Latest news with #theatre
RNZ News
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
New Kiwi comedy follows the fortunes of a struggling theatre
The show must go on, as they say in the theatre. New Kiwi comedy Workmates looks at the lengths two close colleagues will go to to keep their beloved indie theatre from going under. The film's been written by Sophie Henderson, who also plays main character Lucy and it's directed by her husband Curtis Vowell. It draws heavily on Sophie's experiences running The Basement Theatre in Auckland, which also serves as the location for the film's fictional theatre The Crystal Ballroom. The idea for it materialised during the pandemic, when many theatres struggled with repeated lockdowns. This is Sophie and Curtis' third feature film together, after 2013's Fantail and 2021's Baby, Done. Workmates will have its premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festival before it goes for general release date from August 21.
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Beckett's vision is given a haunting and evocative twist
Beckett sa Chreig: Guth na mBan An Taibhdhearc, Galway ★★★★☆ 'I'm not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I want the piece to work on the nerves of the audience.' Samuel Beckett 's reply to Jessica Tandy, as she was preparing for the first performance of Not I in New York in 1972, concerned the instruction that it should be performed at speed. What did concern Beckett was the image created and the sensation it evoked. The striking images created and deep sensations evoked by Sarah Jane Scaife's vision in Beckett sa Chreig: Guth na mBan build on the work that Company SJ started in 2021 with Bríd Ní Neachtain as Winnie and Mícheál Ó Conghaile as translator of Laethanta Sona/Happy Days, set on Creig an Staic, Inis Oírr. There we had one long play, now three shorts; there we had one woman, now three; there we had the sky for a background, here not only are we indoors, but it's very dark, the light becoming even less as we progress from the wonderfully flowing ghostly robe worn by Fiona Lucia McGarry as May/Amy in Coiscéimeanna/Footfalls, Nuala Hayes's face in Luascaire/Rockaby and Caitríona Ní Mhurchú's mouth in Ní Mise/Not I. This time the island is represented on three vertical screens spanning the stage, the middle one set back, leaving a space for the reading of Siosarnach 4/Fizzle 4. Kilian Waters's visually compelling film alternate with the plays and are a relief from the words and unresolved questions and darkness working on the nerves of the audience. READ MORE The images have their own progression from the white of water swirling and breaking on the shore, to the vivid green of the landscape and the grey of the walls. There is the recurring motif of the two women in billowing red petticoats, an appearance of calm as they walk and work. Then there isthe jarring effect of the same figures still moving but transposed to the dreary corridors of institutions where women were put away against their will, having, like the women so convincingly portrayed in the three plays, nowhere to go but inside their head, going over and over events. These later plays, for which Beckett came to prefer the term 'short', are described by Gontarski as 'striking imagist pieces in and of themselves ... resonating with each other to build a greater whole when grouped ... with directors exercising their vision as much by the combination of shorts as by any individual directorial style'. With Ó Conghaile, whose latest work of fiction, An Bhlaosc sa mBois, is a poignant response to the horror of mother and baby homes, again as translator (and opening on the same day as excavation began on the mother and baby home in Tuam), Company SJ's chosen pieces, with images exquisitely blended, has built a greater whole; made something new and realised an evocative and haunting vision. Beckett sa Chreig: Guth na mBan is at An Taibhdhearc, as part of Galway International Arts Festival , until Saturday, July 19th, and in the Project Arts Centre on October 1st-5th as part of Dublin Theatre Festival . English language audio will be available
Mail & Guardian
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Mail & Guardian
The world through Calvin Ratladi's eyes
Calvin Ratladi sees beyond the script, conjuring ghosts of land, legacy and loss in 'Breakfast with Mugabe' The first thing I noticed about Calvin Ratladi were his eyes. Huge, mysterious pools of something warm and comforting. We met on the stairs leading up to Rhodes Theatre in Makhanda where the play he directed for this year's National Arts Festival was about to premiere. Instead of the jingle-jangle of pre-show nervousness, what I saw in his wise and gentle eyes was calm, unabashed patience — an artist's quiet expectation minutes before the public sees a work for the first time. And below the eyes, an openhearted smile, the kind you cherish long after you meet him. For those few moments — 'hello', 'great to meet you', 'break a leg' — Ratladi, who is this year's Standard Bank Young Artist for Theatre, looked at me with such intensity it was as if we were old friends. His eyes were, I thought, those of someone with a talent for baring his soul, someone familiar with the sensation of opening himself up in front of an audience. It was weird then to later hear him tell me that he avoids looking at people for too long. 