We saw talented performer Arthur Romeo take part in Sweet Baby J'ai's one act historical play Recipe for Hot Biscuits and Blues at the Stella Adler Theatre. The play was a part of the 2nd Annual 20% New Works Festival. It was a wonderful performance by the whole cast. Another performance piece that took part in the same evening was This Is War.
We were able to interview Arthur Romeo who was part of the ensemble briefly in Q&A fashion. He has also appeared in films such as Art School Confidential and Be Easy. Arthur's girlfriend, actress-performer Karina Rossy, was there in support(pictured)
Jelly Noose(JN)Q&A with Arthur Romeo:
1. JN: Tell us about your passion for acting/theatre/film(why)
-My passion for the theatre arts revolves around the idea that every single class of art, be it dance, music, graphic, or visual play an integral part in the process and that's amazing because I truly adore all of the arts .Theatre is great because its entertainment, life, and catharsis. You don't come out of a play without learning about something so in that way theatre helps the world go 'round.
2. JN:What is your favorite project that you've taken part in?
-My favorite project that I participated in was a film called Art School Confidential, it was great because I made a lot a great friends on that set and plus I got to work with John Malkovich for two weeks! He's one of my favorite actors.
3. JN:How did you like taking part in Hot Biscuits?
-Its was a wonderful experience! The cast and crew were brilliant, I was quite lucky to be in their ranks. I like that every project I work on I learn something new and can take it with me, in this case it was knowledge of the negro leagues of the 40's and 50's.
4. JN: Do you like musical theatre more or dramas?
-That's hard to say. I'd fashion to say I love all forms of theatre equally. I'm just in love with the spectacle.
5. JN: Of Film and Theatre which do you like more and why?
-Its kind of the same thing as the last answer, while both mediums are wildly different, they are still tightly bound by firm dramatic foundation, and I love both forms very dearly.
6. JN: What are your upcoming projects?
-Right now I have a few books that I'm working on, and as always I'm continuing to do the Hollywood shuffle hustle.
7. JN: What inspires you in your creative works?
-Everyday life, its tragedies, its eccentricities, it's glee, its depravity, its goes on and on.
8.JN: A link - a wep page to see any samples of your work.
-Sure, here's a link to some of my artwork. www.skipstone.deviantart.com/galleryHighlight:
We saw talented performer Arthur Romeo take part in Sweet Baby J'ai's... more
Thursday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show her on CURRENT TV on Tues, Thurs & Sats.
In today's show :
Can't say my name.
It's enough to make you throw up.
Not that I've got anyone to talk to.
Lovely weather.
Ross eats again.
They just get on with it.
A very nice three days.
Barry White.
Dealing with bad news in different ways.
Sight seeing in London on a bus.
It costs pennies to make cola drinks.
Cats "devil ears".
What's the point of walking up a big old hill ?
The glass shelving unit has gone.
Loud music at home.
Happy happy happy.
Spend the money to sit at the front.
Can you see more than one of me ?
TEXT the show : UK - 078... Int - +44... chris@unitedkingdomtalk.co.uk
WWW.UNITEDKINGDOMTALK.CO.UKThursday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show her on CURRENT TV... more
To which I say, "Good." That play sucks. Sorry, Neil Simon fans.http://www.variety.com/VR1118010685.html
To which I say, "Good." That play sucks.... more
In this edition we mark Breast cancer awareness month. Did you know men can get breast cancer too? We preview a new play being performed in the virtual world Second Life. And we meet the man who is credited with creating 'literal videos'.
Life On Line www.life-on-line.tvIn this edition we mark Breast cancer awareness month. Did you know men can get breast... more
The biggest musical flop too date, that lasted a run of only five shows back in 1988, is being revived.
Carrie the Musical (as in horror movie Carrie, as in the one you're thinking of, as in 'who the hell made this into a musical in the first place?') is being brought back to the stage by producers Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum. It all kicks off next month.
Scarlett Johansson is set to follow in the footsteps of Sienna Miller, Jude Law, Hugh Jackman, and Daniel Craig, by heading to Broadway.
