Latest news with #DavidHare
Telegraph
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘There is a stamina factor': Ralph Fiennes on his most daunting role yet
If I listen to the few existing recordings of Henry Irving speaking in 1898, it's hard to connect. One of the most renowned actors of the Victorian era, he has a delivery that seems of another age, a style that feels alien to my ears. The slightly sung quality of his reading is not helped by the scratchy nature of the wax-cylinder recording, which gives the impression of words spoken in a rainstorm. But it seems unfair to decide on the basis of these 'souvenirs' of Irving speaking; what kind of actor he was. So, in preparing to portray Irving in Grace Pervades – a new play by David Hare about him, Ellen Terry and Terry's two illegitimate children – I sought another means of getting to the heart of him. Reading contemporary descriptions of Irving in performance, by those who saw him on stage, is more satisfying, and makes it possible to build a sense of him. He was a slender man, precise and detailed in indicating the physical qualities of a role. His pictorial feeling for the characters he played was emphasised by great attention to his make-up. He was said to have had an odd gait and a mannered pronunciation, but was clearly able to grip an audience with what they read in his face and body. If his voice lacked commanding thunder, he made up for it by intensity of thought, changing the atmosphere by a shift of emotional emphasis and holding the theatre riveted. In We Saw Him Act – a wonderful anthology from the Thirties of Irving's memoirs – a member of the audience recalls feeling a bit disengaged while watching a passable performance until, suddenly, he is moved to exclaim in awe at something Irving does – 'Oh, my God!' – and the young man next to him mutters, 'Yes, that's Mr Irving. He bores you for 20 minutes, then paralyses you for five.' The essential impression I get from Irving's life is his determination to finesse his craft, to mould and redefine himself. Born John Henry Brodribb, in 1838, into an impoverished rural West Country family, he was afflicted with a speech impediment close to a stutter. In his early years, he attended a performance which gave him that vital spark of inspiration that I think many actors have felt in their childhood. You see an arresting theatre production, and suddenly a desire to be on the stage – or, at least, to be part of a world in which the enactment of stories is your job – feels like your destiny. This is the theatre as a calling: the urge to connect to audiences, provoking them, moving them, shifting their awareness and, for a moment, taking them out of their lives. As an actor today, trying to discover Irving, you're looking back over a century and a half of huge changes in theatre – an evolution in both its writing and performance – and left asking what his audiences wanted and how he gave it to them. I believe they wanted to escape into other worlds; a heightened realism, a theatre of grand emotions framed by beautiful stage sets and evocative lighting effects. I think Irving delivered that and, even though the kind of drama he worked in is not at all our drama, what I can recognise is the determination to evolve and challenge oneself in the depiction of characters and in the realisation of any given play. Irving (whose stage name was inspired, apparently, by the American writer Washington Irving and the Scottish preacher Edward Irving) wasn't just an actor: he was producer and director, too. Theatre managers of his era tended to be concerned less with aesthetics than with maximising financial returns through pragmatic choice of repertoire and performers. Yet Irving was a form of king, overseeing all aspects of management and stagecraft, caring profoundly about the total effect of each production. Artistic directorship of a theatre seems to have been defined by him. It could be argued that Irving, with his heightened sense of visual drama, helped nurture and guide public taste towards a more uplifting, exciting form of theatre. History records how he enhanced a scene in The Bells (1871) – in which a murderer (played by Irving, in one of his most celebrated performances) reveals his guilt under hypnosis – with detailed use of music and sound effects; realistically portrayed the psychosis of Macbeth on a vast Scottish heath; and snapped into focus the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey in a magnificent pageant-like production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, served as Irving's loyal manager for more than 20 years, and his memoirs are full of detailed descriptions of extraordinary stage effects created by Irving: salt on stage for snow, glistening under the lights, as the setting for a fatal