Posts Tagged Theatre
Flyovers: the hot new venue
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 10, 2011
Forget parks and piazzas, the most fashionable destination could be hidden in your local underpass
Mention open-air cinema and images of parks, piazzas and country houses spring to mind. Now, though, you can add urban flyovers to this list.
Located in the undercroft where the A12 crosses the Lea Navigational Canal in East London, Folly for a Flyover is screening films every weekend until the end of the month. The unusual venue is certainly not picnic-hamper territory. But that hasn't deterred thousands of people from walking or cycling (despite its car-heavy location there is no parking) to watch movies from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to Tron as part of the arts festival CREATE.
Volunteers from Assemble, the team who last year turned a derelict Islington petrol station into a picture palace, have constructed a temporary building on the site, while screenings and performances will take place outside.
And it is far from the only event to be hidden in our underpasses. This month the pop-up street table tennis project PING! has chosen Spaghetti Junction as one of its Birmingham locations, while a few miles away jazz musician Soweto Kinch is finalising plans for the fourth Flyover Show, a live music event on 20 August under the A41 at Hockley Circus.
Kinch, who lives locally, wanted to reclaim the graffiti-covered space for public use. Organiser Clare Edwards admits the setting has technical challenges but there is an added bonus. When it rained last year "it was like being under a great big concrete umbrella".
Guardian young arts critic competition 2011: Our critics’ picks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 20, 2011
From an illicit Pixies gig to a Mesopotamian ziggurat, Guardian critics recall their biggest moment of inspiration in their respective fields
How to enter this year's competition
Pop: Alexis Petridis
Can any gig you see as a critic ever match the ones you saw as a teenager? Bizarrely, going to a gig when I was 17 was harder work than writing reviews has ever been. It involved not merely getting to London, but lying to my parents about where I was going, lying to my friend's parents about where my parents thought I was going, bunking off school, and then convincing somebody who looked 18 to go to the bar on my behalf.
But none of that mattered the night I saw the Pixies supported by My Bloody Valentine, in September 1988. It's not every night you see arguably the two most important guitar bands of the era on the same stage at the peak of their powers: the Pixies had just released their incredible second album, Surfer Rosa, while My Bloody Valentine had released the astonishing single You Made Me Realise.
It says something about the pre-internet age that, before they walked on, I had no idea what the Pixies looked like. I didn't expect the guy who sang all those dark songs about sex and violence to be chubby and balding. This was nothing compared to the shock of their sound: a ceaseless roar, with the next song starting as the last chord of the previous one was still dying away.
I remember that gig in snapshots. Two roadies having to hold on to My Bloody Valentine's drumkit as Colm O'Cíosóig hit it with such ferocity that it started moving across the stage. The Pixies performing Hey, a song so self-evidently filthy it seemed to have been beamed in from another world. But most of all, I remember feeling more excited than I'd ever been in my life. You could argue that my career has involved chasing that feeling ever since.
Visual art: Adrian Searle
The first serious art exhibition I ever saw was on a school trip to Goya and His Times at London's Royal Academy in 1963. I have seen many Goya shows since and think I know his art well, but he always surprises me, even when I look at paintings I have known for most of my life. How time flies.
I can't say this was the best show, or even the best Goya show, I have ever seen. I was, after all, only 10. But I remember being struck by Goya's weirdness: the distorted faces of the Spanish royal family, the isolated, looming figure of the Duchess of Alba (Goya's lover), the strange skies. Decades later, I saw that the clouds over Madrid often look like old, torn tapestries.
I must have about 20 books about Goya now, including the tiny paperback I bought at the time. It's a useless book – pictures too small, colours all wrong – but I kept it. Another book is Goya's Last Portrait, a play by the critic John Berger. A few years ago, Berger and I had a long talk about that dog Goya painted, the one that could be drowning in quicksand or might just be sticking his nose up over a hill to sniff the sky.
I remember wondering why Goya's paintings meant so much to me when I knew nothing about art and had never been anywhere, least of all to Madrid. Maybe that show only became important later, because of things that happened in my life. Many roads lead back to a kid looking at Goya and understanding nothing.
Classical music: Erica Jeal
It was 10 years ago, but I remember it better than things I heard last week. The Alban Berg Quartet and the cellist Heinrich Schiff were playing Schubert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: the String Quintet in C, the one with two cellos and the glorious first-movement melody that begins again and again, as if the composer couldn't bear to let it go.
A few minutes in, I knew this performance was different from any I'd heard before. Then I realised why. It was all coloured by death, every note. Something in the Alban Berg's playing made it obvious: Schubert, at 31, knew he was dying, and had composed a love letter to the world that was as sweet as it was sincere, full of anguish, acceptance, anger and serenity. I wondered if I was just a bit strung out: perhaps I was the only one experiencing it this way. But at the end, the usually reserved QEH audience was on its feet.
There are few things more depressing than a performance of a work you love that leaves you cold. But there is nothing more exciting than hearing a musician, or an orchestra, take something you thought you knew, and make you realise there is still more to fall in love with. I felt that way hearing Iván Fischer conduct the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in January this year. I felt that way in 2003, when I heard veteran tenor Peter Schreier sing a searing Die Schöne Müllerin, somehow bringing an old man's wisdom to a young man's tale.
That was Schubert again. I'm starting to suspect that Schubert understood everything there was to know about the world, and that the answers to all life's big questions might be found in his music. I haven't uncovered them yet, but I'm still listening.
Architecture: Jonathan Glancey
For as long as I can remember, right back to when I was a teenager trying to piece together the story of architecture, the ziggurat at Eridu had been a presence in my life. I was haunted by the thought that somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia, today's southern Iraq, there lay, in ruins and largely hidden under sand, what might be the world's first monumental building: the mother of all architecture in the world's first metropolis.
I finally got to Eridu just months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow I had persuaded the right people to let me go, and a platoon of Saddam's soldiers now escorted me along routes flanked by unexploded munitions dating from the first Gulf war. The heat was intense: 50 degrees. On the way, we stopped to climb the ziggurat of Ur, walking the site's excavated streets in the zig-zagging shadow of the great pyramid.
When we reached Eridu, the young soldiers were as excited as I was. We almost fell on the sands. It was thrilling to palm them away and find the stepped form of its crumpled ziggurat, built and rebuilt over thousands of years. There was a lake here once, and marshes. Eridu, founded in 5,400BC, was a sacred place for millennia until finally being abandoned in the 7th century AD. In 1949, excavations were undertaken, but it became a no-go zone after the first Gulf war.
At the same time as those excavations were taking place, Le Corbusier was designing his astonishing Unité d'Habitation, a block of flats in Marseilles. Although ultra-modern, this building also managed to be as elemental in form and as ancient in spirit. Great architecture connects with the past and pushes into the future.
Film: Peter Bradshaw
In my time as a critic, there have been many films that have made me want to punch the air with joy (and a few that made me want to punch a brick wall). But the film that I come back to, over and over, is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, a beautiful, sad, sexy, mysterious movie that came out in 2000, when I'd been in this job for less than a year.
