After watching new productions at a rate of about four a week, our theatre critic presents the brilliantly good, the excruciatingly bad and the movingly sad of this year
HOLLYWOOD has its Oscars and Broadway its Tonys. Here, based on 200 nights spent in theatres in 2017, are the Billies: my idiosyncratic selection of the best and worst of the tumultuous past 12 months.
Best new play
It’s been a big year for live animals on stage, with goats and dogs making stellar appearances. It’s not just because Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman includes real rabbits and a goose in the cast that it gets my vote, it’s because the play encompasses so much: a Northern Irish political thriller, a study of unspoken love and a Thomas Hardy-like evocation of timeless rural rituals.
In an outstanding year for new plays— Albion, Ink, Girl from the North Country and Consent—Mr Butterworth’s play Theatre Michael Billington takes the prize (as it did at this month’s London Evening Standard Theatre Awards).
Worst new play
It pains me to say this, as I’m a long-standing admirer of his work, but Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s The Divide was the year’s most crushing disappointment. This futuristic drama, set in a world of enforced sexual segregation in which the species is continued by artificial insemination, occupied six energy-draining hours of one’s time at the Edinburgh Festival and is destined to have a brief afterlife at the Old Vic. Sir Alan’s genius is for exposing the absurdities of the here and now rather than for taking the road to dystopia.
Most striking newcomer
If one good thing came out of The Divide, it was the emergence of Erin Doherty. It fell to her to convey the sweetness and sadness of a woman who saw herself as a reborn Jane Eyre. Miss Doherty went on to enhance her reputation as the eponymous heroine of My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Young Vic, in which she played a young American activist crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 27, 2017 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 27, 2017 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds
