As New Stories Get Told On Stage, New Forms For Them Challenge Ideas Of ‘Good’ Theatre

Lyn Gardner, in a post-Edinburgh column, considers plays that “have a fractured messiness that upends some of the traditional ways we tell stories on stage. … We need to recognise that what might once have been considered failings are in fact their strength. It is theatre that is as much about disrupting the traditional form as telling stories about women that are different from those traditionally told, if they have been told at all.”

Who’s The Next Ivo Van Hove? The Guardian Picks Five Of Europe’s Hottest Experimental Theatre Directors

Matt Trueman’s list includes an Austrian who has actors lip-sync amid candy-colored stage designs, a Frenchman who stages marathon adaptations of great novels, an Austrian who creates devised theatre with ethnic minority and refugee casts, a Vietnamese-Frenchwoman who draws from both literature and post-colonial experience, and a Croatian whose ferociously confrontational work regularly attracts death threats.

New Yorker Festival Announces, Then Drops, Steve Bannon As Headliner

“The announcement [disinviting Bannon] followed several scathing rebukes and high-profile dropouts after the festival’s lineup, with Mr. Bannon featured, was announced.” (One guest who withdrew, comedian Patton Oswalt, suggested Milo Yiannopoulos as his replacement.) Top New Yorker editor David Remnick also encountered stiff resistance from members of the public and the magazine’s staff.

Fire Destroys Brazil’s National Museum

“Founded in 1818 [in Rio de Janeiro], the museum is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution and one of the largest and most renowned museums in Latin America, amassing a collection of some 20 million scientifically and culturally invaluable artifacts.” Says one Brazilian scientist, “The importance of the collections that were lost couldn’t be overstated. They were unique as it gets: Many of them were irreplaceable, there’s no way to put a monetary value on it.”

What Was Lost In The Brazilian National Museum Fire?

Firefighters and museum staffers were able to remove some items from the burning building in Rio, so it will take time for the scale of the destruction to become clear, but here is an overview of what the museum contained, including an 11,500-year-old skeleton, coffins from ancient Egypt, frescoes from Pompeii, pre-Columbian and indigenous art and artifacts, and a major fossil collection.

How Blue Can It Get? Simon Schama Visits The Pigment Archive Of Record

“Rows of pigments in tubes, jars, and bowls are visible through the doors of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. … There are the products of nineteenth-century chemical innovation — viridian green, cadmium orange, and the chrome yellow with which van Gogh was infatuated but which, over time, has begun to darken his sunflowers. But at the heart of the Forbes Collection are the natural pigments that were the staples of painters’ inventories before chemically synthesized paints replaced the impossibly esoteric, the dangerously toxic, the prohibitively expensive, and the perilously fugitive.”