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      London Theatergoers Are on the Edge of His Seats

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      One family firm supplies seating for most of the West End’s theaters, from flexible new spaces to Victorian treasures. Its chief designer reveals some tricks and traps of the trade.LONDON — Earlier this month, during the first performance at the West End’s newest theater, @sohoplace, the audience repeatedly cheered the actors performing “Marvellous,” a comedy about a British eccentric. At one point, several hundred theatergoers even applauded a technician who came on to clean the floor.But there was one person key to the evening whom no one cheered, whooped or even politely clapped. And Andrew Simpson, the designer of the theater’s seats, was happier that way.“If a seat’s good, you don’t notice it,” he said. “You only notice it when it’s bad.” In the world of theater seating, he added, “No news is good news.”Simpson, 62, is in a position to know. He is the lead designer at Kirwin & Simpson, a family firm his grandfather founded that started out patching upholstery in a local movie house during World War II and now supplies the seats for most West End theaters. (It works with some in New York, too, including the Hudson Theater and St. Ann’s Warehouse.)Andrew Simpson, Kirwin & Simpson’s lead designer (and the grandson of the company’s founder) at the firm’s headquarters in Grays, England.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe West End is challenging territory for a seating designer. Many of the London theaters Simpson caters for are Victorian jewel-boxes: tight, ornate spaces built with more attention to gradations of social class than to comfort.Originally, according to David Wilmore of Theatresearch, a company that restores historic theaters in Britain, they would have had a few front rows of luxurious armchairs — known as fauteuils — for their wealthiest patrons. Everyone else sat on wooden benches. When middle-class visitors were finally accorded seats, Wilmore said, theaters preserved their old sightlines by forcing the sitters bolt upright — “part of that Victorian strictness in all areas: ‘You jolly well better sit up and listen!’”That won’t do for seats that now often cost hundreds of dollars to occupy.A recent tour of Kirwin & Simpson’s works in Grays, a working-class town east of London, included a room filled with rolls of multicolored cloth and a shed where five men were busy screwing, stapling and gluing sleek maroon seats for the forthcoming Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York. One warehouse is filled with emergency replacements, so that if a seat rips at, say, the Victoria Palace Theater — the London home of “Hamilton” — a new, perfectly matching one can be installed within hours.Each theater needs many types of seats. The new, 602-capacity @sohoplace has 12 types, according to Simpson, all removable to allow different styles of staging, but some tricky older spaces require far more.A seat that Kirwin & Simpson designed for @sohoplace, a West End theater that opened this month.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThere are high chairs with built-in footrests, to give a clear view from the back of Victorian balconies where front-row patrons would once have sat directly on a low step. There are chairs with wide backs, but smaller seats, designed to fit perfectly into tight curves, and others with hinged armrests that can be raised so wheelchair users to slip into them. And there may be any number of things in between. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Theater Royal, Drury Lane, has over 160 different designs, with widths and angles tweaked to ensure the best view.The seats themselves have become less cluttered over time, losing accessories like ashtrays and wire cages for men to store their top hats. But in the most cramped spaces, Simpson still sometimes employs an illusion. Short armrests make a narrow aisle feel wider, he said, because visitors don’t have to squeeze past them to get to their places, and they are then less inclined to start thinking about how little legroom they have. “It’s all psychology,” he added.It similarly helped if the show was a hit. “If the stuff onstage is really good,” he said, “then people don’t mind what they’re sitting on. If it’s anything less than that, then the surroundings come into focus, shall we say.”The Sondheim Theater in London, which has a capacity of more than 1,000. The seats are by Kirwin & Simpson.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesInside the Kirwin & Simpson workshop.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesEven with the good will of a good show, it can be tough to accommodate theatergoers of varying shapes, sizes and tastes. Nica Burns, the chief executive of Nimax Theaters, the company behind @sohoplace, said she wanted the seats in all her venues to be comfortable for short people like her (she’s 5 foot 2 inches), who don’t want their feet to dangle in midair, and for tall people like her 6 foot 3 inch husband. While the theater was being designed, she kept two Kirwin & Simpson seats in her office and asked visitors try them. But, she said, “you’ll never find a seat that suits everybody.”One demand that Simpson hears increasingly is for wider seats. Last year, Sofie Hagen, a popular comedian, began a campaign on Twitter, urging theaters to publish details of seat widths on their websites, to help larger people like her decide if they wanted to attend. “The amount of times I’ve gone to see a musical only to be in constant, excruciating pain,” Hagen wrote. “Once I had to leave before the show even started because the seat was too narrow.”Hagen said in a telephone interview that every venue on her current British tour had agreed to display details of the width of their seats and she hoped more would follow. “If theaters had signs up saying ‘Fat people are not welcome,’ people would be like, ‘What?’,” she said, “but that’s subliminally the message we’re being told.”At @sohoplace, some dozen seats at the orchestra level and balcony discreetly offer an extra three inches of width, on top of the standard 20 or so. Simpson, the designer, said that during a test event he had happily shared one with his 27-year-old son.For some, however, a big seat might be a little too much comfort. Seats that leave theatergoers “practically rubbing shoulders with one another” make for more of a communal experience, Wilmore, the theater restorer, said.An original cast-iron row end from the Victoria Palace Theater, in Kirwin & Simpson’s workshop.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMichael Billington, who resigned in 2019 after nearly 50 years as The Guardian’s chief theater critic, said he felt “a degree of austerity” helped keep audiences awake. For example, Shakespeare’s Globe in London has both Elizabethan-style standing space and backless wooden benches: Billington described those benches as “a form of terror,” but added that he certainly paid attention whenever he sat on one.The new seats at @sohoplace drew typically mixed reviews from some of their first paying users. In interviews with a dozen audience members at the recent “Marvellous” performance, seven were glowing. John Yee, 22, visiting from Canada and sitting in the balcony, said they were “comfy as hell.”Josh Townsend, who had a spot in the orchestra level, said he was 6 foot 2 and often struggled with seats that lacked legroom, yet @sohoplace’s were “really good.” The week before, he had watched “Dear Evan Hansen” in London’s Noël Coward Theater — whose seats are also by Kirwin & Simpson — and his legs were jammed against the seat in front. This was a huge improvement, he said.But though she had loved the show, Ayesha Girach, 26, a doctor, said the seats were so hard they were “probably the most uncomfortable” she had ever sat in. She then praised those at the Gillian Lynne Theater, just a few blocks away, where she’d recently seen “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” “Those were really comfy,” she said. They were Kirwin & Simpson seats, too. More

