, speed, character performance, and expressivity—preparing participants to contribute to upcoming stop-motion feature productions. Applications for the training program open in September 2025, with the course scheduled to take place in March 2026. The training is fully funded for eight selected animators, with support from AFDAS, France Travail Scène et Image, and the participating studios. 'The Aardman Academy has existed for over 20 years training, nurturing and inspiring new talent,' said Rachel Plant, producer at the Aardman Academy. 'We are delighted to be partnering with Foliascope and Rhinoceros with this new course to inspire the next generation of animators Interested animators can apply via the Rhinoceros website.' The partners will be presenting the new program in a session a the upcoming Annecy International Film Festival next week. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 'Stick' Soundtrack: All The Songs You'll Hear In The Apple TV+ Golf Series 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out?
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in theatre: Rhinoceros; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical
Who would have thought that Rhinoceros, written in the 1950s, would prove to be a stage-shaker today? Sometimes taken as a satire on the rise of the Nazis or the lack of resistance to East European authoritarianism, but surely more accurately described as a general attack on unreflecting conformism, Eugène Ionesco's play is a hard thing to pull off. At least in Britain, where the expectation of naturalism runs deep. After all, the plot turns on the entire human population of a European village – bar one – turning into rhinoceroses. There are touches of Kafka, without the black force. There are Beckettian gleams of despair without Beckett's lyrical intensity – or brevity. Insisting on the one theme without ever quite making an argument, Rhinoceros can easily become both heavy-footed and elusive: a pachyderm peeping flirtatiously from behind a fan. And yet. Here is Omar Elerian's production, making the play seem weirdly true. Current parallels are not underlined but they are unmissable, in the conjuring of a galumphing horror and a miasmic atmosphere: contradictions need only be proclaimed for them to be evidently the case. Of course, even this is morally equivocal: after all, the theatre does dare the audience to believe the impossible. On Ana Inés Jabares-Pita's clinically white set, stage directions are read out – and disobeyed. The inert and the animate are merged. A woman takes her pet cat to the market. The part of the cat is performed by a water melon: first tucked, mewing, under its mistress's arm; the great green fruit is later seen as the victim of a street accident, its red flesh gaping. Catherine Gibbons, head of wigs, hair and makeup, deserves an award: Hayley Carmichael's barnet is an explosion – a wire-wool extravaganza. Joshua McGuire sports a strange jutting curl over his forehead, like – could it be? – the beginnings of a horn? Sophie Steer's postwar victory-roll fringe is as solid as a sausage roll. Elon Musk in his cheesehead hat might pass unremarked. Paul Hunter (the narrator) and Carmichael move with the ease of their clown training: Carmichael seems to have no gap between feeling and gesture. , po-faced but intricate, is compelling, even when wrestling with a tight grey rhino suit. As the sole resister to the spread of rhinoceritis, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù's unvarying sincerity pays off in the closing moment. There is another participant. Some audience members are issued with kazoos and instructed by Hunter when to blow, so that the theatre is filled with the trumpeting of rhinos, the baying of a bamboozled public. It could have been wince-making: it is apt. There is, though, no record of kazoos in the play's first British performance at the Royal Court in 1960, when Orson Welles directed Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. At pretty much the same time that Ionesco was throwing up his pen in despair at the lack of sense in European existence, Alfred Hitchcock was taking a sceptical look at life in the prospering United States. In 1955, mid-career, he embarked on Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 268 episodes of television chillers based on short stories. Jay Dyer (book) and the late Steven Lutvak (score) have made a musical out of slivers of these plots. A frail old lady serves poisoned lemonade to the fellow who murdered her son. A man threatens to jump from a bridge in order to entrap and kill the cop who comes to rescue him. A housewife (no other word for her) bumps off her husband by hitting him over the head with a leg of lamb, then invites the policeman investigating the murder to eat the evidence. These tales tilt one against each other with a similar murderous theme and droll outlook. The music is buoyant, with something of