The actress, 24, will be in the play by American playwright Arthur Miller, beginning December 28.Scarlett Johansson is set to follow in the footsteps of Sienna Miller, Jude Law, Hugh... more
"On stage at the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" are seven actors—and 23 hidden microphones. The new musical "Fela!" has 80 speakers hung around the theater, and mic transmitters embedded in a character's tap shoes. And during one song in "The Phantom of the Opera," actors choose whether to sing along—or just mouth the words—to a prerecorded vocal track.
With theater producers increasingly reliant on revenues from touring shows playing spaces with as many as 4,000 seats, more shows are being rigged with miniature mics and high-tech sound systems to project the performances to the far reaches of the theaters. Sophisticated sound mixing systems can make singers' voices sound better than they would otherwise. And, unbeknownst to most audience members, some performers in musicals are occasionally backed by prerecorded vocal tracks, allowing them to sing quietly, or sometimes not at all, during strenuous dance numbers or scenes with complex effects.
Just as Bob Dylan was booed when he "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the theater community is divided over the growing manipulation of sound on stage. Manny Azenberg, 75 years old, whose first Broadway show as a producer was "The Lion in Winter" in 1966, agreed to allow hidden mics on stage in "Brighton Beach" but refused to put body mics on actors. "You lose quality, you lose intimacy, you lose the reality of the theater," he says.
Many theatergoers have come to expect the miking effect. Microphones on stage allow actors to speak more naturally, emulating the more realistic performance style that audiences are used to from movies and television. Audiences also expect entertainment to be louder generally, after years of surround-sound in movie theaters. Sound designers say it's necessary to turn up the volume on actors as Broadway theaters themselves get louder, with automated lighting and set-moving equipment making a continual background noise. "There's very little true quiet in the theater anymore," says Tom Clark of Acme Sound Partners, which is designing the sound for "Bye Bye Birdie" and other shows this season.
Playwright David Mamet is known for refusing to use any mics at all in his plays. It may be a losing battle. At a recent performance of "Oleanna," his play about sexual harassment now on Broadway, an audience member complained at a "talk back" for theatergoers after the show. Dennis Sandman, a 56-year-old financial planner from East Brunswick, N.J., said he couldn't hear the play from the balcony. "The actors should've worn mics," he told the group. "It's important when you have one of these talkathons to hear it clearly."
Stage sound isn't always invisible. Actor Pablo Schreiber was half-naked for much of "Desire Under the Elms," a fraught drama by Eugene O'Neill on Broadway earlier this year. Audiences seated at the front of the 1,623-seat St. James Theatre could see a battery pack in his long johns with his microphone wire running down his bare back.
Mr. Schreiber says initially he was opposed to using a mic, but later realized it helped involve the audience in ways an acoustic performance might not have in a large theater. During his character's love scene with his voluptuous stepmother, played by Carla Gugino, he could whisper to her and look into her eyes instead of projecting outwards.""On stage at the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" are seven... more
"A few weeks ago, on a fog-enshrouded night in Malibu, Richard Montoya stepped onstage in full mariachi regalia to welcome his audience to what he slyly called the "Getty Pancho Villa."
The occasion was a performance of "Peace," Aristophanes' perpetually timely 2,400-year-old antiwar comedy, updated to take stock of the latest global quagmires and packed with references to Michael Jackson, Brentwood versus Boyle Heights sensibilities and other punchy anachronisms.
The actors included avant-garde stalwart John Fleck and prolific TV and stage veteran Amy Hill. But the production's throbbing Greco-Chicano heart was the vaudevillian antics of Montoya, Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas, better known by their collective moniker of Culture Clash, who adapted the play with John Glore, associate artistic director of South Coast Repertory.
Although the Getty's faux-classical environs offered a ready-made symbol of old-school L.A. exclusivity, on this night the audience was a congenial SoCal blend of old and young, Eastside and Westside, Spanish-dominant and Anglo-centric. Among those who attended the show's three-week run was a new fan so impressed that he fired off an e-mail.