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      Jakub Hrusa Set to Lead Royal Opera House

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      The young Czech conductor will replace Antonio Pappano, who is heading to the London Symphony Orchestra.Jakub Hrusa leading the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall, in New York, in 2019.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLONDON — Jakub Hrusa, a rising Czech conductor, on Tuesday was named the music director of the Royal Opera House in London, one of the highest-profile positions in opera.Hrusa, 41, who has been the chief conductor of the Bamberg Symphony in Germany since 2016, will take on the role in September 2025, replacing Antonio Pappano, who announced last year that he was leaving to become the chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra after a successful 20-year tenure at the opera house.There has long been speculation in London’s opera world over who would replace Pappano. Neil Fisher, a critic for the Times of London, rounded up a dozen contenders last year, including Edward Gardner, a former music director at English National Opera, and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who, until recently, led the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Hrusa was not on the list. But the Czech, who is also the principal guest conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where Pappano is the principal conductor, has long received praise.When Hrusa made his New York Philharmonic debut, in 2017, the critic Anthony Tommasini, in The New York Times, wrote: “With his sweeping arm gestures and choreographic swiveling, Mr. Hrusa is a very animated conductor.” He added, “His approach worked, judging by the plush, enveloping sounds and impressive execution he drew from the Philharmonic players in an auspicious debut.”In a highlight at this year’s Salzburg Festival, Hrusa led a breathless rendition of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova,” directed by Barrie Kosky.Critics have also praised Hrusa’s two performances at the Royal Opera House: a 2018 production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” also directed by Kosky, and a run of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this spring. In The Times of London, Fisher wrote that Hrusa’s conducting of “Lohengrin” “cannily distills the eeriest sonorities of the score, highlighting its bleak beauty.”Hrusa is not the first relatively lesser known option to become the opera house’s music director. When Pappano took the job, in 2002, he came from La Monnaie in Brussels and had little reputation in London at the time.In a news release, Hrusa, who grew up in Brno, the Czech city where Janacek lived, said he was thrilled to accept the position. “I have always dreamt about a long-term relationship with a house where one can reach the highest standards in opera, and I realized very quickly that I adored the whole team of artists and staff at Covent Garden,” he said.Oliver Mears, the director of the Royal Opera, said in the release that everyone at the house had “been hugely impressed by not only his superlative music and theater-making but also by the generosity and warmth of his personality.”On Tuesday, the Royal Opera House detailed some of Hrusa’s early engagements in the new role. In the 2027-28 season, he will conduct Wagner’s four-part “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” with Kosky directing.Pappano described the all-encompassing role of music director last year in an interview with The New York Times: “With all the competition that there is for people’s attention, for fund-raising, even for survival for classical music institutions,” he said, “the job has become much more than just conducting.”A looming challenge for the Royal Opera could be a cut in its budget. The British government is slashing the amount of funding it gives to cultural institutions in London by a total 15 percent, so that it can give more money to arts organization in poorer regions. Last year, the government gave the Royal Opera House £35.8 million, or about $40 million, equivalent to 43 percent of the house’s total income, including for the Royal Ballet. An announcement on future funding is expected this month. More

