In this week’s copy of The Stage:
- Alistair Smith reports from the press launch of ITV’s Grease is the Word
- Nick Awde looks at how television is serving minority groups
- Dear John looks at the magician’s dilemma — should a new act have to go for David Blaine-style trickery to be noticed?
- Get 2 for 1 tickets to see Howard Goodall’s music Days of Hope at the King’s Head Theatre, Islington
- Five successful Edinburgh Fringe regulars talk about how they are preparing for the world’s biggest arts festival
- Martin Shaw talks about his new detective role as George Gently, and what future he sees for Judge John Deed
- Doctor Who executive producer Julie Gardner on the series, the new companion and the future for Torchwood
- Improbable Theatre Company talk about their collaboration with the ENO and the Met in New York to produce Philip Glass’s opera, Satyagraha
- Simon Grover looks at the decline in full-mask theatre.
- Backstage Focus looks at Artsadmin, which has reopened its East End base after major renovation.
Continue reading for some article extracts and page spreads.
It may not happen until August, but planning is already well underway for the thousands of arts professionals who will be taking part in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. Pleasance Director Anthony Alderson, Grid Iron producer Judith Doherty, PR agent Dan Pursey, comedian and actor Lizzie Roper and actor Mike Maran all talk about how they are preparing.
Martin Shaw, who is about to star in a new 1960s-set detective mystery as copper George Gently in a pilot based on the novels by Alan Hunter, says he is bemused by the ‘sex symbol’ tag he has often been labelled with:
It’s not something I seek, it’s just something that goes on and I don’t take it very seriously at all. It’s not difficult to be glamorous on TV, it’s trying to sustain it daily in real life. The sexy thing can’t go on forever and I won’t allow it to – you have to be careful because you don’t want to look silly.
As well as talking about his TV career, Shaw explains what inspired him to become an actor in the first place:
I knew instinctively how to do it from the age of about 14, when we started studying for our exams. We would read Shakespeare plays out loud and most of the kids in the class would say, ‘I don’t understand it, it don’t mean nothing’. It was a foreign language to them and I thought, ‘What’s the problem? It’s crystal clear’. I just knew what it meant and I knew how to say it. It was nice to be good at something instead of being crap at everything else, which was my experience at school.
Shakespeare also features in the next episode of Doctor Who, which started a third series last week. Executive Producer Julie Gardner, who is also Head of Drama at BBC Wales and the BBC’s Controller of Drama Commissioning, talked to The Stage Podcast ahead of the series’ debut.
She reveals that the second series of spin-off show Torchwood will not air until January 2008, after the first got to air by the skin of its teeth:
Last year, we started filming in March and we were on air with 13 episodes from late September, which was just so, so hectic. And we didn’t really have enough time – it was absolutely frantic from day one of prep, it was all hands on deck.
And so, it just works for the BBC2 schedule that we can go in January. So it’ll just give us a little bit more time in our post-production. Which would be lovely, because we were delivering an episode every single week for transmission. It was incredibly tight. So it was just as well we didn’t have any last-minute technical difficulties last year!
Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, of Improbable Theatre Company, talked to Mark Shenton about their production of Philip Glass’s opera, Satygraha:
I remember the first week here, working with the ENO chorus for the first time. There are 40 people and they don’t know what you’re like or where it’s all going to end up, so there’s all that watching of each other that goes on — arse-sniffing, as someone called it — and I’m saying, ‘This will be a really big puppet’, but actually I’m waggling some newspaper around, and they’re thinking, ‘What the hell?’. But as it was being made and formed, they would begin to see that it’s actually going to be quite exciting. But at the early stages, it can look really, really bad.
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Next week: A special edition of The Stage celebrates 80 years of Spotlight, the performers’ directory.
