Donmar Warehouse Research Articles

Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (Directed by Max Webster) at the Donmar Warehouse, London, 2 Jan 2024 and Shakespeare's Macbeth (Directed by Simon Godwin) at Dock X, London, 23 March 2024

Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (Directed by Max Webster) at the Donmar Warehouse, London, 2 Jan 2024 and Shakespeare's Macbeth (Directed by Simon Godwin) at Dock X, London, 23 March 2024

A Dialogue with Walter Meierjohann on Theatre, Installation, and Binaural Sound

This dialogue explores the possibilities of binaural sound for contemporary theatre making and museum curation, situating sonic modes of practice in relation to particular formal experimentations demanded by the context of pandemic and exemplified by the international touring production of Blindness first staged at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2020, and directed by Walter Meierjohann. The discussion between Meierjohann and Georgina Guy opens up the potential of sound installation as an apposite form through which to challenge visual-centric cultures of production and stage particular political and theatrical challenges, related to ideas of community and responsibility, and imagination, collaboration, and collective experience.

“It’s only a play”: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Adamson’s Wife (2019), and the Relevance of Historical Theatre

“It’s only a play”: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Adamson’s Wife (2019), and the Relevance of Historical Theatre Catherine Quirk (bio) Between late 2017 and the closure of the theatres in March 2020, in London alone there were at least a dozen productions of Henrik Ibsen’s plays. To mention only a few of these, at the Almeida, Robert Icke’s 2018 adaptation of The Wild Duck moved the action into the modern day, anglicized some of Ibsen’s less accessible Norwegian names, and in an era of “fake news,” emphasized Ibsen’s thematic preoccupation with truth and lies. Elinor Cook’s 2017 The Lady from the Sea, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah at the Donmar Warehouse, transposed the action to an unnamed Caribbean island in the 1950s, emphasizing the thematic claustrophobia and entrapment of the piece. Stef Smith’s Nora, which premiered at Tramway, Glasgow in March 2019, was mid-run at the Young Vic when theatres closed. Smith’s adaptation modernized [End Page 231] the piece, too: the structure and story followed those of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, but in each act three separate timelines—three Noras—intersected to comment on the unchanging nature of the oppression Ibsen’s Nora faced. Tanika Gupta also turned to A Doll’s House, setting her 2019 Lyric Hammersmith production in late-nineteenth-century Kolkata. The shift in setting, though much of the dialogue and action remained the same, brought out new elements of oppression, and highlighted the enduring relevance of the marginalized figure’s search for freedom. By emphasizing imperial oppression alongside that of gender, Gupta shifted Ibsen’s social commentary to fit a present moment much more deeply concerned with intersectionality. Each of these examples, in adapting Ibsen’s works to be presented to a twenty-first-century audience, emphasize the continued relevance of the plays’ themes, characters, and social commentary.1 Next to Shakespeare, Ibsen is one of the most frequently adapted European playwrights, appearing annually in productions all over the globe. Shakespeare’s ubiquity is often credited to the apparent universality of characters such as Hamlet and Juliet, and of the messages and themes underlying many of his most-performed plays. These stories translate well into other languages, time periods, and situations, and can easily be adapted—as countless productions over the centuries since Shakespeare’s death have proved—to speak directly to seemingly distinct cultural contexts. Ibsen’s continued and international popularity, in contrast, seems to stem more from the enduring relevance of his scenarios. Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins, writing of A Doll’s House (1879) specifically, note that The conditions that supported the promotion and dissemination of Et dukkehjem during this first wave of international success disappeared with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, but the connections between the play and other sexual vectors of social change have never disappeared. The character of Nora has continued to attract artists who are intent on challenging social discrimination.2 The initial “conditions” Holledge et al note as fostering the success of Ibsen in the last decades of the nineteenth century still characterize much of the world: the injustices and oppressive practices Ibsen wrote against continue today, if perhaps in different forms. Awo Mana Asiedu, writing of Tracie [End Page 232] Chimo Utoh-Ezeajugh’s Nneora: An African Doll’s House (2005), credits this continued adaptability and relevance to “the human element, which is universally recognisable, that makes it possible for a play written centuries earlier to have abiding relevance when translated into another culture in another time.”3 From their earliest performances, Ibsen’s social problem plays have continued to address the oppressive tendencies of society. The specific instances of oppression shift over time and by location, as the plays are adapted to fit new circumstances, but the underlying need to fight for change remains constant. Playwright Samuel Adamson has developed a reputation as an adaptor, and particularly as an adaptor of Ibsen. In this article, I examine Adamson’s most recent interaction with Ibsen: Wife (Kiln Theatre, 2019). As Adamson noted in a July 2020 Zoom conversation with Kiln artistic director Indhu Rubasingham...