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      in Television

      One Last Broadcast for Queen Elizabeth II

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      Television introduced Queen Elizabeth II to the world. It was only fitting that television should see her out of it.The queen’s seven-decade reign almost exactly spanned the modern TV era. Her coronation in 1953 began the age of global video spectacles. Her funeral on Monday was a full-color pageant accessible to billions.It was a final display of the force of two institutions: the concentrated grandeur of the British monarchy and the power amassed by television to bring viewers to every corner of the world.“I have to be seen to be believed,” Elizabeth once reportedly said. It was less a boast than an acknowledgment of a modern duty. One had to be seen, whether one liked it or not. It was her source of authority at a time when the crown’s power no longer came through fleets of ships. It was how she provided her country reassurance and projected stability.The last funeral service for a British monarch, King George VI, was not televised. For one last time, Elizabeth was the first. She entered the world stage, through the new magic of broadcasting, as a resolute young face. She departed it as a bejeweled crown on a purple cushion, transmuted finally into pure visual symbol.Americans who woke up early Monday (or stayed up, in some time zones) saw striking images aplenty, on every news network. The breathtaking God’s-eye view from above the coffin in Westminster Abbey. The continuous stream of world leaders. The thick crowds along the procession to Windsor, flinging flowers at the motorcade. The corgis.Viewers also saw and heard something unusual in the TV news environment: long stretches of unnarrated live action — the speaking of prayers, the clop of horse hooves — and moments of stillness. This was notable in the golf-whisper coverage on BBC World News, which let scenes like the loading of the coffin onto a gun carriage play out in silence, its screen bare of the usual lower-thirds captions.The commercial American networks, being the distant relations at this service, filled in the gaps with chattery bits of history and analysis. News departments called in the Brits. (On Fox News, the reality-TV fixtures Piers Morgan and Sharon Osbourne critiqued Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s media ventures.) “Royal commentators” broke down points of protocol and inventoried the materials and symbolism of the crown, scepter and orb like auction appraisers.The queen was the first British monarch to have a televised coronation, in June 1953.AFP via Getty ImagesBut even American TV fell still during the funeral ceremony. The cameras drank in the Gothic arches of Westminster Abbey, bathed in the hymns of the choirs, goggled at the royal jewels, lingered on the solemn face of Charles III during the performance of — it still sounds strange — “God Save the King.” Finally, we watched from above as bearers carried the coffin step by step across the black-and-white-diamond floor like an ornate chess piece.The quiet spectating was a gesture of respect but also a kind of tourist’s awe. We had come all this way; of course we wanted to take in the sights.Elizabeth’s reign was marked by unprecedented visibility, for better or worse. Her coronation in 1953 spurred the British to buy television sets, bringing the country into the TV age and inviting the public into an event once reserved for the upper crust.This changed something essential in the relation of the masses to the monarchy. The coronation, with its vestments and blessings, signified the exclusive connection of the monarch to God. Once that was no longer exclusive, everything else in the relationship between the ruler and the public was up for negotiation.The young queen resisted letting in the cameras. The prime minister Winston Churchill worried about making the ritual into a “theatrical performance.” But Elizabeth could no more stop the force of media than her forebear King Canute could halt the tide.TV undercut the mystique of royalty but spread its image, expanding the queen’s virtual reach even as the colonial empire diminished. There were other surviving monarchies in the world, but the Windsors were the default royals of TV-dom, the main characters in a generational reality-TV soap opera. They became global celebrities, through scandals, weddings, deaths and “The Crown.”The coronation had worldwide effects too. It began the age when TV would bring the world into your living room live — or at least close to it. In 1953, with live trans-Atlantic broadcasts still not yet possible, CBS and NBC raced to fly the kinescopes of the event across the ocean in airplanes with their seats removed to fit in editing equipment. (They both lost to Canada’s CBC, which got its footage home first.)The next day’s Times heralded the event as the “birth of international television,” marveling that American viewers “probably saw more than the peers and peeresses in their seats in the transept.” Boy, did they: NBC’s “Today” show coverage, which carried a radio feed of the coronation, included an appearance by its chimpanzee mascot, J. Fred Muggs. Welcome to show business, Your Majesty.The one limit on cameras at Elizabeth’s coronation was to deny them a view of the ritual anointment of the new queen. By 2022, viewers take divine omniscience for granted. If we can think of it, we should be able to see it.The hearse was designed to allow spectators to see the coffin as it passed by.Molly Darlington/Getty ImagesSo after Elizabeth’s death, you could monitor the convoy from Balmoral Castle in Scotland to London, with a glassy hearse designed and lit to make the coffin visible. You could watch the queen’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall on live video feeds, from numerous angles, the silence broken only by the occasional cry of a baby or cough of a guard. The faces came and went, including the queen’s grandchildren joining the tribute, but the camera’s vigil was constant.After 70 years, however, television has lost its exclusive empire as well. Even as it broadcast what was described — plausibly but vaguely — as the most-watched event in history, traditional TV shared the funeral audience with the internet and social media.Elizabeth and the medium that defined her reign were both unifiers of a kind that we might not see again. Though not all of the British support the monarchy, the queen offered her fractious country a sense of constancy. TV brought together disparate populations in the communal experience of seeing the same thing at once.Now what? Tina Brown, the writer, editor and royal-watcher, asked on CBS, “Will anyone be loved by the nation so much again?” You could also ask: Will Charles’s coronation next year be nearly as big a global media event? Will anything? (You could also ask whether an event like this should be so all-consuming. While American TV news was wall-to-wall with an overseas funeral, Puerto Rico was flooded and without power from Hurricane Fiona.)Monday’s services felt like a capstone to two eras. For one day, we saw a display of the pageantry that the crown can command and the global audience that TV can.American TV spent its full morning with the queen. (Well, almost: CBS aired the season premiere of “The Price Is Right.”) The day’s pomp built toward one more never-before-broadcast ceremony, the removal of scepter, orb and crown from the coffin, which was lowered into the vault at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. Then followed something almost unimaginable: A private burial service, with no TV cameras.Television got one final spectacle out of Elizabeth’s reign. And the queen had one final moment out of the public eye. More

