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* * * St Bride’s Community Centre By Thom Dibdin Powerful and compelling, random ACT’s production of Columbinus at the St Bride’s Centre is a chilling reminder of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, just 11 years ago. There is no doubting the strength of the material that director John [...] * * * Juliet gets her Romeo On Twitter By Thom Dibdin Love has triumphed over controversy in the second week of Such Tweet Sorrow, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s experimental drama based on a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, but told through Twitter and other social media. A week which started with the first on-tweet confrontation between the youth of the rival Capulet and Montague clans, ended with Juliet Capulet’s 16th birthday party – and a certain Romeo Montague not leaving until the following morning. Off-tweet, there was the case of groundlings getting onto the stage, product placement getting into the tweets, and the performers getting right into other forms of social media apart from Twitter. All the while, the tricky question of how much verisimilitude the characters should possess in their use of Twitter itself, rumbled on. Over the five week experiment, telling the tragedy in real time, there are bound to be points of crisis and resolution behind the scenes. The drama’s first big crisis came to a head over its first weekend with the increasing insinuation of players onto the stage who could, at first glance, be thought to be part of the legitimate cast. Several tweeters, notably romeo_mon, BenVoli0 and RoSweetie had been tweeting in character, as if they were members of the cast. While RoSweetie’s Rosaline dropped out pretty quickly and romeo_mon just used an early mistype by genuine cast member Mercuteio as a name and has tweeted successions of mock-profound poems, BenVoli0 was taking a more active role. … Continue reading Review – Such Tweet Sorrow Week 2 * * * LYAMC's Billy Elliot is sold out all week Church Hill Theatre The LYAMC production gets right under the nails of life in a Northumberland pit village during the long winter of the miner’s strike in 1984: the solidarity of the miners, fighting for a community and livelihood; and the antagonism between them and the police brought in from London to protect the scab miners who broke the strike. On top of all this, eleven year old miner’s son Billy has to cope with the loss of his mum, his increasingly senile gran and his enforced, weekly trip to the village hall for Saturday morning boxing club. Made to stay on after boxing one week, he and discovers that the girl’s ballet class is on next – and a whole new world opens up. With simple broad strokes the hard but humane background is given a strong grounding by the 102-strong company. The opening number, The Stars Look Down, is big and emphatic, putting the community values centre stage. … Continue reading Musical Review – Billy Elliot ***
Royal Lyceum Theatre By Thom Dibdin Uprooted from its original time and place, John Byrne’s new version of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard transplants the action to Scotland in 1979, on the eve of Thatcher’s first term in office. It’s a move which leaves Chekhov’s orchard still growing, but transformed. The trees cross the landscape in lines that are true – but it feels as if the political contours of the Seventies have been altered to fit the regimentation of the orchard, rather than the trees planted so as to fit the landscape. There’s a lot more that is right about the play and production than there is wrong, however. Byrne succeeds in finding the comic power of Chekhov and although it is sometimes overplayed under Tony Cownie’s direction, it is the laugh-out-loud comedy in the play which makes the tragedy of it seem all the more heartfelt. … Continue reading Theatre Review – The Cherry Orchard By Thom Dibdin
Such Tweet Sorrow, the RSC’s social media drama based on Romeo and Juliet, achieved its 5,000th follower on Sunday morning. The initial increase of followers to the meta-soap was meteoric, going from 60 on Monday morning, to achieve 3,500 tweeters following Juliet, the most popular of the six characters, on Tuesday evening. The rise levelled off over the week to about 500 a day. On Friday evening Juliet had 4800 followers. “We are hoping, conservatively, to reach 10,000 people,” Such Tweet Sorrow director Roxana Silbert told the Annals in an extensive interview during the week. She pointing out the enormity of having such a number of audience members to any theatre company, let alone one based in a small town in the middle of England. … Continue reading Such Tweet Followers reach 5,000 At last, it has all kicked off in Such Tweet Sorrow, with the first real piece of action after the production had been going for just four days.