Latest news with #playwright
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author who reckoned with colonial legacy, dies at 87
By George Obulutsa NAIROBI (Reuters) -Celebrated Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose sharp criticisms of post-independence elites led to his jailing and two decade in exile, has died at the age of 87, Kenya's president said. Shaped by an adolescence where he witnessed the armed Mau Mau struggle for independence from Britain, Thiong'o took aim in his writings at colonial rule and the Kenyan elites who inherited many of its privileges. He was arrested in December 1977 and detained for a year without charge in a maximum security prison after peasants and workers performed his play "Ngaahika Ndeenda" (I Will Marry When I Want). Angered by the play's criticism of inequalities in Kenyan society, the authorities sent three truckloads of police to raze the theatre, Thiong'o later said. He went into exile in 1982 after he said he learned of plans by President Daniel arap Moi's security services to arrest and kill him. He went on to become a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California-Irvine. 'INDELIBLE IMPACT' Thiong'o ended his exile in 2004 after Moi left office following more than two decades in power marked by widespread arrests, killings and torture of political opponents. Kenya's current president, William Ruto, paid tribute to Thiong'o after his death in the U.S. following reports of a struggle with ill health in recent years. "The towering giant of Kenyan letters has put down his pen for the final time," Ruto said on his X account. "Always courageous, he made an indelible impact on how we think about our independence, social justice as well as the uses and abuses of political and economic power." Although Thiong'o said upon returning to Kenya in 2004 that he bore no grudge against Moi, he told Reuters in an interview three years later that Kenyans should not forget the abuses of the era. "The consequences of 22 years of dictatorship are going to be with us for a long time and I don't like to see us returning to that period," he said. Thiong'o's best-known works included his debut novel "Weep Not Child", which chronicled the Mau Mau struggle and "Devil on the Cross", which he wrote on toilet paper while in prison. In the 1980s, he abandoned English to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu, saying he was bidding farewell to the imported language of Kenya's former colonial master. (Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Aaron Ross)
CBC
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Rag Pickers by Blaine Newton
A sinister note sewn in the lining of a vintage jacket from a second-hand store compels a young woman to make changes in her life. A brother discovers his dying twin has been burying jars of coins in an attempt to create mystery in a neighbourhood. On his 43rd birthday, a man realizes that the critical events of his life occur in years when his age is a prime number. A woman reconfigures her stick figure on the back window of the family minivan in an act of defiance and reinvention. Rag Pickers is a collection of eighteen short stories that challenge the essential loneliness of the human condition. Blaine Newton writes with wry humour, deep observation, and an off-kilter perspective, bringing his skill as a playwright to crackling dialogue and polished prose. Well-crafted, heartbreaking, and really, really funny, this is a book for anyone who has ever felt alone. (From University of Calgary Press) Blaine Newton is an Edmonton-based award-winning playwright, comedy writer, short-fiction author, actor and occasional engineer. His plays have been produced across western Canada, and his short fiction has been featured in magazines and anthologies, and on CBC and CKUA radio. Rag Pickers is his debut short story collection.
Forbes
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘All The Beauty In The World' Author To Write Again After Acting Stint
After his one-man play, All the Beauty in the World—based on his memoir about his brother's death and his time of healing as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum in New York—closes this weekend, playwright, actor and author Patrick Bringley plans to return to his writing. Patrick Bringley, in his one-man play, "All the Beauty in the World" In a recent interview with Bringley, whose play is based on his New York Times best-selling memoir of the same name, said 'for the past two years, I've jut done nothing but running my mouth. It's going to be great to have another period of monkish withdrawal and think about something new and fresh. I want to write.' The play's website calls Bringley's memoir and play 'a portrait of one man's life through a time of transition. While looking for somewhere to contemplate his life and heal from his brother's death, Patrick quits' his job as an event planner at The New Yorker 'and seeks refuge in the most beautiful place he can think of: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through his job as a museum guard, Patrick starts his life anew, all while falling under the spell of the place and the people he meets there. As his connection to the art around him grows, so does Patrick, until he gradually emerges... transformed by all the beauty.' The stage adaptation of All the Beauty in the World was first produced as a special presentation at the 2024 Charleston Literary Festival, in Charleston, S. C. It was there that Bringley met Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London from 2006 to 2016. Bringley said Dromgoole was very enthusiastic about his presentation; Dromgoole eventually did the play's set design and blocking and was 'instrumental in getting the team together.' Bringley, who began giving tours to groups when he left the Metropolitan Museum in 2019, said he had 'given a lot of talks to a lot of museums' and noticed that he was comfortable on stage, and 'enjoyed doing this.' He also said his mother, Maureen Gallagher, is a longtime theater actor in Chicago, 'so I grew up around this.' He also said working as a guard at the Met after his brother's death appealed to him because it allowed him to 'stand still for a while and think my own thoughts and be around things that seemed very elemental and very beautiful and very painful,' since the art, as he was doing personally, grapples 'with life and death.' 'I am truly humbled by the response to the play and my story,' Bringley said. 'It's a magical feeling in the theater, and people stop me after the show to share their own stories about loss, healing, chosen family, and the beauty they find in art and in life. It's exactly why I wanted to adapt my memoir for the stage.' Bringley's book spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library, the Financial Times, Audible, the New York Post, the Sunday Times (London), and others, and has been translated in editions in countries ranging from Italy to Ukraine to South Korea, where has been a #1 national bestseller.