"You guys are heroes and geniuses, clowns and dramatists," it read. "My wife and I saw you in 'Peace' . . . you entertained us, and you tossed a couple of bombs, too, noisy things that did just the right amount of collateral cultural damage. I am an admirer of your work from now on." It was signed " Tom Hanks."""A few weeks ago, on a fog-enshrouded night in Malibu, Richard Montoya stepped onstage... more
I like theatre. Generally, it only takes one really good play or musical to become hooked. But the fact is that most people either can't afford the price or, for one reason or another, just don't think it's worth it. But what if you could download plays online and watch them on your computer? Is this another industry that could be doomed to the empire of consolidation that is the internet?I like theatre. Generally, it only takes one really good play or musical to become... more
"STRANGE is a relative term when applied to the work of Willem Dafoe, and yet when one looks at his fall schedule, it is also the word that jumps most immediately to mind.
In the art-house cinemas he and Charlotte Gainsbourg can currently be seen inflicting unspeakable violence on each other in the Lars von Trier suspense film “Antichrist.” Next, at the Public Theater, he will don a frilly 18th-century costume and lead a giant anthropomorphic duck around the stage by its genitals in Richard Foreman’s surrealist play “Idiot Savant.” After that he can be heard in Wes Anderson’s animated version of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” providing the voice of a knife-wielding rat.
It may be convenient to classify Mr. Dafoe’s choices as strange because they defy easy categorization. The actor himself is not in any particular hurry to explain how his choices should be interpreted. “Nobody has to know what I think about what I do,” he said in his gentlemanly growl during a recent lunch in the meatpacking district. “In fact it’s very important, I think, for an actor to keep their mouth shut on some level.”
No deeper pattern emerges, either, from the body of film work he has built over the last quarter-century. Sure, he has portrayed some memorably unhinged creeps in films like “Wild at Heart” and “Spider-Man.” But that assessment does not account for his subdued performance in “Mississippi Burning,” his quiet heroism in “Platoon” or his comic turn in “Shadow of the Vampire.” And it ignores his parallel career in avant-garde theater, where his work has been even more unpredictable and unquantifiable.
Taken one at a time, each project is an example of an actor following his own idiosyncratic muse; together they have hardly anything in common except that Mr. Dafoe is in them.
In person Mr. Dafoe, a trim, sinewy man of 54, can be an intense, intimidating figure, owing mostly to a reptilian voice that can make the most banal utterances sound a little bit sinister. He is also endowed with a metamorphic face that at first appears skeletal but can communicate a spectrum of emotion with its bends and contortions. When he is deep in thought, the worry lines pile up on his forehead like sand dunes, and when he grins, his mouth appears to stretch beyond the boundaries of his face.
“He looks very much like the Batman cartoon — he looks like the Joker,” said Mr. von Trier, who previously directed Mr. Dafoe in his film “Manderlay.” “He can do strange things with his face that show he’s very much alive.”
"
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Read article for more. Share your thoughts."STRANGE is a relative term when applied to the work of Willem Dafoe, and yet when one... more
Andrew Lloyd Webber has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, but it is in its early stage.
A spokesperson says in a statement: "Andrew is now undergoing treatment and expects to be fully back at work before the end of the year..." Prostate cancer affects 35,000 UK men every year, over 10,000 of those die from the disease.
Andrew is searching for Dorothy and Toto next year for the stage version of the "Wizard of Oz".Andrew Lloyd Webber has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, but it is in its early... more
An East Midlands amateur dramatics group known as the Tipton Amateur Repertory Theatre Society has changed its name after a complaint that its acronym, Tarts, was sexist.
The group have been putting on shows for over 20 years but will now go by the name of Tipton Arts after a local headteacher threaten to boycott their performance of Babes in the Wood.
To be fair, I think the name change is a possibly a good move, think how many men would go to see a play performed by Tarts called "Babes in the Wood" for all the wrong reasons. Though, I can't see them selling as many tickets now!An East Midlands amateur dramatics group known as the Tipton Amateur Repertory Theatre... more
Hadley Freeman writes, "Last weekend, with my brow raised high, I attended the New Yorker festival which was full of people talking, very earnestly, very cerebrally. In other words, it was like stepping right into the magazine, Purple Rose of Cairo-style. Perhaps because I got so carried away on this cloud of cerebralism, I did something I vowed never to do: I went to a talk by some actors.