moonlit duel; an army played by professional soldiers, trudging wearily into the distant upstage then running back through the wings only to re-emerge downstage, creating the illusion of a vast unending column on the march; a small, single light to suggest a lonely fire burning at night. Irving paid attention, too, to the front-of-house atmosphere, illuminating the theatre lobby with candlelight and printing beautifully designed programmes. Eventually, of course, towards the end of Irving's two successful decades, performing alongside the luminous Ellen Terry, at the Lyceum Theatre in London's West End (from 1878 to 1902), the dramas of Ibsen, Strindberg and George Bernard Shaw began edging their way into the public's awareness. Shaw in particular championed a new kind of theatre of ideas with embedded political provocation – something Irving loathed. It's impossible to write about Irving without writing about Terry. Her intuitive alertness and generosity balanced his conscious striving. Born into a theatrical family, she had acted since childhood and seemingly had an unforced gift for performance. Actors can't act alone; or, at least, doing so will only get them so far. Irving was smart enough to identify Terry's talent and know that a partnership between them would have the power of complementary spirits. They may also have been lovers. What is certain is that Terry's two illegitimate children by the architect Edward Godwin were affected by Irving's theatre. Born in 1872, Edward Gordon Craig – Terry's son, and Irving's godson – started to formulate his own ideas, involving simple sets, shafts of light, no actors and no text. It was almost a theatre of dance or puppetry; the antithesis of Irving's taste. Yet he always worshipped Irving as an actor and the spirit of his leadership. Terry's daughter, Edith (known as Edy), is the unsung heroine of this quartet. She had organisational gifts that helped her as a costume-maker – first for Irving at the Lyceum, then independently – but she eventually found her theatrical calling was answered more fully producing and mounting shows from the converted barn her mother had bought at Smallhythe Place, in Kent (now a National Trust museum). With a small group of like-minded women, she developed plays with a political or feminist intent, producing many more than her iconoclastic brother, whose reputation as a director hangs largely on a single 1911 production of Hamlet for the great Russian actor/director Konstantin Stanislavsky. By the time you read this, Grace Pervades will have begun its run as part of a three-play season I've been invited to oversee at Theatre Royal Bath. I had fallen in love with the place after performing T S Eliot's Four Quartets there in 2021, and was both daunted and excited when Danny Moar, the theatre's director, first made me this offer. I quickly knew that I wanted both to present new plays (Grace Pervades will be followed, in October, by Small Hotel by Rebecca Lenkiewicz) and also to direct my first Shakespeare on stage, As You like It. During the Covid lockdown, I had read about Irving and Terry in A Strange Eventful History, Michael Holroyd's account of their partnership, which had in turn inspired me to pull out my battered copy of Gordon Craig's On the Art of the Theatre (1911). Reading it, I was really struck by the sense of a past era of momentous change in the theatre, of what this art form can do and who it can reach – and I approached Hare with the suggestion that this subject would be rich material for a play. As a result, I now find myself in a very small version of the situation Irving must have inhabited for years, which is to be rehearsing and then performing a role at the same time as preparing two other productions as both director and actor – while also dealing with aspects of publicity, programme design, casting and the scheduling of rehearsals. It is, shall we say, an adrenalising process. As an actor, I look to be reassured by the nurturing hand of the director. Sometimes that assurance is not on offer, so instead you look for signals – often from fellow actors – that you are swimming in the right current. In this case, in our rehearsals for Grace Pervades, the brilliantly perceptive Jeremy Herrin has been offering precise notes with gentle consideration. I value his guidance as he helps me and Miranda Raison (playing Terry) through the fine detail and nuance of Hare's dialogue. I'm also paying attention to how he encourages and crucially allows the energy of scenes to evolve without imposing or insisting. I absorb this, and also remember how other directors I have worked with brought together the elements of a production. Next week, I will have to turn and become – I hope – that enabling person for the cast and creative team of As You like