Young Vic 2017/18 Season

I remember him coming over very well in Comic Relief does Fame Academy which Wikipedia tells me was in 2003!

Thanks for the link! When I finally saw A Raisin in the Sun, my response was basically abject horror that Bruce Norris looked at such an incredible play with such vivid characters and apparently thought "okay, but I want to know more about that white guy". Fingers crossed we get to see Kwei-Armah's Beneatha's Place as part of an upcoming YV season!

I recognise him but don't recall seeing anything he's been in or directed. I'm sure he'll be marvellous.

I am rather pleased that the last part of his surname is Armah though. That's a set of initials one step away from danger. Phew.

There are AD approaches and then there's a theatre's culture. Nobody would take over the Court and move away from new writing or make the National only for new plays and, similarly, the director led approach is now an organic part of the Young Vic, with the structure there to support and develop them. 

I saw the One night in Miami at the Donmar, it was ok, he had directed it in Baltimore. His first season announcement will be interesting.

That is all peripheral to what actually appears on their main stage. Their greatest successes were from directors who didn’t come through that system but were brought in from outside, and in some cases they did not initiate the production either, they were told what play to do by the AD. That infrastructure could easily remain in place whilst the main house artistic policy could be radically changed.

I think we agree that we don't want the Young Vic to change it's general approach and programming. I didn't want the Hytner NT approach to change either, however .... Anyway let's see. 

If I didn’t already know he was 50 that quote would confirm it. Wonder why he won’t direct, David Lan occasionally would.

"There are AD approaches and then there's a theatre's culture. Nobody would take over the Court and move away from new writing or make the National only for new plays and, similarly, the director led approach is now an organic part of the Young Vic, with the structure there to support and develop them"


Thing is that Featherstone at the Court has taken quite a radical approach but people seem not to have noticed.  Firstly, when she took over there was suddenly a raft of adaptations from film and books - including "Let the Right One in" and "The Kid stays in the Picture".  Of course there is a precedent here with "Our Country's Good" which was adapted from Thomas Keneally's book (was it "A Fatal Shore"? - I can't remember), but it does rather go against the Court's tradition of original new plays.  Secondly, The Court has become something of a Director's Theatre, I'd say rather than being led by the need to serve new plays - Max Stafford Clarke used to say that he treated classics like new plays and new plays like classics.  The Court has moved very much in the direction of physical theatre, even installations (eg Debbie Tucker Green's last piece).  This is just an observation.

Now, as always, everything at the Royal Court has a writer at its creative heart. As you say, direction and design aesthetics and practices have changed but so has the playwriting culture.

Oh, yes I remember now.  The two books "The Fatal Shore" and "The Playmaker" were used to create "Our Country's Good".  

I wonder if the director-led Theatre is partly responsible for the weaknesses in some new plays we have witnessed this year. The director-writer relationship ensured that the text was developed to the highest standard. Director-led theatre leads to a focus on established texts as the director has the freedom to play around with them. You can’t do this so readily with a new script (unless the director is also the writer). What I am really asking is are directors losing the specialised skill of working with new writing?