Peter Hall News

Now in its fifth year, the award – which honours the memory of RTST co-founder, Sir Peter Hall – offers the winner their first-time opportunity to direct a full-scale, fully funded, mid-scale regional touring production of a classic or modern play, which may be an existing play or a new adaptation of a novel or film.

The autobiographical play about growing up in 1980's Zimbabwe following independence opens at York Theatre Royal on 14 September, with previews from 9 September, until 18 September, with tour dates for 2022 to be announced.

Leicester’s Curve theatre, Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and English Touring Theatre revealed the full company for the upcoming co-production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Anthony Almeida, which will open at Curve on 3 September, and then tour venues across England and Wales.

In Leopards, by rising playwright Alys Metcalf, Niala will be played by Saffron Coomber. Niamh Cusack will be reuniting with director Melly Still in the world premiere of Colin Teevan’s The Seven Pomegranate Seeds.

Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn was today awarded  the Critics Circle Award for Services to the Arts, the Critics Circle’s highest honour. Every year since 1988, the Critics’ Circle has voted for a single leading artist to receive an engraved crystal rose bowl in recognition of their distinguished contribution to the arts.

The third annual French Riviera Film Festival, will present a special Lifetime Achievement Award to Oscar-winning actor George Chakiris and Industry Excellence Awards to Caroline Lagerfelt and Eric Roberts, at an exclusive ceremony on July 14 at the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel, the announcement was made today by festival founders Gotham Chandna and Nicole Goesseringer Muj.

The third annual French Riviera Film Festival will present a special Lifetime Achievement Award to Oscar-winning actor George Chakiris and Industry Excellence Awards to Caroline Lagerfelt and Eric Roberts, at an exclusive ceremony on July 14 at the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel.

Leicester's Curve theatre has released the latest episode of its Curve in Conversation podcast, a look ahead at this autumn's line-up of productions including interviews with multi-award winning master of mind control Derren Brown, actor Sharan Phull and director Anthony Almeida.

The 60th anniversary production of Beckett's masterwork Happy Days, newly opened at west London's Riverside Studios, is indistinguishable from the keen eye of its director, Trevor Nunn, who across more than six decades has contributed many of the most significant (not to mention quite a few of the best) productions in my experience. We look back at a seismic career and select five productions for the ages.

The Associate Artists scheme will encourage these artists to take an active role in the growth and development of Brixton House, as well as furthering their own creative skills and thinking alongside this.

Award-winning theatre company Son of Semele Ensemble is announcing its departure from their Silver Lake home of 18 years. Led by Founding Artistic Director Matthew McCray since 2000, the company has been in residence at 3301 Beverly Boulevard in a black box theatre they created in 2003. 

Hosted at northern venues Manchester Royal Exchange and Northern Stage, Newcastle, and part of its National Programme, two new bursaries will see the recipients work alongside, and receive mentorship from Roy Alexander Weise MBE and Maria Crocker, both previous beneficiaries of the JMK Trust.

Tricia Thorns has been a professional actress for some 35 years and has of late added directing to her distinguished CV. Her latest production is a revival of Staircase, a two-hander from 1966 that was made into a 1969 movie starring, of all people, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. Charles Dyer's play about two gay Brixton hairdressers starts a monthlong run at Southwark Playhouse on June 23, with Paul Rider and John Sackville as its cast. Thorns explains her attraction to the material below and to a play that, she says, has in no way aged with time. 

Under Haydon's stewardship, the Rose's own work will be the priority, as demonstrated by the five Rose Originals in this upcoming season, but there will always be room on the theatre's stage for the country's leading touring shows as well.  This season's Rose Originals are a blend of new plays tackling significant contemporary issues and well-known titles reinvented for today.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opens on Saturday 4 December 2021 at Bristol Hippodrome and tickets are on sale now.

The National Theatre has today announced its programming until the start of next year with productions on all three South Bank stages as well as three major UK tours, two productions on Broadway, a return to cinemas, and a new feature film to be broadcast on television this autumn. In the week the theatre reopened for audiences again, six new productions were announced, and five productions halted by the pandemic were confirmed to return to the South Bank.  

'Namedropping in the Wings' is intended as a lighthearted memoir of how someone in his early twenties with no technical knowledge or training whatsoever became celebrated as a sound expert. It began when a very green 17-year-old got a job in a small London theatre where the artistic director was a young Peter Hall, the genius who went on to found the Royal Shakespeare Company.'

A new musical stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary novel The Great Gatsby is headed for the stage, with a new score from Grammy Award-nominated international rock star of Florence + the Machine Florence Welch and Grammy Award nominee Thomas Bartlett.

With spring quickly approaching and lockdown measures slowly easing, there probably isn’t a better piece of theatre to accompany the warmer weather and cheerier moods than A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jenny Caron Hall brought a captivating reading filled to the brim with stars to our screens last night.

On Wednesday, we're due to give a one-off, live, online performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, starring Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, Luisa Omielan, and Wendy Morgan and I'm cautiously excited about what we're making here!