The premise is simple enough. The scene is 1960s Hong Kong, and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play neighbours who discover their spouses are having an affair. The realisation gives them a kind of intimacy: they have a tragic, erotic quasi-affair of their own. It is electrifying. Leung's desperate sadness is something he cannot admit to anyone, and the final sequence, in which he "confesses" it secretly to himself, is heartbreaking.
So many mainstream films have everything signposted and underlined, leaving no doubt as to what you are supposed to think and feel. In The Mood For Love demands you notice nuances and subtlety; you have to exert yourself to see, really see, what Wong is doing.
Theatre: Michael Billington
The toughest challenge for a theatre critic, and the greatest excitement, comes from responding to something new. How to describe, interpret and evaluate a play that expands the frontiers of drama? My mind goes back to a night in April 1975, when I reviewed the first performance of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic.
I knew something about Pinter, having seen The Homecoming, The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. But I'd never reviewed a Pinter premiere, and this one had the smell of a big occasion: a production starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud.
I know I got some things wrong. At one point, Hirst (Richardson) engages in a prolonged reminiscence with Spooner (Gielgud). I took that as genuine rather than a parodic fantasy. But I did intuit that the play was a reflection of Pinter's own fears: that Spooner, the shabby minor poet, was the man he might have been; and Hirst, the literary celebrity cut off from life, was the figure he was terrified of becoming.
What I remember above all is the crackling comic vitality and sombre poetry of Pinter's language. In the mouths of Richardson, who was all spring-heeled ebullience, and Gielgud, who looked like some seedy, downmarket WH Auden, Pinter's phrases bounced off the walls like a ball in a squash court. In the play's overpowering final moments, one had a sense of Hirst starting to crawl unburdened towards death. Or, at least, to what Pinter poignantly calls a no man's land "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains for ever, icy and silent". That struck me as theatrical poetry at its best: distilled, precise, yet infinitely mysterious.
Trying to pin down a Pinter play at first sight was exhilarating, like stepping into a ring with a champion boxer: one ran the risk of being knocked out.
Dance: Judith Mackrell
It was a Royal Ballet matinee in April 2001, and the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling: I realised I was witnessing the start of one of the great careers. Alina Cojocaru was just 19 and performing her first Giselle, a role that challenges even the most experienced ballerinas. In act one, she has to play a naive peasant girl, her heart broken by the aristocratic love rat Albrecht; in act two, she is a ghost, her dancing as transparent as air. Cojocaru did more than dance both roles with mesmerising beauty: she made you believe she had performed Giselle in some other, previous life.
I have seen more technically brilliant performances (although in act two, Cojocaru's dancing was so eerily exquisite, her feet barely seemed to touch the floor), but I have never seen a dancer live the role with such intensity. In the mad scene that leads to Giselle's death, Cojocaru's body looked so broken with pain you weren't sure she was acting.
Other great productions I have seen would include Les Noces, created by Bronislava Nijinska back in 1923 with a visual, emotional and musical power that blows your head off; Mark Morris's fierce Dido and Aeneas, with himself as the lead; Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, a dance to death on a stage covered with black earth; and Frederick Ashton's poetically exact Scènes de Ballet.
The best moments I have as a critic are when I forget I'm working, when nothing I know has prepared me for what I'm experiencing. As I wrote on that extraordinary day back in 2001: "You felt that flukey thrill of being in exactly the right place at the right time."
TV: Sam Wollaston
The best thing I've ever watched on TV? That's impossible. If you're including drama, news, sport, documentary, comedy, everything, how can you possibly say which is better: news coverage of the twin towers coming down (extraordinary but hardly "good") or series four of The Wire (extraordinary, but less important in terms of changing the world)? Then there's Mad Men, The West Wing, The Thick of It, Ali G, The Office. And Big Brother's first series, when Nasty Nick was kicked out, because it changed television for ever. No, I don't dare pick that – too scared of the flak.
I'm going for Seven Up on ITV. Or 49 Up, as the last instalment, in 2005, was called. Back in 1964, 12 seven-year-olds from a wide range of backgrounds told film-maker Michael Apted what they wanted and expected out of life. Every seven years, Apted has been back to check on them. We've seen them grow up, become adults, fall in love, start careers, get married, have children, succeed, fail, despair, get more posh, get less posh, become Australian, have grandchildren.
It's been an extraordinary journey, a social history of this country: we've seen how attitudes to class, work and family have changed, along with clothes and hairstyles. But it's also, more importantly, the story of 12 individuals. This is real reality TV, touching, sad and funny – and about as important as television gets.
• This article was amended on 20 June 2011. The original stated that 49 Up was in 1995
Guardian young arts critic competition 2011: Our critics’ picks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 20, 2011
From an illicit Pixies gig to a Mesopotamian ziggurat, Guardian critics recall their biggest moment of inspiration in their respective fields
How to enter this year's competition
Pop: Alexis Petridis
Can any gig you see as a critic ever match the ones you saw as a teenager? Bizarrely, going to a gig when I was 17 was harder work than writing reviews has ever been. It involved not merely getting to London, but lying to my parents about where I was going, lying to my friend's parents about where my parents thought I was going, bunking off school, and then convincing somebody who looked 18 to go to the bar on my behalf.
But none of that mattered the night I saw the Pixies supported by My Bloody Valentine, in September 1988. It's not every night you see arguably the two most important guitar bands of the era on the same stage at the peak of their powers: the Pixies had just released their incredible second album, Surfer Rosa, while My Bloody Valentine had released the astonishing single You Made Me Realise.
It says something about the pre-internet age that, before they walked on, I had no idea what the Pixies looked like. I didn't expect the guy who sang all those dark songs about sex and violence to be chubby and balding. This was nothing compared to the shock of their sound: a ceaseless roar, with the next song starting as the last chord of the previous one was still dying away.
I remember that gig in snapshots. Two roadies having to hold on to My Bloody Valentine's drumkit as Colm O'Cíosóig hit it with such ferocity that it started moving across the stage. The Pixies performing Hey, a song so self-evidently filthy it seemed to have been beamed in from another world. But most of all, I remember feeling more excited than I'd ever been in my life. You could argue that my career has involved chasing that feeling ever since.
Visual art: Adrian Searle
The first serious art exhibition I ever saw was on a school trip to Goya and His Times at London's Royal Academy in 1963. I have seen many Goya shows since and think I know his art well, but he always surprises me, even when I look at paintings I have known for most of my life. How time flies.
I can't say this was the best show, or even the best Goya show, I have ever seen. I was, after all, only 10. But I remember being struck by Goya's weirdness: the distorted faces of the Spanish royal family, the isolated, looming figure of the Duchess of Alba (Goya's lover), the strange skies. Decades later, I saw that the clouds over Madrid often look like old, torn tapestries.
I must have about 20 books about Goya now, including the tiny paperback I bought at the time. It's a useless book – pictures too small, colours all wrong – but I kept it. Another book is Goya's Last Portrait, a play by the critic John Berger. A few years ago, Berger and I had a long talk about that dog Goya painted, the one that could be drowning in quicksand or might just be sticking his nose up over a hill to sniff the sky.
