Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Home > Videos Wednesday, 03 February 2010 Bricks and mortar"The theatre is about plays and actors, not maintaining buildings," says Jim Hacker, fictional Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, about London's National Theatre in this 1988 clip from Yes, Prime Minster. Besides being very funny, it has some relevance to a few blogospheric conversations about the establishment of theatre in communities outside of New York, as well as the wisdom of government subsidy for the arts and the personalities and egos at play. The clip begins with Hacker in conversation with fictional NT artistic director Sir Simon Monk about Hacker's proposed cuts to the NT's subsidy on the eve of a special dinner celebrating the arts, but the relevant bits begin at about three minutes in:
The Guardian's Andy Field has other thoughts on the NT today. Posted in /Videos Home > Videos Wednesday, 06 August 2008 Quadruple FeatureSome intriguing visual and aesthetic parallels in the first two YouTube videos below. First, David Tudor performs John Cage's 4'33". The crawl at the bottom of the screen reads: "You are invited to turn down the volume of your TV set, and listen to the ambient sounds present wherever this program is performed." Tudor relates an amusing anecdote at the end of the performance; you should, of course, turn your volume back up for that. Second, Jeremy Irons performs Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu: Quiet meditative works for a quiet meditative moment. Third, there's this, very very rare video footage of Samuel Beckett
himself, speaking about a television adaptation of his play What
Where and his interest in "getting rid of every superfluity" from the
original theatrical text. Although both the video and audio quality aren't
quite pristine, it is nonetheless a brief (only 38- This brings back more than a few memories; What Where was one of the first Beckett plays I saw onstage, during its 1983 New York premiere directed by Alan Schneider (the New York premiere of Ohio Impromptu was a part of the same evening). Such is the way the stages of our lives are set. There's more on What Where, including information on the 1985 Stuttgart television adaptation to which Beckett refers, at the Wikipedia page devoted to the play. Beckett's Catastrophe was the third play to round out that 1983 evening. A version of that play, directed by David Mamet and featuring Harold Pinter, John Gielgud and Rebecca Pidgeon, rounds out this quartet below: Posted in /Videos Home > Videos Thursday, 24 July 2008 What Would Jesus Buy?
If on its first release you missed the Morgan Spurlock- If you're converted, the film will preach to you already, but Spurlock
and VanAlkemade have also made a concerted effort to provide some
historical background on the rise of credit industry practices that still
pose a profound threat to the health of American economic life (as this front- Purchase it at amazon.com today. Or, if that's a little too ironic for you, you can always add it to your Netflix queue, like I did, or borrow it from your local library. I wrote about Billy's performance at the Spiegeltent for the New York Times in 2006. Posted in /Videos
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