Blindness, Excrement, and Abjection in the Theatre: ASTR Presidential Address, 30 October 2021

As most of my human contact became restricted to the Zoom screen in spring 2020, I discovered a serious limit to my capacity for looking. I also began finding it difficult to read. A ten-month headache taught me to stop taking ibuprofen and learn to manage tensions around my eyes and head as well as to shift roughly half of my reading to screenreaders and audio books. The need to restructure my own practices of seeing refocused my interest in theatre's engagement of the senses at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed people's ability to smell, prompted them to hoard toilet paper, and created a U.S. boom in bidet purchases. These personal and cultural developments coincided with revived metaphors of blindness on the pandemic stage. This article begins with a brief discussion of The Blind, an “immersive audio/visual meditation journey” that Here Arts Center produced in 2021, and then centers on Blindness, the “socially distanced sound installation” produced by the Donmar Warehouse in 2020 followed by an international tour. I wonder at the reiteration of blindness as a tragic trope, seemingly unaffected by progress in disability rights, equity, and inclusion. I wonder at the appeal of wielding any contagious illness as metaphor during a global pandemic. My analysis turns particularly upon the relation between blindness and excrement in José Saramago's novel Blindness and the effect of cleansing the theatrical installation of any shit as well as the even more surprising choice to eliminate the voices of the blind characters. A detour through medieval French farces that link blindness and excrement reveals submerged tropes at play in these performative responses to fear of diminished capacity and diminished control—everything that individuals and societies cast out in order to maintain what we call health, whether literal or metaphorical.

Introduction to <i>19 Live</i>

This issue of 19 Live reviews four recent exhibitions — Audubon at the National Museum of Scotland, the exhibition of Charlotte Brontë’s wardrobe at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, ‘Whistler’s Woman in White’ at the Royal Academy, and the Sickert retrospective at Tate Britain — as well as the UK premiere of Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 at the Donmar Warehouse. 

Old Plays, New Narratives

When a theatrical performance is digitally broadcast live to cinemas, the limitations of temporal and spatial specificity are removed and the theatrical experience is simultaneously opened up to a wider audience and inherently altered. One such production, Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse, 2013-14), starring an actor with a particularly enthusiastic online fan community, was broadcast to cinemas by National Theatre Live, where fans recorded it on digital devices, extracted clips and produced animated gifs, which they captioned to reinterpret the play, sharing them online, removed from their original context. The transformation of theatre texts to cinemas to social media platforms raises exciting questions related to how fans interact with culture both as consumers and as producers of new media texts. How do the different transformations (technical and actively fan-produced) affect both the narrative and the cultural experience? How do new texts function as surrogates for, and extensions of, the ‘official' narrative, as well as new interactive narratives in their own right? This paper addresses these questions in the context of a specific theatrical event as it crossed the boundary from a live, co-located experience first into cinema, and then into interactive hypertexts and memes. Drawing on theories of fandom and participatory culture, as well as post-Web 2.0 analyses of Internet behaviours, the paper examines fan production of new media texts and how they both transmit and transform the source narrative via interpretation, re-interpretation, and misinterpretation. Image Credit: Still of fromhiddleswithlove (2014)

Representing victims and offenders in contemporary performance: the ideal and the complex in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

ABSTRACT This article uses the criminological frameworks of ideal and complex victims to explore the Donmar Warehouse’s 2018 production of Measure for Measure that grounded the play in references to the Me Too movement. This production staged two versions of the play in one performance, including regendering and role-switching of the central antagonists, which drew attention to the gender dynamics of victimization and offence. While the traditional Isabella was shown to be a nigh perfect ideal victim, when she assumed the offender’s role and victimized Angelo, no neat reversal of power roles was possible. A framework that allows for more complex understandings of victims and offenders is necessary to read this version and to apprehend these issues in real life contexts. This article argues that representations of victims and offenders in theatrical performance have the power to affect understandings of victimization in broader socio-legal contexts and therefore deserve close analysis.

