this month's
Ink Pellet contains
A Final Haunt
After 33 extraordinary years, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black will haunt the stage of the Fortune Theatre for the final time, as the production ends in the West End on Saturday 4th March 2023. PW Productions announce that after 33 extraordinary years in London’s West End, the theatrical sensation that is Susan Hill’s THE […]
Reaching for the Moon
Susan Elkin paid a visit to Half Moon theatre in London’s East End to chat with CEO Chris Elwell about their extensive education outreach and innovative theatre programmes. Half Moon Theatre sits in the heart of Limehouse in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, spitting distance from the DLR and mainline station. Formerly a pretty […]
National Youth Theatre Rep Company
The National Youth Theatre’s Rep Company is celebrating its first ten years and Susan Elkin paid a visit to learn more. Each year a group of fifteen or so talented NYT members, aged 18 to 25, are selected by audition to join this company. In just a few months they rehearse three shows, many of […]
Apprenticeships
An important and often overlooked route into the industry, especially for many non-performing roles. Susan Elkin has some suggestions. Theatre is like an iceberg. For every role on stage there are probably at least half a dozen technicians you can’t see. And the industry has been telling us for decades that there are skills shortages […]
School Shows
Never underestimate the power of a school production – for every single person involved. When you meet former students, sometimes from decades back in my case, it’s usually taking part in Oliver! or A Midsummer Night’s Dream that they reminisce about with shining eyes. Most importantly it’s a terrific bonding exercise. We hear a lot […]
New Perspectives
With three separate Lucian Freud exhibitions currently on, Graham Hooper took time to visit and here is his review of these contrasting shows. LLucian Freud would have been 100 this year, and that’s a good excuse to look back over his life and work, but especially his work, as the two have a rather nasty […]
Grandad Anansi – Half Moon Theatre
Predicated partly on Black History Month, Elayne Ogbeta’s muliti-layered play presents Grandad (Marcus Hercules) and his primary school age granddaughter, Abi (Jazmine Wilkinson) in his garden. Like everything else in this show, the garden designed by Sorcha Corcoran, is beautiful with lots of colour, light and plants that Grandad knows by name and talks to. […]
Theatre Review – The King of Nothing – Little Angel Theatre
Ben Glasstone’s charming, witty account of The Emperor Who Has No Clothes works well for two main reasons. First it is one of the most perceptive stories ever written, dealing as it does with vanity, self delusion, conformity and truth. It’s both topical and timeless. Second, we have a cost of living crisis and the […]
Book Review – Activist
by Louisa Reid Published by Guppy Books Cassandra, narrator of this powerful verse novel, is a reluctant sixth former in a prestigious mixed school, formerly all boys, where toxic culture simmers. Driven by her own experience, and by nature a feisty “shouter” she campaigns forcibly for acknowledgement that some of the boys at school treat […]
Book Review – A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers: Reorienting Classroom Literacy Practice
by Maya Pindyck and Ruth Vinz, with Diana Liu and Ashlynn Wittchow The thrust of this detailed, well-researched, quite academic book about the poetry in classrooms is that we shouldn’t teach students to search for meaning so that “the poem becomes a specimen for examination under the microscope of interpretative practices”. Instead we should experience […]
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PETER KING teaches English at Wisbech Grammar School, and before the summer holiday, reviewed AQA’s publications about its new English specification. Here, he gives his verdict on the books…
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The Creative Industries are a growing and valued sector, making a vital contribution to the national economy. LESLEY FINLAY looks into the current state of affairs…
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I usually carry some sort of book around with me to pass the time on a train or bus – usually I dive into a novel but recently, and rather unusually, I have been compelled to read some of Arthur Miller’s plays. Death of a Salesman wasn’t - I’m sure – on your summer reads but I found it a real joy to read and a reminder of how important Miller’s writing still is.
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As I read this book, I became increasingly exasperated by the do-gooder narrator, the self-confessed ‘intellectually precocious’ thirteen-year-old Lou Bertignac who has a ‘disturbing maturity’. However, days after finishing it, I was still haunted by its distressing subject matter and heartbreaking reality.
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Charles Dickens’s novels are credited with helping to expose the dark underbelly of Victorian society. Today we enjoy Oliver Twist as a jolly musical, forgetting the horror of child exploitation and poverty depicted in the original novel.
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Sunny snapshots culled from the four corners of the globe make this book seem a tempting invitation to take an international tour.
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What struck me most about Chichester Festival Theatre’s recent revival of Bernard Shaw’s classic Pygmalion was how timeless this play is.
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Come To Where I’m From is the first of the shows the theatre company Paines Plough are presenting at Live Theatre. Paines have asked writers to return to their hometowns and write about ‘the places that shaped them’. Each performance sees four writers reading the results.
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Summer is just not summer without a theatre visit in the great outdoors. My local touring company - The Changeling - takes in some of the loveliest venues in the South East, wakes them up, shakes them up with its full-on, unique and powerful productions.