I have always been interested in what I call actor-speak – and when I say "interested", I mean "intrigued in the way you might be by a man talking to himself, without having any desire to go over and engage him in conversation". However, while I continue to march past muttering men on park benches, I am, thanks to my job, an unwitting expert on actor-speak, having spent many hours of my life listening to actors bang on about their "love of the craft" and "the thing about [insert name of director] – he takes you on an emotional journey".
Some may call this argument prejudicial, but those who do have never spent a morning with Helen Hunt, listening to her expound on her skills. This has nothing to do with lack of respect for actors; just a lack of respect for the language they learn – perhaps at acting school – to describe what they do.
The New Yorker event sounded promising: its panel of pleasing scene-stealers included John Turturro and Joan Cusack. But when – just 10 minutes in – panel member and actor Richard Kind (you'll know him, look him up), said actors do theatre "to nourish themselves", I knew I'd made a grave tactical error. The verb "nourish" should only be used in a culinary context, and even then with restraint.
And, lo, they kept a-coming: there was "our craft" and "the journey one goes on". To finish, actor Christine Baranski announced that "acting is like creating life". Considering this comment came straight after the clip showing her in the sitcom Cybill, that seemed a pretty awesome claim. Shrieking onset at Cybill Shepherd v being God – I guess it's six of one, half-dozen of the other.
Does anyone else on the planet talk about their jobs like this? Well, having spent eight years reporting on fashion, I can assure you they most certainly do. Designer Miuccia Prada, for example, said that her collection for Miu Miu next season was about "questioning innocence". This should be translated to the layman as: "I decided to do cat prints.""Hadley Freeman writes, "Last weekend, with my brow raised high, I attended the New... more
Geri Halliwell wants to make a musical about the rise to fame of the Spice Girls in the '90s.
Personally, if a Spice Girls musical must be made, I think they should go for a more We Will Rock You Approach and come up with some ridicu- wait, that was the Spice World movie. Nevermind.Geri Halliwell wants to make a musical about the rise to fame of the Spice Girls in... more
Artistic license has always been a part of adaptations on screen, stage and in print. But many in New York City's deaf community are outraged over Rebecca Gilman's reworking of Carson McCuller's classic novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”Artistic license has always been a part of adaptations on screen, stage and in print.... more
"The Laramie Project — one of the most-performed plays of the last decade — is based on the true story of Matthew Shepard, the young man who, in October 1998, was savagely beaten and left to die in Laramie, Wyo. Almost instantly, Shepard's name became a kind of grim rallying cry for those drawing attention to hate crimes committed against gays.
Now there's an epilogue to The Laramie Project, and tonight more than a hundred theaters around the country will perform readings of the new play. Together with the first one, it constitutes a powerful version of Matthew Shepard's story.
But it's not the only version — and that's a big part of why the epilogue exists.
Matthew Shepard's savage killing was used to strengthen the argument for hate-crimes legislation. But meanwhile, another version of his story was gathering steam.
Six years after the crime, the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 set out to debunk the idea that Shepard was murdered because he was gay. Like The Laramie Project, the one-hour episode included interviews with Shepard's friends, as well as investigators assigned to the case. ABC's Elizabeth Vargas interviewed Shepard's killers, Aaron McKinney and Russ Henderson, both serving life sentences.
Shepard, 20/20 reported, may have used methamphetamine. The report said that McKinney had been a dealer. "Meth is what made the world go around in Laramie," a friend of McKinney's and a former dealer told Vargas.
20/20 also reported that McKinney and Henderson had been on a meth binge in the days before meeting Shepard. And prosecutor Cal Rerucha told 20/20 that "the methamphetamine just fueled this point where there was no control. So, it was a horrible, horrible, horrible murder. But it was a murder that was driven by drugs."
Playwright Moises Kaufman believes the 20/20 story was "terrible journalism" that "changed the nature of the dialogue." So one of his goals with the new Laramie Project epilogue was to debunk the 20/20 story.
Kaufman and his Tectonic colleagues went back to Laramie last year, re-interviewing many of the people they'd met a decade ago — as well as talking to some new sources.
"One of the things we do in the play," says Kaufman, "is we go back and ask investigators ... and we go back over trial transcripts, and we prove that it was a hate crime."
The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later includes the comments of Rob Debree from the Albany County Sheriff's Office in Laramie.
