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ArtsBeat: ‘Bravest Woman in Mexico’ Sees Her Story on a New York Stage

N.Y. Times Theatre - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 2:57pm

In her first visit to New York, Marisol Valles Garcia watches a “poetic impression” of her life story, which includes four months as the police chief in a community controlled by drug cartels.

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ArtsBeat: Calling Superfans of ‘The Last Five Years’

N.Y. Times Theatre - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 2:40pm

What is it about Jason Robert Brown’s two-character musical that inspires a passionate following?

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Theater Review: ‘According to Goldman,’ at the Clurman Theater

N.Y. Times Theatre - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 2:18pm

“According to Goldman” tells of problems encountered as a professor and a student work on a screenplay.

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ArtsBeat: An Acting Debut for John Guare

N.Y. Times Theatre - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 12:40pm

The Atlantic Theater Company announced that the Tony Award-winning playwright will make his Off Broadway acting debut in its production of his new play, “3 Kinds of Exile.”

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ArtsBeat: A Degas Sculpture Inspires a New Musical

N.Y. Times Theatre - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 12:01pm

“Little Dancer,” directed by Susan Stroman, is to have its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington in October 2014.

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The Natalia Osipova effect comes to the Royal Ballet

The Guardian Stage News - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 6:51am

The Russian star's arrival this autumn, following Leanne Benjamin's departure, opens intriguing questions about the company's next steps

A couple of weeks ago, the Royal Ballet announced that principal dancer Leanne Benjamin would be retiring at the end of this season. Despite the fact that Benjamin had enjoyed a much longer career than most ballerinas – she's 49 – the news still came as a shock. It had got to the point where we all assumed she was somehow indestructible (or that she had some kind of portrait tucked away in her attic). Not only did Benjamin look nothing like her age, she appeared to be dancing better with every passing year.

Benjamin herself has said that age (and motherhood) have been liberating for her, giving her confidence in the knowledge that communication with the audience is more important and rewarding than technical perfection. And the deepening expressiveness of her performances hasn't just been evident in story ballets like MacMillan's Mayerling (the work in which she gives her farewell performance in London, in June). Even in non-narrative ballets like Balanchine's Jewels, Alexei Ratmanksy's Preludes or MacMillan's Requiem a profoundly musical and human intelligence now shapes her dancing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPn1nJMBKZU

As soon as Benjamin's retirement was announced, there was a spate of online chatter about who might be promoted to fill her place. But that chatter took a dramatic change of direction a week ago when the Royal announced that the Russian super-ballerina Natalia Osipova would be joining the company in the autumn.

This was startling news, not only because the netting of Osipova's prodigous talent was such a coup for the Royal, but more practically because she was already a principal with two other companies, the Mikhailovsky in St Petersburg, and American Ballet Theatre in New York. Osipova also dances a busy freelance schedule, and although it's since been announced that Osipova will re-jig her Russian contract to guest-principal status, and although her appearances with ABT are likely to remain restricted to the company's spring/summer season, it's not yet clear how many shows she will actually dance in London. She does apparently plan to make her home in the city, along with her on and off-stage partner Ivan Vasiliev.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iibl54JatU

However, the fact that Vasiliev himself hasn't been hired by the Royal has sparked another round of speculation as to who might be partnering Osipova on the London stage. Her debut with the company will be with Carlos Acosta, in MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet, but one other name that's been thrown into the ring is Edward Watson. The pale, lean and wired Watson could certainly spark an interesting chemistry with Osipova's concentrated energy, especially if they're cast together in the ballets of Wayne McGregor (who's made no secret of his admiration for the Russian ballerina and his interest in working with her).

But partnerships can be as unpredictable on the dance stage as they are in real life. When another exotic outsider, Sylvie Guillem, joined the Royal back in 1989 few could have guessed the effect she'd have on Jonathan Cope, as their evolving partnership cracked open the shell of his very English reserve.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YSlk9l1qKg

Who knows, now, where the Osipova effect will be directed – towards tall, fair, elegant Rupert Pennefather, perhaps, or towards the demonic virtuosity of Steven McRae? One thing's certain: interesting times up there in the principal ranks of the Royal.

