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Year in review: My favourite digital shows 2021

In London theatre, Musicals, Opinion, Other Recent Articles, Plays, Reviews by Debbie Gilpin23rd January 2022Leave a Comment

Despite the fact that theatres were once again up and running for about half the year (varying from place to place), there was still a massive appetite for digital productions going into 2021.

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‘It felt like we were all creating something very special together’: A fond farewell to The Show Must Go Online series

In Online shows, Opinion, Plays, Reviews by Debbie Gilpin18th November 2020Leave a Comment

I may be woefully behind on my show write-ups, but I couldn’t not mark The Show Must Go Online coming to an end – at least until further notice.

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‘My favourite part of working in casting is meeting fresh, exciting talent’: Sydney Aldridge on the casting process for The Show Must Go Online

In Features, Interviews, Online shows, Opinion, Plays by Debbie Gilpin16th August 2020Leave a Comment

I’ve really admired the work of Sydney Aldridge throughout the course of The Show Must Go Online, so who better to talk to about casting and her experiences with this innovative Zoom theatre project?

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‘All in all, yet another brilliant show’: AS YOU LIKE IT – The Show Must Go Online (Online review)

In Online shows, Opinion, Plays, Reviews by Debbie Gilpin12th August 2020Leave a Comment

From Rome to the Forest of Arden, as The Show Must Go Online next tackles As You Like It.

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‘I could have written an entire post about Ruth Page’s performance’: HENRY V – The Show Must Go Online (Online review)

In Online shows, Opinion, Plays, Reviews by Debbie Gilpin30th July 2020Leave a Comment

I’m running out of superlatives for The Show Must Go Online. Each show is exceptional, including the latest staging of Henry V, and manages to improve upon the previous week in as many ways as possible.

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Lost Labour of Love: ‘All I had to do was turn up & say the words wot Shakespeare wrote, didn’t I?’

In Features, London theatre, Opinion, Regional theatre, Reviews, Touring by John Chapman15th June 2020Leave a Comment

Knowing that some 600 people had applied the week previous to that, I had no great expectation that I would be selected but, to my amazement, I was offered the part of Costard.

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I feel I personally have to advocate for Shakepeare’s Globe even more strongly

In Features, London theatre, Opinion by Debbie Gilpin9th June 2020Leave a Comment

Reading that the Globe may struggle to come back from this current crisis without the help of donations and emergency funding didn’t seem quite real.

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‘Thoughtfully & inclusively cast’: RICHARD II – The Show Must Go Online

In Online shows, Opinion, Plays, Reviews by Debbie Gilpin3rd June 2020Leave a Comment

The Show Must Go Online was firmly back in history mode with the beginning of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy in Richard II. Not quite as much bloodshed as the previous set of histories that we’ve seen – more posturing and challenging than anything.

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‘Every single week gets more inventive!’ The Show Must Go Online actors discuss their lockdown hit

In Features, Interviews, London theatre, Online shows, Opinion, Plays by Debbie Gilpin6th May 2020Leave a Comment

I posed some questions to The Show Must Go Online returnees Luke Barton, Kristin Atherton, David Johnson and Lucy Aarden about their experiences with this weekly lockdown hit.

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‘I’m glad this version has helped me to appreciate the play more’: The Show Must Go Online’s Titus Andronicus (Online review)

In London theatre, Online shows, Opinion, Plays, Reviews by Debbie Gilpin29th April 2020Leave a Comment

Last week was Shakespeare’s birthday, so The Show Must Go Online went all out with their latest production, holding a Titus Andronicus party in the Bard’s honour.

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‘I lost a gig on the crest of the wave & knew immediately I was only the first of many’: Robert Myles on launching weekly Shakespeare reading The Show Must Go Online

In Features, Interviews, Online shows, Plays by Emma Clarendon23rd April 2020Leave a Comment

We chatted to the actor about his project The Show Must Go Online, which weekly presents a Shakespeare play for online audiences.

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‘Quite extraordinary innovation’: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW – The Show Must Go Online

In Opinion, Plays, Reviews, Video by Debbie Gilpin31st March 2020Leave a Comment

The success of Show Must Go Online’s engrossing The Taming Of The Shrew is a real credit to the company’s creativity and the magic of this emerging art form.

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‘A roaring success’: The Show Must Go Online’s Shakespeare series makes an impressive start

In Opinion, Plays, Reviews by Debbie Gilpin25th March 2020Leave a Comment

Last week saw the first production of The Show Must Go Online, a series devised by Rob Myles (who Mind the Blog regulars will recognise from Merely Theatre’s Twelfth Night and his insight into Shakespeare dramaturgy) which will bring a different Shakespeare play to YouTube each week with a rotating cast of actors.

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UK-Ukraine: artistic collaborations during wartime

Array ( [post_title] => UK-Ukraine: artistic collaborations during wartime [post_content] =>

Aileen Gonsalves, who founded Butterfly Theatre Company and is the creator of the Gonsalves Method – specialising “in immersive theatre with a focus on truthful, authentic and moment to moment performance that makes the audience feel something real” – recalls some of the work she has done with Ukrainian artists this year. I spoke to her via Zoom; the following is an edited transcript of our conversation, 20-11-22.