I remember wondering why Goya's paintings meant so much to me when I knew nothing about art and had never been anywhere, least of all to Madrid. Maybe that show only became important later, because of things that happened in my life. Many roads lead back to a kid looking at Goya and understanding nothing.
Classical music: Erica Jeal
It was 10 years ago, but I remember it better than things I heard last week. The Alban Berg Quartet and the cellist Heinrich Schiff were playing Schubert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: the String Quintet in C, the one with two cellos and the glorious first-movement melody that begins again and again, as if the composer couldn't bear to let it go.
A few minutes in, I knew this performance was different from any I'd heard before. Then I realised why. It was all coloured by death, every note. Something in the Alban Berg's playing made it obvious: Schubert, at 31, knew he was dying, and had composed a love letter to the world that was as sweet as it was sincere, full of anguish, acceptance, anger and serenity. I wondered if I was just a bit strung out: perhaps I was the only one experiencing it this way. But at the end, the usually reserved QEH audience was on its feet.
There are few things more depressing than a performance of a work you love that leaves you cold. But there is nothing more exciting than hearing a musician, or an orchestra, take something you thought you knew, and make you realise there is still more to fall in love with. I felt that way hearing Iván Fischer conduct the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in January this year. I felt that way in 2003, when I heard veteran tenor Peter Schreier sing a searing Die Schöne Müllerin, somehow bringing an old man's wisdom to a young man's tale.
That was Schubert again. I'm starting to suspect that Schubert understood everything there was to know about the world, and that the answers to all life's big questions might be found in his music. I haven't uncovered them yet, but I'm still listening.
Architecture: Jonathan Glancey
For as long as I can remember, right back to when I was a teenager trying to piece together the story of architecture, the ziggurat at Eridu had been a presence in my life. I was haunted by the thought that somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia, today's southern Iraq, there lay, in ruins and largely hidden under sand, what might be the world's first monumental building: the mother of all architecture in the world's first metropolis.
I finally got to Eridu just months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow I had persuaded the right people to let me go, and a platoon of Saddam's soldiers now escorted me along routes flanked by unexploded munitions dating from the first Gulf war. The heat was intense: 50 degrees. On the way, we stopped to climb the ziggurat of Ur, walking the site's excavated streets in the zig-zagging shadow of the great pyramid.
When we reached Eridu, the young soldiers were as excited as I was. We almost fell on the sands. It was thrilling to palm them away and find the stepped form of its crumpled ziggurat, built and rebuilt over thousands of years. There was a lake here once, and marshes. Eridu, founded in 5,400BC, was a sacred place for millennia until finally being abandoned in the 7th century AD. In 1949, excavations were undertaken, but it became a no-go zone after the first Gulf war.
At the same time as those excavations were taking place, Le Corbusier was designing his astonishing Unité d'Habitation, a block of flats in Marseilles. Although ultra-modern, this building also managed to be as elemental in form and as ancient in spirit. Great architecture connects with the past and pushes into the future.
Film: Peter Bradshaw
In my time as a critic, there have been many films that have made me want to punch the air with joy (and a few that made me want to punch a brick wall). But the film that I come back to, over and over, is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, a beautiful, sad, sexy, mysterious movie that came out in 2000, when I'd been in this job for less than a year.
The premise is simple enough. The scene is 1960s Hong Kong, and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play neighbours who discover their spouses are having an affair. The realisation gives them a kind of intimacy: they have a tragic, erotic quasi-affair of their own. It is electrifying. Leung's desperate sadness is something he cannot admit to anyone, and the final sequence, in which he "confesses" it secretly to himself, is heartbreaking.
So many mainstream films have everything signposted and underlined, leaving no doubt as to what you are supposed to think and feel. In The Mood For Love demands you notice nuances and subtlety; you have to exert yourself to see, really see, what Wong is doing.
Theatre: Michael Billington
The toughest challenge for a theatre critic, and the greatest excitement, comes from responding to something new. How to describe, interpret and evaluate a play that expands the frontiers of drama? My mind goes back to a night in April 1975, when I reviewed the first performance of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic.
I knew something about Pinter, having seen The Homecoming, The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. But I'd never reviewed a Pinter premiere, and this one had the smell of a big occasion: a production starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud.
I know I got some things wrong. At one point, Hirst (Richardson) engages in a prolonged reminiscence with Spooner (Gielgud). I took that as genuine rather than a parodic fantasy. But I did intuit that the play was a reflection of Pinter's own fears: that Spooner, the shabby minor poet, was the man he might have been; and Hirst, the literary celebrity cut off from life, was the figure he was terrified of becoming.
What I remember above all is the crackling comic vitality and sombre poetry of Pinter's language. In the mouths of Richardson, who was all spring-heeled ebullience, and Gielgud, who looked like some seedy, downmarket WH Auden, Pinter's phrases bounced off the walls like a ball in a squash court. In the play's overpowering final moments, one had a sense of Hirst starting to crawl unburdened towards death. Or, at least, to what Pinter poignantly calls a no man's land "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains for ever, icy and silent". That struck me as theatrical poetry at its best: distilled, precise, yet infinitely mysterious.
Trying to pin down a Pinter play at first sight was exhilarating, like stepping into a ring with a champion boxer: one ran the risk of being knocked out.
Dance: Judith Mackrell
It was a Royal Ballet matinee in April 2001, and the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling: I realised I was witnessing the start of one of the great careers. Alina Cojocaru was just 19 and performing her first Giselle, a role that challenges even the most experienced ballerinas. In act one, she has to play a naive peasant girl, her heart broken by the aristocratic love rat Albrecht; in act two, she is a ghost, her dancing as transparent as air. Cojocaru did more than dance both roles with mesmerising beauty: she made you believe she had performed Giselle in some other, previous life.
I have seen more technically brilliant performances (although in act two, Cojocaru's dancing was so eerily exquisite, her feet barely seemed to touch the floor), but I have never seen a dancer live the role with such intensity. In the mad scene that leads to Giselle's death, Cojocaru's body looked so broken with pain you weren't sure she was acting.
Other great productions I have seen would include Les Noces, created by Bronislava Nijinska back in 1923 with a visual, emotional and musical power that blows your head off; Mark Morris's fierce Dido and Aeneas, with himself as the lead; Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, a dance to death on a stage covered with black earth; and Frederick Ashton's poetically exact Scènes de Ballet.
The best moments I have as a critic are when I forget I'm working, when nothing I know has prepared me for what I'm experiencing. As I wrote on that extraordinary day back in 2001: "You felt that flukey thrill of being in exactly the right place at the right time."
TV: Sam Wollaston
The best thing I've ever watched on TV? That's impossible. If you're including drama, news, sport, documentary, comedy, everything, how can you possibly say which is better: news coverage of the twin towers coming down (extraordinary but hardly "good") or series four of The Wire (extraordinary, but less important in terms of changing the world)? Then there's Mad Men, The West Wing, The Thick of It, Ali G, The Office. And Big Brother's first series, when Nasty Nick was kicked out, because it changed television for ever. No, I don't dare pick that – too scared of the flak.