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Children of the Sun – review

The Guardian Stage News - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 6:13am

Lyttelton, London

Maxim Gorky takes up where Anton Chekhov leaves off. Written in 1905, shortly after what would become known as Bloody Sunday, when peaceful protesters were shot down by the tsar's troops, this rarely seen play offers a tragicomic picture of a self-absorbed intelligentsia. Although the work is no masterpiece, Howard Davies's production and Andrew Upton's new translation prove it's a fascinating document of its time.

Gorky's focus is on one particular privileged family who, in Bunny Christie's evocative set, occupy what looks like a miniature fortress. Protasov, the head of the house, is a scientist so obsessed with his own experiments that he seems blind to the world around him. He ignores the loss of his wife's love, views the overtures of an adoring widow with amused disdain and scarcely notices that his sister, Liza, is edging towards madness. Although Liza has a paralysing fear of life that makes her reject a persistent suitor, it is she who is the closest to an authorial voice. When Protasov envisions a distant future in which poverty and sickness are eradicated, Liza enquires: "But at what daily, hourly, soul-destroying, inhuman, crushing cost?"

Gorky's crucial point is that Russians want immediate progress rather than utopian dreams. But, although his play satirises the intelligentsia, it doesn't sentimentalise the proletariat. We're offered a vivid portrait of a society in a state of prerevolutionary chaos, and that emerges strongly from Upton's free adaptation. I'm not crazy about his use of four-letter words to lend the play an urgent contemporaneity, and can't really believe that the bookishly secluded Liza would say "Shut up about my fucking nerves." But Upton heightens the Ibsenite notion that Protasov's chemicals are contaminating the water supply and reorders the events of the last act to bring the play to an explosive conclusion.

Davies's production precisely captures the contradictions of a work in which people are absurd without being worthless. Geoffrey Streatfeild as Protasov follows a basic rule of acting by playing the character from his own point of view, as a man who believes his visionary experiments justify his unworldliness. Justine Mitchell as his alienated wife, Emma Lowndes as his truth-telling sister and Paul Higgins as the Hamletesque vet who passionately adores her, also give beautifully defined performances. You won't find here the symphonic beauty of Chekhov. But this is a work that, in its jaggedness and volatility, echoes a fractured society on the verge of momentous upheaval.

• What have you been to see lately? Tell us about it on Twitter using #GdnReview

Rating: 4/5

Theatre

Michael Billington
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Graeme Gilmour obituary

The Guardian Stage News - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 5:33am

Sculptor and designer who created memorable installation art on rivers and hilltops, in forests and fields

Since the advent of John Fox's spectaculars of ritual and procession in Yorkshire with the Welfare State International company 45 years ago, much of our most potent theatrical and installation art has taken place in outdoor landscapes, on rivers and hilltops, in forests and fields. The sculptor and designer Graeme Gilmour, who has been found dead aged 48, was at the heart of many such recent adventures.

For more regular theatregoers, Gilmour will be remembered for his brilliant collaboration with the director Phelim McDermott and the designer Julian Crouch on Shockheaded Peter (1998), a "junk" opera and sardonic elegy for dead children based on Heinrich Hoffmann's cautionary tales. It was produced by Michael Morris's Cultural Industry, with jangling music by Martyn Jacques and the Tiger Lilies. Gilmour's contribution as a puppeteer, performer and co-designer of mobile cardboard furniture, trick costumes and an eerie stage environment of doors and shutters was central to the success of a show that originated at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and went on to win an Olivier award for best entertainment and a Critics' Circle gong for best design.

Although Gilmour stayed, on and off, with that show throughout a world tour that lasted several years, Shockheaded Peter still represented a domestication of his work. He belonged outdoors, with Scotland's largest free-standing permanent sculpture, Arria, a giant steel female figure with swooping arcs looming over the M80 in Cumbernauld, that he collaborated on with Andy Scott; or with the now decaying Meg the Horse (from Robert Burns's poem Tam o'Shanter) that he created as part of Scotland's Year of the Homecoming in 2009.

The son of a furniture shop manager, Ewing, and his wife, Molly, Gilmour grew up with his brothers in Ayr and Prestwick in the west of Scotland, dabbling in amateur dramatics before attending Prestwick academy and then, between 1982 and 1986, the Glasgow School of Art, where he studied sculpture.

