FILM Ryan Gilbey
Crumb Terry Zwigoff’s stark documentary captures the sort of everyday madness you don’t find, well, everyday. Highlights include Mark Rylance – the new artistic director – on playing to the Elizabethan auditorium, Brian Cox on his Regent’s Park Richard III, and Sir Peter Hall on how the Globe’s stage might change his RSC Julius Caesar. Doubting Thomases take note: it’s enough to give a theatre a good name.
ADRIAN TURPINpounds 11 seat, pounds 5 stand 0171-311 1111 Info 0171-401 9919. But the programme soon leaves the beaten track with a range of quirky topics – Bill Gaskill on asides, Ian Judge on the daylight audience – that wouldn’t look out of place on an English degree finals paper. Importantly, they also reveal a theatre unafraid to innovate.
Some traditional Bardolatry kicks off on Wednesday, with Shakespeare’s Stars (6.30pm) boasting more top-brass thesps than a Labour fundraiser circa 1987: Dench, Lapotaire, Bolam et al. Conducted by some of Britain’s finest actors and directors, the workshops offer the first chance to see the performance space in use. What it will offer, they fear, is a Bard fossilised in Elizabethan amber. “I don’t know why, but it’s very hard for us to get rid of that impression,” chief executive, Michael Holden, admits exasperatedly. “We’re really not about recreating ‘authentick-with-a-K’ Shakespeare.”
Given this image problem, the launch of the Globe’s Shakespeare workshop series is timely. Each month, some benefit or appeal takes place; and yet, whatever the venue’s merits, many London theatregoers hold a deep-seated suspicion of it.
Whatever has a theatre, and in particular one that hasn’t even opened yet, done to deserve such a reputation? The Globe, Shakespeare’s open-air playhouse reconstructed on its original site, has been surprisingly slow to find a place in the public’s affections. PRABJOT DOLLY DHINGRA
Information: 0171-383 5455 or call your local leisure services department. Playday, the annual event organised in conjunction with most of the country’s local authorities, is now in it’s eighth year. Anna Labelska, coordinator of NVCCP (National Voluntary Council for Children’s Play) says the theme of communication “gives plenty of scope for the imagination and includes lots of challenging activities. It also enables children from different ethnic backgrounds and those with learning difficulties to show that they have ways of expressing themselves that others can learn from”.
Some activities have been suggested and organised by children themselves, and include games involving semaphore, morse code, braille, graffiti, CB radio and Chinese whispers. Children’s author Michael Rosen has proposed a bid to break the record for the world’s longest poem (currently standing at 500,000 lines). Balloons are to be launched in a grand ceremony in Stirling, while in Whyteleafe, Surrey, children will be creating a performance of Treasure Island. At Rutland Waters, a police communications vehicle will be on site relaying messages, Gloucester sees an organised rocket launch, and, perhaps most ambitious of all, kids in Cleveland will be busying themselves devising their own newspaper. While the adult world is being bombarded with advertisments telling them, “It’s good to talk” and “Orange – we’ve got it covered”, 200,000 children around the country this Wednesday will be turning their attention away from the fast-moving world of communication to one more simple and creative. In other words: How To Be Queer And Still Have A Gas.RYAN GILBEYLondon Film-makers Co-op, 42 Gloucester Av, London NW1 (0171-586 8516) every Fri to 25 Aug.