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      in Theater

      At Shakespeare’s Globe, a Nonbinary Joan of Arc Causes a Stir

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      Even before the production debuted, it had inflamed a rancorous debate about sex and gender that plays out almost daily in Britain.LONDON — When the playwright Charlie Josephine watched the first performance of their play “I, Joan” at Shakespeare’s Globe last week, they sat in the theater, wracked with nerves.The play, based on the story of Joan of Arc, is Josephine’s first on a major London stage. But that was not the only reason that the playwright, who identifies as transgender, queer and nonbinary, and uses the pronoun they, was anxious. Throughout last month, “I, Joan” had been at the center of a media furor in Britain because of Josephine’s decision to depict Joan of Arc as nonbinary.In the play, which runs at the Globe through Oct. 22, Joan of Arc comes to terms with their gender identity while inspiring French soldiers to repel English forces from their soil. “I’m not a girl,” Joan says at one point. “I do not fit that word.”When The Daily Mail, a tabloid newspaper, reported details of the Globe production in August, it led to a barrage of complaints on social media and in print. Allison Pearson, a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper, wrote that recasting Joan of Arc as nonbinary was “an insult.” Sophie Walker, a former leader of Britain’s Women’s Equality Party, wrote on Twitter that when she “was a little girl, Joan of Arc presented thrilling possibilities about what one young girl could do against massed ranks of men. Rewriting her as not female and presenting it as progress is a massive disappointment.”Shakespeare’s Globe, where “I, Joan” is running through Oct. 22.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe Globe warns patrons about details in “I, Joan” that some may find upsetting. This is not the first show there that has caused a stir.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesBefore anyone had even seen it, the Globe’s show touched a nerve in Britain, where a perceived conflict between the rights of women, and transgender and nonbinary people, has ignited a furious debate that plays out almost daily in the news media, in lawmakers’ speeches and in the courts. Some feminists in Britain have long called for the maintenance of rights based on biological sex, rather than gender identity, which they say threatens women’s-only spaces. Many transgender and nonbinary people say those campaigns discriminate against them and create a hostile environment.The story of Joan of Arc — a 15th-century teenage girl who is said to have heeded God’s instructions to put on men’s clothing and lead French soldiers in battle, only to be tried for heresy and burned at the stake — has been the subject of plays for centuries. Daniel Hobbins, a historian at the University of Notre Dame, said many of those depictions played fast and loose with historical truth. Shakespeare, in “Henry VI, Part 1,” portrayed Joan of Arc as a witch, in keeping with British views at the time, Hobbins said. In the early 19th century, Friedrich Schiller, in “The Maid of Orleans,” showed Joan falling in love with an English knight. “That didn’t happen,” Hobbins said. “She has been reimagined forever to suit contemporary needs.”Joan of Arc was tried for heresy in the 15th century and burned at the stake.Helen MurrayLucy Delap, a professor of gender history at the University of Cambridge, said Josephine’s reinvention of Joan of Arc had fed into a debate in Britain that had become “so heightened” that there was little communication between the two sides. A play like “I, Joan” could have been a way to open a conversation that would cross that divide, she said, but it had instead become a “useful dog whistle” for people “who were hot under the collar about trans issues.”Heather Binning of the Women’s Rights Network, a group that aims “to defend the sex-based rights of women,” said in an email that she objected to “I, Joan” because a nonbinary identity was “a 21st-century idea.” Joan of Arc “existed in a time where her struggles were that of being a woman,” she wrote. “Being female, and the biological sex of her body, lies at the root of this story.”Binning said she thought “I, Joan” was “trying to attract attention by riding on the wave of gender identity ideology that is sweeping not just the U.K., but many other countries.”Sitting on the roof terrace of the Globe’s offices last week, Josephine, the playwright, said they had anticipated most of the complaints, and felt they were misguided. The play was not trying to erase women from history, Josephine said. It was meant to open up new ways of thinking about a historical figure. If anyone wanted to keep thinking of Joan as a young woman, they said, “then, cool — you still can.”Josephine, 33, said the French martyr’s story had meant little to them growing up in a working-class family in Hemel Hempstead, southern England. The Globe asked them to write the play last year; the playwright’s main concern, at first, was nothing to do with gender, but how to talk about Joan’s religious beliefs in a way that would resonate with a largely nonreligious theatergoing audience.Thom as Joan of Arc.Helen MurrayMembers of the “I, Joan” cast, including dancers the script describes as “young, queer and fierce.”Helen MurrayJosephine said the decision to make Joan nonbinary came after studying Joan’s life and realizing that Joan of Arc had been willing to die at the stake rather than stop wearing men’s clothing. This was “not a casual fashion statement,” Josephine said. “It was a deep need for them.” Josephine wanted to depict what it would have been like for “a young person in a female body, who is questioning gender in a very different society than what we live in now,” they said. “My younger self really needed a protagonist like this,” they added.Michelle Terry, the Globe’s artistic director, said the playhouse had a history of causing a stir by playing with gender onstage. In 2003, Mark Rylance, the company’s artistic director at the time, upset some patrons with all-female productions of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Richard III.” More recently, Terry said she received complaints for playing Hamlet there in 2018, and again this year, when the Globe toured a production of “Julius Caesar” in which the main male characters were played by women.“Everyone’s got an idea of how plays should be done and how historical figures should be treated,” she said. All “I, Joan” was doing, Terry said, was asking, “Who is Joan for now?”For all the media fuss, the one place where few people seemed concerned about Joan of Arc’s gender was in the auditorium of the Globe itself. At a recent performance of “I, Joan,” the audience of nearly 1,000 was made up of the theater’s usual mix of British theater lovers, tourists and school groups. At 7:30 p.m., Isobel Thom, who plays Joan, walked onstage and began the show’s opening speech: “Trans people are sacred. We are the divine.” The monologue was interrupted by cheers of support.Audience members seem to have embraced the depiction of Joan of Arc as nonbinary. In interviews with nearly 20 spectators, no one said they had a problem with it.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesRobin van Asselt, 23, a transgender woman from Amsterdam in the audience, said she had cried watching the “casual queerness” onstage. Joan’s “aggressive push to be seen and respected” as nonbinary “was just so cathartic,” van Asselt added.In interviews with nearly 20 more audience members, no one said they had a problem with a nonbinary Joan of Arc. Wanda Forsythe, 72, a retired college administrator on vacation from Toronto, said she “didn’t feel offended as a woman — just that it could have been done a bit better, and shorter.” (The show runs almost three hours.)Jackie Warren, 62, a retired government official, said she and her husband came to two plays at the Globe every year and had picked “I, Joan” at random. Portraying Joan as nonbinary was “really clever,” Warren said.“I’m old, aren’t I?” she added, “so I don’t understand a lot of it. I just think we need to open our hearts to everybody, and I can’t understand why we can’t.” More