I'm going for Seven Up on ITV. Or 49 Up, as the last instalment, in 2005, was called. Back in 1964, 12 seven-year-olds from a wide range of backgrounds told film-maker Michael Apted what they wanted and expected out of life. Every seven years, Apted has been back to check on them. We've seen them grow up, become adults, fall in love, start careers, get married, have children, succeed, fail, despair, get more posh, get less posh, become Australian, have grandchildren.
It's been an extraordinary journey, a social history of this country: we've seen how attitudes to class, work and family have changed, along with clothes and hairstyles. But it's also, more importantly, the story of 12 individuals. This is real reality TV, touching, sad and funny – and about as important as television gets.
• This article was amended on 20 June 2011. The original stated that 49 Up was in 1995
The Observer Summer Arts Calendar
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 30, 2011
Our critics pick the season's highlights: From Lady Gaga to Harry Potter, Coppélia to Tony Cragg, this summer has something for all
MAY
4 FILM The Tree of Life
The much-delayed fifth feature from director Terrence Malick, snapped up by Icon for UK release ahead of its Cannes showing, is a multi-generational drama featuring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn – and, reportedly, dinosaurs.
5 CLASSICAL From the House of the Dead
Opera North's production of Janáek's final work, directed by John Fulljames and conducted by Richard Farnes. Stars Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Alan Oke and Roderick Williams. Leeds and touring
DANCE By Singing Light/Romance Inverse
National Dance Company of Wales bring Stephen Petronio and Itzik Galili's arresting double bill to Dance City in Newcastle, with the former set to the poetry of Dylan Thomas.
6 THEATRE Shrek
Nigel Lindsay plays the lime-coloured, lovelorn ogre, with Amanda Holden as Princess Fiona and Nigel Harman as Lord Farquaad, in this Anglo-American production at Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
CLASSICAL The Damnation of Faust
Ex-Python Terry Gilliam takes on the devil as director of this ENO staging of Berlioz's masterpiece, conducted by Edward Gardner and starring Peter Hoare, Christine Rice and Christopher Purves.
7 CLASSICAL Steve Reich at 75
UK premiere of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, part of the two-day Reverberations festival at the Barbican. Then toured by the Kronos Quartet in Glasgow (13 May) and Norwich (17 May).
10 THEATRE The Cherry Orchard
Zoe Wanamaker stars; Howard Davies, who has excelled in the staging of Russian drama, directs in the National's Olivier, with a design by Bunny Christie and a translation by Andrew Upton.
11 FILM Cannes film festival
Robert De Niro heads the jury at Cannes this year, casting his eye over eagerly awaited films by Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, Lynne Ramsay and Woody Allen, whose Midnight in Paris opens the competition.
13 DANCE Royal Ballet
The season's penultimate triple bill at the ROH includes the Royal Ballet premiere of Balanchine's Ballo della regina and a new work, Live Fire Exercise, from Wayne McGregor, set to a score by Sir Michael Tippett.
FILM Attack the Block
The debut feature from Joe Cornish, of Adam and Joe fame. A "hoodie horror" about aliens landing in south London and teenage gangs uniting to fight them.
14 ART Tate St Ives
Treats at the Cornish gallery's Summer Exhibition include late paintings by Agnes Martin, installations by Martin Creed and sculpture by Naum Gabo.
16 POP Kate Bush: Director's Cut
While fans await an album of new material, the fabulously eccentric Bush has chosen to rework a selection of older songs: "The Sensual World" gains a new title and lyrics from Ulysses.
THEATRE Much Ado About Nothing
Hotly anticipated. David Tennant and Catherine Tate play the sparring lovers at Wyndham's in London. They are directed by Josie Rourke, who takes over as artistic director of the Donmar next year.
18 ART Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want
Tracey Emin needs no introduction, and quite possibly no huge solo retrospective, but this show of sculptures, photographs, films and drawings at the South Bank's Hayward Gallery will no doubt thrill her fans and infuriate her detractors alike.
19 THEATRE Lord of the Flies
William Golding's savage fable, adapted by Nigel Williams, plays in the open air until 18 June at Regent's Park theatre, which is enjoying its most imaginative era for decades.
21 ARCHITECTURE The Hepworth Gallery
The second David Chipperfield-designed gallery in two months. The Hepworth promises to be as good as the first, the Turner Contemporary in Margate. No beach in Wakefield, but a fine permanent collection of Barbara Hepworth's sculpture.
23 POP Lady Gaga: Born This Way
Two taster tracks have overtly recalled Madonna, both musically ("Born This Way") and irreligiously ("Judas"). But the proper follow-up to Monster remains this year's most eagerly awaited pop release.
27 POP Take That
Britain's best-loved manband have sold out 27 nights at the UK's vastest stadiums, with the Pet Shop Boys supporting.
JUNE
2 DANCE Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde!
Dave St-Pierre is the enfant terrible of Canadian dance and has provoked comparisons with Pina Bausch. In this production at Sadler's Wells, his 20 performers are literally and figuratively stripped naked.
3 ART The Government Art Collection
Discover which works of art your government owns; which Lowrys, Turners and Bridget Rileys hang in Downing Street. All is revealed at the Whitechapel Gallery.
4 ART Venice Biennale
Quite simply the most important international art event in the world; 82 artists in the official Giardini pavilions, with many more off site at the Arsenale. Until 27 November.
7 ARCHITECTURE Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Usually less stuffy than its art counterpart; curated this year by a stylistic odd couple of the flamboyant postmodernist Piers Gough and the more restrained Alan Stanton.
8 DANCE Coppélia
Peter Wright's production of Coppélia with the Birmingham Royal Ballet is a funny, occasionally spooky, family ballet, set to Delibes's irresistible score. At the Lowry, Manchester, and touring.
10 POP Meltdown
Former Kink Ray Davies is this year's curator at the South Bank, recreating 60s TV show Ready Steady Go!, and springing surprises such as the Fugs. But will the Kinks reform?
CLASSICAL Aldeburgh festival
Opens with Simon Rattle and the CBSO. Premieres by Elliott Carter and Harrison Birtwistle , as well as Netia Jones's site-specific Everlasting Light, set in Sizewell. Runs until 26 June.
15 FILM Edinburgh film festival
Instead of an artistic director, EIFF has appointed guest curators, including Isabella Rossellini and Gus van Sant, who should make this year's event particularly interesting.
21 ARCHITECTURE Transport Museum Glasgow
Zaha Hadid now has several UK works to her name, but this will be her biggest public work to date, pending completion of the Olympic aquatic centre.
22 THEATRE Ghost: the musical
Matthew Warchus's production of the 1990 movie moves from Manchester to London's Piccadilly, with music by Dave Stewart. Stars Richard Fleeshman.
