At the start of 2020, Southwark Playhouse commissioned a group of playwrights to write short plays. The aim was for them to be performed on stage by the Elders Company, the playhouse’s drama group for anyone aged 65 and over, but then lockdown came along.
theatre
In a time of bitter, divisive politics, the positive, as well as the negative aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it is truly global: people everywhere feel the same fear, sorrow and frustration at the same time.
Every Christmas, London’s Old Vic delivers a production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This year is no exception – except that it comes to us via Zoom.
Even more than an outpouring of passionate pacifism, Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave is a universal exploration of the heroic strength of character required to reject decades of blind allegiance to an unholy cause.
If you can embrace it, lockdown’s shift from the real to the virtual is a liberation that makes anything possible.
Grange Park Opera Interim Season. Simon Keenlyside: An Autumn Walk in Wales (available online). Review by Barbara Lewis: Context is all, says Simon Keenlyside, as for the second time this year he delivers a musical tour of his own personal context – the woods around his Welsh home.
![Susannah De Wrixon and Kwaku Fortune crop[4837]](https://londongrip.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susannah-De-Wrixon-and-Kwaku-Fortune-crop4837-180x180.jpg)
Before lockdown, Bewley’s CafĂ© Theatre in the bustling heart of Dublin was the place to grab a short lunch-time play, a bowl of soup – and maybe even chat up a stranger. For now, those days are gone, but Bewley’s has joined forces with online events company The Lock Inn to open the tiny venue to a potentially limitless audience.
The Dirty 30 II: Electric pay-per-view. Review by Barbara Lewis. Instead of loud applause and cheers, “you were spectacularly fabulous,” pops up on the side of the screen from an online viewer, as the imaginary curtain goes down on the Degenerate Fox theatre’s online adaptation to the times we’re in.
A Feast in The Time of Plague, Grange Park Opera online. Review by Barbara Lewis.
#FinboroughForFree. Adding Machine: A Musical. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Ghost Light, National Theatre of Scotland film. A theatre never goes completely dark, even in lockdown: a single light bulb, known as a ghost light, carries on glowing like a sanctuary lamp.
by Barbara Lewis • music, opera, performance, theatre, year 2021 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, music, opera, performance, theatre •
L’Heure Espagnole, Grange Park Opera – an hour of escape into Maurice Ravel’s gloriously light opera bouffe that allows a woman to juggle three lovers with impunity.