A few days ago, Ellie & I watched South Korean playwright Jaha Koo’s play/performance Haribo Kimchi at the Southbank Centre in London. We both were rather excited, when we were queuing with around 150 ethnic South Koreans (many, no doubt, with a British passport) and roughly the same number of audience members from British and other backgrounds. JAHA KOO’S HARIBO KIMCHI SOUNDED LIKE A MUST-SEE PERFORMANCE What we had heard about the play had sounded intriguing: a performance involving audience members, which combines video, robots, smells, sounds, music and traditional theatre, staged in a fully operational street kitchen where food is being prepared throughout the play by the main actor, who also happens to be the playwright, director, composer, video artist, robot designer and operator, and composer. We had been told that the street kitchen within the story is located in a working class district of Seoul, the time is […]
Canned Goods, the play, at Southwark Playhouse – My Review
Ellie & I recently watched another play at the marvellous venue that is Southwark Playhouse: the play Canned Goods. Having grown up in Germany, I, like everyone else in my generation, knew about the important historic aspect of WWII, that the play is based on. But talking with my friends and checking the WWII Wikipedia article, made me realise that it is not common knowledge everywhere: a false flag operation staged by Nazi Germany and involving an attack on the radio station in Gleiwitz, kicked off World War II. Pics public domain. (1) Franciszek Honiok, (2) & (3) Alfred Naujocks 1936 & 1946. NUREMBERG TRIALS TRANSCRIPTS ARE THE BASIS FOR THE PLAY CANNED GOODS Most of the facts around SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s “Operation Himmler” only came to light during the testimony of SS Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremberg Trials. Naujocks had organised the operation under orders from […]
The Lehman Trilogy at the NT – Loved it (and I worked there)!
We’ve just returned from a performance of the Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre. It was one of the best plays we’ve seen in years, truly awesome. While previous performances of the play across Europe have involved vast casts, Ben Power‘s (the NT deputy artistic director’s) English language version of Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s play involves just three actors. They re-enact the one and a half centuries of the Lehman brothers’ family history from when the first of the initial three brothers emigrated from a small village in Bavaria (where I’m from) to Montgomery, Alabama, in the South of the U.S. From when they were god-fearing, law-abiding, humble, not-so-well-to-do corner store owners (and later on cotton merchants) to them losing control of their investment bank in the 1960s, and to the bank’s demise as a faceless global investment bank in the Financial Crisis of 2008, when godless monsters like Dick […]
Andrew Scott in Sea Wall, celebrating 200 years at the Old Vic
We’ve just returned from our visit to the Old Vic to watch Sea Wall, a monologue performed by Andrew Scott. It was written specifically for him more than ten years ago by Simon Stephens. This time around, it was staged again to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the theatre. Scott’s character Alex tells the audience about his life with his loving family. How he made friends with his wife’s father, an ex-soldier, how their young daughter brings joy to their life, how he’s happy with his job and where he lives. Photo of Andrew Scott (c) Kevin Cummins; rest (c) BSqB Gradually the monologue steers towards the revelation of perhaps the most horrible event that can happen to man. As you would expect from an actor of Scott’s calibre, his performance is smooth and precise. The audience is laughing out loud one second and holding back tears the next […]
Jack Thorne’s Woyzeck, Old Vic
In Germany, where I grew up, we love Büchner. Our Booker Prize equivalent is called Georg Büchner Prize, and seen as a clear early indicator of the next German speaker who will win the Nobel Prize in literature. This young playwright, novelist, poet, physician, revolutionary, founder of a secret society, university lecturer, and natural scientist died at the age of 23 of typhoid fever in 1837, before being able to finish Woyzeck. His last and most famous work merely exists in fragments, was published only 40 years later and first performed in 1913, just to become the most influential and most performed play in the German language. All photos (c) Manuel Harlan, except Old Vic building front and actors bowing to audience. Heavily influenced by Shakespeare, Büchner was decades ahead of his time with his writing style using short sentences and simple, at times colloquial language, and with Woyzeck being […]