Shouts and Murmurs - November 12, 2024
The return of Exeunt Magazine on Substack, Paul Mescal in Streetcar again, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, and much more.
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 - reviews, interviews, opinion, long-reads - plus any other interesting or inspiring theatre stuff I find. At the moment, you can only read the top section for free, but you have to pay me £5/month or £50/year - or just email me, if that seems a bit steep - if you want to read the good stuff on the other side of the paywall.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
Stuff is coming back. Exeunt. Miss Saigon. Fascism. Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Some returns are more welcome than others. Exeunt, for example, the online theatre magazine founded by Natasha Tripney and Daniel B Yates has been much missed since it disappeared in January 2022. For twelve years, it was a home for passionate, innovative writing about performance – I still think my review of James Graham’s Quiz, written as a quiz, is the best thing I’ve done – until it paused publication nearly three years ago. Praise be, then, that it will be returning on November 19 with a new editor – Holly Williams – and a new home right here on Substack. Exeunt redit.
The other things I am less thrilled about: it seems unlikely I’ll catch Paul Mescal as Stanley as I don’t own anything valuable enough to sell to raise the money for a ticket, and I caught the last season of President Trump and was not a fan. In any case, I saw Elizabeth Newman’s superb revival of Streetcar – I like plays with one-word abbreviations – at the Edinburgh Lyceum last week, the day after the election, and I am not sure I will ever see a more resonant performance of Tennessee Williams’ play. He knew, didn’t he? America’s bifurcated psyche is right there in the hoity-toity, condescending, delusional Blanche and the impulsive, proudly uneducated Stanley, The ending - of both play and election - has the grim inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It is Stella I feel sorry for. And Miss Saigon, again? Please have an original idea.
Other stuff remains frustratingly absent, like meaningful state support for theatre. I was interested in Lyn Gardner’s latest piece in The Stage. For an industry that brims with creativity, she observes, theatre is remarkably reluctant to experiment with new models. It would be intriguing to see Kwame Kwei-Armah’s argument followed to its logical conclusion: why saddle yourself with the onerous responsibilities of public funding, if you are not actually getting enough funding to survive? Other options exist.
“Just as our education system still seems to be designed for the demands of the Industrial Revolution rather than the 21st century and our NHS feels as though it is stuck in the mid-20th century, theatre too, sometimes feels as if it is increasingly threadbare and working within structures that are no longer fit for purpose. Rather than trying to patch these existing ways of doing things, there is a need to be more radical, more disruptive and to reinvent the process to create greater capability.”
In other news: Nicole Scherzinger got in trouble for liking some tweets; interesting new seasons were announced at Jermyn Street Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre; a new theatre is opening in Shepherd’s Bush; Eclipse Theatre has closed; Arts Council England has introduced a major new scheme to help boost touring theatre.