Vanessa Liberad Garcia reports on Company of Angels, the Los Angeles theatre group committed to connecting with the community When one of my best friends, Baby Dewds (aka talented theatre actress Dani O’Terry), invited me to watch a play in Downtown Los Angeles called Civil Rites, I was excited. She and I are both staunch […]
Trainspotting The Play: Harry Gibson: 10 Years On
Joy Hancox: Kingdom For A Stage
Budge Burgess This is a curiously enigmatic book, a detective story which remains unsolved… or at least unresolved. Joy Hancox explores the nature of the Elizabethan stage, raising searching questions about its nature and function, sucking the reader deeper and deeper into her research. The stage plans Hancox acquired in 1984 were 17th architectural drawings […]
Andrew Goodman: Gilbert and Sullivan’s London
Budge Burgess When General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, complained that ‘the devil has the best tunes’, he meant the sensual, drunken pleasures of the working class pub and music hall, not the elegant appeal of Gilbert & Sullivan. Yet Arthur Sullivan’s light operas deliver enduring, popular tunes, and the words of W.S.Gilbert embody […]
Richard Witts – Artist Unknown: An Alternative History Of The Arts Council
Robin Askew "The Arts Council has piddled about in the cultural life of Great Britain for half a century." From this opening sentence, former arts administrator Richard Witts mounts a sustained attack on the cranky Council’s waste, incompetence and stupidity, gleefully exposing fiasco after fiasco until the reader begins to marvel that any art actually […]
Irvine Welsh : You’ll Have Had Your Hole : You’ll Have Had Your Theatre
Dr Willy Maley applauds the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s stage play You’ll Have Had Your Hole Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind of people who attended football matches at his plays. Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with […]
Trainspotting: The Play : Expletives Repeated
Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspottinghas taken the theatre world by storm. Chris Mitchell discusses censorship, sincerity and swearing with the director. [Note: this interview is about the original stage production of Trainspotting in 1996. Spike also has another interview with Harry Gibson on the 10th anniversary stage production of Trainspotting in 2006.] […]
Albert Camus: SPIKE interviews Catherine Camus, daughter of Albert Camus: Solitaire et solidaire
Russell Wilkinson talks to Catherine Camus about Albert Camus’ The First Man [Cliquez ici pour la version française de cette interview] In January 1960, the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus was killed in a car crash along with his friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard. Recovered from the wreckage of the crash was the unfinished […]
Graham Duff on the Edinburgh Festival: Lunatic Fringe
Comedian Graham Duff Now more than ever, publicity and promotion can spell life or death for an Edinburgh Fringe show. The people on the front line are the Leafleters, or as they are courageously known in the world of promotion, Foot Soldiers. The people whose job it is to whittle away a fad wad of […]
Quentin Crisp : Resident Alien : An Englishman In New York
Chris Mitchell goes for lunch with Quentin Crisp This month sees the publication of Resident Alien, the selected diaries of Quentin Crisp. It is difficult to surmise whether this man needs an introduction or not, such is his longevity as a cult figure of quintessential Englishness, “a stately old homo of England”, to quote […]