Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Over a cup of tea at Sydney's Wharf Theater, Brendan Cowell is talking about the time he gave up drinking for 11 months in 2005. "And I didn't even have one of those brandy chocolates," says the 30-year-old playwright and actor, his laconic bearing becoming increasingly animated. "I didn't have a drop, because I favor a couple of drinks, and my whole world just changed in the most beautiful fashion and in the strangest and darkest as well." Around this time in the interview, Cowell's hand accidentally clips the tape recorder, sending a pair...
...naturally gifted as he is as an actor (untrained, he studied communications), Cowell's instincts are even sharper as a writer. It was at university, after seeing David Rabe's 1984 play Hurlyburly, when he decided to become a playwright. "The idea of this man screaming at a television, on cocaine, just having a dialogue with the newsreader-I remember watching that scene and just wanting to write something like that, wanting to write this psychotic angry male spree," says Cowell, who premiered his first play, Men, at Sydney's shoebox-sized Old Fitzroy Theatre in 2000. "I have...
When it was first staged in London (starring Laurence Olivier and directed by James Whale, who went off to Hollywood and gave us Frankenstein), Journey's End was hailed as an antiwar statement. The playwright, who served in France during the war (and went on to write films like The Invisible Man and Goodbye, Mr. Chips), always disputed that assessment. In fact, seen today in the absolutely riveting new production directed by David Grindley (based on his much acclaimed London revival of 2004), in the midst of another national debate about another war, the play is more poignantly and powerfully...
...condescension or satire. Yes, the young commander of the company, the competent, hard-drinking Stanhope (Hugh Dancy, the Brit heartthrob who's a standout in a cast of mostly Americans), lets slip a few bitterly sarcastic words about the general who has ordered the unnecessary raid. But no antiwar playwright could have written the delicate scene in which Stanhope tries to buck up, without shaming, a cowardly officer who is faking illness to avoid battle: "Supposing the worst happened--supposing we were knocked right out. Think of all the chaps who've gone already. It can't be very lonely...
...Really, I'm trying to be Ibsen. That's my secret hope: that I could somehow turn into [the playwright Henrik] Ibsen. There are things happening all the time to real people. You don't have to enact them or write them. I'm trying to make a play, not an educational device...