It. Immersed in Henry Irving: The Actor and His World, Laurence Irving's forensically detailed 1951 biography of his grandfather, I can't help reflecting on the totality of Irving's vision, shaped by years of uncertainty and penury – the idealism and perfectionism that drove him to capture his audience. It's hard not to be inspired by him. But there is a stamina factor. If you are directing and performing – at the same time – tiredness must be accepted or ignored, as sheer adrenaline helps you through. If you don't fall ill, there can be a sweet spot between activity and exhaustion. How will I feel, having played Irving on Monday night, getting up to lead rehearsals for As You Like It on Tuesday morning? How will I feel, having opened As You Like It, to turn around and start working with director Holly Race Roughan and be secure in my lines for Small Hotel? Ultimately, it's the company spirit that will carry us – the energy of a team. The collective energy of any ensemble has always been moving to me, whether I'm part of it or not. I'm idealistic about what a theatre company represents at its best; that whatever the scale or size of role held by each individual within it, on or off-stage, it is a community working in harmony. There can be discord or tension, of course, but the aspiration is to offer an experience that touches the mind or heart and especially the soul of that other essential theatre community: the audience. That is the destination that will define us. Irving and his productions had varying critical responses, yet, ultimately, the fact of the audience's continuing attendance suggests that they decided overwhelmingly in his favour. As he says in Grace Pervades, 'Ellen, theatre is a group activity.' Grace Pervades by David Hare, the opening production in the Ralph Fiennes Season, is playing at Theatre Royal Bath ( until July 19
Times
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Times
David Hare: ‘I have been heartily kicked by the BBC'
I am sitting in a tiny podlike meeting room at BBC Broadcasting House with David Hare. Not that being perched on a sofa in the equivalent of a broom cupboard stops Britain's most famously opinionated playwright from expounding his views on everything from Keir Starmer and Israel to the National Theatre and the BBC itself. Just turned 78, he is clearly not running low on verbal gas, social critiques or thunderous denunciations. So having set to rights the worlds of religion, the Labour Party, media, high finance and the justice system in such classic plays as Racing Demon, The Absence of War, Pravda, The Power of Yes and Murmuring Judges, has he thought about writing a drama about the dominating figure of our present age — Donald Trump?
Scroll.in
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
This book illustrates how a robust cultural milieu in the 19th century modernised Calcutta
Modernity needs a crucible and a tree, the former where seminal ideas and practices germinate and the latter where they flower. If there was one crucible of art in India in the 19th century, it was Calcutta. Calcutta could be looked upon as a crucible of modernity, where over the past centuries, it has been a melting pot for various currents. They were ignited by economic, social, and cultural transformative forces that shaped the urbanisation of Calcutta. In the popular and intellectual terms of discourse, modernity implies the production and adoption of new ideas and ways of thinking that defy or depart from the traditional lifestyle and ideas. In this sense, modernity reinvents itself and changes its shape with every stage in the socio-economic transformation of society, and can therefore be ancient and contemporary. Modernity in Calcutta introduced the concepts of freedom, equality, and fraternity, which helped frame democratic and egalitarian forms of political governance in the modern Western world in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was also felt in Calcutta. Calcutta in the 19th century became the locus of exchange between the British metropolis and its Indian colony. Its port, built by the British, served to export native raw materials to England to grease its industrial wheels. It also served to import Danish Christian preachers who set up the first printing press in Srirampore, near Calcutta. It also brought an Englishman named David Hare to Calcutta, where he opened a school to teach English to Bengali students. The Hindoo College set up in 1819, employed a brilliant young teacher, Henry Derozio (son of a Portuguese father and an English mother, who was born in Calcutta). He imparted the ideas and thoughts of contemporary Western philosophy and political science to his Bengali students. Thus a new generation of Bengali intelligentsia was produced which approximated to the role