The king of Roseland High School

Niccolò Machiavelli, the father of modern political science, wrote in his treaty The Prince that in order to retain power efficiently, “it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both”. Machiavelli's vision probably influenced William Shakespeare in creating Richard III, the most famous disabled character in western drama, in the eponymous tragedy because Richard III reasons through similar lines when he says: “Since I cannot prove a lover… I am determined to prove a villain”. Richard III has inspired American playwright Mike Lew to write Teenage Dick, currently at the Donmar Warehouse (London, UK) under Michael Longhurst's direction. If some elements of the play still mirror the original Richard III, with its setting in a modern American high school, Teenage Dick is an impressive autonomous reflection on disability, power, and the hellish period that adolescence may be.

A prison audience: women prisoners, Shakespeare and spectatorship

ABSTRACTIn 2017 the Donmar Warehouse presented The Tempest to women prisoners at HMP New Hall, UK. The production was part of a trilogy of Shakespeare plays directed by Phyllida Lloyd, each staged with an all-female cast and each set within a women’s prison. Over the five years of developing this trilogy the Donmar undertook extensive research and development into the prison context, including in collaboration with York St John University’s Prison Partnership Project. This paper explores the prison audiences’ experiences of The Tempest, examining how they responded to seeing their own lived experiences on stage, filtered through the prism of Shakespearian plot, characterisation and language. In particular, this paper focuses on moments of identification, where the women found direct resonance and self-recognition with the characters and experiences in The Tempest. At the same time it draws on discourses from dramatherapy and aesthetic theory to argue for the importance of various forms of emotional, empathetic and psychical distance. Using close analysis of the spectators’ responses, it describes how for the prison audience the result was an oscillation between identification and distance, a reading of “me but more than me” that produced a powerful affective and reflective impact.

The Gifts of Mania

‘What does sadness feel like? Acid rain.’ At the outset of this adventurous personal account of bipolar disorder, Lucy Newlyn outlines some of her incentives: among them, to explore and discover her own mental processes; to help diminish the terror and stigma of insanity; and to illuminate the complexity of the human mind as beyond straightforward definition. ‘The mental condition I describe does not accommodate itself to the normal tidy distinctions between forms’, she asserts, ‘and no straightforward narrative mode will do’ (p. 7). Her exploration, written in diary form but frequently straying into more experimental modes, follows emergent investigations of the illness over the last two decades, from Kate Jamison’s Touched with Fire (1996) to Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears, which premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 2010, and Stephen Fry’s two documentaries The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive and The Not So Secret Life of the Manic Depressive: 10 Years On, aired in 2006 and 2016.

“We Are Not Making a Movie”: Constituting Theatre in Live Broadcast

“We Are Not Making a Movie”: Constituting Theatre in Live Broadcast Lindsay Brandon Hunter (bio) In the introduction to his landmark text Liveness, Philip Auslander references a banner outside Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre reading “Not Available on Video” as emblematic of theatre’s particular preoccupation with its own liveness, pointing out that “the only way of imputing specificity to the experience of live performance in the current cultural climate is by reference to the dominant experience of mediatization” (5).1 Further, he notes that when “the live itself incorporates the mediatized,” as contemporary theatre practice regularly does, that incorporation is manifested “both technologically and epistemologically,” altering not only how theatre is made, but how we recognize and apprehend it. “The result of this implosion,” he writes, “is that a seemingly secure opposition is now a site of anxiety” (44). Perhaps nowhere is that implosion more explicitly demonstrated than in the live broadcast of theatre from the stage to cinemas, as in the National Theatre’s NT Live series or the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon. Live broadcast theatre complicates the putative ontological separation between staged performances and screened ones—between the theatre the companies broadcast and the films the venues more usually host—in particularly visible ways. It also suggests theatre as a multifarious and adaptive form, capable of distinguishing itself not only, and perhaps not even primarily, by its ephemerality, or the embodied co-presence of actor and performer, but rather by the specificity of the techniques and conventions that produce it. Many other scholars have since scrutinized and interrogated the presumed opposition referenced by Auslander, offering new theories that illuminate complex relationships and interdependencies between performance, including theatrical performance, and media. In an especially illustrative example, the opening of Sarah Bay-Cheng’s essay “Theatre Is Media” paints a picture of even conventionally live theatre as inextricably imbricated with digital media—in particular, when she recounts her experience attending the Donmar Warehouse production of King Lear, starring Derek Jacobi, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) during its US tour. Bay-Cheng provides a comprehensive account of an encounter with a high-profile production of a deeply canonical work, a production that, despite its relatively traditional staging, “was largely activated by and within mediated networks,” in which the stage work itself comprised only a part of “an extended engagement with the play” (33). From the email newsletter by which she learned about the production, to online reviews of its run in London, to her own tweets and blog postings on the production in reflection, Bay-Cheng narrates a path through her experience of the production “unbounded by the duration of the performance in BAM’s Harvey Theater.” She argues persuasively that the live performance arguably at the center of that experience did not constitute “a privileged site of temporary encounter,” but rather “yet another form of mediated interaction” with its “text, contexts, and artifacts” (ibid.). As she notes in passing, the production of King Lear, which Bay-Cheng demonstrates as so thoroughly enmeshed in mediated networks, was shown in cinemas in the United Kingdom, United States, and beyond as part of the NT Live series. NT Live, which premiered in 2009, adapted a model for simultaneous broadcast of work from the stage that was pioneered by the Metropolitan Opera in its Live in HD series, which debuted in 2006. Like the Met’s series, NT Live broadcasts temporally live video of staged performance to cinema screens as the production is happening—at [End Page 15] least for audiences in the UK and parts of Western Europe.2 In this essay, I examine how theatrical productions are mediatized via live broadcast and the strategies levied to maintain for the resulting mediatizations the name and status of theatre. While the broadcasts’ deployment of the rhetoric of liveness may appear to affirm the centrality of liveness to the theatre, the success their producers claim in removing theatre to the screen—producing “the theatre squared,” as Bay-Cheng puts it (2007, 37)—simultaneously implies otherwise, suggesting temporal liveness, evanescence, and co-presence between an audience and performers as less than necessary for an object that nonetheless aspires to...