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      In Two London Plays, Being Black Means Looking From the Outside In

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      Black characters in “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child” endure microaggressions and aspersions. The familiar scenarios hit home for our critic.LONDON — It was my second time here, and I kept trying to remember if I had felt as conspicuous during my first visit. I could count the number of other Black women I spotted during my five days here: the hotel receptionist with the French braid, whom I spoke with when I stopped in to ask to use the bathroom, the long-haired woman at my own hotel’s front desk, the woman talking rapidly into her cellphone outside a Starbucks, the two women (clearly tourists) with matching backpacks near the British Museum, and the young woman with the short, relaxed hair, who was clutching a shopping bag as she walked briskly down the street. That list isn’t comprehensive. But it’s not far off.So when the eyes of a white person linger on me, as they did numerous times during this trip, my imagination tricks me into thinking every glance is a rebuke — whether because of my obvious Americanness; or because of my race, my tattoos or my pink hair. I don’t know how to sit with my discomfort in these moments, and I inevitably ask myself: How much of an outsider am I?Such thoughts often cross my mind when I go to the theater — whether in New York, London or elsewhere — and sit among the predominantly white audience, watching the mostly white actors onstage. In choosing which London shows to squeeze into my short work trip, I gravitated to two brand-new family dramas, “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” with big-name stars and stories about white families.As these weren’t the domains of Tina Turner or Sister Deloris Van Cartier or Noma Dumezweni’s Nora Helmer, I didn’t expect to see any Black women on either stage. But I was wrong; in both “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” a Black woman — the lone Black person in each show — is not only a part of the play, but she also serves as an outsider who witnesses and comments on the chaos, enduring microaggressions and outright aspersions before making her escape.In “Mad House,” written by Theresa Rebeck (“Bernhardt/Hamlet”) and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, David Harbour (“Stranger Things”) plays a man named Michael who is watching over his dying father, Daniel (played by Bill Pullman) in rural Pennsylvania. But the father’s illness isn’t enough to stop the man’s unending stream of vitriol and abuse.It’s just the two of them now, since Michael’s beloved mother died, because of — according to his father — Michael’s yearlong stay at a mental hospital, which broke her heart. Rounding out the living members of this broken nuclear family are Michael’s brother, Nedward, a Manhattan stockbroker who pops up after a prolonged absence to take charge of Daniel’s assets, and his sister, Pam, a vicious manipulator who shows up halfway through the play to exacerbate the situation.Into all this mess enters Lillian, a Caribbean hospice nurse hired to help make Daniel comfortable during his final days. She maintains her professionalism despite Daniel’s crass come-ons, objectifying of her body, offensive comments about trans people (she’s so muscular she might be a man, he declares) and racist attitude (he repeatedly insists that he paid for her, like a slave). She’s spoken down to and bossed around by Ned and especially by Pam, who insists Lillian is unqualified. After Lillian shares a letter with Michael that she’s discovered among Daniel’s papers, the extent of his family’s lies come to light.Because I’ve seen so many plays in which the entrance of a Black character signals the beginning of a string of awful clichés and tropes, I am now leery when I see a lone Black person appear among a cast of white characters. When Akiya Henry, the actress playing Lillian, initially appeared in the first act, walking into Daniel and Michael’s kitchen, I felt this same foreboding.Originally from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as the family members announce several times, Lillian is an outsider, and she’s a helper — quite literally, of course, since she’s a nurse. Armed with sharp retorts and a sassy, well-timed sucking of her teeth, Lillian punctuates the absurdity of the circumstances and brings the outside world into the confines of this unstable family home so the audience doesn’t get too claustrophobic. She is also the main inciting force that moves the story forward and cracks open the family dynamic. She’s not so transparent an archetype that her tale is left to the imagination, though: She gets a tragic, grief-filled back story, but only so the play can relate Michael’s emotional baggage through Lillian. She’s the mirror held up to Michael’s inner life.Racheal Ofori as the adopted daughter of a white family in Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIn one of the other West End plays I saw, Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child,” directed by Nicholas Hytner, the token Black woman is even more aware of her status as an interloper, and the script struggles to give the character dimension.Here, Alex Jennings (“The Crown”) plays a philandering vicar and alcoholic who becomes the town pariah after refusing to allow balloons at a young girl’s funeral. The Black actress Racheal Ofori plays his adult daughter Naomi, who materializes like the prodigal adopted daughter. Appearing in fitted tops and mini skirts after nightlong partying, Naomi is, well, the black sheep in more ways than the most obvious racial one. Unlike her religious father, she is what she calls a “militant atheist”; she lacks the same underlying bitterness of her mother and outshines her hardworking but overlooked elder sister.Naomi plays no role in the odd central drama about balloons but saunters onto the stage every once in a while, in her club clothes or pajamas, taking in the drama and mocking and jesting at her family and her status as the sole person of color. Like Lillian in “Mad House,” Naomi serves as the wise fool.Hers is one of several side stories in this intriguing yet overpacked play: Feeling alienated as a Black woman in a white family, she seeks out her birth mother in the hope that doing so will help her find her true self. In the meantime, her character is the snarky observer who then complains about being tokenized by her community. In one instance, she sneers as she describes the self-congratulatory white moms who proudly set up play dates between their daughters and the town’s Black girl.The similarities in the way the characters’ arcs end in each play are intriguing: For both Naomi and Lillian, the departures are abrupt. It’s as if neither stage has a place for these Black women beyond their roles as outside observers and truth-tellers. Once they’ve played their parts, they are seemingly given an out; finally spared from having to see the mess through to the end. But the exits of these Black women also seem like a validation that they don’t actually belong there. That they are exceptional.And, in a sense, they are — both Henry and Ofori make their characters compelling, so much so that sometimes they steal the spotlight. Not for long, though — never for long. Despite the strong Black female leads you can catch on some stages, too many productions still embrace a very narrow role for their Black women, who can nurture, drop snide remarks and reveal truths the other characters fail to see — so long as they know their place as visitors in the narrative. More

