Jonathan Holmes (theatre director)

Last updated

Jonathan Holmes (born 28 October 1975, in South Yorkshire) is a UK theatre director and writer.

Contents

Jonathan lives in North London. He is a cousin of army officer William Thomas Forshaw and film director Cy Endfield.[ citation needed ]

Education

He attended Wath Comprehensive School, The University of Birmingham (where he emerged with a first-class degree), and completed a Ph.D. [1] at The Shakespeare Institute.

Career

For six years, he taught Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, leaving as a Senior Lecturer in 2007. During his time there, he wrote two books: Merely Players [2] (about the rhetoric of classical acting) and Refiguring Mimesis [3] (with Adrian Streete, about aesthetics). He also set up a new degree programme in Drama and English.

During this first career, he became an expert in the work of John Donne, and organised the first live performance for four centuries of several of Donne’s songs at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in 2005. [4] Performers included Dame Emma Kirkby, Carolyn Sampson and The Sixteen. The event sold out, and the proceeds were donated to the charity Peace Direct. In 2011, he also wrote and directed Into Thy Hands , a biographical play on Donne. [5]

In 2007, he wrote, directed and produced the play Fallujah, [6] starring Harriet Walter, Imogen Stubbs and Irène Jacob. It ran in a specially tailored space on Brick Lane, with a score by Nitin Sawhney, and design by the conceptual artist Lucy Orta. At the time, it was the only significant account of the sieges of Fallujah, and is composed entirely of verbatim testimony. In 2008, he collaborated with the choir and period instrument orchestra The Sixteen and actors Alan Howard and Virginia McKenna in a series of concerts at the South Bank Centre.

He has also written and directed two short films starring Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Elliot Cowan and Julian Ovenden, and is nearing completion on a feature documentary, Perpetual Peace. [7] This last includes interviews with peacemakers around the world and features contributions by Harold Pinter, John Berger, Karen Armstrong, George Monbiot, Tony Benn and Noreena Hertz, among others.

In 2008, he set up The Jericho House, a movable performance venue specialising in cross-media collaborations around the theme of hospitality. The Jericho House is groundbreaking in its use of sound and music, leading Holmes to set up a partnership with The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience examining the effect of sound on the brain.

In 2009, Jericho produced a critically acclaimed site-specific testimony play [8] about the neglect of New Orleans after the hurricane. It was called simply 'Katrina,’ and the run sold out completely.

In 2010, Holmes began a campaign for continuing state support for the arts with an event called ‘What’s the point of art?’ attended by many influential people from the creative industries. The resulting public debate led to all three main parties committing to maintaining arts funding at 2009 levels at the next spending round. [9] [10]

Related Research Articles

Theatre techniques are procedures that facilitate a successful presentation of a play. They also include any practices that advance and enhance the understanding the audience brings to the action and the acting by the cast on stage.

Jonathan Pryce Welsh actor (born 1947)

Sir Jonathan Pryce is a Welsh actor who is known for his performances on stage and in film and television. He has received numerous awards, including two Tony Awards and two Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2021 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to drama. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he began his career as a stage actor in the early 1970s. His work in theatre includes an Olivier Award-winning performance in the title role of the Royal Court Theatre's Hamlet in 1980 and as The Engineer in the stage musical Miss Saigon in 1990. On the Broadway stage he earned Tony Awards—the first for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his Broadway debut role in Comedians (1977), the second for Best Actor in a Musical for the Broadway transfer of the musical Miss Saigon (1991).

Simon Callow British actor, director, and writer

Simon Phillip Hugh Callow is an English actor, director, and writer. He is internationally known for his roles in films like Amadeus, A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shakespeare in Love.

Stage combat Technique used in theatre to create the illusion of physical combat

Stage combat, fight craft or fight choreography is a specialised technique in theatre designed to create the illusion of physical combat without causing harm to the performers. It is employed in live stage plays as well as operatic and ballet productions. With the advent of cinema and television the term has widened to also include the choreography of filmed fighting sequences, as opposed to the earlier live performances on stage. It is closely related to the practice of stunts and is a common field of study for actors. Actors famous for their stage fighting skills frequently have backgrounds in dance, gymnastics or martial arts training.

Mimesis is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including imitatio, imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self.

