David Farr, new artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, answering Guardian critic Michael Billington’s criticism of doing his production of Julius Caesar in modern dress (published on September 14):
“In approaching a Shakespeare play I immerse myself in its language, and move towards an imaginative world that might best express my interpretation of that story. I have set Shakespeare in 1950s America, Samurai Japan, a crumbling English country house and now in an ex-Soviet republic. The aim, in each case, is to illuminate the play, to render it clear, urgent and exciting. Billington finds a director’s obsession with using the modern world tiresome. For me, by contrast, the really clichéd safety zone of Shakespearean production is that which sets the play somewhere in the early 20th century, preferably in England with vaguely ‘period’ costumes. This type of productions lacks specificity, encourages woolly acting and smacks of what I can only call a ‘theatrey-ness’. It instils in me a quiet longing for death. Theatre needs historical intelligence but it also needs a modern consciousness. Shakespeare’s won productions were modern-dress – he was talking about his world.”
James Nesbitt, on learning how to tile for his next play Shoot the Crow, opening at the Trafalgar Studios at the end of this month (interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, September 14):
”Even if I’m rubbish in the play, I’m going to be able to tile my bathroom”.
Trevor Nunn on leaving behind the artistic directorship of the National Theatre (interviewed in the Evening Standard, September 13):
”Because you lose the immediate daily contact with so many close colleagues, it does feel like a bereavement. You can’t creep back and be a spectre at the feast and you can’t have secret meetings with people out of school, either. But there is also a release in not having those deadlines, those financial pressures. And you do hear the word ‘no’ on such a regular basis… I had a delightful time at the National and I’m having a delightful time not being at the National.”
About Rob Lowe, reviewed in A Few Good Men at the Haymarket by Kate Bassett in The Independent on Sunday (September 11, 2005):
“Lowe acquits himself admirably but he looks curiously like a crusading ventriloquist’s dummy with his square-jaw small-physique combo.”
