Free Thinking Festival - Stage Directions
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actress Juliet Stevenson - whose work on theatre, film and TV includes Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Village and the BAFTA award winning Truly Madly Deeply – comes to Sage. She’s joined on stage by Natalie Abrahami, who directed Stevenson in an acclaimed recent revival of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the Young Vic in London. They ask: how easy is it to break rules in the theatre?
The text of a play contains stage directions - sometimes very precise. If the play is a classic, audiences and critics may have fixed ideas about what they expect to see. Matthew Sweet chairs a discussion which lifts the curtain on the experimentation that goes on in the rehearsal room and before the TV cameras roll.
Natalie Abrahami is directing a production of Queen Anne at the Royal Shakespeare Company. It's a new play by Helen Edmundson which explores the relationship between Queen Anne and the Duchess of Marlborough. It runs at the RSC from November 19th 2015.
Producer: Sarah Crawley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Scene one. |
| 0:33.4 | A wooden platform with three chairs arranged in a row. |
| 0:37.4 | A low table with a clock on it. |
| 0:39.4 | Bottles of water on the table. |
| 0:41.2 | Or perhaps by the legs of the chairs. |
| 0:43.5 | Next to each chair is a microphone stand. |
| 0:46.1 | The presenter is sitting in one of these chairs. |
| 0:48.5 | He is a man in his forties dressed in a plain, inexpensive suit |
| 0:52.6 | that conveys the impartiality of the BBC. |
| 0:59.0 | Presenter, cheerfully, hello, welcome to free thinking. |
| 1:03.5 | For what promises to be a magnificently starry edition of the programme, |
| 1:08.0 | on which we're going to find out what happens when you break the rules in theatre. And if you truly can, when you have the ghosts of Beck programme, on which we're going to find out what happens when you break the rules in theatre, |
| 1:12.0 | and if you truly can when you have the ghosts of Beckett and Eugene O'Neill on your back. |
| 1:17.1 | And we're going to do that with the help of one of this country's sharpest directors and best-loved |
| 1:21.5 | actors. I have in my hand a piece of paper. It's the script for this programme. I wrote it this morning and I'm reading from it now. |
| 1:30.0 | Though as the next 45 minutes unfold, I'll probably refer to it less and less until we get to |
| 1:35.5 | the bit when I thank you, the audience, for having come here. But there's nothing in it that tells me |
| 1:41.1 | how I should be saying this to you. I could shout it at you. I could |
... |
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