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News: Pubs and theatre. An age-old pairing.
This exciting project will no doubt resonate with anyone that has ever stepped into a pub, so this February, grab your pint of Drunken Nights and witness something completely original and unique.
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News: The 28 Day Project launches wonderful opportunities
The 28 Day Project is an exciting initiative offering emerging talent a step into the film business.
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Have you got the Star Wars X Factor?
Thousands turned away at open auditions after standing in the rain for hours.
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News: TheatreCraft returns to help young people’s backstage careers
The 8th annual event returns to the Royal Opera House later this month.
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BLOG: Theatre: the best casino shows around the world
Casinos around the world offer some of the best theatrical entertainment you can find.
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BLOG: 5 Best Actors in Superhero Cinema
Is “superhero” acting any less challenging?
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Blog: Films to study for inspiration
Watching great actors can often inform your own work.
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Blog: Shakespeare experimenting with the limits of contemporary drama
Briony Rawle heads to Yorkshire and takes a closer look at Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
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Review: Bat Boy, Southwark Playhouse ✭✭✭
A campy fun musical with bite screams Douglas Mayo.
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Review: Visitors, Arcola Theatre ✭✭✭✭
Barney Norris first full-length play is an exquisitely written examination of love and loss, writes Alex Delaney.
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Review: 1984, Almeida Theatre ✭✭✭✭✭
This fresh vision of 1984 feels like a rediscovery of Orwell’s dystopia, writes Sophia Longhi.
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Review: Secret Theatre – Show 4, Lyric Hammersmith ✭✭✭✭
This review comes with a capitalised, emboldened and even italicised, SPOILER ALERT. That should do, writes Briony Rawle.
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Save The Forest Café!
Honour Bayes makes an impassioned plea to save Edinburgh’s Forest Café.
Add a commentThe Forest Fringe Café on Bristo Place, EdinburghA shining free beacon in the middle of an inevitably money sucking Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Forest Café is an independent social and arts centre currently located on Bristo Place. Achingly cool and run by volunteers as a charitable self-sustaining not-for-profit organisation, it has presented a refreshingly free alternative to both its artists and audience members.
Now in 2010, the year of the cuts, the Forest Café is in serious danger of being closed down. As the EUC, the charitable organisation that owned the Bristo building, has gone into receivership, the Forest Café finds itself fighting for the very home that staged the beginning of so many careers and the space that inspired the germination of so many cutting edge projects.
And it really is a creative powerhouse; for 4 years it has been home to Forest Fringe (www.forestfringe.co.uk), the brainchild of Andy Field and Debbie Pearson. An artistic collective dedicated to the facilitation and encouragement of new work, Forest Fringe has enabled the promotion and creative development of young companies and artists such as Tinned Fingers, Kings of England, Fringe First winners Little Bulb (pictured), Lucy Ellison and Nic Green whose Trilogy took the Barbican by naked storm earlier this year.
Bastioned by Lyn Gardner, Charlotte Higgins and the Battersea Arts Centre, Field and Pearson are a force to be reckoned with. They recently tweeted this about the campaign: “Forest Fringe only exists because of everything the Forest Cafe has done to make it possible. Without them nothing would have been possible.”
For all artists coming out of training the shock of how much it costs to produce even the simplest scratch piece in the professional sphere is devastating. Even in the boom ‘Cool Britannia’ years this was the case and under Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ the irony of the imploding nature of arts cuts is no longer funny; Big Society, Small Art.
Forest Café needs £500,000 to purchase Bristo and it is a purchase that would benefit all of us as we move into a world of stringent subsidised cuts. It would only take £10 from 50,000 supporters, or £100 from 5000.
I’m far from loaded and I donated a tenner. Donate to ensure there will always be a place for emerging artists like yourself to both show and develop their work, to be able to fail and progress without the need of daddy’s £10,000 in the bank. Just click on the link below and become part of your future.
To donate http://forestcafe.tumblr.com/
– Honour Bayes
Published on November 26, 2010 · Filed under: Blogs, Featured; Tagged as: Andy Field, Battersea Arts Centre, Charlotte Higgins, Debbie Pearson, Edinburgh Fringe, Forest Fringe Cafe, Kings of England, Little Bulb, Lucy Ellison, Lyn Gardner, Nic Green, Tinned Fingers