POP Glastonbury festival
Barring any mishaps, U2 finally lead the charge at Worthy Farm, with Beyoncé, Coldplay, the Chemical Brothers and Morrissey providing backup. NB: Dengue Fever are a band on the bill, not this year's health scare.
24 CLASSICAL Two Boys
ENO premiere of Nico Muhly's co-production with the New York Metropolitan Opera about a teenage stabbing. With a libretto by Craig Lucas, directed by Bartlett Sher and conducted by Rumon Gamba.
FILM The First Grader
When the Kenyan government introduces free primary schooling, a former Mau Mau fighter, now in his 80s, applies for an education. Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl) directs, Naomie Harris co-stars in this British film which won an audience award at Tribeca.
ART Magritte: The Pleasure Principle
Still the best of the surrealists, with this first show in a generation focusing on eroticism, visual revelation and the influence of commercial design. More than 100 paintings at Tate Liverpool.
FILM Bridesmaids
In this female riposte to the stag-party-gone-wrong subgenre, produced by Judd Apatow, Saturday Night Live regular Kristen Wiig (who co-wrote the script) plays a lovelorn maid of honour ill-equipped to organise her best friend's pre-wedding rituals.
29 POP Arcade Fire
First, the Texan/Haitian/Canadian indie wunderkinder took London's O2 Arena. Now, they are taking Hyde Park, with help from Mumford & Sons, Beirut and the Vaccines.
30 ART Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography
Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy: more than 200 works showing the astonishing impact of this single country on photojournalism, documentary, fashion and art photography. At the Royal Academy until 2 October.
THEATRE Manchester international festival
The flourishing festival will include Robert Wilson's The Life and Death of Marina Abramović and Victoria Wood's The Day We Sang, inspired by Manchester Children's Choir. Runs until 17 July.
JULY
1 ARCHITECTURE Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
Every year the Serpentine asks a famous architect to design the gallery a temporary pavilion. This year it has lured Peter Zumthor out of his Alpine lair.
3 POP Ke$ha
America's second-most outrageous starlet is back on our shores. Ke$ha's Get $leazy world tour is oversexed and over here until 13 July.
5 DANCE Sylvie Guillem
New contemporary works by William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián performed by the celebrated ballerina. Essential. To 9 July at Sadler's Wells.
6 ART Thomas Struth
One of Germany's most praised photo artists comes to Whitechapel Art Gallery. Includes the celebrated Museum series and recent installations of Cape Canavarel and the Korean shipyards.
7 ART Glamour of the Gods
Hollywood portraiture from the industry's golden age, 1920-60. From Greta Garbo to Audrey Hepburn, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe: portraits that transformed actors into international style icons. At the National Portrait Gallery.
8 THEATRE Double Feature
Four new plays by Sam Holcroft, DC Moore, Prasanna Puwanarajah and Tom Basden - all writers new to the National Theatre - are staged by a new ensemble in the Cottesloe.
FILM Jack Goes Boating
Philip Seymour Hoffman makes his directorial debut and stars in this tale of lost souls and confused love lives in snow-bound New York. It's based on a 2007 play in which he also appeared.
12 THEATRE A Woman Killed With Kindness
In what promises to be a radical production, Katie Mitchell directs Thomas Heywood's celebrated but rarely seen play. The domestic tragedy, written in 1603, will be staged in the National's Lyttelton.
15 FILM The Deathly Hallows: Part Two
After 10 years the Harry Potter franchise reaches its denouement with a film set to keep box-offices busy.
CLASSICAL The Proms
The BBC Proms opening fortnight includes Havergal Brian's mammoth "Gothic" symphony, new conductor Juanjo Mena, soloist Steven Osborne and pianist Lang Lang. To 10 September.
POP POP Latitude
The headliners may be iffy – the National and Paolo Nutini – but Latitude in Suffolk is a sublime antidote to the mud and mayhem of other festivals. And Alan Hollinghurst is in the Lit Tent.
POP Snoop Dogg
The lazy drawl of Calvin Broadus has long been eclipsed by the rapper's multiplatform media career. It's worth savouring, as he performs 1993's Doggystyle at Manchester international festival and Lovebox Weekender.
20 DANCE Roland Petit
Triple bill of works by the French choreographer, Margot Fonteyn's lover and husband of Zizi Jeanmaire. Includes the sexy, existentialist Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. ENB at the Coliseum.
FILM Nader and Simin, A Separation
Winner of the Golden Bear award at Berlin in February, Asghar Farhadi's fine film explores class tensions in present-day Iran as a middle-class couple on the verge of separation battle over the care of an elderly relative.
26 CLASSICAL St Endellion festival
An ambitious festival in north Cornwall (stars perform for no fee). Includes Wagner's Die Walkure with Susan Bullock (30 July), which then goes to Truro's Hall for Cornwall (2 Aug).
POP Womad
Womad's organisers are on solid ground with headliners such as Baaba Maal and Rodrigo y Gabriela, but the splendour of Womad is always in the discovering.
29 FILM Horrid Henry
The popular series of children's books about a troublesome pre-teen gets the 3D treatment, with Theo Stevenson as Henry, and Anjelica Huston and Richard E Grant among the adults.
30 ART Tony Cragg
Huge retrospective for Tony Cragg, senior British sculptor, with an emphasis on the cast-art of the last decade. At the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to 6 November.
To see a PDF of the page as it appeared in the print edition click here
Lyric theatre, Belfast – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 16, 2011
The revamped Lyric theatre in Belfast is a lesson in how buildings should be built, with plenty of 'creases'
I didn't think buildings were made like this any more. Some architects win a competition with a design that responds to purpose and place and makes of them a thing of three dimensions, worked out in its planning and details. Following due adaptation to budget and function, the thing is then built. Builders put together materials in the ways proposed and drawn by the architects, even when these ways are a little more challenging than the plainest, bluntest methods of construction. The builders use their heads and hands to realise what is important about the design and sometimes lend their knowledge to improve it.
This is a description of architecture, traditionally considered. More often, it now goes like this: an architect has a "vision" or a "design concept" whose essential details are then ground down until they suit the most efficient processes of construction. Oblique lines and irregular angles get straightened out and conjunctions of different materials, which might require a little thought to realise, are avoided. The building becomes an assembly of "packages" – glass, concrete, steel, cladding – rather than a coherent whole. The architect's signature flourishes will remain, but deep down the building will be very like all the others built in the same way.
The Lyric theatre in Belfast, however, does things the old-fashioned way. It started life 60 years ago in the window recess of the consulting room of a neurologist, Dr Pearse O'Malley, and his wife, Mary, who held verse plays there. It then occupied a converted stable loft and, from 1968, a new building which, through shortage of funds, lacked such things as rehearsal rooms and offices and whose dressing rooms and toilets were in portable buildings.
It kept going through the Troubles, when other performance spaces closed, and served as a neutral, non-aligned space in a divided city. The Lyric is now Northern Ireland's only full-time producing theatre. Its building was loved, but when water started cascading through gaps in the roof, the need for a replacement became pressing. A design competition was held and won by Dublin architects O'Donnell and Tuomey.