On graduating, he joined the Welfare State community of artists, building a huge effigy of Saint Mungo for a mammoth lantern parade in Glasgow's year as European capital of culture in 1990, as well as two great Margaret Thatcher floats that sailed poignantly down the Clyde to mark the transfer of the government's capital investment to foreign shipyards. For the capital of culture finale he provided two great expanding pink salmon rising in the night sky over Glasgow Green in a wild constellation of fiery stars and planets – fish out of water with a scintillating message of colour, noise and defiance.

In the following decade, Gilmour was part of a loose collective of sculptors (including Andy Scott and Ewan Hunter), Acme Presentations, who created the annual Shine on Glasgow festivals, climaxing in the raucous, spectacular 1997 celebration of the Scottish Trades Union Congress.

In 1998, he was a key member of the Improbable Theatre and World Famous collaboration, led by Crouch and Mike Roberts, that produced Sticky at the Stockton international riverside festival. This was a huge, weird outdoor installation including a 100ft tower made entirely of sticky tape and a giant insect wrapped in Sellotape giving birth to a host of larval eggs.

Gilmour's trademark became steel-framed structures encased in industrial shrink-wrap and illuminated with lights, fire or fireworks. If Welfare State were known as "engineers of the imagination" then he became a notable technician and head foreman. Much of his work was intentionally fleeting, evanescent, designed to explode or expire at the very moment of its greatest impact.

Although he was a fully signed-up, dedicated Scot – he wore kilts and loved mackerel fishing – Gilmour gravitated naturally towards the artistic community in Brighton, East Sussex, and made his home there 15 years ago. In 2004, he "did a Christo", covering Brighton Dome in shrink-wrap. And he designed three solo shows for his friend and fellow Brightonian, Tim Crouch, each one telling the back story of outsider characters in Shakespeare: I, Peaseblossom, I, Banquo and I, Malvolio. Crouch testifies to the deep creative input of Gilmour's designs, which combined vivid practical density with startling costume: a terrifying severed head for Banquo and a blood-boltered set that was destroyed at each performance; a pair of beautiful fairy wings for Peaseblossom made of clingfilm, coat-hanger wires and the skeleton of a rucksack; and soiled long- johns for Malvolio who appeared with a coronet of flies buzzing round his bald pate.

Gilmour also worked with such inventive theatre groups as Dot Comedy and Spymonkey, and devised a long-range programme of site-specific events in Northumberland over three years, including Out of Water (2008) in the Kielder Forest with Phil Supple.

For the London 2012 festival, he was part of the Brighton-based Millimetre company that built (in a farmyard) the extraordinary one-bedroom boat hotel that is still moored on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, as though abandoned by a receding tide, a cultural eyrie for writers and composers with peace for contemplation and great views of the Thames.

Although he had latterly turned to computer visualisation, Gilmour's real contribution lay in this continual redesign and enhancement of the landscape, and his work in another part of the woods, as it were, in Dover, led him to directing the choreography of five firework-bedecked boats for the festival A Song for Dover last year.

Gilmour is survived by his two brothers and his mother.

• Alexander Graeme Gilmour, sculptor and designer, born 29 September 1964; died 23 March 2013

Michael Coveney
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Missed a West End show? It could be coming to a cinema near you

The Guardian Stage News - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 4:04am

Digital Theatre and CinemaLive have paired up to screen best of British theatre, both new and from the archives, in UK cinemas

Digital Theatre, which makes filmed theatre productions available for download online, is to screen some of its recordings in cinemas around the UK.

The company has partnered with film producers CinemaLive and will present its first series of screenings in September 2013. Titles have not yet been announced, but the focus will initially be on commercial West End productions, some newly recorded and some from Digital Theatre's archive, which includes David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing and David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker in Arthur Miller's All My Sons.

Since the launch of National Theatre Live in 2009, theatre has had an increasingly regular presence in cinemas. In June, NT Live will broadcast its first West End production, The Audience starring Helen Mirren, following the lead of Graham McLaren's production of Great Expectations, which live-broadcast its opening night around the UK, taking around £80,000 at box office.

However, Digital Theatre and CinemaLive's partnership expands the possibilities by offering audiences another chance to catch past productions they might have missed at the time.

Peter Skillman, CinemaLive's director and chief executive, said: "We know how attractive West End theatre productions are to exhibitors looking to bring their audiences must-see event cinema and we are thrilled to be able to satisfy this need."