"We've proven that there were no drugs on board with McKinney and Henderson — just none," Debree declares. And what about the claim that Shepard's murder was a robbery and drug deal gone bad? "That's some kind of massive denial," one openly gay Laramie resident tells Tectonic Theater.
Laramie police commander Dave O'Malley, who also appears in the 20/20 episode, says: "It angered me more than anything the things [ABC] didn't say — the things they left out."""The Laramie Project — one of the most-performed plays of the last decade — is... more
"The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism.
Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day.
The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to detect cheating students, to compare language used in Edward III — published anonymously in 1596, when Shakespeare was 32 — with other plays of the period.
He discovered that playwrights often use the same patterns of speech, meaning that they have a linguistic fingerprint. The program identifies phrases of three words or more in an author’s known work and searches for them in unattributed plays. In tests where authors are known to be different, there are up to 20 matches because some phrases are in common usage. When Edward III was tested against Shakespeare’s works published before 1596 there were 200 matches.
Sir Brian said: “There might be ten to 20 common phrases between two plays by different authors. The computer is picking out three-word sequences that could just be chunks of grammar. But when you get metaphors or unusual parts of speech, it is different.”
The Shakespeare matches came from four scenes, about 40 per cent of the play. The remaining scenes had about 200 matches with works by Kyd, best known for The Spanish Tragedy, a play known to have influenced Shakespeare, indicating that he wrote the other 60 per cent of the play.
The suggestion that Shakespeare had a hand in Edward III has been debated for about 150 years but has found favour only recently. It was ignored by mainstream publications until 1997, when it was included in The Riverside Shakespeare, and has subsequently been accepted by The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works.
Sir Brian said: “When you have 200 [matches] you can be pretty sure. Everyone can see that certain scenes are very Shakespearean, but no one could see why there were verses that are definitely not his. There is a real difference in quality between the two authors.”
The mystery has endured because some academics refuse to believe that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights at that stage of his career, he said. “They think, Shakespeare has been elevated to the position of the Bard, so why would he have collaborated with anyone else?”""The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an... more
"The play, To enjoy the sweetness you must taste the bitterness, produced, written, directed and acted by Iraqis, is the first evening stage show in Baghdad since the war that toppled Saddam Hussein six and a half years ago.
Although it is a comedy, the title and story have an obvious and serious resonance for people who long for better times. The 1,000 seat theatre, built during the Iran-Iraq war and which in its heyday hosted sell-out foreign productions of Shakespeare and Chekhov, is, once again, full.
As nervous ushers handed out white plastic garden chairs to customers who had paid 10,000 dinars (£5.50) for seats only to be left standing, the significance of the night-time performance was not lost amid the hubbub.
"We used to go to the theatre and cinemas all the time before the war," says Elaf Mohammed, a 29-year-old civil engineer accompanied by her husband Usama and three-year-old daughter. "It is so good that we can do so again."
Until little more than a year ago, going to a restaurant, one of the few evening diversions available in Baghdad, would have been considered dangerous. Downtown neighbourhoods such as Karrada and Mansur would have been empty by 6pm. Now they are bustling.
"Life must go on," Elaf says, in a sentiment shared by Usama, whose face bears the scars of debris that struck him when a massive truck bomb killed dozens and wounded hundreds at Baghdad's foreign ministry just seven weeks ago.
"People used to be scared to go out at night," he says. "I feel happy this has changed. Baghdad is a big city and we need to enjoy culture."
While the Baghdad cinemas that once showed international and Arabic films remain closed, bar a few matinée screenings, it is a sign of progress, perhaps, that families have the option of going to the theatre in the evening.
The play's actors, most of them stars of local television shows, include Majid Yassin, a veteran performer who fled Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion ushered in bombings, kidnappings and sectarian murder that eviscerated society, but who has since returned.
"The hearts of Iraqis are full of hurt, you can see their pain from the outside. People have been used to crying," he says.
"My colleagues and I perform so that we can make them laugh again."
The play opened during Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that follows the holy month of Ramadan, and was the idea of producer Essam al-Abassi who, when not devising productions, sells mobile phones in the Iraqi capital.
Centred on two friends who quarrel when one falls in love with the other's sister, the plot contains an element of science fiction when a spaceship uplifts the men to Neptune, forcing them to put aside their differences.
