Author: Publisher:
ISBN: 9781406373394
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 128
Book Description
Synopsis coming soon.......
Paradise
Author: Kae TempestPublisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1529045274
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
‘Tempest has a gift for shattering and transcending convention.’ New York Times Philoctetes lives in a cave on a desolate island: the wartime hero is now a wounded outcast. Stranded for ten years, he sees a chance of escape when a young soldier appears with tales of Philoctetes’ past glories. But with hope comes suspicion – and, as an old enemy emerges, he is faced with an even greater temptation: revenge. Kae Tempest is now widely acknowledged as a revolutionary force in contemporary British poetry, music and drama; they continue to expand the range of their work with a new version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes in a bold new translation. Like Brand New Ancients before it, Paradise shows Tempest’s gift for lending the old tales an immediate contemporary relevance – and will find this timeless story a wide new audience.
The National Theatre Story
Author: Daniel RosenthalPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849439435
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1433
Book Description
Winner of the STR Theatre Book Prize 2014 The National Theatre Story is filled with artistic, financial and political battles, onstage triumphs – and the occasional disaster. This definitive account takes readers from the National Theatre's 19th-century origins, through false dawns in the early 1900s, and on to its hard-fought inauguration in 1963. At the Old Vic, Laurence Olivier was for ten years the inspirational Director of the NT Company, before Peter Hall took over and, in 1976, led the move into the National's concrete home on the South Bank. Altogether, the NT has staged more than 800 productions, premiering some of the 20th and 21st centuries' most popular and controversial plays, including Amadeus, The Romans in Britain, Closer, The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors. Certain to be essential reading for theatre lovers and students, The National Theatre Story is packed with photographs and draws on Daniel Rosenthal's unprecedented access to the National Theatre's own archives, unpublished correspondence and more than 100 new interviews with directors, playwrights and actors, including Olivier's successors as Director (Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner), and other great figures from the last 50 years of British and American drama, among them Edward Albee, Alan Bennett, Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, David Hare, Tony Kushner, Ian McKellen, Diana Rigg, Maggie Smith, Peter Shaffer, Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard.
Costume at the National Theatre
Author: National TheatrePublisher: Oberon Books
ISBN: 9781786829757
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
The National Theatre's Costume department is one of the theatre's largest departments. Their skilled practitioners work in a number of areas including tailoring, dyeing, costume props, costume production and maintenance to produce over 10,000 costume elements every year, transforming a designer's vision for a production into vibrant reality. Costume at the National Theatre is a lavish large-format photographic book featuring the extraordinary work of the Costume department, accompanying the National Theatre's showcase Costume exhibition from October 2019 to June 2020.
Frankenstein, based on the novel by Mary Shelley
Author: Nick DearPublisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571277225
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 103
Book Description
Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie.Childlike in his innocence but grotesque in form, Frankenstein's bewildered creature is cast out into a hostile universe by his horror-struck maker. Meeting with cruelty wherever he goes, the friendless Creature, increasingly desperate and vengeful, determines to track down his creator and strike a terrifying deal.Urgent concerns of scientific responsibility, parental neglect, cognitive development and the nature of good and evil are embedded within this thrilling and deeply disturbing classic gothic tale.Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, adapted for the stage by Nick Dear, premiered at the National Theatre, London, in February 2011.
Stage Blood
Author: Michael BlakemorePublisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571311237
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
In 1971, Michael Blakemore joined the National Theatre as Associate Director under Laurence Olivier. The National, still based at the Old Vic, was at a moment of transition awaiting the move to its vast new home on the South Bank. Relying on generous subsidy, it would need an extensive network of supporters in high places. Olivier, a scrupulous and brilliant autocrat from a previous generation, was not the man to deal with these political ramifications. His tenure began to unravel and, behind his back, Peter Hall was appointed to replace him in 1973. As in other aspects of British life, the ethos of public service, which Olivier espoused, was in retreat. Having staged eight productions for the National, Blakemore found himself increasingly uncomfortable under Hall's regime. Stage Blood is the candid and at times painfully funny story of the events that led to his dramatic exit in 1976. He recalls the theatrical triumphs and flops, his volatile relationship with Olivier including directing him in Long Day's Journey into Night, the extravagant dinners in Hall's Barbican flat with Harold Pinter, Jonathan Miller and the other associates, the opening of the new building, and Blakemore's brave and misrepresented decision to speak out. He would not return to the National for fifteen years.
Leopoldstadt
Author: Tom StoppardPublisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802157726
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 125
Book Description
**Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play** Finally making its Broadway debut in a limited engagement run, Tom Stoppard’s humane and heartbreaking Olivier Award-winning play of love, family, and endurance At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today’s most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.
Dramatic Exchanges
Author: National Theatre LettersPublisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782833978
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 485
Book Description
The perfect gift for any theatre lover There has been always as much drama offstage as on at the National Theatre, and much of it is to be found in the letters, telegrams, scribbled notes and colourful postcards of its main players. - What drove Laurence Olivier to confess: 'The foolishness of my position starts to obsess me'? - Why did Maggie Smith write: 'I am absolutely heartbroken by your decision'? - What prompted Judi Dench to ask: 'Can't you write me a musical so that I can sit on a chair in a fur hat & nothing else and sing RUDE songs?' This book brings together for the first time some of the most inspiring, dramatic and amusing letters from the life of Britain's most beloved theatre: Laurence Olivier's gracious rejection letters, Peter Hall's combative memos, Helen Mirren's impassioned defence of theatrical innovation, fantastical good luck missives and long conspiratorial letters. Together, they reveal the stories behind some of the most lavish, triumphant, daring and disastrous productions in the theatre's history, including Amadeus, Romans in Britain, Laurence Olivier's Othello, Closer, The History Boys and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A rich collection of correspondence like no other, this book offers a fascinating and celebratory look at the world of theatre and beyond.
Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories
Author: S.E. WilmerPublisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587295210
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
Historians of theatre face the same temptations and challenges as other historians: they negotiate assumptions (their own and those of others) about national identity and national character; they decide what events and actors to highlight--or omit--and what framework and perspective to use for telling the story. Personal biases, trends in scholarship, and sociopolitical contexts influence all histories; and theatre histories, too, are often revised to reflect changing times and interests. This significant collection examines the problems and challenges of formulating national theatre histories.The essayists included here--leading theatre scholars from all over the world, many of whom wrote essays specifically for this volume--provide an international context for national theatre histories as well as studies of individual nations. They cover a wide geographical area: Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America. The essays contrast large countries (India, Indonesia) with small (Ireland), newly independent (Slovenia) with established (U.S.A.), developed (Canada) with developing (Mexico, South Africa), capitalist (U.S.A.) with formerly communist (Russia), monolingual (Sweden) with multilingual (Belgium, Canada), and countries with stable historical boundaries (Sweden) with those whose borders have shifted (Germany).The essays also explore such sociopolitical issues as the polarization of language groups, the importance of religion, the invisibility of ethnic minorities, the redrawing of geographical borders, changes in ideology, and the dismantling of colonial legacies. Finally, they examine such common problems of history writing as types of evidence, periodization, canonization, styles of narrative, and definitions of key terms.Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories will be of special interest to students and scholars of theatre, cultural studies, and historiography.
Pictures in the Air
Author: Stephen C. BaldwinPublisher: Gallaudet University Press
ISBN: 9781563681400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Book Description
Most of all, Pictures in the Air portrays the true, ongoing heritage of the National Theatre of the Deaf - the fine performers, directors, and playwrights that for the first time had a national stage of their own upon which to showcase their skills. This book shows that they have succeeded, in triumph after triumph, for the past quarter of a century.