Founded by Robert Delamere and Tom Shaw in 2009, Digital Theatre now hosts productions from some of the UK's largest theatres, including the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare's Globe and the Almeida theatre. It has also launched an iPad app, and hosts the Routledge Performance Archive of audio-visual material that aims to provide insight into key productions.

Delamere said: "It's fantastic to be partnering with an organisation with the reputation and expertise of CinemaLive to bring the best of British theatre to cinemas around the world."

Matt Trueman
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Humans that harm animals should be held accountable | Colleen Boggs

The Guardian Stage News - Wed, 04/17/2013 - 12:20am

We are quick to punish animals that attack humans, but what about the reverse such as the Ringling Bros elephant shooting?

Unfortunately, we are all too used to news of drive-by shootings in America. But last week, one incident drew particular attention because the victim was an elephant.

Elvis Presley's hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, was the scene of another performer's injury when an elephant traveling with the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey circus was shot. PETA has offered a reward for the perpetrators' apprehension, and the police are investigating.

Once the perpetrators of this crime are apprehended, they should be held accountable on the same terms that we would apply if they had shot a human being. When an animal performer injures a human being, we are quick to blame and punish that animal. We don't give animal performers equal recognition as victims of violence.

Thomas Edison electrocuted the elephant Topsy in 1903 because she had squashed three handlers, one of whom had tried to feed her a lit cigarette. Edison electrocuted other animals as well, but filmed Topsy's execution for promotional purposes, to demonstrate the superior power of the electric current he had developed. Even in death, Topsy performed in an advertisement. Although this incident took place a century ago, similar rushes to judgment and calls for an animal's death accompanied the spectacular mauling in 2003 of Roy Horn by tiger Montecore during his Las Vegas performance. Shows such as Fox's "When Animals Attack!" had aired in the years before the incident.

In cases where animal performers commit violence, we are quick to attribute agency to them, but when animal performers are victims, we dismiss them. That needs to change because our own humanity is at stake in how we treat animals. For too long, the discussion about humans and animals has revolved around essential differences. We have tried to define what makes a human a human and what makes an animal an animal. We have tried to determine the "nature" of each, without recognizing their shared culture.

Descartes cut open his wife's living poodle to prove that animals were soulless machines. His celebrated insight, "I think, therefore I am," came at a terrible cost to animals: the flip side of his dictum was that animals think not, therefore they are not of any consequence. Descartes' attitudes are still with us.

Animal welfare groups and animal rights activists have long opposed those attitudes. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued in 1789 that we were asking the wrong questions about animals: "The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?" Bentham's query gave rise to the contemporary animal movement inaugurated by Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" and represented by PETA. They have argued that animals do suffer, and that their suffering matters.

People who cut open poodles and people who want to protect them against such suffering are very different in their actions, but they both base their actions on animals' nature, making animals' ability or inability to suffer the measure for what they see as being right or wrong. Definitions of human-animal difference or of animals' "nature" insufficiently address the reason these specific violent incidents occur in the first place: circus elephants remind us that human beings and animals participate in the same culture. When it comes to incidents like these, we need to stop focusing on natural differences, and shift our attention to human-animal relationships.

Elephants are not native to Tupelo, Mississippi, nor is their natural habitat the big top. The elephant injured in the shooting was a performer. As all actors on late-night television are quick to remind us, performing is hard work. The animal's shooting is not only a crime, but also a workplace injury. Once we recognize that the elephant is a performer and a worker, we will need to consider the rights his labor bestows on him, and the obligations it places on us. We will also come to recognize that, in the contexts of labor and performance, human beings and animals are not separate from each other.

Donna Haraway has taken up this issue in her recent work. Drawing on the example of sheep dog, she has argued that training creates a bond between dogs and people that reshapes both. She has coined the term "companion species" to explain that our focus on evolutionary difference is misplaced: we are in this together. Human and non-human animals forge bonds through their shared work, and profoundly transform each other.

Clearly, such a transformation has occurred in the case of a trained circus elephant. As victims of violence, such animals should have equal rights. Those rights need not be based on judgments that we make about human and animal nature. The comparison between human beings' and animals' nature has far too long hindered us from recognizing that our relationship to one another shapes who we are, and imposes obligations on us.

We are quick to rush to judgments when animals attack, but slow to see animals as victims of the attacks they suffer. Relationships bring obligations with them. It is time we follow through on our obligations to companion animals. Our humanity depends on it.