The play is passionately patriotic and although it does not explicitly refer to the sectarian divide between Shia and Sunni, Abassi concedes that the gulf between Iraq's two dominant communities did inspire him.
"I am trying to send a message to the people that in the end there are no differences," he says.""The play, To enjoy the sweetness you must taste the bitterness, produced, written,... more
"To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting that younger actors ought to have a bit more respect for the traditions to which they belong, as Rupert Goold has done, is insulting, absurd and maybe even self-serving. The director is hugely gifted, but he’s surely guilty of Year Zero, clean-slate thinking.
For him, freshness is too often about imposing his own clever-clever ideas on plays, not in discerning and fulfilling an author’s aims and intentions. And that’s not a generational problem, as Goold must have discovered when members of his own cast rebelled against his reinterpretation of King Lear, with the result that it was a bit more Shakespearean when it moved from Liverpool to London.
On the other hand, he’s right to defend younger actors from any inference that they’re less able than their predecessors. He’s equally right to add that they’re more physically adroit than, say, many members of the Gielgud generation. One can only judge the quality of actors from their performances on stage and my own recent experiences tell me that the future of acting and therefore of the British theatre is very bright indeed. Just last month I went to the little Bush Theatre in West London to see a play called 2nd May 1997, was delighted by a mainly young cast, and thrilled by a total unknown, a recent RADA graduate called Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
She played the unlikely pick-up of an earnest Lib Dem on election night — and suggested vulnerability, need, damage, even desperation, behind a tipsy, flirtatious and immaculately observed exterior. Would her and others’ performances have been better if they’d immersed themselves in theatrical history or watched their seniors from the wings, as Dame Judi did? In this case, probably not. In the case of major classical actors performing major classical plays, well, maybe.
Vanessa Redgrave is said to be able to walk on stage from the wings and, without obvious preparation or missing a beat, to transform herself into whatever character she is playing. American Method actors such as Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino will spend hours thinking, feeling, willing themselves into a role. Dame Judi herself tries to have a quiet, reflective time, girding herself for the fray in her dressing room and, when she’s not on stage, turning on the Tannoy and listening to the unfolding production.
To watch Sir Ian McKellen or Dame Judi herself evolve their characters in rehearsal and then present the result on stage is obviously an education.
But each performer must find his or her own way to excellence. It’s not as if the pressure is missing. In a profession where unemployment often exceeds 90 per cent, performers who fail to exploit every opportunity for self-improvement — well, they would have to be foolish, self-destructive, mad.""To claim that Dame Judi Dench is “strangling theatre” by suggesting that younger... more
"Art for art's sake, goes the saying. But the UK's radical theatres are increasingly pleading for money for God's sake, as they face a growing threat of financial hardship and closure.
Despite a bumper year for Britain's stages, political theatres find audiences are staying away, opting to forget their troubles with escapist, light-hearted productions.
The latest venue at risk is The Tricycle in north London, which has staged a series of productions based on recreations of seismic political events such as the Scott inquiry, the Nuremberg trials, the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the Bloody Sunday inquiry.
The Tricycle's misfortunes follow hard on the heels of the collapse of several other radical theatres. The 7:84 theatre company in Edinburgh closed in January after funding problems, and the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow is said to be in discussions with its local authority and could be facing cuts in an upcoming "week of bad news" for arts organisations in the city.
Some of Britain's leading artists, including Paula Rego and Antony Gormley, said this weekend that they intend to help save The Tricycle by donating works for auction later this month.
"It is very important to have political theatre," said Gormley, "where recent events, or attitudes to events, are reflected on."
Rego added: "English theatre is the greatest in the world and the plays in smaller theatres are often the ones that the larger venues shy away from."
Other famous names to donate include the actor Sir Antony Sher, the illustrator Ralph Steadman, the artist Maggi Hambling and Sir Peter Blake, who designed The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album cover.
The theatre, which has also produced acclaimed plays about Guantanamo Bay, Deepcut – the Army barracks where four soldiers died of gunshot wounds – and the Hutton inquiry, needs £2.75m a year to stay afloat, only a third of which comes from ticket sales.""Art for art's sake, goes the saying. But the UK's radical theatres are increasingly... more