an Ink Spots swing, echoes of the Hitchcock signature tune, and the entire cast coming together to chorus 'Everybody wants to kill someone'. Scarlett Strallen and Sally Ann Triplett almost burst out of their skins with vivacity and top notes. The evening drifts sweetly, without suspense or propulsion. John Doyle directs with traces of the stripped-down style he deployed so memorably in his Sondheim productions 20 years ago. His cunning design is the best aspect of the show. Behind a proscenium arch in the shape of an early TV set (with bevelled edges), the cast caper around flimsy props: doors have no supporting walls, a ladder stands in for the suicide's bridge. The stage is overhung by an outsize camera and an extra-long phallic mic. Monochrome dress is made for black-and-white telly: a spectacular New Look frock with heart-shaped patch pockets; a pair of snazzy check pedal-pushers. The pattern of a knitted pullover suggests the cross-hatching on a slightly blurred grainy screen. It's a decorative pastiche of fictions that, as satires on conventional morality, merit something sharper. Not for the birds, but no frenzy. Star ratings (out of five) Rhinoceros ★★★★Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical ★★ Rhinoceros is at the Almeida, London until 26 April Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical is at the Theatre Royal, Bath until Saturday 12 April
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Rhinoceros: Clever and playful –but not quite a piece for our times
Ingeniously introducing us to a provincial French town whose inhabitants morph into indomitable rhinos, when Ionesco's Rhinoceros – an allegory of individual defiance in the face of stampeding conformism – premiered in Dusseldorf in 1959, it was met with a widely reported 10-minute ovation. It valuably spoke to a Europe shaken by totalitarian horror, on the Left as well as the Right. At the 1960 London premiere, Laurence Olivier starred as the refusenik clerk Berenger, directed by Orson Welles. The Romanian-French playwright inspired Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill and others. Yet where Rhinoceros once roamed the cultural landscape, eliciting awe, along with the rest of its author's Absurdist oeuvre, these days it can seem a museum piece, a taxidermied classic. At the Royal Court in 2007, Benedict Cumberbatch earned raves playing Berenger but one reviewer noted the play had 'not survived its own occasion'. Has the critic Kenneth Tynan, who accused the 'anarchic wag' of steering drama up a 'blind alley', had the last laugh? Tynan's erudite critique of Ionesco's 'anti-theatre' is actually referenced in this archly self-aware Almeida revival which often has the dependably buffoonish Paul Hunter adopting a wry narratorial role, intoning stage-directions into a microphone and even exhorting some audience participation. Given that the liberty-taking adaptation is by director Omar Elerian, who triumphed here three years ago with a revelatory production of Ionesco's The Chairs, starring the late Marcello Magni and his wife Kathryn Hunter, the production comes armed with a persuasive confidence in its artistic mission. Presented on a minimal, mainly white set (with a raised central platform, rear-curtains, and a lot of lab coats and comically mad hair), the evening has a light, on-its-feet, deconstructed quality, the accent on multi-roling ensemble virtuosity. You don't see rhino-heads and horns sprouting, or even papier-mâché pachyderms. Instead, much is capably conveyed by sound effects (denoting the stampedes) and body language conjures the grim dehumanisation process. Joshua McGuire (big since the BBC sitcom Cheaters) memorably goes to town, contorting and bowing low, with three other cast members following suit to suggest a bestial immensity. Given how apposite the message of the play is – take your pick from the current contagions of group-think – it should straightforwardly map onto today's nightmares and tap lasting truths about human nature. But much as this version punctures the fourth-wall, for me it still lacks real punch. We are rendered complicit by larky stealth: we're asked to practice a convoluted clap that later becomes a slap of domestic violence, and, in a rather I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue flourish, selected audience-members sound on kazoos to evoke rhino roars. But it's too cosy to cause discomfort while a lot of the honoured original text comes over as plutôt wittery. As the odd man Berenger, a gentle, ruminative Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù (of Gangs of London fame) comes into his own at the end, appalled as his beloved Daisy (Anoushka Lucas) starts to follow the herd before standing his ground and repeatedly bellowing 'I will not surrender' despite an attempted curtain-call around him. Still, it's the stuff of appreciative applause, and ticked-off checklists, not headline-making ovations.
