This Director Plans To Subvert Audience Expectations, Please A Repressive Government, And Bring Some Avant Garde Theatre To Beijing

That’s the goal in Chen Shi-Zheng’s adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, anyway. “Despite the familiarity of this 13th-century play to spectators in Mr. Chen’s homeland, they might have trouble understanding all the lines. The principal actors Mr. Chen has cast for this staging in China are almost all Americans, and they will speak in English. In fact, very little about the production will signal the story’s Chinese origins.”

A Box Office Worker Becomes A Last-Minute West End Star

Jennifer Caldwell, who was working in the box office in London’s Arts Theatre, got the call to fill in when the understudy was already filling in someone else’s role: “One of the producers saw me on the box office and said ‘I’ve had an idea’ about getting me to fill in. I said maybe, so he said ‘what if we cut parts of the show – can you do a reduced version of the track?’ and I said why not! We rehearsed from 3.30pm until 5pm and were on stage at 7pm.”

The Head Of The Royal Academy Will Step Down After Eleven Blockbuster Years

Sir Charles Saumarez Smith “will leave at the end of the year and said he was departing at a time of ‘obvious strength and success.’ Just over a million people visited the gallery in 2017, and a £56m redevelopment of the site was unveiled earlier this year.” And then there are the blockbuster David Hockney and Anish Kapoor shows – triumphs for the RA.

Why Do Adults Reread Our Childhood Classics – And What Do We Learn About Ourselves When We Do?

It’s familiarity, true: “There is an allure to the repetition of rereading, submitting to the rhythms of a narrative, place, and characters you know well, and the familiar emotions they evoke. Rereading also has a different pace. I tear through a book on the first read, to find out what happens next, but rereading feels mellower and more leisurely, even while relearning the parts I’ve forgotten.” But then, there’s the discovery of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia – basically, there’s the risk of understanding the suck fairy.