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"Performance Reviews"
A set reminiscent of the dilapidated stately home that Alex Eales designed for Katie Mitchell’s Alles Weitere Kennen Sie aus den Kino in Hamburg, except more vast: its wide stretch fills the massive proscenium of the Barbican and recedes far into the depths of the stage, revealing further hallways as more of the […]
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Very quick & short off-the-cuff review.
Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Turgenev’s play (directed by Marber himself) is slick, smooth, professional, superficial, and extremely English.
A cool set, made up of suspended perspex walls and a huge reproduction of a Romantic landscape painting, cluttered with pretty 19th-century furniture, with rustic chairs for the entire cast upstage […]
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Things that don’t happen as often as I would like: seeing shows in Toronto that assure me that theatre remains a vital art form here; seeing shows that only make sense as theatre, and couldn’t be a film or a novel; seeing shows that make me feel, immediately, that I want to see them again, […]
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For years now, I have been trying to figure out and describe what exactly is so special about German theatre. In some ways, particularly from the perspective of the English-speaking theatre world, it may seem like I’d need to draw up a pretty long list of oddities: no historical costumes, no respect for the text, […]
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Jette Steckel’s production of Arthur Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land at the Deutsche Theater makes no efforts to reinvent much of anything. It’s a very well done, moderately inventive staging of a classic — and it’s remarkable precisely because it is so unremarkable in context. This is simply a good example of what “normal” looks like […]
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An empty stage, sliced diagonally in half by dolly tracks running from downstage right to upstage left; on those tracks, a grand piano on a cart, equipped with a microphone for the player. The pianist enters, sits at the piano, and starts a tentative vocal improv. Lights off. The cast shuffle on. Lights up. Actors […]
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(Off the cuff and short.)
My evening in the Volksbuehne: Frank Castorf directing The Master Builder.
4 hours of Ibsen. Well. 4 hours of Ibsen and a lot of other stuff. 4 hours of nine life-sized dolls of the former Volksbuehne star Henry Hübchen being thrown around on stage; 4 hours of actors walking in […]
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Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, under the new artistic leadership that took charge last season, has quite aggressively redefined itself as what they call a post-migrant theatre — building an ensemble deliberately designed to reflect the multi-ethnic makeup of contemporary Germany (and especially contemporary Berlin), and staging a repertoire in which new plays, often with an […]
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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.