Wall Street Journal
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Creditors' Review: Liev Schreiber's Master Manipulator
New York The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was long dead before the term passive-aggressive was first coined during World War II, subsequently to become so ubiquitous as to be rendered almost meaningless. But his 1889 play 'Creditors,' being revived off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre in a sharp and stimulating production, offers a master class in the psychological manipulation the term loosely describes.
Telegraph
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Fifth Step: Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman are an irresistible double act
The bold-minded Belfast-born playwright David Ireland has a rare ability to attract top-flight actors for his darkly comic, often taboo-testing work, with unhinged male psyches his forte. In his breakthrough, Cyprus Avenue, Stephen Rea played a Belfast loyalist convinced his baby grand-daughter has the face of Gerry Adams. And late in 2023, Woody Harrelson starred in Ulster American as a Hibernophile Hollywood A-lister aghast to realise he has signed up to play a Protestant Unionist on stage. With The Fifth Step, David Ireland has finally arrived in the West End attended by the kind of dream cast that has fans snapping up tickets with barely a thought for the show's content. After an Edinburgh Festival premiere last year, Slow Horses star Jack Lowden is joined for the London run by Martin Freeman, everyone's favourite Hobbit, for a dive into the step-programme of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which two men – one battling the bottle, the other his (older) sponsor – share the challenge of recovery. I'd love to salute this as the writer's deserved hour of triumph, not least because this piece transmutes his painful experience into the stuff of accessible entertainment. The author attended AA when he was in his twenties and like Lowden's lost soul, who grabs our attention at the start by opening up to Freeman's James about his lack of luck with women, and addiction to porn, he has said he struggled with dating then. Like Luka, too, who surreally claims to have encountered Jesus in the guise of Willem Dafoe on a gym treadmill, he had a religious epiphany that saved him. Yet despite bubbling with hard-won authenticity and again displaying Ireland's flair for nifty, surprising dialogue, the short evening (80 minutes, directed by Finn den Hertog) winds up seeming curiously flat. At Edinburgh some complained about a rushed denouement but the amended, putatively adrenal resolution here feels no less abrupt, while generating a diminished provocative charge – attention is tilted from the damage perpetuated by Luka to the demons of paranoia and jealousy suffered by James. Interesting conversational skirmishes about the saving power of faith, and the surrogate spirituality of AA, take a back-seat to bickering about who said what. At its best, we're shown two fallible blokes striving to trust each other within a frame-work designed to help the vulnerable that still runs the risk of abusive power-play. But as a drama it finally lacks the requisite emotional punch to the guts. The big saving grace is the makeshift double-act itself; both men winningly rising to the challenge of the ringside space's gladiatorial intimacy. Freeman's eyebrows work expressively overtime in polite quizzicality, repressed concern and growing shiftiness. Compared to this middle-aged, uptight, sexlessly married guardian-figure, Lowden captivates with his edgy physicality and a Scottish accent redolent of hard-living; he welds child-like cluelessness with a steely tenacity. To be 'glass half full' about it, their presence and gear-switches are an irresistible theatrical proposition. But the play itself remains a step-change short of a knock-out sensation. Until July 26;