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      in Television

      Dolly Alderton’s ‘Everything I Know About Love’ Is Adapted for TV

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      The writer has turned her memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which plots its central friendship like a grand love story.LONDON — Dolly Alderton peered through the window of her old house in Camden Town, squinting to see inside the kitchen. She had last visited the tree-lined street in London the year before, “with my mates when we were drunk,” she said. When she asked the current tenants if she could look inside, “they said, ‘Did you write a book about living here?’” she recalled. It was, apparently, the first thing the landlord mentioned when advertising the property.On that visit, the 33-year-old writer had been in the midst of turning that memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which premieres in the United States on Peacock on Aug. 25. Both iterations are set in this area of North London — known for its rich rock ’n’ roll history and graffitied canal — where Alderton lived for almost 10 years, and which she jokingly described as “the second-most visited tourist destination in London after Buckingham Palace.”During that decade, Alderton worked as a story producer on the British reality TV show “Made in Chelsea,” wrote a dating column and created a hit podcast, “The High Low,” with the journalist Pandora Sykes. But what defined the period for Alderton was being single, in her 20s and living with friends.When it came to adapting her memoir for the screen, Alderton realized that readers connected with how she had framed her relationship with Farly Kleiner, her childhood best friend, as “epic and grand and romantic” — a love story. In the series, the two are fictionalized as Maggie (Emma Appleton) and Birdy (Bel Powley). With the show’s “ups and downs, tensions and silliness, surprise and excitement,” Alderton said, the seven episodes plot the narrative arc of their relationship like a romantic comedy.Alderton said that she saw Maggie, played by Emma Appleton in the show, “as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me.”Matt Squire/PeacockMaggie’s more sensible best friend, C is based on Farly Kleiner, Alderton’s own childhood best friend.Matt Squire/PeacockWorking Title Films, which made rom-coms like “Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Love Actually” — acquired the film and TV rights for the memoir in 2017, when the book was still at the proposal stage.Eric Fellner, the production company’s co-chairman, also optioned “Bridget Jones” from Helen Fielding’s book. When he read “Everything I Know About Love,” he “thought, this writer has got a similar connection to an audience that Helen Fielding had all those years ago,” he said in a recent phone interview, “and maybe this is the millennial version.” Both writers, he added, “can look at their generation in a brilliantly humorous way.”At a cafe in Primrose Hill, Alderton said that for her generation, “sincerity has become unfashionable” and that coming of age in the 2010s meant growing up in “a very cynical time.” It is against this backdrop that “Everything I Know About Love” is set, in 2012 — “literally the year Camden stopped being cool,” Alderton added. ‌Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as the pop star Self Esteem, was in an indie band at that time. She contributed three songs to the show’s soundtrack, and said the episodes were “so evocative of the ever-competitive alt scene, where everyone is trying to seem like they’re not trying.”Birdy, Maggie and their two housemates, Amara (Aliyah Odoffin) and Nell (Marli Siu), are all “provincial or suburban” and “on the fringes of everything — in not a good way,” Alderton said. When they arrive in Camden, all four are ravenous for some big city experience.This lack of urban initiation is what distinguishes Alderton’s characters from their more aspirational forebears in shows like “Sex and the City” and even “Girls.” Alderton once pined for the glamour of the big city, too, she said. She grew up in Stanmore, a “comfortable” and “beige-carpeted” suburb of North London, she said, where “the buses are slow and infrequent.” As children, she and Kleiner would circle a single cul-de-sac on their scooters, and wander around the shopping mall without ever buying anything. “All we did was talk and dream,” Alderton said, adding that the lack of stimuli gave her brain “an Olympic workout for imagination.”Alderton spent nearly a decade living in the Camden area of London, a period she turned into a best-selling memoir.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesNow, Alderton is one of Britain’s best-known millennial writers. Between her memoir, podcast, a recent novel and her gig as an agony aunt for a British newspaper, many young British women see her as the trusted voice of a close friend.“There’s always women running up to her wanting to talk to her,” said Cherish Shirley, a writer and story consultant on “Everything I Know About Love.” Most days, Alderton said, she meets “amazing, generous, lovely girls” in bars, bookstores or bathrooms who want to talk. “Because I opened up a channel of communication,” she said, “they speak very intimately back to me.”But after the paperback edition of “Everything I Know About Love” came out in 2019, the amount of attention began to feel “unmanageable,” she said. Alderton moved back to her parents’ house for six weeks to spend some time being “really small and really quiet and really hidden away,” she said.For the first time in her career, she also began putting more distance between herself and her work. In adapting her memoir for television, she said she chiseled the show’s protagonist into a character who was less self-aware, and less precocious, than herself.“I see Maggie as someone who is 10 tracing paper copies away from me,” Alderton said. Another divergence from the book is the addition of characters of color, including Amara, a Black British dancer. “Criticism of the book — that I fully accept — is that it was very white,” she said. This was another reason she made the show “semi-fictional,” she said, and Shirley added that Alderton was intentional in bringing together “a mixed group of women from all sorts of backgrounds” to form the show’s writers room, and fill out its world with authentic, diverse characters.Clockwise from left, Birdy (Powley), Amara (Aliyah Odoffin), Nell (Marli Siu) and Maggie (Appleton) in their shared kitchen during a scene from the show.Matt Squire/PeacockIn March, three months before the show premiered on the BBC in Britain, Alderton had “a big wobble” about being thrust into the spotlight again, she said. Surian Fletcher-Jones, an executive producer on the show, instructed her to get “match fit.” Alderton said she stopped drinking for a while, and also started a course of cognitive behavioral therapy, billing the sessions to the production.Simon Maloney, a producer who also worked on Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” emphasized the importance of providing support for female showrunners who draw heavily from their personal experiences, Alderton said. “You can’t drag the story out of a woman like that, and then leave her alone,” she remembered him saying.Alderton described herself as “an oversharer,” but these days, she thinks carefully about how that sharing should take place, and posts less on social media. ‌“What I now realize,” she said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Fellner revealed Alderton had a studio deal for a film adaptation of her fiction debut, “Ghosts.” She is also researching a novel about heartbreak and loss. “The work I do in fiction is still very exposing,” Alderton said, because it continues to reference her life, even if she is no longer the main character.“That’s enough of my heart, and soul, and brain and life spilled out everywhere,” she said.“What I now realize,” Alderton said, “is people don’t need to go into forensic detail of their emotional lives to get people to like, and then relate, to them.”Ellie Smith for The New York Times More

