Theatre

How Farce Became Tragedy: 'Permanent Way'

a new play by David Hare I saw this play about rail privatisation at Sheffield's Trades and Labour Club. It was refreshing to see a national theatre production taken out to an alternative venue. But I'm not sure how many of the audience on the night wouldn't have made it to the local theatre - a few maybe. Permanent Way explores the scandal of rail privatisation. It is based on a series of interviews with individuals involved - civil servants, managers, politicians, and most powerfully, those injured and bereaved in the post privatisation rail disasters. Characters talk directly to the...

Come Out Eli

'Come Out Eli', at the Arcola Theatre, Hackney, September 2003 Reviewed by Janine Booth Last Christmas, police held gunman Eli Hall and his hostage under seige in a Hackney flat for 17 days. Graham Road was condoned off, lots of people's daily lives were affected, and most locals had something to say about it. Playwright Alecky Blythe tape-recorded many of their comments, and this play consists of five actors reciting their words. A seige is usually portrayed on stage and screen as a melodramatic stand-off. It is all tension, violence, good-versus-evil, law-versus-disorder. You could forget...

The writing on the wall

Going bust for an education We don't want your vote BNP's new Euro-bigots 'Left-wing' xenophobia Bridges to nowhere Going bust for an education A record number of people are expected to declare themselves bankrupt this summer. Many of them will be students trying to get rid of their credit card, student loan and other debts. According to the Department for Education and Skills, 899 students and graduates became insolvent last year, compared with 276 in 2002. Some students figure that the penalities of becoming bankrupt at the age of 21 are less than having a life-long debt. Especially while...

No Sweat launches £2,000 appeal: Support Mexican workers' organisation

By Mick Duncan Facing competition from China's new capitalists, the Mexican bosses are driving down wages, imposing ever poorer working conditions and constantly violating labour rights. Workers face long working hours, little or no health or safety guarantees, child labour, no freedom of association, and the violation of company Codes of Conduct. The Mexican workers are fighting back, and we want to help them. No Sweat has launched an appeal for £2,000 to fund two specific projects being undertaken by the CAT workers' organising centre in Puebla, Mexico. £1,700 will be used to pay for 15...

The Laramie Project

THE LARAMIE PROJECT showing at the Cochrane Theatre, London, until Sunday 6 April About sixteen years ago, I saw a film about the murder of a gay man: The Life And Times Of Harvey Milk. It left me tearful, angry, and turbo-charged with determination to fight against this injustice. 'The Laramie Project' is a play about the murder of a gay man, and had the same effect on me. In 1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, 21-year-old student Matthew Shepard was kidnapped from a bar, driven out to deserted countryside, tied to a fence and beaten with fists and gun butts. He was left there for eighteen hours...

Bacchai

Irony has become so siamese-twinned with ‘post-modern’ that you fear to separate them would cause bleeding from heart and brain. It’s easy to forget it was the Greeks who started it. Euripides’ Bacchai (now playing at the National Theatre in a production by Peter Hall) is deeply, disturbingly ironic. Hall’s use of traditional masks (criticised in many reviews for destroying the humanity of the piece) and the bare amphitheatre stage, for me, underlined the irony and the modern echoes. The foyer exhibition of designer Alison Chitty’s sketches clearly showed these ‘modern’ elements are not...

The Coast of Utopia: More People's Friend than People's Will

by Oona Swann If there was a dramatic equivalent of Poet Laureate Tom Stoppard would be it. He can play wittily with complex intellectual ideas and serve up populist entertainment, like 'Shakespeare in Love', which is equally stuffed with knowing treats for the discerning. I like his stuff. I don't mind his (Thatcherite) politics because it's dressed up so appetisingly. So when I hear he's writeen three linked plays around the lives of 19th century Russian revolutionaries, I expect something a bit special. Not that I expect to agree with him, more that if anyone can wittily dramatise the...

The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui

'The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui' by Bertholt Brecht, in a new translation by Andy de la Tour, directed by Phil Willmott, and playing until 24 August (2002) at the Bridewell Theatre, Bride Lane (off Fleet Street) London. “There’s no spoon long enough to sup with you!”, Mayor Dogsborough shouts at Arturo Ui when Ui comes knocking on the door to blackmail him with guaranteed silence about Dogsborough’s corruption, in return for political support. Dogsbourough’s puffed-up, morally upright pomposity is all the more ridiculous in the light of his leading the total capitulation of all the grocers...

Frozen

'Frozen' at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, London until Saturday August 24th 2002 It helps to know what you’re watching. Maybe then I’d have my psychological armour in place and not be streaming tears just minutes into ‘Frozen’ at the National Theatre. But that’s what it’s like. Nobody is ever prepared for their child to be abducted, for the months possibly years of waiting and not knowing, for the small bones finally dug up from some outhouse to be identified as their child. Grief seems too small a word for the raw annihilating awfulness of such an experience. It’s a credit to the...

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