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The Independent
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
An absurdist fable for fascism, The Almeida's production of Rhinoceros is a rare beast on London's stages
Eugène Ionesco's 1959 absurdist play Rhinoceros has long been seen as an allegory for the rise of fascism, showing how people are gaslighted, coerced and coddled into putting up with a bizarre new status quo. So it would be easy for Omar Elerian's adaptation to play up the obvious Trump parallels. Refreshingly, he hasn't, instead crafting something that deliberately floats above ugly political realities, buoyant as a child's balloon. Here, Sopé Dìrísù (Gangs of London) plays Bérenger, a scruffy everyman surrounded by conformist bores in white coats. Not least his sanctimonious friend Jean, given a winning smugness by Joshua McGuire (Cheaters), who tells him off for boozing and not wearing a tie. When a rhino rampages through his small French town, Bérenger is horrified, but his friends and colleagues soon bury themselves in dry philosophical debates that accustom them to a new pachyderm-centric way of life. Elerian takes a Brechtian approach to the play, reading out Ionesco's elaborate stage directions and comically misinterpreting them for the audience's amusement (a cat is played by a giant watermelon). Everything is artificial here, from the live foley sound effects to the strange swirly shapes into which the actors' hair has been teased. This deliberate non-naturalism makes it hard to settle into the world of the play, especially since Elerian has chucked so many different jarring elements into the mix here. Some early scenes inflate like over-proved dough, with their long preambles and verbal repartee that's too literally translated to achieve full hilarity. But as the leathery-skinned beasts multiply, this production's power grows, helped by wonderfully imaginative bits of physical theatre. McGuire's transformation into a silver-skinned monster is a marvel, his shifting body capturing how attempts to empathise with extreme positions can open you up to losing your own values. Hayley Carmichael quakes like a freshly-birthed faun after her encounter with a rhino, but soon her terror matures into a surreal kind of love. And Paul Hunter acts as an unofficial emcee and anchor in this strange world, gently inculcating the audience into its rules. Dìrísù initially feels a bit lost here, giving a straightforwardly truthful performance among all these heightened grotesques. But there's a mounting power in that as the final scenes draw in and chaos reigns, thundering hooves crushing everything he used to know. A production like this is a rare beast on London's stages – with its gleeful non-naturalism, witty physical theatre and tooting kazoos – and it deserves to be appreciated.
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's nice to be morally dubious': Cheaters star Joshua McGuire on the hit show and his new role
For the past five weeks, Joshua McGuire has been in a whitewashed room in north London pretending to be a rhinoceros. The 37-year-old actor isn't in a performance art piece or strange social experiment, but rather starring in director Omar Elerian's new production of Eugene Ionèsco's 1959 absurdist play, Rhinoceros; it is his first stage role in seven years. 'It sounds mental but it's the theatre of the absurd, so it's meant to be baffling at points,' he says with a smile, back in human form in a white T-shirt and cap while on a break from rehearsals, where he is clearly enjoying taking on the story of a small French town whose inhabitants gradually turn into rhinos. If you have watched a British comedy over the past decade, it's likely you've seen McGuire in it. The endlessly energetic performer is usually found next to the leading man, sporting a frizz of curly hair and delivering anxious one-liners or slapstick pratfalls. He has featured in everything from Netflix series Lovesick to Richard Curtis's About Time and Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. On stage, meanwhile, he had his breakthrough in Laura Wade's 2010 satire on the British upper classes, Posh, playing a member of a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club, and has since starred opposite Daniel Radcliffe in David Leveaux's 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. 'I was a class clown so it's not surprising so many of my roles have been comedic,' he says, speaking in the quick nasal tone of his many characters. 'But in recent years the work has been getting darker, which is welcome, since it's nice to be morally dubious for once.' In 2022, McGuire starred as 'clever asshole' Chris Clarke in the Downing Street thriller Anatomy of a Scandal, while in Rhinoceros he is tackling material that has been read as a critique of postwar fascism, challenging the audience and its central character Bérenger to question how much people will believe and go along with – even if it means succumbing to a crash of rhinos bolting across the stage. 'The play is about groupthink and the dangers behind the ideas we might buy into,' McGuire says. 'You can read it as a comment on social media and how we can become indoctrinated to follow the crowd, even if we don't initially agree with where we're going. But ultimately it's the cast in a white box with no props – the audience can fill it with whatever they're seeing and that's the most confronting thing of all.' While his role as Jean in Rhinoceros sees him showing a darker side to his usual playfulness, it was McGuire's top billing in 2022's BBC series Cheaters that has done more than anything else to transform him from a sputtering sidekick into an unlikely leading man. Starring alongside Susan Wokoma, Cheaters sees McGuire playing Josh, a downtrodden sound engineer whose adulterous one-night stand with Fola (Wokoma) while on holiday ends up following him home when he realises she has just moved in across the road. 