Shouts and Murmurs - December 4, 2024
A day late - sorry! - here is The Crush Bar's round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews, features and other content elsewhere.
Hello, and welcome to Shouts And Murmurs, a weekly email for paid supporters of The Crush Bar, written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Every week, I round up the best theatre writing elsewhere - news, reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, long-reads - plus any other interesting or inspiring theatre stuff I find.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
Please, won’t someone think of the children?
Theatre made for younger audiences has been in the news a lot lately: last month, the National Theatre axed its Primary Schools Touring Programme, prompting dozens of artists to sign an open letter in The Stage calling the decision “deeply damaging” and demanding a rethink. “Talk about an own goal at a time when theatre as an industry needs to demonstrate more than ever to government what a crucial role it has to play in supporting and restoring the expressive arts to their essential place in schools” wrote Lyn Gardner, also in The Stage. The National Theatre’s co-chief executive Kate Varah responded by citing “funding constraints” for the move and refusing to budge.
The conversation has evolved over the last week. The Royal Shakespeare Company - in an remarkable coincidence of timing - announced that it was doing the opposite of the NT and expanding its touring work in schools in 2025, planning to reach over 24,000 kids next year. In Scotland, The Traverse Theatre revealed that its Class Act programme had reached nearly 400 young people. Resources are tight across the sector but plenty of theatres are managing to keep their youth engagement work alive: that the nation’s most heavily subsidised venue is slimming its provision down seems wrong, particularly when it has just mounted a very gaudy, very starry production of The Importance Of Being Earnest. It seems, wrote The Guardian’s stage editor Chris Wiegand, a “dispiritingly Scrooge-like move” and one that “could jeopardise the development of theatre audiences, and practitioners, of Christmasses yet to come.”
Young people have also been on the minds of Rosemary Waugh, who has visited Bath’s celebrated children’s theatre The Egg for The Stage, which was the focus of a grim online pile-on last year in response to The Family Sex Show; Alice Saville, who has reported on her recent expeditions to baby-friendly shows for Exeunt; and Kenny Wax, who, interviewed in The Telegraph, has blamed the premature closure of the musical Why Am I So Single? on the fact that its youthful target audience is too poor to sustain it. “The show is for the Gen Z generation, and they want to be paying 30 or 40 pounds,” Wax says. Co-producer Ameena Hamid agrees: “Right now, with the cost of living, when you’re thinking about what risks you should take, what you’re going to do with your friends on that one thing you do once a month, we’re fighting a lot.”
Elsewhere, there is plenty of reaction to the news that Rupert Goold will leave the Almeida Theatre to take up the artistic directorship of the Old Vic in 2026. Writing in The Guardian, Michael Billington praised Goold’s “respect for new writing” and his “highly imaginative approach to the classics” and forecasted that he would “make waves on the Waterloo road.” Writing in The Telegraph, Ben Lawrence wrote that Goold had turned the Almeida Theatre in to the “king of the small theatrical powerhouses” but that he would “have his work cut out” at the Old Vic. His new venue “receives no public subsidy and has more than 1000 seats to fill, compared to the Almeida’s 325,” but the “cerebral” and “populist” Goold “has the chops” to make it work. “Next stop, I sincerely hope, is the National Theatre,” Lawrence concluded.
In other news: Ewan McGregor is returning to the West End; the Tron Theatre has announced its 2025 season; so has the Arcola Theatre; this week is crunch time for Scottish culture funding; artists owed money from Summerhall have been left in limbo again; sixty Welsh arts organisations will share a £1 million funding boost.