Colleen Boggs
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About New York: Irish Actor Meets Ugandan Orphan and Adopts Him

N.Y. Times Theatre - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 8:10pm

Johnny O’Callaghan wrote a play, opening next week, about the resistance he met when trying to adopt a 3-year-old.

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Theater Review: Odets’s ‘Big Knife,’ With Bobby Cannavale

N.Y. Times Theatre - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 7:00pm

Clifford Odets’s 1949 drama, “The Big Knife,” opened on Broadway in a sluggish, soulless revival starring the talented Bobby Cannavale.

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Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Collaborative Plays

N.Y. Times Theatre - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 1:47pm

Jackie Sibblies Drury, whose latest play is running in Providence, R.I., is a playwright of the moment for creating works that are collaborations by actors, a director and a writer.

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Theater Review: ‘Sleeping Rough,’ by Kara Manning, at the Wild Project

N.Y. Times Theatre - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 1:39pm

A grieving mother whose son has died in Iraq turns to flag burning and spray painting in “Sleeping Rough,” by Kara Manning.

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In praise of … Maxim Gorky | Editorial

The Guardian Stage News - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 1:20pm

Gorky's work can be both variable and politically crude, but his was an extraordinary and a serious creative life

His long years as a Soviet-era icon consigned Maxim Gorky's reputation to the cold war permafrost for half a century. But Andrew Upton's new adaptation of Gorky's 1905 play Children of the Sun at London's National Theatre is the latest of Gorky's plays to return brimming with new life to the British stage after suffering a long period of condescension. Like his plays Philistines and Enemies, both successfully revived in the last decade, Children of the Sun combines echoes of Chekhov with the rawer political nerve that would ensure both Gorky's later canonisation under Stalin and his subsequent neglect in the west. Aspects of recent adaptations have been controversial, and Gorky's work can be both variable and politically crude. But his was an extraordinary and a serious creative life and it is good to have him edging back on to the collective mental map again. It is surely time that his novels, which were once so popular, got a fresh look too.

Russia

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No point in heckling: standup comedy at the cinema

The Guardian Stage News - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 12:00pm

Can the raucous experience of a live comedy club survive when it's shown at the cinema? Brian Logan investigates a new experiment

Friday night at Cineworld Wandsworth, south London, and people are filing in to see the nail-biting psych-thriller Trance and the carnival of pulchritudinous teen flesh that is Spring Breakers.

Not me. Oh no. I'm here to watch a film about other people watching middle-aged men tell jokes about how daft they look wearing Crocs.

Put like that, Comedy Store: Raw & Uncut sounds like a galaxy far, far away from anything you'd normally see at the movies – and not especially alluring. But that's what they said before Met Live, National Theatre Live and their numerous imitators trounced the doubters and proved that broadcasting theatre and opera to multiplexes worldwide was not only big business, it could also change the way we experience live performance.

Now the Comedy Store, Britain's best-known comedy venue, is getting in on the act, broadcasting club-night comedy to the nation's multiplexes. The pilot season of Raw & Uncut saw four nights at the Store made into four feature-length films, screened at fortnightly intervals a couple of months after they were originally recorded.

Speaking via email from India, where he's currently visiting his Mumbai club, Comedy Store supremo Don Ward calls it "a unique and pioneering action". One hundred and fifty UK cinemas have screened the four films, and Ward says they're working out how to expand worldwide. Of the pilot season, he continues: "The response from the public has been excellent, and there is enthusiasm on the part of exhibitors to continue [with] the format."

This is where I'm not so sure. In Wandsworth, the public isn't exactly rushing the doors: I've been forewarned by the publicist that "this cinema hasn't had the biggest take up audience-wise", and sure enough, when I arrive at Cineworld there are only around 25 people in attendance (some 5,000 people bought tickets for the season overall).

The market for NT Live is obvious: the many thousands of people around Britain and the world who would love to see the National Theatre's shows and will never get the chance. But aren't frustrated comedy fans thinner on the ground? Comedy on DVD has rarely been more available, and because of the standup boom of the last decade, more people than ever have the chance to see live comedy in clubs or arenas.