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance ed. by James C. Bulman, and: The Shakespearean World ed. by Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance ed. by James C. Bulman, and: The Shakespearean World ed. by Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby Will Tosh The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Edited by James C. Bulman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. pp xxvii + 669. $150 Hardback The Shakespearean World. Edited by Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017. pp xxiii + 654. $230. Hardback. Two recent collections exemplify the divergent pathways available to editors who wish to capture in print the "state of the field." In positioning itself as a decided intervention in the burgeoning discipline of performance studies, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance contains a number of essays that are set fair to become standard reading on the topic. But in having almost nothing to say about the politics of performance in terms of gender, sexuality and (dis)ability—and surprisingly little on the subject of race—it fails to capture an ongoing element in contemporary debate. Routledge's The Shakespearean World, on the other hand, offers a historicist roadmap to early twenty-first century Shakespeare studies, taking the reader through the intellectual developments that led to the present moment. In dating less rapidly, the Routledge volume may prove the more persistently useful of the two. First, the Oxford Handbook. Edited by James C. Bulman, it is a substantial work with thirty-six essays and an introduction, arranged into four parts ("Experimental Shakespeare"; "Reception"; "Media and Technology"; "Global Shakespeare"). Bulman presents it as a successor to Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen's Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (2005). Hodgdon's introduction to that collection identified the study of Shakespearean performance as a pursuit that engages with the "enthusiastic exploration of performance past" (1) and deploys a productive mix of disciplines to analyze the work of theater in the here and now. Thirteen years later, Bulman offers a much less secure vision of the subject: he introduces a "slippery entity called performance," a "turbulent sea, into whose waves only the most foolhardy or daring amongst us venture to swim" (1). This anxious language says something about the contested evolution of theatrical performance in an era of encroaching broadcast and social media technologies, and perhaps something too about the widespread collapse in [End Page 559] optimism during the past decade: as Paul Menzer puts it in his contribution, "melancholia sits brooding upon performance studies" (220). Susan Bennett's chapter sets a tone of skepticism for many of the contributions that follow. She exposes the vacuity of "experimental Shakespeare," arguing that after a half-century of evolution the term has decayed into a global marketing ploy. The rot sets in for Bennett in the 1980s, a decade that sees both the development of "global Shakespeare" as an international theatrical aesthetic ("the fusion cuisine of stage performance," 22), and the revival of an interest in early modern staging that came to be known as "Original Practices" (OP)—the phrase denoting different things on either side of the Atlantic. In Bennett's reading, OP-informed theaters work hand-in-glove with the higher education sector and the heritage industries, to the detriment of artistic innovation. Kim Solga writes damningly of another sort of theatrical conservatism espoused by theater critics: the pernicious demand for "respect" for Shakespeare's ostensible intentions, most noticeable as a form of critique when the director is female. Solga traces "reviewers' anxious policing of the Bard's gendered borders" (113) from the 1990s onwards. Recent years have seen both improvement (for example, Phyllida Lloyd's major all-female work for the Donmar Warehouse in London) and apparent backsliding: Solga regards Emma Rice's resignation from Shakespeare's Globe, announced at the end of 2016, as the artistic director's only choice given the perceived constraints placed on her work. This is an uncomfortable conclusion for the Globe, and it is not the only way to understand that difficult departure; it would be interesting to hear more on this topic in light of new artistic director Michelle Terry's radical feminist work in production style and casting from 2018. W.B. Worthen foresees extreme changes in theatrical performance. He considers "Shakespearean...

