The Bald Soprano – Episode 9 – Reading Plays

A new podcast in which two writers attempt to develop a film in real time, with no preparation. Featuring Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal. Download: Let’s write a film – Episode 2. Previous episodes.

A new podcast in which two writers attempt to develop a film in real time, with no preparation. Featuring Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal. Download:  Let’s Write A Film.

Love and Money is a little known play from 2006, an early work by Dennis Kelly, the London Irish television writer who would go on to create controversial British television series Pulling & Utopia. The play debuted at the Manchester Royal Exchange, before moving to the Young Vic. It was recently staged in Dublin by […]

A satire of the Southern potboiler in the form of a beauty pageant, The Miss Firecracker Contest was first performed at a tiny LA theatre in 1980. Later moving to an off Broadway production directed by ubiquitous character actor and storyteller Stephen Tobolowsky. Tobolowsky’s childhood experiences served as the inspiration for this story of narcissism […]

Martin McDonagh’s 1996 play ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan’ is the first in a loosely defined and as yet unfinished Aran Island Trilogy. Set on the most banal of the islands, Inish Maan, in the early 1930s, the play is a violently farcical examination of family, social exclusion and the noble lie. Cripple of Inishmaan was […]

A family history entwined with the legacy of slavery. Black urban poverty in 1930’s Pittsburg. Criminality and working class aspirations. Intersectionality and the patriarchy of the poor. August Wilson’s Piano Lesson is an issue play, and winner of the Pulizer prize. Does this relentlessly grim parlour drama descend into stereotyped kitsch, or lend it’s denigrated […]

Some peanuts are eaten, some water bottles empties, some hotel rooms vandalised. Outside of that Neil LaButes ‘Some Girls’ is a less than action packed look at relationships. Love through the eyes of an immature ‘every guy’ whose self absorption drives his quest to reexamine a history of failed relationships. There are plenty of plays […]

His autobiography boasts that Steve Martin began working at age ten in the newly opened Disneyland, graduating to study poetry and philosophy and spend 18 years performing as “America’s best loved stand up comedian”. Martin has in addition managed a career an accomplished banjo musician and movie star. He writes “I was not naturally talented… […]

Arriving at the end of the nineteen nineties, at exactly the time Martin McDonagh was exploding the Irish national theatre with the first of his Leenane trilogy, Disco Pigs articulated a radical new vision of Irishness. An Irishness deracinated of nationalism, appalled by republicanism, raised on television and clubland. A dissolute Irishness – frozen in […]

Quantum Physics, synchronicity, English mustachios, it has to be Eugene Ionesco’s ‘The Bald Soprano’ (La Cantatrice Chauve). This is a play for which context is essential: Beckett’s growing reputation in France at the beginning of the 1950’s. The efforts of dramatists who became known as the ‘theatre of the absurd’ to acknowledge the horrors of […]