That's not the only problem I see with the format. Inside the cinema, before the screening begins, we weather a humorous advert for a sponsor, which asks us not to heckle the comedians, because they can't hear us. It's a joke, of course, but it nails an obvious flaw. One reason people go to comedy is to be part of a live, communal experience. Here in Cineworld, where there's little attempt at liveness (the gigs we're watching have long since finished), the atmosphere leaves something to be desired. When the film's first comic, Ian Stone, leaves the stage, people can't quite decide how to respond, whether to applaud or not.

Ward insists standup "loses nothing" being screened. I'm not entirely convinced by that either, though it's true that there are some gains. The screening certainly recreates the intimate Comedy Store atmosphere – but with close-ups. And the four standups, plus compere, are all funny. OK, so they're not the top tier of UK comedy, who would presumably prefer to withhold their material for their own DVD releases. But they're capable pros, trading in unadventurous but reliably amusing man-at-a-microphone comedy.

Here, though, is another issue. It's impossible not to notice that every one of the 20 participating comics in Raw & Uncut is a man. And, watching the film in Cineworld, the event comes across as strikingly male (two of the acts – Tom Stade and Jeff Innocent – major in blokey tales of sexual derring-do). Again, Ward refuses to see the problem: when I ask why Raw & Uncut is a woman-free zone, he answers, with breathtaking chutzpah, "There are hardly any female comics on the circuit."

That may not hurt Raw & Uncut's commercial chances, but it surely weakens Ward's rhetoric about doing things differently. The Comedy Store could be right that standup in cinema has a future – but if it's going to capture a wide audience, it needs to think much harder about who it's putting up there in the spotlight.

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ArtsBeat: Public Theater Season to Include ‘Fun Home’ and New Apple Family Series Play

N.Y. Times Theatre - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 11:55am

The season will also include new work from Suzan-Lori Parks, Mike Daisey and Elevator Repair Service.

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Lesley Manville, actor – portrait of the artist

The Guardian Stage News - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 11:00am

The actor discusses the pleasures of anonymity, the tribulations of single motherhood and the lightbulb moment she had with Mike Leigh

What got you started?

I had two starts, really. The first was going to the Italia Conti stage school, aged 15. I'd gone to sing, but one day I found myself doing an improvisation and thought, "Oh God, I quite like this acting thing." The second start was meeting Mike Leigh when I was 22. He showed me I could play people that weren't like me. It was like a lightbulb going off.

What was your big breakthrough?

Making a film called Grown Ups with Mike Leigh in 1980. Both of the pieces we'd worked on together before that hadn't actually come to anything. First tThere was a radio play, Too Much of a Good Thing, about a girl losing her virginity, which got banned initially by the BBC for its realistic-sounding sex scenes. Then And there was a play we did for the RSC that never saw the light of day. But Grown Ups opened doors for me in a major way – I spent the next 10 years working at the Royal Court.

Do you suffer for your art?

Not any more. But I did when my son was young and I was a single mother. A lot of the actors I knew threw in the towel when they became mothers. I couldn't do that financially, and I didn't want to – but I was knackered all the time.

What's the biggest myth about being an actor?

People mistake the fact that we have a nice time at work for it being easy. I spent last week in the dark, freezing, doing hellishly long days. Then there's the fact that people think you're always earning a fortune. That's absolutely not the case – especially in subsidised theatre. Actors often have to turn down a play because they can't afford it, unless they can do a bit of telly either side.

Stage or screen?

Stage is the ultimate test; I like watching established screen actors on stage to see if they can really do it. But it's great to have a healthy mixture of the two. Film is so technical: there's something very particular about the relationship between you and the camera. It took a long time for me to get good on film.

What work of art would you most like to own?

I'm a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I'd like anything by him – particularly a painting called Madame Hessel on the Sofa. His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.

Is there an art form you don't relate to?

I have trouble with sheep in formaldehyde.

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

A director once said to me, "I've got no notes for you, except act better."

Do you care about fame?

No. I'd hate not to be able to travel on the tube. I quite like that people tend not to know my name. I remember being at the Cannes film festival for All or Nothing. I looked very different in the film – I had a little greasy bob and no makeup. I went to a dinner after the screening and everyone completely ignored me. I got a real buzz out of that.

In short

Born: Brighton, 1956.