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      in Theater

      Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair

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      In London, a new play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a revival of “The Seagull” explore undercurrents of pain.LONDON — There’s a chill in the air at the Almeida Theater, notwithstanding the record-breaking heat here. That drop in temperature comes from the coolly unnerving “Patriots,” a new drama whose look at power politics in Russia over the last quarter-century induces a shiver at despotism’s rise.The gripping production, directed by Rupert Goold, runs through Aug. 20.Written by Peter Morgan (“The Crown,” “Frost/Nixon”), “Patriots” surveys the sad, shortened life of Boris Berezovsky, the brainiac billionaire who died in 2013, age 67, in political exile in London. An inquest into Berezovsky’s mysterious death returned an unusual “open verdict,” but on this occasion, it is unequivocally presented as a suicide: The play ends with this balding man, bereft of authority, preparing to end his life.An academic whiz-turned-oligarch who expedited the rise of the younger Vladimir V. Putin, Berezovsky later fell out with the onetime ally who enlarged his power base, according to the play, with promises of “liberalizing Russia,” yet proceeded to do anything but.Morgan introduces Berezovsky, age 9, as a math prodigy whose mother hoped he might become a doctor. (A gleaming-eyed Tom Hollander plays the role throughout.) From there, we move forward 40 years to find Berezovsky an integral member of Russia’s moneyed elite welcoming to his office an obsequious Putin, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.“Respected Mr. Berezovsky,” says an initially indrawn, ferret-like Putin, “one would have to live on another planet not to know you!” But it isn’t long before Putin has changed his tune, and his tone, as he rises from prime minister to president and consolidates power around himself. In one notably effective wordless scene, Putin tries out poses in front of a mirror to see which makes him look most impressive. His earlier hesitancy has given way to a man in love with his own heroism.Berezovsky looks on at so dramatic a change in character appalled, urging the former K.G.B. operative to “know your place.” But Putin by this point simply won’t be sidelined. And besides, reasons Putin, why hold your enemies close when they can just as easily be destroyed?Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots.”Marc BrennerGoold, the director, dealt with a different headline-maker at the Old Vic this spring in “The 47th,” which imagined Donald J. Trump in the run-up to the next presidential election. Goold is in better company this time: “Patriots” is a richer, less fanciful play, with grim resonances for today. Although Morgan rightly leaves it to the audience to make the connection, you can draw a line between the glorious empire Putin yearns for in the play and his ongoing attack on Ukraine.In one of the performances of the year, Will Keen, as the Russian leader, astonishes throughout, bringing his character to agitated, unpredictable life. His early fawning in Berezovsky’s presence gives way to an icy rejection that finds its fullest expression when his onetime mentor writes as a fellow patriot requesting permission to come home to Russia. Putin dictates a reply, then tells his secretary to rip the letter up: Berezovsky, Putin concludes, “is not worth it.”Hollander impresses, too, as he did in a dazzling star turn in “Travesties,” which won the actor a 2018 Tony nomination — two talky plays requiring an actor at home with reams of language. His character is both a quick-tempered womanizer, and too naïve to realize the young Putin’s potential for authoritarian misrule.Widening the play’s scope yet further is the Russian president’s friend, the oligarch Roman Abramovich (the excellent Luke Thallon), who battles Berezovsky over ownership of the oil company Sibneft. That case, which came to trial in London in 2012, plays out here as a resounding defeat for Berezovsky that only amplifies his psychic distress. Alexander Litvinenko (Jamael Westman, a former leading man in “Hamilton”), the Putin critic who was poisoned in 2006, shows up, too, as the “most honorable” of dissidents (or so Morgan maintains): a political casualty wreathed in glory that the sorrowful Berezovsky never