The Archive
Recordings from November 2008
Total Number of Recordings from this month: 10
- INTERVIEW: PETER GILL The playwright and director talks to Heather Neill about Apprenticeship (Oberon), a new book reflecting on a long-lost diary that documented the RSC's pioneering 1962 production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle - in which Gill acted.
“To have just a 'directorial theatre' is boring. I keep seeing things where the production gets in your way.”
- Recording Date: 01-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: ENDA WALSH (2/2) The playwright talks to Aleks Sierz about his career, from the classic Disco Pigs (Corcadorca, 1996) through to his current film, Hunger (Steve McQueen) and his Dostoyevsky adaptation for Theatre O, Delirium (Barbican, 2008). Expletives not deleted.
“I'm interested in very small, claustrophobic situations and the effects that the outside world has on them.”
- Recording Date: 03-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: ENDA WALSH (1/2) The playwright talks to Aleks Sierz about his scintillating 2006 play for Druid, The Walworth Farce (now at the National), and about the mechanics of keeping a farce moving. Expletives not deleted.
“When it's blood, and your family history, sometimes you hear a version of a story that's completely not the way you saw it.”
- Recording Date: 03-Nov-2008
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- INTERVEW: ALEXIS ZEGERMAN The actor and playwright chats to Aleks Sierz about her full-length debut, Lucky Seven (Hampstead), which was inspired by the 1963 Seven Up! television documentary series, as well as about working as a theatre and film actor with director Mike Leigh.
“I do think that we have this weird fetish for looking at celebrities, and at ordinary people in general, on reality TV.”
- Recording Date: 06-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: SAMUEL WEST Heather Neill talks to the actor and director about his career, his passion for verse drama and his approach to playing the part of Harry in The Family Reunion, the centrepiece of the Donmar Warehouse's current TS Eliot festival.
“What is fascinating and difficult for a non-believer is to trust the idea of redemption that lies behind this play - because that's what Eliot adds to the Greek story.”
- Recording Date: 11-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: CAROLINE CLEGG The director and producer talks on the telephone to Aleks Sierz about Eloquent Protest, an annual Remembrance Sunday event that both commemorates the victims of war and protests against conflict, and her work with Feelgood site-specific company in Manchester. Sound quality: variable.
“We finished off with 'Let the Sun Shine in' from Hair, on its 40th anniversary, and as our message of hope to Obama.”
- Recording Date: 11-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: BETH TRACHTENBERG The tyro producer tells Philip Fisher how she raised £4.5million to put on a new West End musical, Imagine This (New London Theatre), set in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, and why she thinks it is an important show.
“I believe that this is a show that screams to be exposed to the public - and I don't see it as a holocaust musical.”
- Recording Date: 12-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: SCOTT GRAHAM AND STEVEN HOGGETT The joint-artistic directors of Frantic Assembly, talk to Philip Fisher about their radical new vision of Shakespeare's Othello (currently playing at the Lyric, Hammersmith), and about the path from dance theatre that has led them to it.
“He said, 'It's full of violence, revenge, hatred, nastiness and sexual intrigue, jealousy. It's all the things that you're obsessed with.'”
- Recording Date: 14-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: ADRIANO SHAPLIN The American playwright and director talks about his first commission for the Royal Shakespeare Company: The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes (currently at Wilton's Music Hall). Mark Brown quizzes.
“I make the claim that 85 per cent of the play is true. When you make art you shouldn't write about what you know, but about what you don't know.”
- Recording Date: 23-Nov-2008
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- INTERVIEW: TRACY LETTS The American writer and actor talks to Philip Fisher about the inspiration behind his multi-award-winning Broadway hit, August: Osage County, now at the National, and his career in the theatre.
“We became aware that we’ve tapped into a need on the audience’s part and when you do that it’s very gratifying.”
- Recording Date: 28-Nov-2008
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