Practitioners’ Perspectives

Abstract The following interview was completed by e-mail on 26 November 2015. It focuses on Christopher Shinn’s Teddy Ferrara (2015), a play both informed by and in response to a number of recent suicides, including that of Tyler Clementi. This conversation explores Shinn’s creative processes for the play, which began its theatrical life in the Goodman Theatre in Chicago before being brought to the Donmar Warehouse in London where it had its London premiere. It goes on to examine Shinn’s views about the adolescent experience, desire, and LGBTQ issues, and it suggests some avenues for more positive ways to engage in discussions despite our differences.

The Shakespeare Cinemacast: Coriolanus

Josie Rourke’s Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus (2013–14) was broadcast by National Theatre Live (NT Live) to cinematic venues all over the world. Previous considerations of Shakespearean cinemacasts have explored the similarities and differences between watching an NT Live broadcast and viewing a theatrical version of the same production. With its preference for text over image, its acceptance of theatrical conventions, and its status as a special, ephemeral happening, the cinemacast does bear a resemblance to a theatrical performance. However, based on the cinemacast’s shot selection, multicam approach, and editing process, it also resembles a televised event. Furthermore, the two-dimensional, large-screen showings in movie theaters; the cinematic camera work; and the control of the viewer’s gaze intrinsic to cinemacasts make them similar to films. Cinemacasts lack the co-presence of actors and audience inimical to theater; they cannot achieve many of the editing and camera effects of moviemaking; and NT Live productions cannot be viewed on television. Thus, cinemacasts do not fit comfortably into any single existing category of media. By focusing on Tim van Someren’s contributions as the director of the NT Live version of Rourke’s production, I hope to demonstrate that cinemacasts constitute, not an original art form, but a new postmodern pastiche of the forms in which Shakespeare has taken shape in the past, including theater, cinema, and television. As such, they deserve to be compared with each other, rather than being considered only as cut-rate replacements for a theatrical experience of the play.

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”: The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”:The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions Michael D. Friedman Coriolanus is queer. I mean to assert, by this statement, that Shakespeare’s play portrays masculine erotic desire in a way that defies traditional categories of sexual identity.1 The play not only challenges heteronormativity by offering several examples of homoerotically-charged dialogue between male characters, but it also contests homosexual identification by including declarations of heterosexual desire by the same male figures.2 The full erotic natures of Caius Martius and Aufidius cannot be confined within the strict parameters of conventional hetero- or homo-sexuality, and yet the stage history of the play, since the mid-twentieth century, reveals repeated attempts to fix what Shakespeare has portrayed as fluid; to stamp as either gay or straight a wellspring of eroticism that defies stability and binary classification. To illustrate this point, I will draw upon material from six British stage productions of Coriolanus that appeared after 1958, when, as James C. Bulman notes, Britain’s Lord Chamberlain relaxed his veto upon the discussion of homosexuality on stage (39). Three of these productions are connected by their casts, as well as by their treatments of male sexual desire. Tyrone Guthrie’s staging at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1963–64 has been generally acknowledged as the first major production to incorporate a homosexual bond between Coriolanus, played by John Neville, and Aufidius, depicted by a young Ian McKellen. Two decades later, McKellen graduated to the title role in Peter Hall’s 1984 production at the National Theatre, which featured Greg Hicks as Aufidius. Their performance incorporated various homoerotic elements, but it stopped short of depicting the two men as homosexuals. Hicks then ascended [End Page 395] to the part of the Roman general opposite Chuk Iwuji as his Volscian nemesis in David Farr’s 2002 RSC production. In this version, Coriolanus did not display a palpable sexual attraction towards his enemy, and all of the production’s homoeroticism emanated solely from Aufidius. The three remaining productions that I will examine here share no cast members, but they do correspond to individual examples within the first set of performances in their attitudes toward the representation of male sexuality. Like Tyrone Guthrie, Gregory Doran, in his 2007 RSC production, depticted Martius and Aufidius as homosexual lovers. Josie Rourke, whose Donmar Warehouse production, which opened in December of 2013 and was broadcast to cinemas around the world by NT Live in early 2014, emulated David Farr by portraying a one-sided eroticism between a homosexually-inclined Aufidius and a heterosexual Coriolanus. Finally, David Thacker’s 1994 RSC staging featured a mutually homoerotic relationship between the two foes that resembled the one in Peter Hall’s production, but Thacker’s version did not exhibit the same striving toward binary categorization of sexuality that is evident in interviews with McKellen and Hicks about their rehearsal process ten years earlier. In fact, by representing the erotic relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius in an intentionally ambiguous manner, Thacker’s production, among those examined in this essay, comes closest to capturing the queerness of Coriolanus. Before Tyrone Guthrie directed Coriolanus, he developed a reading of the play based on now-discredited psychoanalytic theories of the origins of homosexuality, an interpretation that he later embodied upon the stage. As R. B. Parker observes, “Extrapolating from Freud’s connection between overmothering and the narcissistic idealization of other men, Tyrone Guthrie concentrated his […] production at the Nottingham Playhouse on a homosexual attraction between Martius […] and Aufidius (126). In an essay entitled “On Producing ‘Coriolanus’” published in the Laurel Shakespeare edition of the play (1962), Guthrie seized upon Coriolanus’s obsession with Volumnia as the underlying cause of his eroticized bond with his Volscian enemy. As Ian McKellen recalls, Guthrie gathered his cast together on the first day of rehearsals and presented this analysis of the play without revealing its author: “I’m going to read to you this introduction to an American edition of Coriolanus. I agree with every word of it.” This short essay concentrated on Coriolanus’s heroism, under-pinned or undermined by a mother-fixation. His archrival Aufidius was a...

