Swiss director Milo Rau’s ripped-from-the-headlines approach to theatre has included shows about wars in Iraq and Congo and the exploitation of migrant workers. His four-hour documentary play (created with Servane Dècle) about the trial of the men who drugged and raped Gisèle Pelicot has been performed around the world and will be staged by the Young Vic at London’s County Hall on 30 November. The production swiftly sold out but will be livestreamed in full.
The cast includes Adjoa Andoh, Rosie Jones and Olivia Williams. It just floors you.” It’s already one of Europe’s coolest theatre companies, an avant garde hit factory that stormed the West End with The Years and Oedipus. Now, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam has launched its own record label to release the “most requested” music from its recent productions.
The first compilation includes tracks by Thijs van Vuure from an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room. The moving mosaic of schoolboys he painstakingly choreographed for the viral Storm video has brought Damien Jalet on to the smartphones of a huge new audience. On Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage, you can now see the great innovator twisting scenes of ecstasy and agony with performers among the statues of Oslo’s Vigeland Museum, in the hour-long film DuEls (made with Erna Ómarsdóttir).
Highlights include a tangled trio familiar from horror hit Suspiria. Endlessly intriguing, not least in how the movement changes your appreciation of figures frozen in time: a choreographer illuminating sculptors. When director Carrie Cracknell was cast in a student production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, she considered herself “no match for his dazzling dialogue, speed of thought or emotional depths”.
But Cracknell mastered all of that, and much more, in her Old Vic revival of the chewy Arcadia, which traverses two different centuries to explore matters of the universe and the heart, with a first-rate cast including the luminous, Olivier-nominated Isis Hainsworth. If only all plays left you with quite so much to think about. On NT at Home from 26 November.
In 2017, the performance artist Selina Thompson arrived at the Edinburgh fringe with a mallet, protective goggles and blocks of salt rock that she duly hammered in a one-woman show whose audience members each took home a piece. Thompson left Edinburgh that year with several awards for her extraordinary account of the transatlantic slave triangle and how she retraced its route, from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica. The performance inspired this film on BBC iPlayer, which preserves its sense of ritual, commemoration and intimacy – and adds Thompson’s reflections on its creation.
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