The Death and Performance Symposium at Sick! Theatre Festival, University of Salford Being seen ‘Death’, Steve Eastwood suggests, ‘is the final representational taboo.’ He is talking about his film Island, a documentary which he filmed over the course of a […]
Bryony Kimmings is talking to her critical inner voice. ‘Haven’t we seen enough theatre shows about metal mothers?’ it says with a leer. It’s a man’s voice, specifically the voice of a male theatre producer with a slightly northern lilt. […]
In many ways, director Rebecca Frecknall’s retelling of Summer and Smoke, which recently ended its west end run at the Duke of York’s Theatre, was masterful. Frecknall took a rarely staged work by Tennessee Williams and created a beautiful, […]
I ended last month by suggesting that we need works of art which strip illness bare of its metaphors and give truth value to both its social conditions and the testimonies of those affected. A couple of weeks later at […]
The first in a series of posts considering the metaphorisation of illness in contemporary performances. In 1978, Susan Sontag famously warned her readers of the dangers of treating illness as metaphor. Reflecting on the metaphorisation of tuberculosis in the nineteenth […]