'Usually, I don't look at people when I speak to them,' he told me during a lunchtime interview a few days later. 'I hardly look at people at all, because when I do, I start seeing beyond …' And although his words trailed off then, I understood what he meant, knew that what he was alluding to was a gift, a sensitivity that has doubtlessly fuelled his artistic vision. 'I've always known about this,' he says. His ability to see below the surface, see 'beyond' what exists in the physical realm, is precisely what catches you off guard in his new play, Breakfast with Mugabe , which — after its debut run in Makhanda — opens this week at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. It's a curious and demanding play, one that works hard for the audience's attention, and requires intense listening. If you do fall under its spell, you're rewarded with insights you don't see coming. It also appeals to what Ratladi refers to as 'an African palate' — something that might just throw you off guard with its alternative imagining of an otherwise well-documented sliver of history. 'In my storytelling, it's never just entertainment,' he says. 'There's also advocacy, and there's a conversation.' And, yes, there's a potential provocation. Breakfast With Mugabe – Calvin Ratladi. (MARK WESSELS) In his work, he wants to take you somewhere you haven't been before, and it's not necessarily a comfortable place. When he created a performance about his father, a miner in his childhood home of Witbank, he says he imagined what it must be like to spend so much of one's life far beneath the surface of the earth. And that was the emotional journey he shared with his audience. In Breakfast With Mugabe , he uses a classically-shaped play to take the audience through the veil, to share insight into a realm of spiritual reckoning beyond the rational, and to drive home the dichotomy of two worlds co-existing. The play, written in 2005 by the Cambridge-based writer Fraser Grace, feels particularly poignant at a time when populist authoritarians are having a global moment. It is not a play about Mugabe's rise to power, though, but of a period during his rule when he is plagued by some manifestation, haunted by unresolved grief. And the play hints that what's generally ascribed to paranoia might be something quite different, something unknowable if viewed through a Eurocentric lens. The play has weighed on Ratladi since he first read it in 2016. He tried to produce it previously but couldn't raise the funding; he says it's not the kind of show that can be staged on the cheap. There have been passing thoughts, too, such as casting himself as Mugabe, with non-binary performance artist Albert Ibokwe Khoza in the role of Grace Mugabe. 'I wondered what it would have meant if I played Robert Mugabe with my body, to go against expectations, push boundaries.' His reference to 'my body' is an allusion to his small stature, an effect of kyphoscoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine which is chronic and incurable. Despite its effect on his physical health and on his ability to do some things most of us take for granted (like drive a car), the condition has not stood in the way of his focus on advocating — through storytelling — for a better world. Nonetheless, while his theatre work has earned him acclaim and has been even more widely embraced overseas, he's perhaps best known for his role as Goloza in Shaka iLembe , the popular television series that last month entered its second season on Mzansi Magic. While Ratladi has wanted to be a director since his early-20s, he says he has spent his career accidentally being cast in performing parts, a number of them created specifically for him — despite trying to avoid performing. He says just about everything he's ever acted in, including Shaka iLembe , 'came from coincidences'. Breakfast With Mugabe was no coincidence, though.'I love classics … Macbeth , King Lear , Miss Julie … I love them. And this seemed like a classical play to me, a big story with great depth.' Breakfast With Mugabe also grapples with ideas and themes that recur in works Ratladi has created. (Mark Wessels) It also grapples with ideas and themes that recur in works he's created. 'What seems to come up over and over in my work are issues of land, of memory, and of power. I found these issues paralleled in the play.' In the end, he cast Themba Ndaba as Mugabe and Gontse Ntshegang as Grace, with Craig Jackson as Dr Peric, the psychiatrist summoned to attend to the Zimbabwean president's mounting psychological torment. Ratladi says the play requires actors with stamina who can carry the weight of the drama, endure the heaviness, not to mention the many words. What you notice first about the play is the set, which suggests an almost violent collision between two worlds: a presidential living room imbued with all the trappings of modern Western existence and, surrounding it, a disconcerting African wasteland of dirt and rubble and shattered earth. It is as though some colonial edifice has been torn out of the earth. Discussing the design, Ratladi spoke of the fact that, growing up in a mining environment, this shattered landscape was his reality. 