Tweeting and quotes….

• Stephen Daldry, interviewed in The Times on April 22 by Valerie Grove, on the difficulties faced by writers: “Of all the disciplines in the theatre, writing is the most exposing; the buck stops there. I take my hat off to writers. The anger is what keeps any artist coming back after being shot down. It’s not really anger, but spirit.” And he says he would gladly go back to working in regional theatre, as he did at the beginning of his career: “There’s something about getting a relationship going between a city and a theatre that is unique, which you can’t get in the metropolis where so many diverse theatres are servicing different voices and communities.”

• Chris Monks, interviewed in The Guardian today (April 30), about taking over the artistic directorship of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, which he officially assumes the reigns of tonight, with the opening of his production of Moonlight and Magnolias. At 54, he’s come late to running a theatre for the first time, but it’s something he’s always wanted to do, he tells Alfred Hickling: “”It has always been my ambition to run a theatre, but it had to be the right one. I wouldn’t want to run the National. I wouldn’t even want to run the West Yorkshire Playhouse. This theatre is the perfect size for me.”

He also reveals that Alan Ayckbourn will be a continuing part of the theatre’s life, but says, offering a home for his new plays for as long as he continues to produce them. But the theatre cannot trade on his reputation indefinitely: “Nobody knows when Alan is going to write his last play. There are perhaps some people who would like to see this place become a kind of shrine, offering endless revivals of his work. I think that would be a mistake.”

It’s time to give it a new energy and focus: “Stephen Joseph said you should destroy whatever you have after seven years and start again. By his own reckoning, we’ve been here 47 years too long already.”

• Meanwhile, not too far from Scarborough, the opening of Hull Truck’s new venue has received raves for the building - but not so much for the first show. In The Times, Jeremy Kingston writes today (April 30), “Towards the end of its life Hull Truck’s old theatre on Spring Street was showing its age and infirmities. But now, after years of waiting, the company has moved into terrific new premises on Hull’s main thoroughfare equipped with spacious lobbies, a rehearsal stage, a black box studio and a main auditorium that continues the Spring Street tradition of a wide (but now deeper) stage reaching into a curving auditorium. Wright & Wright Architects call this a half thrust, and the whole design catches and builds on a sense of anticipation and thrill, linking the adventurous past to future joys.” But the current show isn’t one of those joys: “Choosing the show to open a new theatre is never simple. John Godber, the creative director, wanted singing and dancing but also the contemporary world. In Funny Turns, written and directed by him, he has touched on all three and obviously I’d have liked to say what fun it is, how ingenious, how good. But really I can’t, because the story he puts in to link the musical stuff is so perfunctory.”

In The Guardian, Michael Billington is likewise impressed by the building: “In these recessive times, a new theatre is as rare as snow in June. And in moving from an old converted backstreet Methodist church into a spanking new space in the town centre, Hull Truck has got itself a dazzler. What strikes me is the value for money of the £15m venue: it boasts a 440-seat main house, a 135-seat studio and wide public spaces that use glazed brick and steel. The architects, Wright and Wright, seem to have done little wrong. But there is also continuity. Alan Ayckbourn, in a pre-show platform with Hull Truck’s creative director, John Godber, pointed out that ‘the trouble with opening a new theatre is that you often frighten off the people who used to come to the old one’. There’s no danger of that happening here. The wraparound stage has echoes of the former Spring Street building, and Funny Turns, written and directed by Godber, shows his familiar optimistic championship of society’s underdogs…. In the end, the show displays both Godber’s good and bad qualities: a love of the marginalised along with a tendency to lapse into wish fulfilment. But the main point is that he has got the building open and shown its potential through the use of speech, song and dance routines from the Youth Theatre ensemble. The road to Hull may be paved with good intentions, but the city can be justly proud of its cracking new playhouse.”

• Adetomiwa Edun, the Nigerian-born, Eton and Cambridge educated actor who opens as Romeo in the Shakespeare’s Globe production of Romeo and Juliet, in interviewed in today’s Independent by Amol Rajan, and says of his casting, “Of course there are people who think your blackness is the most interesting thing about you, but I don’t. My feeling on the relevance of blackness to actors is that the hard work was done decades ago, and we shouldn’t be obsessed by it. There were pioneers in the Seventies, Eighties and so on, and they broke taboos. A lot of actors in generations that have gone before have done the work for me. I’m not saying race is irrelevant but this is a cosmopolitan age and these things matter less than they used to.”

What matters more to him is his own education as a classics scholar: “Classics shaped me. It’s the study of peoples, of civilisations, and you get a very strong sense of the role that drama plays in shaping their identity. Classics students are essentially cultural archaeologists, and that’s a good thing for actors to be, too.”

• Clarke Peters, an American-born black actor who has long made his home in Britain but returns regularly to America where he has starred in The Wire, is one of those pioneers, being one of the first actors to bring colour-blind casting to British musicals when he became the first black actor to play Sky Masterson in a rep production of Guys and Dolls at Watford, and subsequently reprised it when he took over the role in the West End run of the National’s production of that show. In an interview in today’s Times, he reveals why living and working in Britain remains his first choice: “Everyone said: The Wire’s hot, you should go to LA.’ But when I got out there I just thought, ‘This is a bunch of dimwits here. Let me get back to London, man, back to some theatre’. I’m here because theatre is a part of your culture. Our points of reference in America aren’t steeped in literature, they’re steeped in that five minutes between commercials.”

• Stephen Sondheim, interviewed in The Times on April 25, talks about ‘Children and Art’, the song from Sunday in the Park with George, and interviewer Alan Franks says, “Many hear the author’s voice in the manifesto. When it comes to what will survive him, Sondheim has an abundance of one, but nothing of the other; no children.” Sondheim replies, “Ah, well, now, if I had to live my life over again, I would have children. That’s the great mistake I made. It’s too late now. The idea of being a homosexual and raising children was one that was just not acceptable until, my goodness, I’d say the 1970s or 1980s. You want to live long enough to see your children grow up, they’re not puppies. The joy is not just to have them, but to watch them change and grow. So, yes, that is a great regret.” There is, Franks replies, his body of body, though - and this has changed and grown over the years. Sondheim replies, “But as Bach proved to a great degree, you can have both. It would be nice to have both. But to have any outlet for creative energy is indeed a very good emotional substitute for not being able to put that energy into the raising of a family.”

• Anna Maxwell Martin, quoted in The Times diary column on April 28 after her BAFTA win for Poppy Shakespeare, talks about her future ambitions, and how they don’t embrace seeking stardom: “I’d just like to do more of the same really. I’m not hugely pretty, so it’s sort of in the hands of fate.”

• Michael Coveney, reviewing the Tricycle’s Afghanistan cycle of plays The Great Game in The Independent on April 28, ponders the following intriguing question: “Twelve plays about Afghanistan in Kilburn? The very thought of it might drive you to enquire after the possibility of seeing 12 plays about Kilburn in Afghanistan.”

• Quentin Letts, reviewing the RSC’s new production of As You Like It in the Daily Mail on April 29, writes, “What a squeamish nation we have become. One of the little touches of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new As You Like It is to have the shepherd, Corin, skin a rabbit at the start of the second half. The actor entrusted with the role, Geoffrey Freshwater, is admittedly not the most skilful of butchers, but you should have heard the squeals and groans last night! I suppose they all think animals die and go to Heaven and the meat in our supermarkets merely grows on trees.”