What to do when the rain is lashing down on a Sunday? Head over to the V&A Museum where for another five Sundays at 2pm there is a free screening of a play filmed live in performance. These screenings celebrate the 20th anniversary of the National Video Archive of Performance. Remember the Theatre Museum, which used to be near the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden? That was a branch of the V&A.
On Sunday, 29 April, there was an utterly absorbing three-hour epic of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Staged by the theatre company Complicité, it starred Juliet Stevenson and was filmed at the National Theatre in 1997. These recordings are a precursor of the popular NT Live screenings. They are high quality recordings – certainly not a single camera stuck in the back row, and give you a real sense of being in the theatre. They are screened upstairs in the Sackler Centre in the V&A, opposite the Science Museum entrance.
Future screenings are:
- 6 May: David Tennant in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (2005).
- 27 May: Dominic West and Paul McGann in Simon Gray’s Butley (2011).
- 3 June: Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig in Caryl Churchill’s A Number (2002).
- 10 June: Tusk, Tusk from the Royal Court Theatre (2009).
- 17 June: The Tricycle Theatre’s production of Gillian Slovo’s The Riots (2011).
Find out more here.
London Letter 