'I think it's what I grew up surrounded by — the mining industry. I grew up in the mines. So it's about the landscape I grew up with. That's what the set is.' The issue of the land — and the destructiveness of mining — is, of course, a key issue in any sort of post-colonial analysis of African history. And there's something elegiac about this part of the set. It's barely used, though, until — during a truly creepy and ethereal moment in the play — it dawns on you that it is a kind of spiritual wasteland. It's a realisation that shifts the play's entire axis of meaning. For Ratladi, the set's design visually and figuratively sets up the dichotomy that's at the heart of the play. 'There's the European side and there's the spiritual side in Africa.' In his sketches of the set, he says he referred to it as 'a split personality', which is something 'a lot of Africans have'. He says the set represents these dichotomies, such as the capacity to embrace African spirituality and Christianity. Ratladi says he was fascinated with the idea that 'what was being regarded as paranoia, a psychological issue in the play, for me was a spiritual issue — that's what I saw this figure of Mugabe actually grappling with as a person'. 'I think some audiences will come with a racial eye,' Ratladi says. 'It's hard not to, because there are so many triggers. Some will feel cheated, some will feel otherwise. For me, that's the conversation I'm trying to have with people. To discuss the fact that as much as Mugabe was so passionate about the land and taking it back, he's the same man who earned seven degrees while in prison, and who had embraced Western ways of thinking. He sought medical help in Europe rather than from the people around him.' Ratladi is interested in the paradoxes and in the possibilities those paradoxes open up. Which is why, when he looks into the story, it seems to him that 'there was a spiritual awakening that wasn't fully embraced — and it caused a lot of suffering'. 'I was interested in what's not in the media, and also not in the script. I was interested in where we might be missing parts of the story of this man about whom so much has been said and written.' He says that, as much as the work might have a political message, there is always a human element, always a personal story at the heart of the wider picture. A nation might be suffering, but what if the cause is a personal pain or affliction being experienced by the nation's leader? It's that dichotomy — between the public and personal story — that he's also interested in with this play. Ratladi says that is the power of theatre; to convey big ideas through a very personal, intimate and digestible story. You sit there in the dark for an hour or two and are not lectured to, but get to witness — and feel — another worldview. Breakfast with Mugabe plays at the Market Theatre from 16 July until 10 August.
CBC
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Acadictionnaire: A new, bilingual look into the ABCs of Acadian history
A first of its kind at Le Pays de La Sagouine, this 25-minute play takes audiences through the terms that represent Acadians for a crash course in the culture.
The Guardian
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Minnie Driver signs up for lead role as Every Brilliant Thing comes to West End
Minnie Driver has joined the list of stars performing Every Brilliant Thing – a play told by one actor with the help of almost the entire audience – in London's West End. The show opens next month at @sohoplace with Lenny Henry in the principal role; later it will be played by Sue Perkins, Ambika Mod and Jonny Donahoe, the comedian who presided over its triumphant run at the Edinburgh fringe in 2014 and far beyond. For Driver it marks a return to the venue where she performed White Rabbit Red Rabbit for one night last November. That theatrical experiment required a different actor to perform the play, sight unseen, each time. Driver, who shot to fame in the 1990s films Circle of Friends and Good Will Hunting, is no stranger to the London stage. In 2003 she starred in the West End alongside Matthew Perry in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Every Brilliant Thing, written by Duncan Macmillan with Donahoe, is based around a list created by the narrator to remind his mum, after her first suicide attempt, of everything that's worth living for. 'I have wanted to do a play in London again for the longest time,' said Driver. 'I didn't want to take on a big classical role, walk down a well-trodden path. I wanted to find something that would be new to a lot of audiences, that was both funny and sad and unique in its storytelling – something unusual that you'd talk about on the train home, think about the next day at work. I knew how I wanted it to make me feel, I just didn't know what it was. Then I read Duncan's play.' Driver said that 'the thought of doing a one-person show is like staring up at an enormous mountain that you're expected to free solo', but added that the play's 'clarity, humanity and humour struck me really deeply. I am terrified and excited in equal measure to tell this brilliant, beautiful story and to be in such a great company.' The play's run has now been extended to 8 November. It will be directed by Jeremy Herrin and Macmillan, marking the show's West End debut after being performed in more than 80 countries and adapted into a film.
