I wasn’t going to write anything about this. But now I’ve read Robert Cushman’s review of Soulpepper’s Crucible, and now I’m incensed; so now I have to write about this.
Soulpepper’s Crucible is a very well-acted performance that is almost entirely devoid of ideas. It shows little evidence of direction beyond the coaching of actors, […]
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In my recent exchange with Jacob Zimmer, I took particular exception to his argument that old plays don’t have the same impact anymore that they might once have had because “we are in a different time. Story telling modes change.” My largely unqualified riposte then was “plays are not stories. Whatever a play […]
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Before I respond to Jacob Zimmer’s thoughtful and generous comments on my “5 Points of Contention,” I first have to give him, or rather his company, Small Wooden Shoe, massive kudos for staging a reading of, would you believe it, Kleist’s Prince of Homburg on Monday — by sheer coincidence, one […]
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I was a little overwhelmed by the response to my “Five Points of Contention” post. Despite its relentlessly local focus, it quickly saw almost as many hits as my less-than-jolly review of Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous and my attack on Sherlock-author Stephen Moffat’s sexist scripts. Thank you all for reading, for sharing on Twitter […]
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Toronto is a great theatre city. All year long, a wonderful variety of performances are on offer here, from commercial, production-values-driven Mirvish musicals to the fantastic range of shows staged essentially for free and driven by little more than love of the art during the summer festivals, the Fringe and SummerWorks. We have a number […]
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I’ll have more to say on this later on, but here, for your consideration, two lengthy-ish quotations from not altogether recent works about what’s wrong with some approaches to staging the classics — approaches that remain, sadly, utterly dominant in Canada.
In chronological order, first, here’s Bertolt Brecht, from “Intimidation through Classicism” (1954), a short […]
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This is a snapshot of a post. It’s the product of an hour or two of research, and I’ll probably come back to the topic soon, and in more detail. For now, here’s a sketch of an infuriating situation.
I always knew that theatres in the English speaking world in general, and in Canada in […]
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Holger Syme's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.Images may be reused as long as their source is properly attributed in accordance with the Creative Commons License detailed above. Many of the photos here were taken at the Folger Shakespeare Library; please consult their policy on digital images as well.