Earlier in the week on the blog I was talking about booking shows months in advance, but it is not just shows with star names that you have to be quick off the mark with. A month before Complicite returns to the Barbican with A Disappearing Number, the box office has opened for the next Complicite show, Shun-Kin, which has already been seen in Tokyo, and opens at the Barbican in January 2009. Get in quick.
Complicite made the leap from outside to the inside, the upstream to the mainstream, when it first mounted Shakespeare, and the same may happen for Frantic, which is tackling its first Shakespeare play, Othello, at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth before heading off on tour. It says a great deal about our theatre culture that companies are often not taken seriously until they tackle a classic. I'll be taking a look at the end of the week.
I'm also heading to Truro to see Barabas, a new version of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, boasting a Cornish and European cast. It's at the Hall for Cornwall, where I've never been but which people tell me is lovely. While I'm there I'm going to take the opportunity to talk to Bill Mitchell, who used to be with Kneehigh and now has his own company Wildworks, which produced the extraordinary Souterrain. They've got a big show coming up in 2009 called Beautiful Journey, which will be played in shipyards and which takes its inspiration from the sea. As JG Ballad observed: "The sea is like memory; however lost or forgotten, everything in it exists forever."
I'm also going to Kent, where Canterbury Cathedral is reviving its tradition of commissioning new plays for the cathedral and which back in the 1930s produced TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Maybe Sebastian Barry's Dallas Sweetman, which gets its world premiere on Thursday night, will turn out to be as memorable. Paines Plough's Roxanna Silbery directs.
The rest of the week will see me at Theatre 503 for Glyn Maxwell's Mimi and the Stalker, and at Stratford East for the Ray Davies/Paul Sirret musical Come Dancing. While we're talking of musicals, Eric's at Liverpool comes from the same team that created Taboo.
Deep Cut at the Sherman is an example of theatre that tries to force change and this week at Soho there is three days of debate and performance in Acts of Resistance, a programme of events that considers whether theatre can change the world. It includes the only UK performances of Monde Wani's The Rivona Trial.
Elsewhere, I'd recommend The Ethics of Progress at South Playhouse (where Ellie Jones is reviving Fin Kennedy's How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found in early October), Waves at the Lowry, the BAC Scratch Festival at BAC this weekend and the Arches Live Festival in Glasgow over the coming week. I also like the look of Cherry Blossom, which is in preview at the Traverse. Don't forget that Hedda has been extended for a week at the Gate, a theatre that is absolutely at the top of its game in every way at the moment and that Of All the People in all of the World continues at the AE Harris Factory in Birmingham. Oh, if you are free on Thursday try David Gale's Peachy Coochy Nite at the Arts admin café at Toynbee Studios.
For those of you who have been wondering what has happened to the Bush, which has gone mysteriously quiet, the news is that due to water damage the theatre has been unable to use its lights. Undaunted, it is launching a season of plays that can be done largely in the dark, but which of course will be completely dazzling. Certainly the line-up looks great, with new work from Simon Stephens, Jack Thorne and Bryony Lavery among others.
I'd really like to know what you are seeing. Is Ivanov as good as the critics are saying? If you've seen Of All the People did you find it as moving as I did? What should be on this list, and isn't? Have a great weekend.