The theatre stands on the edge of Belfast's centre. The site is sloping and irregular, with small redbrick houses on one side, and a lush, green sweep of the river Lagan on the other. The new building includes an enlarged auditorium of 390 seats, an experimental studio space and a large rehearsal room.
What the architects have created is a three-dimensional wander between these three main spaces, across several different levels, compressed into an angular brick shape that echoes both the little houses and the craggy geology that surrounds the city. John Tuomey romantically describes this arrangement as "rocks in a river", while saying that "Belfast is a pointy kind of place, not rounded", to which his angular design also responds.
From time to time views are presented of trees and river and back to the city of Belfast. The building has many of what Tuomey calls "creases": kinks and angles that encourage unexpected connections between people, that make, he says, "a space between ourselves" and "make people aware of one another".
It culminates in the auditorium, an asymmetric arrangement of banks of seating whose purpose is to present actors with the audience, rather than axial lines of aisles. Boxes are added to the walls not for the sake of capacity – they add a grand total of 12 seats – but to "populate" the walls, to "make them feel lived in". Tuomey compares the terraced interior to "vineyards", which is how architect Hans Scharoun described the magnificent interior of his Philharmonie concert hall in Berlin.
There is much brick and daylight and views of trees, which gives the theatre a 1960s Scandinavian feel. As theatre is a thing of darkness and artifice, the building risks being too wholesome for its own good, yet it still feels convincingly theatrical. The multiple views from one level to another have something to do with this, as does the interior of the auditorium which, lined with dark, faceted wood, is more intense and otherworldly than the rest of the building. All this is combined into what Tuomey calls "one house" – in other words a place where barriers between front and back, and between actors, audience and support staff, are kept to a minimum.
Architects love to spiel, and Tuomey has a greater gift for the poetic turn of phrase than most, but he is almost entirely believable. This really does feel like a place that will bring together the multiple lives of the people who work in it and visit it. The things he says about "making people aware of one another" are more than just talk.
He is believable because the words are not an applique of verbiage to a standard product, but are translated into the space and stuff of building. And the building is a thing made, rather than assembled. It is a work of craft rather than process; joinery, not flatpack. The Lyric has one or two awkwardnesses, and there may be more spectacular or adventurous buildings finished this year, but it is a job very well done.
Shakespeare: Stratford. London. Gdańsk?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 5, 2011
Four centuries on, Poland is rebuilding its Shakespearean theatre
In a wind-blasted former car park outside Gdańsk's historic city centre, Professor Jerzy Limon is marking out a theatre. "The main stage," Limon says, indicating the rubble-strewn ground, "will be here, and the box stage here." We both squint at a perilous-looking ditch. "The audience sits there."
We're having to use our imaginations, but in just over two years' time this nondescript corner will be transformed into a £20m theatre designed by architect Renato Rizzi, which will be home to the city's annual Shakespeare festival – one of the world's largest – as well as a year-round programme.
But the really fascinating thing about the site where we are standing is its past. Just a few metres below our feet lie the remains of another theatre, this one four centuries old. Remarkably, it was built not for Polish actors, but for English ones, making Gdańsk the site of the only Shakespearian playhouse to have been constructed outside England during the Bard's lifetime.
Limon, 60, who teaches at the University of Gdańsk, relates the tale over lunch. "During Shakespeare's time, competition between theatre companies was growing, and many actors found themselves unemployed. So they travelled." From the 1580s onwards, English troupes – initially performing in their native tongue, then offering German translations of plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare and many others – acted in Leiden, Frankfurt, Vienna, Prague, even reaching Riga in winter 1647 (they wrote to the authorities moaning about the snow). A troupe performed at Helsingør (Elsinore) in 1586, raising the intriguing possibility that Shakespeare heard about the setting for Hamlet from colleagues who had seen it firsthand.
They also visited Danzig (Gdańsk), then one of the wealthiest cities in Europe. Actors first arrived as early as 1587, and continued coming until the 1650s; after about 1600 they performed in their own purpose-built playhouse, modelled on the Elizabethan Fortune theatre in London. "Spreading culture was not the aim," explains Limon. "But English drama percolated around Europe. Poland became a haven."
Wandering among Gdańsk's meticulously restored townhouses, you find marks of this intriguing theatrical past. Next to an ornate Renaissance gate, the hall where the "English comedians" first acted still stands. But the theatre was lost: probably destroyed in the early 19th century, its site reused for a synagogue, then, after the Nazi occupation, for housing. More recently it performed the exalted role of car park for the ABW, the Polish MI5. The idea of restoring it struck Limon while he was doing his PhD thesis in the late 70s, but it wasn't until the fall of communism that the idea of digging for the old theatre – and raising a new one – became thinkable. "Initiatives appeared everywhere in Poland," he smiles, ruefully. "There was a lot of energy and enthusiasm. And naivety."
It has been an arduous battle: private philanthropy was unheard-of, state bureaucracy has weighed heavy, and the project seemed impossible until European funds became available in 2007. Even now, the foundation behind the Teatr Szekspirowski (Shakespeare theatre) has only enough cash to build the basic structure, which will protect and display the archeological dig; it is still fundraising for stage equipment. Yet, 20 years on, things are at long last moving. When builders moved in a few weeks ago, it was marked in flamboyant Polish style with a commissioned "dance" for the diggers by director Robert Florczak, whose audacious multimedia Macbeth debuted at last year's Shakespeare festival.
Gdańsk is, indeed, undergoing a second renaissance – in addition to the festival, now in its 15th year (Limon is behind this too), the city bustles with energy. During my visit I saw newly commissioned dance at the city's opera house, snuck inside the Two Windows theatre, a tiny pop-up space within a former shop, and nosed around the Wyspa institute, a hip contemporary art gallery that will soon open in refitted premises. Across town, builders are finishing off a £170m football stadium for next year's European championships. Even Gdansk's dockyards – made famous by Lech Wałęsa and his Solidarity party – are being rebuilt as the "Young City", a glossy development of waterside apartments, offices and cultural spaces.
Though Limon is modest about his brainchild, he admits it is a metaphor of sorts. "Historically, Gdańsk was a miniature of the united Europe, an affluent society living in peace. The project is a symbol of England's contribution to European culture." And surely of Poland's, too? He grins. "Of Poland's, too."
• For details, and to offer your support, see: www.teatrszekspirowski.pl
Digital love: Manuelle Gautrand and the Gaîté Lyrique
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 21, 2011
The Gaîté Lyrique, Paris's newest theatre, is a marriage of past and future so bold it takes the breath away. Jonathan Glancey explores a temple of technology and art
Everyone knows appearances can be deceptive, but the newly renovated Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique in central Paris takes the Bourbon biscuit. From the outside, it seems as conservative as any French arts institution. Built in 1862, its slightly pompous facade makes it every inch a creation of Napoleon III's overambitious second empire.
When you walk inside today, though, a beautifully restored Italianate foyer gives way almost immediately to an ultra-modern world of pulsating, bleeping, thumping digital art, music and film. From this month, the building that in the 70s housed a circus school with elephants stabled in the attic will be simply known as La Gaîté Lyrique, an €83m (£72.5m) "theatre for the digital arts" created and paid for by the City of Paris.