* * * * The cast of Such Tweet Sorrow: Mark Holgate (Tybalt), Geoffrey Newland (Friar), James Barrett (Romeo), Charlotte Wakefield (Juliet), Ben Ashton (Mercutio) and Lu Corfield (Jess) By Thom Dibdin Brilliant in concept, timely in its production and horrifyingly time-consuming to witness, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest offering to the digital age has been shaking the world’s desktops, tweetdecks and smart phones since first tweet last Monday morning. It might not be on any of Edinburgh’s conventional stages, but as a piece of digital theatre – or maybe it is meta-soap – it occurs wherever there is an appliance to watch it. Which means that it is happening here, as much as it is happening anywhere. In its first four days, Such Tweet Sorrow generated an audience that had, as of Friday 16 April 14.55 GMT, grown to at least 4,427. That was the number of people following Juliet Capulet (@julietcap16) on twitter at that time, a number that is rising by the minute. She is merely the most popular of the six true characters – and one slighty off-slant Greek chorus style character – performing in the production via Twitter. It’s not all 140 character tweets, however, as they also have the combined forces of YouTube, twitpicks, AudioBoo and other internet-based social media platforms at their disposal. … Continue reading Review – Such Tweet Sorrow  Greg Jones as Bugsy and Karla Ritchie as Blousey Brown * * *Church Hill Theatre There’s a smoochy, laid-back feel to the Smycms’ production of Bugsy Malone, which is playing at the Church Hill Theatre until Saturday night. It’s epitomised by Greg Jones in the title role with his drawling narrator’s delivery – like a music hall Sam Spade. The laid-back style is absolutely correct for an adult version of show which is usually played by kids and which draws much of its innate comedy – albeit comedy which is too often of the cutsie-pie type – from the juxtaposition of childhood innocence with the callous world of gangsters in prohibition-era New York. … Continue reading Musical Review – Bugsy Malone  Secret Garden publicity shot By Thom Dibdin There are thrills, spills and pills in store at the King’s with a schedule that runs full-tilt from the September 13 opening of Calendar Girls – returning for a fortnight with Elaine C Smith staring – right through to 13 November curtain down on Enron. Particularly exciting for those who like their drama edgy is Simon Stephen’s Punk Rock, which deals with simplistic demonising of cultural phenomena as the cause of teenage rebellion (Sept 28-Oct 2). Carrie’s War arrives direct from the West End (Oct 5-9), with Brigit Forsyth leading the 13-strong cast in Nina Bawden’s best-loved story of one ordinary girl and her brother, packed off to the Welsh mining valleys at the start of war and living through extraordinary events. Suitably for a family show, it runs in tandem with a new production of Room on the Broom, adapted from the best-selling book by Julia Donaldson (Oct 7-9). Peter Hall’s production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce follows … Continue reading Festival and King’s Theatres announce Autumn/Winter seasons  Part of John Byrne's 'pop-up' set for John McGrath's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil By Thom Dibdin It will be the last of the events held during the Curtain up: 40 years of Scottish theatre exhibition, which runs to May 3 and covers exactly the same ground as the exhibition itself. While Scottish literature has enjoyed an impressive renaissance since the Eighties, Professor Stevenson will argue that the revival in Scottish drama began significantly earlier, in the Seventies or even before. He will set out to explore the roots and nature of developments involved, the work of playwrights concerned and consequences which helped shape the wider success of Scottish writing later in the century. Curtain up marks the achievements of Scottish theatre over the past 40 years. Using theatre archives, props and playwrights’ and actors’ papers, the exhibition highlights Scotland’s rich and vibrant theatrical tradition. … Continue reading Dramatic developments at National Library  Juliet (Charlotte Wakefield) and Romeo (James Barrett) By Thom Dibdin Romeo and Juliet is being brought into the social media revolution in a brave new experiment from the Royal Shakespeare Company called Such Tweet Sorrow. Directed by Roxana Silbert – one-time Literary Director at the Traverse in Edinburgh and most recently artistic director at Paines Plough – the “production” will be played out on Twitter and other social media in real time, over the next five weeks. The production will be performed by six Twitter characters – Juliet Capulet, her sister Jess and brother Tybalt, Romeo Montague, his best mate Mercutio and Friar Laurence. As the action unfolds online, the cast will improvise the dialogue between themselves and engage with each other and their virtual audience communicating via their tweets. To be honest, this seems like a brilliant idea. So much so that I’ve spent the day looking at the different tweets, following the characters, finding new ones – who is this jago-klepto? – checking out Juliet’s You Tube video and debating whether this really is theatre. When I first started following the different characters this morning, they had about 60 or so followers. As I write this, Juliet – julietcap16 – has 1,884 followers. … Continue reading Such Tweeting Sorrow |
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