Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label theatre

Nicol Williamson Has Died

Sad news.  One of Eyewear's favourites, the gifted, troubled Nicol Williamson , the high-pitched thespian who played Merlin in the classic Excalibur (still wilder and more erotic than Game of Thrones ), and Sherlock Holmes in The Seven Percent Solution , has died of esophageal cancer in his mid-70s.  He will be missed. Nicol Williamson as Merlin

The Great English Play

I saw Jerusalem last night at the Apollo Theatre in London, just as it returns to London after its triumphant Broadway reincarnation, where lead Mark Rylance won the Tony for Best Actor, and where it was nominated for Best Play ( War Horse won by a nose).  The sense of excitement in the audience was palpable - Keira Knightly was in the row ahead of me, cuddling up to a handsome young man - it was that sort of vibe.  I came to the play without any sense of how good it was meant to be.  I was in fact a bit put off by the subject - a drunken Romany squatter - and thought it might be an angry State of England Play.  Instead, the last ten minutes are the most purely dramatic and moving I have ever experienced in the theatre, and I have seen hundreds of plays since I was a kid, in New York, Toronto, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon. Butting up against an extremely raw, ugly and authentic sense of a broken Britain of promiscuous, foul-mouthed, drug-addled youth, and an...

You Are Here: Poetry As Theatre

Colette Bryce, Daljit Nagra and Jo Shapcott , write emotional, complex, funny and engaging poems. Publishers, readers and prize judges alike love them. You Are Here is a new poetry show which brings the poets together on stage for a beautifully designed performance which asks Who are you? Where are you and where are you going? Poems pose the questions and whisper the answers. You Are Here is produced by Jaybird , the live literature production, promotion and management enterprise run by Julia Bird . (Julia also works part time for the Poetry School and recently published her own first collection of poetry). She says ‘I have worked as a poetry promoter for years, but I also have a love of theatrical sparkle and spectacle. When I produce live literature shows like You Are Here (and Tilting the Mirror with Jean Sprackland and Greta Stoddart previously) I am trying to find a way to introduce the pleasures and provocations of contemporary poetry to a theatre or arts centre audience....