As part of their 80th anniversary celebration and as a precursor of the International Festival in Tbilisi next year, the Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre invited directors, dramaturgs and producers from Israel, Romania, and London to come and see their work. I was lucky enough to attend this theatre festival as representative of the Soho Theatre London.

The presentations opened with a new adaptation of the Shakespeare classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Marjanishvili’s Artistic Director Levan Tsuladze. Tsuladze’s vision of the play is a pink and white extravaganza dominated by the development of a gay relationship between Oberon and Puck. The fairies, dressed in skimpish ballet dresses, inspired by Art Nouveau design, are representative of a Victorian prettification which culminates in an extravagant Botticelli pastiche when Titania emerges from a giant mussel. Continue Reading »

Clockheart Boy from Dumbshow is a twisting tale of grief, bitter sibling rivalry and the difficulty of mending damaged hearts. The Professor lives among his eccentrically gifted creations, brooding upon the loss of his vanished daughter. Then a boy without a heart washes up on the beach, asking questions about love which lure him to explore the darkest corners of his new family’s history.

Sam Gayton’s drama is a nicely judged mixture of woeful and haunting and silly. A bedtime story stolen from Plato, complete with shadow puppets and philosophical musings, immediately gives way to something suspiciously like a good old fashioned kitchen slosh scene. Michael Bryher’s production moves between profundity and daftness with ease, and with an infectious sympathy for the frailties and follies that make us human. Asa Norling’s inventive set gives the company a magical world to play in Continue Reading »

Hans’s Andersen’s The Snow Queen is a cruelly bleak epic of a fairy tale, in which lost childhood innocence can only be redeemed at the price of suffering and sorrow. So when Finger in the Pie’s version of the story kicks off with the jovial tones of a pre-recorded Sandi Toksvig, it’s a fairly inauspicious beginning. Things get better when Robin Guiver and Jen Pearcey (standing in for an indisposed Ana Mirtha Gutiérrez) embark upon their own almost wordless prologue of boy and girl love, discovering friendship and the fragility of affection as they watch the flowering and withering of a single red rose.

Guiver’s Kay is a thoughtful portrait of unlovely adolescence, gangly and self-centred and utterly enraptured by new intellectual discoveries that transform the contours of his imaginings. His fixation with the mathematical perfection of snowflakes draws him away from Pearcey’s touching Continue Reading »

London Theatre Blog is pleased to present a series of seven reviews, written by director/dramaturg Jens Peters, of productions at the Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre (Tiblisi, Georgia) as part of its recent International Project. The first review is of a new play entitled The Rendezvous by acclaimed Georgian writer Tamara Bartaia. It took place at the Drayton Studio in London on the 18th November 2008.

Tamara Bartaia’s new play is based on true events that took place during the Georgian civil war of 1991-1993. The action is set in a graveyard in Tbilisi in 1998. Led by a beggar-cum-narrator (James Bye), the audience encounters the ghosts of the young victims of the recent conflict. Timo (Alex Price), Kakha (Michael Norledge), Nik (Daniel McCloud), Lexo (Joseph Thompson) and Besso (Ben Upson) were a young band Continue Reading »

Modern theatre criticism has problems, and those problems are generational in nature. That’s the one overriding conclusion with which I left the Royal Court after Brickbats in Cyberspace, in which a panel of theatre critics, bloggers and theatre practitioners convened to discuss the effect of the Internet, and specifically blogging, on modern theatre journalism.

There are very few professional theatre critics in the UK, by which I mean people that earn a living from theatre criticism alone. Of those few, the vast majority are of what most people like to call ‘a certain age’. I knew this before attending the discussion; as a young person working in the field of arts journalism, it has a direct effect on my life. What I hadn’t considered was the effect it has on the evolution of theatre journalism as a form. Continue Reading »