Grads' Club: Readers I apologise; I have been AWOL, with less emphasis on the ‘leave’ and more emphasis on the ‘working my behind off’. My behind and several pounds that the gym couldn’t get rid of but the stress of assisting on a fringe show did in...

Education and Training: Last week I saw, and enjoyed, Bridge Theatre Company’s production of Something for the Winter, by Deborah Gearing. It was my first visit to Southwark Playhouse too, so that was memorable as well. The Bridge Theatre Company comprises a group of 18 and 19 year old actors who have trained at the BRIT school for Performing Arts and Technology, Croydon. They work for a year with theatre professionals on a single production which tours to venues and festivals during the spring and summer....

Shenton's View: 
Monday’s Guardian included a full page ad for the new Wildworks outdoor show Babel, being presented as part of World Stages London, containing critical quotes. “Heart-warming and uplifting,” says one. “Eye-opening and inspiring,” says another. Yet another claims, “loved it, incredibly impressive and uplifting.” And who wrote them? Tom, Dick and Harry, that’s who — or rather, Tom, Ambra and Hunt. As the tagline over the ad puts it, “The People Have Spoken!” Yet we have no idea at all who they are. It’s all reminds me a bit of...

Shenton's View: Just the other day I was talking about drawing up lists of favourite things, and last week Michael Coveney provided his own list of his favourite UK theatres, in which he wrote, “I wonder if we’d ever all reach agreement on our top ten favourite British theatres. Here are ten of mine: Wyndham’s and the Haymarket in London, Theatre Royal in Brighton, the King’s in Edinburgh, the Glasgow Citizens, Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds, Theatre Royal in Stratford East, the Royal Court, the Wakefield Theatre Royal and Opera House,...

Education and Training: On Friday I went to Dukes Hall at the Royal Academy of Music — surely one of the prettiest concert halls in London with its amber and cream decor, chandeliers and oil paintings, not to mention the splendid acoustic. My purpose was to watch the internationally celebrated Semyon Bychkov rehearse the Academy Concert Orchestra and the work was Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I walked into the hall to the rich sounds of the fourth movement, the adagietto which has become so well known and popular since Visconti’s film Death in...

Shenton's View: Theatre is a constantly evolving art form — from the top (of who makes it and where they make it) to the all-important bottom line of who receives it, i.e us the audience and how we see it (not to mention how we behave as we do so, as witness the controversy I ignited last week over the matter of Bianca Jagger’s appalling manners). Theatre, of course, doesn’t exist without its audience — as Steve Marmion, artistic director of Soho Theatre, said earlier this year, “Art is pointless without an...

Education and Training: It’s pretty unusual to find an acclaimed company of young graduates who first worked together while they were at school and which is now directed by their drama teacher. But that’s how Idle Motion came about. Lyn Gardner of The Guardian described its 2010 show, The Vanishing Horizon, as ‘a little jewel of a show … propelled by real ingenuity.’ My Stage colleague, Lauren Paxman who saw in it Edinburgh deemed it ‘one of the Fringe’s most beautiful, accomplished and innovative physical theatre pieces.’ Paul Slater teaches drama at...

Shenton's View: It’s been an interesting week: I have been making headlines this week as well as writing them for a change. My blog entry here on Monday that recounted my encounter with Bianca Jagger at last Friday’s Barbican opening of Einstein on the Beach was picked up, in turn, by the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay column on Tuesday, the Guardian news pages on Wednesday, plus a banner trailer on the front page to a G2 feature tied into it on theatrical etiquette; two Telegraph stories posted online yesterday, from both the...

Shenton's View: It’s always difficult picking favourites — but of course we all have them. One of the questions I’m asked most regularly is what my favourite show playing in London is, or to provide a list of the top three, by way of a shorthand recommendation for visitors from abroad. (And right now I’d say: Matilda for a new musical, Sweeney Todd for a brilliant revival, and One Man Two Guvnors for an uproarious comedy, but of course I’m not saying that this will work for everyone!) Starting the weekend after...

Education and Training: Last year I attended a work in progress performance by Filkskit Theatre at New Diorama Theatre where they were completing a research and development week. I wrote a blog about it the time in which I opined “it’s very encouraging to see young actors founding their own company and creating some truly original, fine quality work.” Earlier this week the finished version of Snow White played for three Brighton Fringe performances at The Warren - a delightful new venue in the middle of the city, complete with a magical...

Shenton's View: In the week following the announcement of this year’s Tony nominations, the Broadway box office grosses for last week make interesting reading — and worrying signs for a few shows on the current Broadway slate. Receipts for Leap of Faith, for instance, which won a surprise nomination for Best Musical, actually saw receipts drop, from $224,539 the previous week to just $171,381 last week, with an average attendance of 72.9% (against the previous week’s 85.3%). But though the attendance percentage might not seem so bad, it can’t be read in...

Shenton's View: 
Reviews come in lots of shades of grey. Thanks to the virtually all-pervasive system of star ratings across the reviewing landscape — though not, as I’ve pointed out before, in The Stage itself! — we’ve become trained, both as readers and reviewers, to reduce the judgements we read or make to a simple code; though as I’ve also said many times before, there’s no universally applied index to explain the calibrations that make up the differences between each register on that code. There is, however, at least a black-and-white sense...

Education and Training: Last week I judged a school student theatre review competition. It was run by a company which specialises in high quality issues-inspired plays performed mostly in secondary schools. The company had invited teenagers who’d seen a specific production to submit a review for the competition. I was asked to judge from a final shortlist of five. It was an interesting task which left me reflecting on how reviews should be written — and how you learn to do them....

Shenton's View: I’m not often driven to rage in the theatre, but at Friday’s opening of Robert Wilson’s production of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Barbican Theatre I found my patience sorely tested, and I not only reached breaking point, I actually snapped. The amazing show — part art installation, part minimalist musical meditation, part dance spectacle — is an endurance test to begin with, not least on the bladder, even though a technical breakdown at a clearly shockingly under-prepared Barbican meant an unscheduled break afforded a pee break...

TV Today: This evening sees the start of Britain’s Got Talent’s live semifinals, after a series of prerecorded auditions which, the addition of new judges Alesha Dixon and David Walliams aside, have been punctuated by several social media and second screen campaigns. The most visible characteristic element...