of modernity, by both interrogating the sanctity of their past indigenous tradition, as well as challenging the authority of the current colonial order. One of the students of Hindoo College, Kishorichand Mitra was to describe the spirit of modernity of those days in the following memorable words: The youthful band of reformers who had been educated at the Hindoo College, like the tops of Kanchanjunga were the first to catch and reflect the dawn. These students, along with leading intellectuals and social reformers like Rammohan Roy, Radhakanta Deb, Dwarkanath Tagore, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, as well as business entrepreneurs like Ramdulal Dey and Motilal Sheet, played a pivotal role in introducing the ideas of a cosmopolitan modernity, and encouraging practices in society and culture in conformity with that contemporary global concept of modernity. Calcutta subverted the concept of colonial modernity that was sought to be imposed by the British rulers. By using the same tools of knowledge that were given to them by these rulers, they constructed a different concept of modernity. The British rulers wanted to mould a generation of Bengalis, a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. They groomed this class in the hierarchal order of barristers, civil servants, and army personnel to be trained in Britain, followed by the next subordinate group of Bengalis, who were trained in Calcutta to operate as teachers, lawyers, medical practitioners, and junior employees in the administration, as deputy magistrates and clerks, to serve their British bosses. But such transactions between the rulers and the ruled in colonial Calcutta led to a new conceptualisation of modernity by these Bengali middle classes. Modernity was no longer a monopoly of Western colonial powers. Many among the Bengalis who were trained in Lincoln's Inn as barristers, or as civil servants in London, came back to Calcutta with ideas of modernity to which they had been exposed during their stay abroad, ideas of democracy, parliamentary elections, judicial independence, accountability by the rulers, local selfgovernance, and right to self-determination. They began to assert their rights as Indian citizens on these lines, some within the colonial order, some daring to break out from it. It is in Bengali culture that Calcutta has played a major role in introducing modernity. The term modernity here suggests the ability of indigenous litterateurs and artistes to respond to extraneous new thoughts and styles and techniques, and reinterpret and use them in their own creative ways. From the nineteenth century onward to today, Calcutta has remained a crucible, where the exciting encounter between local and traditional Bengali ideas and forms, and their counterparts from the West, has led to a succession of creative output in literature and the arts. We are familiar with the rise of the Bengali novel with Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the multi-faceted contributions of Rabindranath Tagore to modern Bengali culture, the founding of the Bengal School of Art under the auspices of Abanindranath Tagore, and still later the Calcutta Group of painters like Rathin Maitra, Gopal Ghose, Paritosh Sen. But, it is important to note in this context that it was not only these members of the educated middle classes, who participated in this encounter between the East and the West. Calcutta's lower orders created a distinct culture of their own in the nineteenth century by adopting the technology of contemporary modernity, and interpreting the new ideas of modernity in their own way. We thus find urban folk singers, like kobiwalas, panchali-singers, and jatra actors, learning to use newly introduced musical instruments, like the violin, harmonium, and clarinet, to sing songs that lampooned the manners and habits of the westernized Bengali babus who imported these same instruments to Calcutta. We find traditional scroll painters coming to Calcutta and discovering the importance of paper, which was easily available due to the setting up of paper manufacturing mills by British entrepreneurs. They began to use paper to paint both the traditional religious themes, and also to depict the new urban environment. They came to be known as Kalighat pats, since these painters settled down near the Kalighat temple in Calcutta. Jamini Roy was the urban patua who built a bridge to modernity with his iconic painting. Similarly, poets and writers from the lower orders in nineteenth-century Calcutta made use of another form of modernity, the newly introduced printing press. Some among them set up printing presses in the Battala area of north Calcutta, which opened up a wide avenue for the publication and distribution of popular literature, and also woodcuts.