knew.There’s an aspect of bravery, you feel, in writing “Patriots” at all while Putin is on the march. (That said, like Trump with “The 47th,” it’s possible these men’s egos would thrive on the attention.) In the days after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, orchestras, concert halls and opera houses pulled Russian works from their stages, and it looked as if it might no longer be allowable to perform the Russian repertory in the West; overseas trips by the Bolshoi Ballet, among other storied Russian arts companies, were canceled, as well.Emilia Clarke, second from right, in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc BrennerSo it’s a relief to welcome a Russian classic, “The Seagull,” first presented in 1896 by Anton Chekhov, who died nearly a half-century before Putin was even born. That this first of Chekhov’s four great plays ends, as does “Patriots,” with a suicide is an intriguing coincidence that also points to the undercurrents of pain that inform both plays.Performed barefoot and in modern dress, Jamie Lloyd’s enthralling production, at the Harold Pinter Theater through Sept. 10, furthers the stripped-back approach to the classics he brought to a recent “Cyrano de Bergerac” that was acclaimed in New York and London.Just as that play dispensed with a fake nose for its title character, this “Seagull,” seen here in Anya Reiss’s 2012 version, never features the wounded bird of the title onstage. Doing without props of any kind, the cast members, headed by the “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke in a terrific West End debut, deliver the play seated on green plastic chairs and boxed in by chipboard; they speak with a quiet intensity, as though we were eavesdropping on the characters’ innermost thoughts. Some will be exasperated by the approach, but I was riveted from the first hushed utterance to the last.Like “Patriots,” this “Seagull” draws from its own well of grief, even if the world of writers and actresses in Chekhov’s play is a long way from Morgan’s power-brokers and politicos. Lloyd’s ensemble communicates the shifting affections of a quietly devastating play that leaves you transfixed by the theatrical potency of despair.Patriots. Directed by Rupert Goold. Almeida Theater, through Aug. 20.The Seagull. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Harold Pinter Theater, through Sept. 10; in cinemas Nov. 3. More

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      in Movies

      Kevin Spacey Pleads Not Guilty to Sexual Assault

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      The Oscar-winning actor will face a trial in June 2023 — a rare example of a celebrity #MeToo case reaching that stage in Britain.LONDON — Kevin Spacey, the Oscar and Tony Award-winning actor, pleaded not guilty to charges of sexual assault on Thursday, British prosecutors said.In a short hearing at the Old Bailey, one of London’s grandest courthouses, Mr. Spacey, 62, confirmed his name and address — he is appearing as Kevin Spacey Fowler — before pleading not guilty to all charges, according to the BBC and other news agencies.The actor’s appearance was largely procedural. During the hearing, the presiding judge scheduled a three-to-four week trial that will not start until June 6, 2023; the British judicial system is struggling to deal with a severe backlog.Mr. Spacey is facing four charges of sexual assault in the case, as well as one of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent, which involved the penetration of a man’s mouth with a penis. The five offenses involve three male accusers, and are said to have occurred between March 2005 and April 2013, a time when Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London.Mr. Spacey was expected to plead not guilty to the charges, following an earlier court appearance in London. At that hearing last month, Patrick Gibbs, Mr. Spacey’s legal representative, said the actor denied all the charges and was determined to “establish his innocence.”Mr. Spacey, who won Academy Awards for his performances in “The Usual Suspects” and “American Beauty,” is free to work and travel before the trial, having been granted unconditional bail.Since the #MeToo movement spread worldwide in 2017, Mr. Spacey, who is also well known for having starred in the “House of Cards” series on Netflix, is one of the few high-profile celebrities accused of sexual assault to have faced a trial. More