Aileen Gonsalves

…
Six weeks before the invasion [Feb 24, 2022] Butterfly actor/puppeteer Bethany Greenwood and I had started working with a group of Ukrainians led by producer Natalia Sklyarska, who galvanised the theatre community in Kiev into doing street theatre. She said that it wasn’t something that was done there – whenever they told people about doing outdoor theatre, they didn’t understand what she was saying.

So Butterfly got involved helping make a street theatre project with them and we’d meet actors, directors, people in education and so on via Zoom once a week. Week One we had a great time – they were a great group, so enthusiastic. As each week went by, we in England would be saying to ourselves: “Have they not got Russian troops on the border? Is no one going to speak about it?” By the fourth week we just brought it up.

And they were completely calm – “We’ve been in a war zone for eight years, they won’t do anything”. The week before the invasion, the last week, was the first time they said “Yes, we are a little bit nervous now”. The show then went ahead, on the Sunday before the invasion [Thursday], in the Kontraktova Square in Kiev. It was fantastic – there were about 50 kids in tiger masks taking part in this show about tiger and a hunter, with musicians following around. It was a piece effectively about being bullied by a greater force, though they didn’t really seem to see the metaphor. There was quite a lot of denial.

Then after the invasion started, we worried about everyone over there. From that moment, I kept in touch by email and Facebook. We said “We are here for you, let us know what we can do”. Within a month, they were all over Europe, they had scattered. I said “I know it seems mad, but the only thing I can really do is offer your artists acting classes”. They said: “We definitely want that, we’re stuck in different countries”. So I said OK. Natalia and Masha [Natalia Sklyarska, producer and Maria Grunicheva, director] put out a call to their network. They made a Facebook group to communicate with artists in Europe.

Each week I’d post the class Zoom link and say ‘Come if you want to come’. So it was quite fun, there were about 30 actors, directors, choreographers. The most bizarre thing was I said ‘What would you like to do?’ They said: Shakespeare’s sonnets. So I said ‘OK’ and we would meet online, they’d do them in Ukrainian and I was teaching my acting method. They didn’t know where they all were, so they’d be saying to each other “Where are you?”. We did that for a couple of months.

They were massively committed. That moved me and kept me going. They’d learn their lines and come prepared. That gave Masha the idea: could we create something online? We showed them the online Christmas Carol that we did during the pandemic and settled on A Midsummer Night’s Dream because they knew it and also knew that if they did it in Ukrainian, those watching abroad would follow it. Masha set up a company, StageUA, bringing in a dozen or so other actors to create a bigger unit.

They were dotted across 12 European countries – including Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as some in Ukraine. They used the play as a chance to escape and focus on something else. We taught some online acting skills we had learnt during the pandemic and they would come back and show us what they’d done. And they were a hundred times more inventive than we had been pushing Butterfly’s Technical Director Alex Gray into new territory.

We would always say: “How are you all doing?”. They were very excited about rehearsing and wanting to show us what they’d done. It was strange: we got into the bubble of the play as actors often do, but we felt close to the war – they would suddenly say things like “We’re having to walk back from the bomb-shelter”, or, “We can’t meet today because of the power cuts”. The rest were perhaps feeling a bit guilt-ridden that they weren’t in Kiev – there was a real distinction between people who stayed and the people who are safe but on someone’s floor.

They performed Dream about five times over the summer, including a special performance for the military. It’s a hard sell overseas, because of the language barrier. But what struck me was the inspiring boldness of their approach – they use their bodies in completely different ways.

Everyone is now looking to see what might be done next. There are two projects they want to do: an English-Polish-Ukrainian project around children and being displaced and also something to do with promoting Ukrainian culture – they’re passionate about the fact that people think their culture is Russian, so the focus would be on a street carnival, or something of that type.

Has British theatre done enough to help Ukraine? I think our theatre is sadly so embedded in its own problems it has really lost sight of its role – it doesn’t realise how world-changing it’s supposed to be, all the time. It has become very inward-looking. Coming out of the pandemic, people were waiting to hear about Arts Council NPO funding, worried about their own affairs. I’d love to see British theatre be more outward-looking in 2023 and come together as a unified force with a unified voice to speak up in solidarity about the war happening so close at hand.

Watch The Tiger is Coming, possibly the last newly created theatre work to be presented in Kiev before the start of the war

The post UK-Ukraine: artistic collaborations during wartime appeared first on Critical Muse - Dominic Cavendish.

[post_excerpt] =>

Aileen Gonsalves, who founded Butterfly Theatre Company and is the creator of the Gonsalves Method – specialising “in immersive theatre with a focus on truthful, authentic and moment to moment performance that makes the audience feel something real” – recalls some of the work she has done with Ukrainian artists this year. I spoke to her […]

The post UK-Ukraine: artistic collaborations during wartime appeared first on Critical Muse - Dominic Cavendish.

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Aileen Gonsalves

Watch The Tiger is Coming, possibly the last newly created theatre work to be presented in Kiev before the start of the war

The post UK-Ukraine: artistic collaborations during wartime appeared first on Critical Muse - Dominic Cavendish.

[post_excerpt] =>

The post UK-Ukraine: artistic collaborations during wartime appeared first on Critical Muse - Dominic Cavendish.

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