New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Adjoa Andoh Q&A: 'Life is a miracle – don't waste it on not being yourself'
Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad Adjoa Andoh was born in Bristol in 1963. As a stage actor she has played lead roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and on screen made her Hollywood debut in Invictus (2009). Since 2020 she has played Lady Danbury in the Netflix series Bridgerton. Andoh is a supporter of the Multibank charity initiative. What's your earliest memory? Sitting on the floor in the kitchen of our flat in Leeds and looking up at my mum by the sink with the window's light behind her. It was before my brother was born, so I was maybe two years old. Who are your heroes? Pippi Longstocking is my childhood hero. I wore red tights on my head to be her – a bold, brave girl who had adventures! My adult hero is Nelson Mandela. During apartheid-era South Africa, my Ghanaian-English family was illegal. What book last changed your thinking? Virginia Axline's Dibs in Search of Self. It was the book chosen by Harriett Gilbert, the presenter of Radio 4's A Good Read. I was a guest. Axline, a psychologist, wrote it in the Sixties about a five-year-old-boy she was treating. It made me really think about the profound impact our adult behaviours have on the psyches of small children. What political figure do you look up to? Again, Nelson Mandela. Someone very human – full of joy, anger, appetite, self-doubt; making his life one of brilliant strategy, patience and self-sacrifice in the service of freedom for all people. His humanity is all the more courageous, because more touching. What would be your Mastermind specialist subject? Advert jingles from the late Sixties, early Seventies – the bar is not high! In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live? There is no other time I'd prefer – are you kidding? We have anaesthetics, contraception, indoor plumbing, the vote and a general acceptance that all human beings are of equal value – although that last is frequently tested. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe What TV show could you not live without? The American sitcom series Black-ish, created by Kenya Barris. Who would paint your portrait? Lucian Freud. What's your theme tune? Currently 'Marching on Together', the anthem of Leeds United Football Club. But eternally, Roberta Flack's version of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received? It was from my brother: lean into the yes of no because life is a miracle; blink and it's gone; don't waste it on not being you. I am trying to follow it and failing daily. What's currently bugging you? The fear and the unthought-of damage the Supreme Court's ruling on the definition of a woman is immediately causing in the lives of our vulnerable trans population. What single thing would make your life better? Peace. When were you happiest? Taking the curtain call at the press night of Stuff Happens by David Hare at the National Theatre in 2004. I played Condoleezza Rice. Seeing David Hare's Plenty in 1979 made me want to be an actor. In that 2004 curtain call, I felt I had landed where I was built to be. In another life, what job might you have chosen? I would have been an architect. Are we all doomed? No. Human beings are built for hope. It is why we love a sunrise and blossom in the spring, and cry at kindness. [See also: Can you ever forgive Nick Clegg?] Related This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain's Child Poverty Epidemic
Irish Independent
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Wexford Drama Group to stage award winning play in New Ross ahead of All Ireland finals
The members have had a successful run with the production in the ADCI Drama Festival circuit, which has also qualified for the Open All Ireland Drama finals in Athlone, taking place this month. Skylight is a beautiful, modern love story by David Hare. Set over one single evening in 1995 it's the story of Kyra, an idealistic young teacher who finds herself confronted by her former lover, multi-millionaire Tom. The couple search for common ground and perhaps a road back to each other. The play is directed by multi-award winning director, Paul Walsh and stars Andy Doyle, Conor Farrell and New Ross' own Seona O'Connor. Speaking about the upcoming festival, Mr Walsh said: 'The first time I was part of the All-Ireland Drama Festival was 2007 and I couldn't believe the level of margin in the air and it's something I have felt on every visit since. 'Being part of the 2025 line-up is very special, we are doing a play I adore with a fantastic cast and crew. The line-up of plays is phenomenal and we are honoured to be part of it. To my cast and crew, getting to perform in Athlone is the beautiful gift we get at the end of a ten month journey and I know we intend to enjoy every minute.' Mr Walsh said he's 'delighted' that Wexford Drama Group is in a position to bring Skylight to the people of New Ross at St Michael's Theatre before their Athlone venture. The production will take to the stage on Saturday, May 10, at 7.30 p.m. and tickets can be purchased through the theatre on (051) 421 255.