'I was drawn to Cheaters because everyone in it has committed some sort of betrayal but they're also empathetic and lovable,' he says. 'I really liked how Josh isn't macho or a gym guy but he's still shown in moments of passion and is working his way through the difficulties of a long-term relationship.' Created by Oliver Lyttelton, Cheaters features plenty of well-observed relational dynamics, as well as a lot of sex. In the 18 10-minute episodes of series one, characters masturbate, get naked, perform oral sex and experience several orgasms. 'It was my first experience doing intimate scenes on screen and it was such a gift to be performing alongside Susie [Wokoma], not least because we were both at Rada together in the same year, so I've known her for ever,' he says. 'We would be in bed almost totally naked, surrounded by 20 crew putting up lights, and we would just be chatting about which mutual friends we had seen recently.' The show became a sleeper hit and a second series came out last year. With the increased popularity, though, it must have been a challenge to prepare his family for the show's steamy content? 'I had to tell my mum that there was nudity in episode one and that it arrives pretty fast,' McGuire laughs. 'It's like five minutes in and bam – there's my full bum out! There was no easy way to tell her that but she's seen it all and she's proud of me.' Growing up in Warwick as the youngest of three siblings, McGuire fell into acting seemingly by accident. 'I didn't have a particularly thespy family since my mum's a paediatric nurse and my dad worked for IBM,' he says. 'We were only a 10-minute drive from the RSC in Stratford-on-Avon though and my mum would always take me to see new productions – both the good ones and the not so good.' In 2001, at 13, McGuire was cast as one of the young actors in Gregory Doran's King John at the RSC and soon caught the bug for performance. 'They would just get local boys from the nearby schools to fill in as the young parts for some of the RSC performances and I thought it would be a fun thing to do,' he says. 'I was suddenly part of this mad world where people were getting paid to have fun every night and then going for drinks afterwards. I was enchanted and to this day whenever I smell incense it takes me right back to the Swan stage and the cardinal in the play swinging his censer across the boards.' Getting into Rada at 19, McGuire joined a mightily talented cohort, including Wokoma, Daisy May Cooper, James Norton, Cynthia Erivo and Phoebe Fox. 'It was a magic time because from 10am to 6pm each day you'd just be playing and discovering,' he says. 'I would laugh at what my older brother might have thought if he could see me spending all day being water or jelly.' In his final year, McGuire was cast with Norton to play members of the riot club in Wade's Royal Court send-up of the Oxbridge Tory elite, Posh. 'His talent was immediately evident,' Observer theatre critic Susannah Clapp says of his performance in the ensemble. 'He gleamed in an excellent cast and has since been a good picker of good plays – rumpled in James Graham's Privacy (2014) and garrulous and bossy in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.' While McGuire says his experience of Posh was overwhelmingly positive – 'I thought all jobs would be as fun, as popular and as pertinent to the moment as that' – future stage roles were less straightforward. 'I had the opening line of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and one night I began it by skipping the first two pages of the script entirely,' he laughs, head in his hands. 'It's like suddenly thinking about walking and you trip up. Thankfully, I don't think anyone noticed because Dan [Radcliffe] is so famous that for the first five minutes of that show at least, no one was looking at me.' Does he wish his career had taken off to similar heights, rather than largely being known for supporting roles? 'God no. I have mates who have lost all anonymity and it's really tough, especially if you have kids,' he says. 'I have a two-year-old son now and I love being able to go to work but then also come home, put him to bed and leave it all at the door.' In 2022, McGuire married actor Amy Morgan and the pair share parental responsibilities in their London home alongside their work. 'We're living the dream because we've been able to work and have our boy and not really sacrifice any roles,' he says. 'It does take a village and we're very lucky to have so many friends and grannies around for babysitting!' At least McGuire's current rehearsal schedule means he can be home for bedtime and once the play's run begins he can spend the day with his son instead. 'As a dad, this show takes on another resonance, thinking about how social media groupthink might affect his life in the future,' he says. 'But he can't even read yet so there's no use worrying too much – I'm more desperate instead to be in one of those Julia Donaldson Christmas adaptations, which he might just about understand!' Until then, it's a welcome return for McGuire to the London stage, bringing his comedic excitement and recently showcased vulnerability to both rhinoceros and human beings. Rhinoceros runs at the Almeida, London N1 from Tuesday 25 March to 26 April
