Tom Stoppard’s version of the Chekhov play is part of the Donmar’s residency at Wyndham’s theatre, an ambitious project that aims, says director Michael Grandage, to bring about a return to straight theatre in the West End and make it accessible to all.
Tickets will be sold at Donmar rather than West End prices, with 130 tickets per performance going for £10, which means that each show will need to sell a formidable 80% of the 750 seats to break even. However, the success of Grandage’s Othello last autumn, which sold out so quickly it left many disappointed, suggests that this is by no means unlikely.
Ivanov has been rapturously received, with critics enthusiastically relating to Kenneth Brannagh’s debt-ridden and crumbling lead, a moody, self-loathing, comic Russian Hamlet with [the mother of all midlife crises]. A slight improvement, then, on the play’s 1897 premiere, after which a disgusted Chekhov disconcerting news that video games are the most lucrative media products around these days, this year’s Cambridge Film Festival
will show a series of Machinima films, made using techniques and tools more commonly used in games than cinema. The Festival’s Machinima series will show film from recognised genres translated into CGI worlds, along with a discussion of the place of Machinima films in the world of film today.
Matt Kelland, co-curator of the series, explains the popularity of this surreal and often surprising new branch of cinema: ‘As young people become more enaged with internet culture and home-produced content, they are becoming more interested in user-created movies like machinima, and less interested in broadcast content.’
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Co-curator Saint John Walker, however, interprets it in terms of ‘the spectacular/fantasy versus documentation/realism. Games and CGI/VFX cinema are growing; film realism is shrinking.’ He is optimistic about the future: “In five years time we’ll see the Machinima era as a watershed, like the talkies!”
Films showing in the series will include Lainy Voom’s Black Swan, Tony Bannan’s Folie à Deux (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G0L8eepoXk) and the video made by Phil Rice for the Radiohead song “Bodysnatchers”.
Plugged in festival
The festival season is now over (which is, I suspect, why the weather has improved so suspiciously suddenly), but if you’re not quite ready to let go, swap your wellies for a pair of headphones and head to Dalston’s Café Oto this weekend. The London Placard Headphone Festival takes place this Saturday, with banks of headphone splitters taking the place of PAs to provide a concentrated yet strangely isolating listening experience. The audience will bring their own headphones, and plug into electronica from the likes of Hamster Ate My Garage Band and Leafcutter John, and the “medieval drum robot and synth array” of Bavin. Which, all in all, sounds like a far wiser way of seeking sound quality this weekend than the alternative – joining Metallica fans petitioning for a rerecorded and remastered Death Magnetic, having decided that its current version sounds better on Guitar Hero.