In fact, Gaîté Lyrique is far more than just a theatre. Bursting with energy, it is, according to its artistic director Jérôme Delormas, "a tool box", a "place of continual evolution", a "laboratory of cultural motivations". Immediately behind the lavish marble of the lobby is a web of new spaces set across seven floors and shaped to allow the world of digital artistry to let rip.
There is something distinctly French in this marriage between the grandly historical and the audaciously modern. Think of IM Pei's glass and steel pyramid rising from the Louvre's Cour Napoleon, or La Défense, a district of brutal 50s towers that stands to the west of the Champs-Elysées. In the early 70s, Paul Andreu's design for Charles de Gaulle airport evoked travel by spaceship rather than airliner. In 1977, Rogers and Piano's Pompidou Centre emerged from the heart of old Paris like some sci-fi oil refinery, and four years later the TGV came snaking out from under the glass roofs of 19th-century Parisian train sheds, projecting rail transport into a new, 300kph era. Every so often architecture in France, moves suddenly, shockingly forward even though planning and conservation laws can be very tough indeed.
"The Gaîté Lyrique took eight years to redevelop. "We had to think first of the sound," says Manuelle Gautrand, architect of the new-look theatre. "There are 120 apartments in the neighbourhood, so we had to build as quietly as possible and to make sure that even when the performances are exciting, the building is completely quiet. So, each of the performance spaces sits inside walls that sit inside walls; it's like a Russian doll."
It was possible for Gautrand to build inside the walls of the theatre, because while the facade has, in effect, remained unchanged since 1862, the interior had been largely gutted. After a long decline, the theatre was closed in 1987 to make way for Planète Magique, a kind of low-rent Disneyland. Where the glistering auditorium had once stood – in which Offenbach's celebrated operettas played, Victor Hugo celebrated his 70th birthday and Diaghilev's Ballet Russes danced – there rose a clumsy great rollercoaster. Opened in 1989, the theme park closed just two years later. This grand architectural dame then stood empty until its radical transformation began.
Delormas is the first to admit that the Gaîté Lyrique is likely to appeal mostly to an audience aged between 15 and 35: "For once", he says, "it will be a case of young people dragging their parents to a museum." The programme ranges from the latest experimental theatre by the Rimini Protokoll Collective – the young German directors best known for putting Das Kapital on the stage – to music from avant-garde artists such as Brian Eno to 3D digital performances.
You can also come here simply to play the latest computer games. There are studios for artists, equipped with cutting-edge computer technology, a library that stocks hundreds of arts magazines, an auditorium for screenings and talks and, of course, a cafe, where the 19th-century architecture has been offset by funky new furniture and flying saucer-style chandeliers. In full flow – when walls dissolve into videos, three-dimensional computer-generated beings come to life in break-out spaces and futuristic music fills this enormous venue – Paris seems very far off indeed.
The interior is something of a maze; sometimes seeming like an empty warehouse, at others a box of architectural tricks. The main performance space at the heart of the building – one of a number of theatres within the theatre – is lined outside with mirrored panels. Inside, this windowless black box can be transformed into a comfortable auditorium with rows of seats that pop up from under the floor. A second, smaller space features a floor built in steel sections; these can be raised and moved around to create different sets and seating structures.
Galleries and mezzanines around the main performance spaces allow visitors to look into what's happening and, as sound, light and images spill out of performances, these become auditoriums in their own right. Dotted throughout the largely windowless building – most of which is fitted out in a hard factory-like aesthetic, as well as splashes of bright pink, gold and yellow – are colourful mobile booths where you can watch a film, play a game, read or work. Gautrand calls these éclaireuses (girl guides); the idea is that they direct visitors through the ways of this unconventional theatre. "With the help of the éclaireuses," says Gautrand, "you can find a place of your own even in all this colour and noise."
I enjoyed Gaîté Lyrique. It took me into another world. And, yet, the shift between grand Paris and the latest whizzy stuff is as abrupt as a train crash. I couldn't help feeling a little like Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle, befuddled by technology, or Lemmy Caution, the private eye in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville who arrives in a nightmarish, ultra-modern city.
Alphaville was filmed in La Défense, an area many hate, but which Gautrand loves. The Marseilles-born architect, who set up her own practice in Paris in 1993, is designing a skyscraper to be situated here. A shimmering tower, dressed in what looks like a filigree fabric but is actually multi-angled sunscreens, it will, she says, "soften some of the harder aspects of Alphaville". It will also be in stark contrast to most of the straight up and down office towers that characterise this ageing "city of the future". The project is currently waiting for the final stage of planning permission before construction can begin. Gautrand also designed the eye-catching Citroën 42 showroom on the Champs-Elysées, whose steel and glass facade is made up of giant Citroën logos.
Life, colour, emotion
In Saint-Etienne, a city south-west of Lyon, Gautrand has designed a remarkable Cité des Affaires, steel and glass government offices that snake through the city, further enlivened by three bright yellow entrances which bring a shimmering gold light into the undercrofts and courtyards.
"It is, I suppose, scenographic", says Gautrand, borrowing the language of the theatre. "The building is a densely occupied development, so I have given it, I hope, some life, colour, emotion. Also, I felt that this part of Saint-Etienne was somehow sad; if there had to be new offices here, then they had to have something special, something you cannot quantify." Whatever that something is, the Cité des Affaires is a remarkable development. "As with the Gaîté Lyrique," says Gautrand, "the modernity here is definitely a contrast with the old world around it, but it can be as playful and as atmospheric as a 19th-century operetta, too. Why not?"
So in Saint-Etienne and Paris, visitors and government officials can work and play in an ultra-modern setting that seems theatrical to its very core. Only in Paris, this bright and boisterous new world has been housed behind the walls of a historic theatre, rather as if Jacques Tati was to walk by with an iPhone tucked away in his old raincoat pocket.
France's five most thrilling architects
De Portzamparc is French architecture's most brilliant intellectual. An urban planner as well as an architect, in 1994 he became the first Frenchman to win the Pritzker prize. He's working on several huge projects, including the Cidade da Música in Rio.
Nouvel is an international star, who often represents French architecture abroad. His experimental architecture is characterised by its use of metal and glass, creating buildings that glitter.
In 1990, Perrault delivered his signature building, the industrial, totally transparent Berlier hotel in Paris. He also designed the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, draped in metallic mesh.
Though he builds little, Bouchain is a pioneer, famous for his low-cost transformation of industrial spaces into cultural zones.
François proves that sustainable architecture needn't constrain the imagination. His environmentally friendly buildings use trees, pot plants and other living materials in their construction.
Sophie Trelcat, architecture critic
Zaha Hadid on song: China’s Guangzhou Opera House
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 1, 2011
Jonathan Glancey at the opening of the Guangzhou Opera House
Royal Shakespeare theatre complex, Stratford-upon-Avon
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 28, 2010
The revamped RSC showcase has its faults, but it will make watching Shakespeare a more rewarding experience
Can you spend a hundred million pounds on nuance? Or, rather, can you justify it? Should such sums be shovelled at achieving intangible effects, which might otherwise help house the poor or save sports programmes in schools? Or, next to the billions vanishing into faceless corporations under the private finance initiative, or bailing out Ireland, might it not be money well spent?
This is the question raised by the revamp of the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the main consequence of £113m of expenditure is a difference measured in yards in the position of actors relative to the audience. Its success will be defined by the timbre they feel able to adopt and the detail of their expressions observable by spectators.
To be sure, the tab covers other useful things: better access, less cramped foyers, bars, a rooftop restaurant, new dressing rooms with a view of the river Avon. It includes the cost of building the temporary Courtyard theatre to house performances during building works. Of the money spent, £40m is not public, but from benefactors led by Lord and Lady Sainsbury of Turville. But, ultimately, the main object was to replace the 1932 auditorium, designed by Elisabeth Scott, with another that would work better, while retaining and modifying the rest of the building.
Scott's space, at the request of her clients, mimicked the then-ascendant medium of cinema. It fanned out from a proscenium, widest where it was furthest from the stage, meaning that generations of school parties would be introduced to Shakespeare as the distant oscillation of smudges. The new theatre has a thrust stage and a very thrusting one at that. It projects the action deep into the auditorium, with the audience stacked around it in stalls and galleries, in conscious imitation of the courtyards and high-sided theatres where Shakespearean drama was first performed.
It is, says the Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director, Michael Boyd, "a one-room space for performing Shakespeare, rather than one lot of people in one room looking at another lot of people acting in another room". The new theatre is smaller than the old one, with 1,040 rather than 1,400 seats, but the maximum distance of spectator from stage is down from 27 metres to 15 metres.
The acoustics, fine-tuned with the help of experience from the temporary Courtyard theatre, promise to be immaculate. A basement, expensively wrested from the Avon-soaked mud beneath the theatre, and a fly tower filled with a "wedding cake" of gear, will lay on a director's dream of potential effects. The bare boards of the stage are deceptive, sustained as they are by bionic infrastructure.
The RSC have bet heavily that the thrust stage will be the way of the foreseeable future. They already had one, in the much-loved 1980s Swan theatre, which lies end to end with the new auditorium, and has been little changed by the new works. Sir Peter Hall has muttered that they're overdoing it. Boyd retorts that the new theatre is sufficiently adaptable to achieve Hall's preferred form, which is a more shallow thrust.
What the RSC is not now trying to achieve is a theatre that can do everything. A decade ago, a previous attempt was made, by the then artistic director Adrian Noble and the flamboyant architect Erick van Egeraat, to create a place that could handle both proscenium and thrust. Hugely complex, this would have obliterated all the theatre's existing buildings and some of the open space around them. Eventually, the scheme crashed and burned, to be replaced by the more sober project we have now.
The new work is collaborative and consensual to a fault. The RSC says it chose Bennetts Associates, the architects, because they were good at the workshops they arranged between potential architects and theatre people. Rab Bennetts, the leader of the practice, stresses the importance of "managing meetings and being consultative". His interventions are commonsensical, deferring to both the drama of performance and the retained parts of Elisabeth Scott's art-deco building. They help the building to flow better inside and to connect better with the surrounding town.
The play's the thing, in other words, and the ensemble counts for more than the star. If there's one character in the team who is more equal than the others, it's Michael Boyd, who, in contrast to his cautious colleagues, declaims to the press with actorish fluency and flourish. His vision of performance drives everything; the architecture serves to achieve it.
But there's something missing. Architecture and theatre are rivalrous companions, in that each proposes a universe into which the inhabitant or spectator is invited to enter. Modern architecture also favours the honest exposure of the stuff of which it is made – plain steel and bricks – which is at odds with the illusion and greasepaint of theatre. To say a building looks like a stage set is usually an insult. The very best theatres, old or new, give due prominence to the stage while also conjuring in the auditorium and foyers their version of Prospero's cloud-capp'd towers and gorgeous palaces, which can be done as well by the gilt and cherubs of an Edwardian music hall as by the rough walls of a converted warehouse.
Bennetts's theatre doesn't do this. He uses handsome steel and untreated oak, but their qualities are muddied by the low light of the auditorium and you have to look hard to notice them. In the foyer, a distressed wall of the old building has been left fashionably exposed, but it doesn't join up with the other surfaces to make a coherent space. Architectural expression is largely outsourced to the theatre's new 36-metre campanile, a slightly gawky assembly of brick and glass.
Problem-solving and process over-dominate. The theatre is what the RSC call "an optimal environment for experiencing Shakespeare", a phrase that could only make the Bard cringe. Contemporary architecture tends to oscillate between the iconic and the efficient and the RSC, in going from van Egeraat to Bennetts, has experienced both. Given that choice, it has made the right one, but it has missed out something else, which is the making of places with their own identity and life, complementary to that of the drama.
For all that, the main aim has been achieved. Subtlety and spectacle and the wrapping together of audience and action will all be possible as never before. Is this worth £100m? If the arts are worth investing in at all, and if that investment should support the best possible realisation of art, then the answer has to be yes.
The thrust of the problem for the RSC’s new stage
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 24, 2010
The renovation of the Royal Shakespeare Company's main theatre in Stratford brings the audience closer to the actors. The big question is whether it will help them hear
Like Jonathan Glancey, I welcome Stratford's architectural transformation. I toured the new complex a couple of months ago and found it both inspirational and user-friendly. But in praising the new, I think we should be wary of accepting popular myths about the old. The problem with Elisabeth Scott's original auditorium was never audibility; it was remoteness. I sat in the back row of the Stratford balcony in the 1950s many times to see Olivier's Macbeth and Titus, Gielgud's Lear and Prospero and heard every syllable. What was disconcerting was the sense of distance from the stage.
The new, more intimate house addresses that problem brilliantly. The big test is whether it aids audibility. During the RSC's occupation of the temporary courtyard, with a thrust stage that offers a rough prototype for the new theatre, I have received a number of readers' letters complaining about actors not making themselves heard. And when I interviewed Peter Hall recently, he wisely pointed out that "the thrust stage is difficult for complicated words". In any thrust stage there is, in fact, a classic trade-off: what the audience gains in closeness, it loses in always seeing actors' faces and hearing every word. The real challenge for the RSC in its new house lies in overcoming that dilemma.
The other big issue is that the 450-seat Swan theatre has provided, as Glancey rightly points out, a model for the new main house. Since the Swan is one of the best theatres in Britain, that seems logical enough. But will they be too similar in style – in effect a Swan One and Two? And will designers have scope for the kind of long-distance pictorial perspective provided by proscenium stages? Again, only time will tell. So, while I welcome the new Stratford complex and eagerly look forward to seeing how it works in practice, we should acknowledge that it won't solve at a stroke all the problems inherent in staging Shakespeare. It simply creates fresh challenges for future generations of actors, designers and directors.