Henry IV by Donmar Warehouse (review)

Henry IV by Donmar Warehouse (review)

Foreword

It seems fitting that during the year of the Ninth International Conference on Eugene O'Neill, O'Neill's plays have enjoyed a remarkable season in terms of international productions. Naturally, O'Neill plays were well represented in London, with Long Day's Journey Into Night staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Ah, Wilderness! staged by the London Theatre Workshop, and most intriguingly, The El Train (a combination of three early plays, The Web, Before Breakfast, and The Dreamy Kid) performed by Found Productions at Hoxton Hall and starring Ruth Wilson, who is fast becoming a major interpreter of O'Neill's plays after her performance in the highly acclaimed revival of “Anna Christie” by the Donmar Warehouse. Yet O'Neill's plays were staged across several continents, including Desire under the Elms at the Dublin Theater Festival, Long Day's Journey at the Bermuda Theater Festival, Mourning Becomes Electra at the National Youth Theater in Moscow and Teatro San Martin in Buenos Aires, and Beyond the Horizon at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts—all of which affirms O'Neill's international legacy.Although a great amount of interest in O'Neill in the United States focuses on the upcoming revival of Robert Falls's The Iceman Cometh with Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next year, O'Neill's plays also had much success in regional theaters during the 2013–14 season. In the South, O'Neill productions included Long Day's Journey at the Art Klub at Michalopoulos Studio in New Orleans, A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Irish House in New Orleans, and Desire under the Elms at the Raleigh Little Theater in North Carolina. “Anna Christie” is scheduled for production in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2015. In the Midwest, O'Neill stagings included Ah, Wilderness! in Wisconsin Rapids, Beyond the Horizon at the Ensemble Theater in Cleveland, and even the little-known Shell Shock was mounted in Akron. In California, Long Day's Journey was performed at the Maverick Theater in Fullerton, and A Moon for the Misbegotten was performed at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura. On the East Coast, The Iceman Cometh arrived at the Quotidian Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, and Mourning Becomes Electra unfolded its length at the Quintessence Theater in Philadelphia.Along with the revivals in Moscow and Philadelphia, Mourning Becomes Electra was adapted as an opera by Marvin David Levy under commission from Lincoln Center and performed with much enthusiasm by the Florida Grand Opera last November. Moreover, Lars Norén's And Give Us Shadows, which depicts a fictional encounter of O'Neill, Carlotta Monterey, and his two adult sons from previous marriages as part of a story about family and paternal love, was staged at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, New York, taking us deeper into the shadowy life that haunts us still.

Macbeth performed by the Manchester International Festival (St Peter’s Church), and: Coriolanus performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)

Macbeth performed by the Manchester International Festival (St Peter’s Church), and: Coriolanus performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)

King Lear performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)

King Lear performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)

Coriolanus performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)

Coriolanus performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)