Newbury theatre guide
Find out about theatre events coming up in and around
Newbury and West Berkshire, reaching out to Oxford, Basingstoke
and Reading. Follow us on
Twitter
. Email us at
Posters of forthcoming productions are here.
Dark times
The theatres are closed and we don't know when they will reopen. Amateur
and professional, all will suffer. Some may not survive. The Watermill and
Newbury Corn Exchange are asking for donations to help them keep going;
other theatres are probably doing the same.
Newbury Theatre is joining up with
Penny Post to give
updated theatre information, and it will also appear here. Penny Post is a
great source of local information - if you don't know it already, I can
thoroughly recommend it, particularly now when a lot of us will be stuck at
home.
But there's lots happening online
The Watermill have now furloughed almost all of their remaining staff and stopped all their weekly online activities that had been scheduled to the end of June. They say, "We have been blown away by your generosity towards our ACT NOW, to help us ACT tomorrow appeal [on their website] and we remain grateful and humbled by the support you have shown us at this challenging time. Sadly, like many other theatres, The Watermill’s future is uncertain, but we will work as hard as we can to find a way to safely welcome audiences and participants back through our doors once again."
The
Corn Exchange, Newbury have got
Armchair Reviewers' Club in their Creative Online Sessions this
week.
Respond to last week's screening,
1st July
For last week's session of the Armchair Reviewers Club,
we sat down to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream
in the comfort of our homes. We encouraged our audiences to submit their
thoughts on the play via email or social media, and we'll be creating a
'roundup' that brings these reviews together.
This week’s screening, 2nd July
Join us as we watch
another theatre performance via a link in the comfort of our homes. This
week we'll be watching Synergy Theatre Project's Girls Like That,
an urgent and explosive play that explores gender equality and the pressures
on today’s digital generation. Written by Evan Placey and directed by Esther
Baker, it was performed by a company of professional and ex-prisoner actors
in 2014. The play won Best Play for Young Audiences at the Writers Guild
Award 2015. It is
available on YouTube.
The BBC have released nine recordings of Shakespeare
productions by the RSC and the Globe on iPlayer. This is part of BBC4's
Culture in Quarantine: Shakespeare season. They are also
showing recordings on BBC Four:
Much Ado About Nothing, 28th June, 21:00 and available
online
Michelle Terry and Edward Bennett star as Beatrice and Benedick in
an acclaimed RSC production, set at the end of WWI, of Shakespeare's
much-loved comedy.
Proteus
Theatre of Basingstoke have made available full-length video
recordings of some of their productions. They are free to watch, but you can
support them by making a donation.
Every Thursday, the National Theatre are making NT
Live productions available on YouTube, free for a week. More information at
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home. This is what's coming
up.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, 26th June to 2nd July
The London Theatre Company's immersive production of Shakespeare's romantic comedy filmed live at the Bridge Theatre in 2019 by National Theatre Live.
Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the production features Gwendoline Christie, Oliver Chris, David Moorst and Hammed Animashaun in this hilarious tale of flying fairies, love triangles and mistaken identities.
The Globe's fortnightly free
YouTube streamings of their productions on Monday nights has now got to the
end of its run but they are promising that 34 productions from their 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, which welcomed artists from all over the globe to perform Shakespeare’s works in their own language on the Globe Theatre stage, will also be shared for free.
Watch this space!
More information at
www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2020/04/03/how-to-watch-our-free-globe-player-films/
The
Show Must Go Online has weekly readings of the Complete Plays of
Shakespeare (Wednesdays, 19:00) by a global cast, in the
order they were believed to have been written. It uses global casts,
including professionals and amateurs, and you can either watch the plays or
apply to read a part. You can stream previous readings of the plays,
starting with Titus Andronicus.
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
1st July
The RSC are showing some of their productions on BBC
iPlayer and some of them are being shown on BBC Four - see above.
They are also making a further 18 Shakespeare productions available on a
14-day free
trial with Marquee TV.
www.rsc.org.uk/news/watch-rsc-shows-from-home
You can search for reviews of previous productions - there are more than 900 pages of them in the Archive!