Metta likes...Hamlets

Loren O'Dair
Photograph Anna Hmmersley

This week Hamlets. Metta likes Hamlet in general - the play and the character - having done our own all-female version back in 2007, (also I assisted on Tim Carroll's production for The Factory) and in the last two weeks I've seen another two productions - the UK tour mounted by Icarus Theatre Collective, starring Metta regular Loren O'Dair, and the National Theatre production (though not with Mr Kinnear).

Interestingly though I saw both these shows at a point at which they weren't quite ready for public consumption - the Icarus production was a dress rehearsal and the National production was the understudy run.

Responding to a site

Samuel Collings | Photograph William Reynolds

So our latest production - Luigi Pirandello's The Man With the Flower in His Mouth - takes place within a café. I mean not only is the action (such as it is) set in a café but we're also staging it in one - the beautiful and intimate (recently opened) London Particular on the New Cross Road. And in fact this is our second foray into site responsiveness this year (I won't dare to call it site-specific because for the purists out there site-specific is itself a very 'specific' term) after our commission from the V&A museum to create a performance (which became for us a bit of an experiment in dance theatre) in one of their Spiral Booths.

Metta likes... Production values

This week, we like high production values.

Well, we always like high production values, but lets think a little about what that means. What we often mean is a slick and highly polished production - the sort of thing that looks expensive to achieve, the kind of professionalism you expect to see at the National or in the West End for example, but is that the only meaning?

Metta likes... Site specific theatre

This week - site specific theatre!

I have to admit that I still sometimes get lost in the terminology here. We have site specific, site sympathetic and then site responsive. Since the vagaries of the term is not an original gripe, I'll brush over it and quickly define what I'm talking about. What Metta really like at the moment is theatre performed where it is set.

Metta likes...men

Between the three of us (me, Heather & Will) we see at least five different shows a week so in the spirit of celebrating all the great art out there (not just the stuff we make) we have decided to have a weekly round-up of great things that we want to share with the world.

I'll kick off with Out of Joint's production of The Big Fellah - running at the Lyric Hammersmith til Oct 16th and then on tour til mid November.