Theatre in the Noughties: the decade’s top ten

Ten years ago, the British theatre impresario Michael Kustow issued an impassioned plea for the theatre, in a book with the now quaint title, ‘Theatre@Risk’. Faced with the overwhelming forces of both the internet and global capital, Kustow wondered, would theatre survive?

It seemed for a while during this decade that Irish theatre makers were responding to this challenge by including bits of video in their plays and calling them “multimedia”.

The response may have been glib, but the challenge was real. New media offer genuinely new means of entertainment and social interaction, and the expectations they create – of accessibility, interaction, and real-time response – are poorly met by the cumbersome form of traditional theatre.

For Prospect Magazine: Beckett begins again

Is the work of Ireland’s greatest dramatist being ossified by reverence? Colin Murphy watches three productions on tour and asks Beckett’s first British publisher what the future holds, in the current issue of Prospect.

See also ‘Back on the road in rural Ireland’ in the March issue of Le Monde Diplo: an interview with Henry Woolf, the 79-year-old star of John Calder’s production of ‘Endgame’ and a veteran of Anew McMaster’s famous fit-up. And there is also an accompanying podcast of that interview.

‘Endgame’ in the Wicklow Mountains

Henry Woolf is the 79-year-old playing Clov in the Godot Company’s ‘Endgame’. I spoke to him about his life in theatre, which started with a tour in 1957 with Anew McMaster’s legendary travelling theatre company.

henry-woolf

Interview broadcast as a podcast on Le Monde Diplo to accompany the print article.

Review: Sam Shepard’s ‘Ages of the Moon’

In Sam Shepard’s ‘Ages of the Moon’, not a lot happens. Two men drink, sitting on a porch. Nobody else comes along. One of them leaves, briefly. Most of what they talk about is objectively meaningless: rambling musings on life, alcohol, women; shared memories of past misadventures. A fan hums above them erratically, till one of them shoots it. They have a fight. One of them is hurt. It seems bad. They watch the moon.

The play is softly melancholic, with a streak of bleakness and despair, and a countervailing seam of hope and humanity.