Career: Has worked frequently with Mike Leigh, in his films – including High Hopes, Secrets & Lies and Another Year – and his stageplays. Has also performed at the Royal Court, with the RSC and at the National Theatre; and, most recently, in the BBC TV series Mayday, which is out now on DVD.

High point: "Playing Marlene in Top Girls at the Royal Court."

Low point: "After making Turning down all the work I was offered for a year around 1980. I was on a mission to go in a new direction."

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Helena Carroll, 84, Actress and Irish Players Co-Founder

N.Y. Times Theatre - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 10:41am

Ms. Carroll, an Irish actress known for her stage, film and television appearances in the United States, was a founder of the Irish Players repertory company in New York.

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Marc Maron is the latest comedy star to go from podcast to TV pilot

The Guardian Stage News - Tue, 04/16/2013 - 9:42am

The route from internet audio show to TV and publishing success is well trodden in the US, but why are so few British comics keen to follow suit?

Last week IFC (the network that produces Portlandia) released the trailer for Maron, comedian Marc Maron's semi-autobiographical sitcom, which premieres in May. Its creator/star also has a book of essays, called Attempting Normal, published at the end of this month. But just four years ago, by his own admission, Maron "had nothing going on". Having made his name in the 90s alternative comedy scene, he had lost touch with his more famous peers, including Louis CK and Patton Oswalt. Twice-divorced and fired from his third radio hosting gig in four years, Maron moved from New York to LA with three cats and few prospects. The 49-year-old's current career revival is all thanks to his hugely popular podcast, WTF, a twice-weekly interview show where he has swapped laughs and neuroses with everyone from Sarah Silverman to Robin Williams.

Now he's following in the footsteps of Scott Aukerman, whose improv podcast Comedy Bang! Bang! was also adapted for television by IFC, and Chris Hardwick, creator of The Nerdist podcast. Not content with one TV show, Hardwick also fronts a post-Walking Dead discussion called Talking Dead, has filmed a pilot for Comedy Central and last month launched the first series of the Nerdist TV show for BBC America. While he gained notoriety presenting cheesy dating shows in the 90s, it took a podcast to give him credibility. And he's not the only one.

Aisha Tyler is probably best known for playing Ross's girlfriend Charlie on Friends, but her Girl on Guy podcast made a wider audience aware of her comedy roots. As a result, she was announced as the new host of Whose Line Is It Anyway? last month and has her own book coming out this summer. Meanwhile, comedian Pete Holmes has parlayed the success of his podcast You Made It Weird into an upcoming sketch show. And although it wasn't true, a recent rumour that 30 Rock actor Alec Baldwin would take over Carson Daly's late-night talkshow seemed plausible thanks to the interviewing prowess he has shown on his own podcast, Here's the Thing.

When podcasts started back in 2004, few people realised their career-boosting potential. Pioneers such as Jesse Thorn and Dan Klass made quality shows that attracted loyal audiences and media coverage. But when I fired up my first MP3 player in 2005, I listened to a lot of podcasts that featured unintended sound effects and prolonged drunken giggling fits. Their creators often described them as "homemade radio shows" and that was exactly how they sounded.

They have become considerably slicker since then. To be a comedian in the US without a podcast is increasingly to be an oddity. It may even be a liability. Podcasts are a becoming an easy way for TV networks to find fresh talent with an established following. The potential for them to be used as a springboard to writing, acting, and presenting jobs is huge.

But they haven't taken off in quite the same way in the UK. Here podcasts tend to be drawn from popular radio shows made by established media corporations (such as Danny Baker's BBC podcast) rather than original, independently produced content. One exception is The Ricky Gervais Show, which Channel 4 adapted into an animated series in 2010. But Gervais had established a career in entertainment long before he hit "record".

So why are up-and-coming comedians in the UK less interested in building a millions-strong audio audience than their US counterparts? Perhaps because we have a more thriving live scene – America has no real equivalent to the Edinburgh festival, and the comparative size of our countries means it's far easier for British comedians to build a following by touring. Or it may just be that we're a step behind. Either way, it's a shame.

Cheaper and easier to put together than a YouTube production (and marginally less likely to attract incendiary comments), podcasts can provide a low-risk, low-cost way to try out new material, and not just for comedians. Releasing chapters of his audiobooks as podcasts helped Scott Sigler become a self-publishing superstar. Perhaps it's time for writers and performers on this side of the Atlantic to take note – and pick up a mic.

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