Rehearsal halls have to be, by definition, safe spaces. They have to be places where people can be as vulnerable as necessary, as open as they need to be, as free of inhibitions, as daring, as fearless, as liberated as the work requires.
I am sick and tired of men who […]
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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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I’ve decided to go through my many Facebook posts about theatre from last year and collect all my instant reactions to shows as I saw them — fragmentary, brusque, overly enthusiastic or unsympathetic as they may be. Sometimes these posts spawned spirited discussions, and I’ll try to include whatever else I said as the threads […]
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About a year ago, prompted by the mess at the Factory Theatre, I started writing a series of blog posts about what bothered me about our city’s theatre scene. Kelly Nestruck’s article in this Saturday’s Globe and Mail about one of Toronto’s major theatre companies, Soulpepper, now has me reconsidering some of what […]
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This is an obituary.
Let me quote Soulpepper’s own company history, a history that traces the progress from a “dream” to “making the dream a reality” to the birth of “a new company”:
Soulpepper Theatre Company began with twelve actors who wanted to explore the great stories of classical theatre and inspire the […]
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I am happy. Tonight, I saw a genuine piece of theatre. A show that did the sorts of things that I go to the theatre for. The things theatre can do and film can’t. That show was Soulpepper’s production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Royal Comedians, directed by László Marton.
Predictably, I suppose, my delight was not […]
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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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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.