This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(August 2011) |
The York Realist is a 2001 play by Peter Gill. It was premiered at the Lowry in November 2001 before moving to the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Court Theatre in January 2002 by English Touring Theatre, with Gill himself directing. It transferred to the Strand Theatre in March 2002.
Nick Curtis and Jessie Thompson writing for the Evening Standard, listed The York Realist as one of the 50 Best Plays of the 21st century. [1]
It is set in the early 1960s and revolves around George (a Yorkshire farm labourer involved in a production of the York Mystery Plays who withdraws from the production), John (the production's shy assistant director who tries to convince him to come back), the love affair between them, and the clash between regional and London culture.
Reviews of the original production ranged from "a rare blast of reality" (the Guardian) to a "stunningly boring slab of dour social realism" (the Telegraph).
The play was nominated for Best New Play at the Olivier Awards and Evening Standard Theatre Awards and won the Critics Circle Award for Best New Play.
The play was revived in October 2009 at Riverside Studios by Good Night Out Presents. The production received positive reviews, with Michael Billington describing the production as "lovingly revived by Adam Spreadbury-Maher" (the Guardian). The production was seen as particularly fitting given that Gill founded the Riverside Studios in 1975, and that this would be the first Gill production at the theatre for 30 years. [2] The play was revived in September 2009 at the Riverside Studios by the company Good Night Out Presents, to mark Gill's 70th birthday. It was revived again in February 2018 at the Donmar Warehouse.
Role | ||
---|---|---|
Oct 2009 Riverside Studios | Feb 2018 Donmar Warehouse | |
George | Stephen Hagan | Ben Batt |
John | Matthew Burton | Jonathan Bailey |
George and Barbara's Mother | Stephanie Fayerman | Lesley Nicol |
Barbara | Fiona Gordon | Lucy Black |
Arthur | Sam Hazeldine | Matthew Wilson |
Doreen | Sarah Waddell | Katie West |
Jack | Jack Blumeneau | Brian Fletcher |
Amadeus is a play by Peter Shaffer which gives a fictional account of the lives of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, first performed in 1979. It was inspired by Alexander Pushkin's short 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, which Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov used in 1897 as the libretto for an opera of the same name.
Sir Peter Levin Shaffer was an English playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He wrote numerous award-winning plays, of which several were adapted into films.
Travesties is a 1974 play by Tom Stoppard. The play centres on the figure of Henry Carr, an elderly man who reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during the First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce when he was writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the Russian Revolution, all of whom were living in Zürich at that time.
Hugh Wooldridge is an English theatre director, theatre and television producer and writer, and stage lighting designer. Wooldridge was born in Amersham, Bucks, the son of British composer John Wooldridge and actress Margaretta Scott. He is the brother of actress Susan Wooldridge. Wooldridge currently specialises in large productions, often at the Royal Albert Hall, London. He also teaches, gives master-classes and runs workshops.
The King's Head Theatre, founded in 1970 by Dan Crawford, is an off-West End venue in London. It is the second oldest operating pub theatre in the UK. In March 2010, Adam Spreadbury-Maher became Artistic Director and the theatre became home to resident company OperaUpClose for 4 years.
The Hothouse (1958/1980) is a full-length tragicomedy written by Harold Pinter in the winter of 1958 between The Birthday Party (1957) and The Caretaker (1959). After writing The Hothouse in the winter of 1958 and following the initial commercial failure of The Birthday Party, Pinter put the play aside; in 1979 he re-read it and directed its first production, at Hampstead Theatre, where it opened on 24 April 1980, transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 June 1980, and it was first published, also in 1980, by Eyre Methuen. The play received its American premiere at the Trinity Repertory Company in 1982. Pinter himself played Roote in a subsequent production staged at the Minerva Theatre, in Chichester, in 1995, later transferring to the Comedy Theatre, in London.
Theatre503, formerly the Latchmere Theatre, is a theatre located at 503 Battersea Park Road in Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth, above the Latchmere pub. The venue is known for promoting the work of new writers.
John Newport Caird is an English stage director and writer of plays, musicals and operas. He is an honorary associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was for many years a regular director with the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and is the principal guest director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm (Dramaten).
Peter Gill is a Welsh theatre director, playwright, and actor. He was born in Cardiff to George John and Margaret Mary Gill, and educated at St Illtyd's College, Cardiff.
The Riverside Shakespeare Company of New York City was founded in 1977 as a professional (AEA) theatre company on the Upper West Side of New York City, by W. Stuart McDowell and Gloria Skurski. Focusing on Shakespeare plays and other classical repertoire, it operated through 1997.
Neil Peter Jampolis was a light designer, set designer, and stage director. He was best known for the light designing he did for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s 1975 production of Sherlock Holmes for which he won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award. Jampolis went on to win an American Theatre Wing Hewes Design Award in 1982 and three more Tony Award nominations for The Innocents, Black and Blue, and Orpheus Descending. He also won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for lighting Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner's Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Jampolis had also worked as either a light designer, set designer, or stage director with Pilobolus Dance Theatre the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, Opera Pacific, the New York City Opera, Pasadena Playhouse, and Hollywood's Matrix Theatre among others. He was most recently one of the main light designers for the Seattle Opera and a distinguished professor of theatre at UCLA's School of Theatre, Film, and Television. He also occasionally worked as a stage director and set designer for Seattle Opera.
William Dudley is a British theatre designer.
The White Bear Theatre is a fringe theatre founded in 1988 at the White Bear pub in Kennington, London, and run by Artistic Director and founder Michael Kingsbury. It is one of London's leading pub theatres, as well as one of the longest established, dedicated since inception to both new writing and to its Lost Classics Project, which focuses on productions of obscure historical works. Notable theatre practitioners who have worked at The White Bear include Joe Penhall, Dennis Kelly, Mark Little, Emily Watson, Tamzin Outhwaite, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Vicky Featherstone, Torben Betts, Lucinda Coxon, Adam Spreadbury-Maher, and Brice Stratford.
Madeleine Boyd is a British set and costume designer who trained in Theatre Design at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design and graduated in 2001.
The Cock Tavern Theatre was a pub theatre located in Kilburn in the north-west of London. The venue specialised in new works and critical revivals. Resident companies Good Night Out Presents and OperaUpClose were also based at the venue. It shut in 2011, due to health and safety problems regarding the Victorian staircases that serviced the theatre.
Adam Spreadbury-Maher is an Australian/Irish theatre artistic director, producer and writer. He is the founding artistic director of the Cock Tavern Theatre, OperaUpClose and The Hope Theatre, and is the current artistic director of the King's Head Theatre. Spreadbury-Maher introduced the first unionised pay agreement for actors in a pub-theatre in 2011, and in 2017 introduced the first fringe creative pay agreement and gender policy.
Good Night Out Presents is one of the resident theatre companies at The Cock Tavern Theatre in London.
Motley Theatre Design Course is a one-year independent theatre design course in London. It was founded at Sadler's Wells Opera in 1966.
Robin Norton-Hale is an English writer and director for opera and theatre. She is the Artistic Director of OperaUpClose, having founded the company alongside Adam Spreadbury-Maher and Ben Cooper in October 2009 and was previously Artist in Residence at Oxford Playhouse. She studied English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford and was a Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow (2013/14).
Holding the Man is a stage adaptation by Tommy Murphy of Tim Conigrave's memoir of the same title. It is one of the most successful Australian plays of recent times and the winner of multiple awards. It premiered in Sydney, and then across Australia, as well as internationally–on London's West End and in Los Angeles.