Christopher Plummer Canadian actor (1929–2021)

Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was a Canadian actor. His career spanned seven decades, gaining him recognition for his performances in film, stage, and television. He received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, two Tony Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Grammy Award nomination―making him one of few recipients of the "Triple Crown of Acting" to also acquire a Grammy nomination. He made his Broadway debut in 1954 and continued to act in leading roles on stage, playing Cyrano de Bergerac in Cyrano (1974), Iago in Othello, as well as playing the titular roles in Hamlet at Elsinore (1964), Macbeth, King Lear, and Barrymore. Plummer performed in stage productions, including J.B., No Man's Land, and Inherit the Wind.

Diegesis is a style of fiction storytelling that presents an interior view of a world in which:

  1. Details about the world itself and the experiences of its characters are revealed explicitly through narrative.
  2. The story is told or recounted, as opposed to shown or enacted.
  3. There is a presumed detachment from the story of both the speaker and the audience.
Erich Auerbach German philologist (1892–1957)

Erich Auerbach was a German philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times and frequently cited as a classic in the study of realism in literature.

Jonathan Stephen Firth is an English actor. He is best known for his roles in such noted British television productions as Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Victoria & Albert. He lives in Islington, North London.

Rudolph Walker Trinidadian actor

Rudolph Malcolm Walker is a Trinidadian-British actor, known for his sitcom roles as Bill Reynolds in Love Thy Neighbour (1972–76) and Constable Frank Gladstone in The Thin Blue Line (1995–96). Since 2001, he has played Patrick Trueman in the BBC soap opera EastEnders.

Nicholas Briggs British actor (born 1961)

Nicholas Briggs is an English actor, writer, director, sound designer and composer. He is associated with the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spin-offs, particularly as the voice of the Daleks and the Cybermen in the 21st century series.

Jonathan Hyde Australian-born English actor (born 1948)

Jonathan Stephen Geoffrey King, known professionally as Jonathan "Nash" Hyde, is an Australian-English actor. Hyde is perhaps best known for roles as Herbert Arthur Runcible Cadbury in the 1994 comedy film Richie Rich, Samuel Parrish and Van Pelt in the 1995 fantasy adventure film Jumanji, J. Bruce Ismay in the 1997 epic romantic film Titanic, Culverton Smith in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Warren Westridge in creature feature film Anaconda, Dr. Allen Chamberlain in the 1999 adventure horror film The Mummy, and Eldritch Palmer in the FX TV series The Strain. Although an Australian citizen, he has mostly lived in the United Kingdom since 1969, after his family left Australia.

Mark Rylance British actor, playwright and theatre director

Sir David Mark Rylance Waters is a British actor, playwright, and theatre director. He is known for his roles on stage and screen having received numerous awards including an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Laurence Olivier Awards, and three Tony Awards.

Ken Ludwig American playwright and theatre director

Ken Ludwig is an American playwright and theatre director whose work has been performed in more than 30 countries in over 20 languages.

Trevor Peacock English actor (1931–2021)

Trevor Edward Peacock was an English actor, screenwriter and songwriter. He made his name as a theatre actor, later becoming known for his Shakespearean roles. Later in his career, he became best known for playing Jim Trott in the BBC comedy series The Vicar of Dibley.

Christopher Francis Villiers is an English actor, screenwriter and producer.

Chris Noonan Australian filmmaker and actor (born 1952)

Chris Noonan is an Australian filmmaker and actor. He is best known for the family film Babe (1995), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Red Lion was an Elizabethan playhouse located in Whitechapel, just outside the City of London on the east side.

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is a book of literary criticism by Erich Auerbach, and his most well known work. Written while Auerbach was teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, where he fled after being ousted from his professorship in Romance Philology at the University of Marburg by the Nazis in 1935, it was first published in 1946 by A. Francke Verlag.

Pammal Sambandha Mudaliar

Pammal Vijayarangam Sambandham Mudaliar (1873–1964), who has been described as "the founding father of modern Tamil theatre", was a playwright, director, producer and actor of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. He was a recipient of the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.

References

  1. ↑ "Directory of Shakespearean Theses: 1990-2006. Compiled by Thomas Larque". Archived from the original on 5 July 2008. Retrieved 10 August 2008.
  2. ↑ Holmes, Jonathan (2004). Merely Players?: Actors' Accounts of Performing Shakespeare. ISBN   978-0-415-31957-7.
  3. ↑ Holmes, Jonathan; Streete, Adrian (2005). Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature. ISBN   978-1-902806-35-8.
  4. ↑ "Login".
  5. ↑ Billington, Michael (3 June 2011). "Into Thy Hands – review" – via The Guardian.
  6. ↑ "Login".
  7. ↑ "Search results". YouTube .
  8. ↑ "Login".
  9. ↑ "Login".
  10. ↑ "Login".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.