Old vic welcomes Emma rice

The Bridge and The Yard Theatres operating year round, Elliott & Harper popping up at Wyndham's and elsewhere to be announced, Wise Children resident at The Old Vic, and HighTide Festival in Walthamstow and Paines Plough Roundabout shows at the Orange Tree.

London theatre is changing for the better.

The Royal Court is exploding in international and local focus, and in venues from the Site to the Gielgud to Tottenham and Pimlico.

The Bush now has a Theatre and a Studio, and the Tricycle will soon open in expansion after a show at the Dorfman.


Only Hampstead and Shakespeare's Globe (post-Emma Rice) are teetering on the brink.

Perhaps just not to my taste.

Surely the Old Vic is the poshest theatre around?! The West End theatres tend to try to draw mixed crowds of tourists and day trippers as well as wealthy Londoners and the odd theatre geek.

The only theatre that matches the Old Vic for 'poshness' of audience, in my experience, is Hampstead.

The only truly posh theatrical venue I can think of is the Royal Opera House, and even all that poshness must mostly be for show, as they still let me in.

Emma Rice describes Wise Children as a 'love letter to theatre'.....she describes all her shows the same way.

Yes, she'd never work at Hampstead. Far too few elderly Jewish business owners and dissatisfied office workers in all her shows.

Live in Hampstead. I wish! Yes, people do book because it is the local. Ain't that a good thing? West End too expensive and the National too unpredictable. Almeida too achingly fashionable...etc. But most of the audience will patronise all of the other London theatres. It is a theatre loving community. 😂😂And, yes many times people don't know what they are seeing because 'she' booked it or someone else booked it to make a cosy foursome.

But to the topic.

An interesting move for ER and the OV.



I’ve been thinking a great deal over the last few weeks about not liking ER’s work. I’m sorry but it’s just not for me. But who is it for? The argument about ‘new and young’ audiences has been brought up a great deal over the last year (and has been resurrected, just a little, by ER’s predecessor this last week or so). But, whatever the facts about audience data, why are ‘new and young’ audiences, frankly, having to ‘make do’ with exactly the sort of visual language and schtick that, indeed, turned me onto theatre thirty years or so ago?



Kneehigh’s Wikipedia entry (so it must be true) dates them to 1980. Earlier, indeed, than the likes of Volcano (1988), DV8 (1993), Complicite (1983), Trestle (1981), Forced Entertainment (1984) and most certainly Frantic (1994) and Punchdrunk (2000). Many of those outfits are still around, some have passed by the wayside a little and others (and their members) have developed their language and their reach – from McBurney through to Hoggett. Could it be argued that ER hasn’t ‘moved on’ in the same way? Could it be argued that she could or should have done so to make way for others?



There is a question of opportunity, I appreciate. The 80s and 90s were great years for theatrical innovation. Just as the 60s were with Brook, Joan Littlewood, Ken Campbell and Berkoff. Circumstances are different these days for directors, writers and devisers wanting to make their name and get ahead. The atmosphere for a new language to emerge into might just not be there.



But I remain sad and baffled that people are getting (over) excited about a ‘brand’ of physical, devised, experimental theatre that’s now 30 years old (or, ok, 14 years old if you go by Kneehigh’s website and the production of Tristan and Yseult (something things do, indeed, never change)) but is being proclaimed by young and old alike as new, exciting, relevant, contemporary and ‘down with the kids’ (a form of words that does, of course, date me).



As I said – I don’t deny that this is exactly the sort of thing that got me going 30 years ago. Lots of sexy young people jumping up and down to loud music to detract me from the fact that it was in fact Ibsen (Volcano – How to Live) or Shakespeare (Fecund - Hamlet) that I was watching. But I moved on and I remain grateful for the fact that I got hooked in the first place. But, I would argue, today’s 20-something theatre addicts of tomorrow deserve someone and something of (sorry…) their own age and generation (as I did). So let’s find and celebrate them.



By the way. One small queston of geography. Was ER’s ACE grant not designed to be part of the ‘regional agenda’ and therefore West Country intended? Why, therefore, the Old Vic? Just asking.



I wish her well. But I don’t think I’ll be going. And although I hope it finds an audience, I hope the kids get something else entirely and soon.

Will be an interesting link up, I'm assuming Matthew Warchus as Artistic Director has signed this deal off. I'll be interested to see how many plays Emma's company does at the Old Vic each year. Ideally no more than a couple - it acts as their London base and fills agreed gaps in Matthew's programming.

It allows Matthew to operate on a quality rather than quantity basis whilst not taking up too much of the Old Vic's year plus gives the theatre another artistic director's ideas via Emma.

Does anyone think that the photo of Emma on Whats On Stage that she almost has a similar hairstyle to Don King.

A great director of popular theatre, as evidenced by audiences (I love the elitist work of those such as Katie Mitchell but there should be room in anyone's life for both, to focus on one at the expense of the other is just too limiting). The list is long, Tristan and Yseult, Red Shoes, Brief Encounter, The Wild Bride (less well known but, for me, their best show), etc.

Regarding Kneehigh, they are a noticeably different company than the one back in the eighties, mostly indoors now, for a start. Since the split to create Wildworks with the sadly recently passed Bill Mitchell I would say. It's really about 12 years or so that this happened and I put them in the same era as Punchdrunk, way after Complicite.

As for where theatre is new, we need to see the increasing merging with technology, as well as different methods of storytelling, such as multiple simultaneous narratives.

EDIT: 'cheap props', Parsley, you really don't understand the concept of rough theatre do you? 

Kryz1000, the references you make are to British companies but their best work has always fed off global figures; Littlewood and Brecht, Brook and Artaud etc. It's the same now, Icke and Van Hove, Emma Rice and Staniewski (and by extension, Bakhtin, folk culture and the carnivalesque), the debt we pay to European theatre is huge, partly because we remain more conservative than the continent and slow to pick up on the new.

for new British young companies, I'd suggest Barrel Organ and the Irish company Dead Centre as being interesting developments, cross media, Kate Tempest is a force of nature (pun intended)

To be honest, nothing is ever new, it is just work created by newer, younger people.