Verified introductory podcast archive on theatre, plays, and performance.
Antonin Artaud enters the story of theatre like a jolt of electricity into a dead nerve. In the 1920s and 30s, this French poet-actor raged against “civilized” theatre, insisting that beneath society’s polite masks…
It is a sultry Midsummer Eve in 1889, past midnight. In a cramped upstairs hall of a Copenhagen student club, by the flicker of gaslight, an illicit theatrical experiment reaches its climax. On a…
The final line of dialogue hangs in the air of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen on a frigid December evening, 1879. A young woman named Nora Helmer stands at the threshold of her cozy…
A cold January night in 1782 at the Mannheim Court Theatre. The chandeliers’ flames flicker as a restless audience packs the hall – students in threadbare coats jostling beside merchants and minor nobles. A…
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing sits in a dimly lit box of the Hamburg National Theatre on a late September night in 1767, his pulse quickening with anticipation. On stage, the final act of his new…
Paris, 1973. The dim, cavernous interior of La Cartoucherie—a former munitions factory on the outskirts of the city—has been transformed into a bustling revolutionary fairground. It is here that 1789, a theatrical reenactment of…
New York City, 1968. In a converted garage on Wooster Street in Soho—gritty walls, low ceiling, the smell of sweat and incense in the air—a group of performers and spectators are entangled in a…
East Berlin, 1961. The auditorium of the Volksbühne theatre is packed to the rafters on a damp autumn night. A new play called Die Umsiedlerin (“The Resettler Woman”) is making its debut, and whispers…
Avignon, 1976. Late on a July evening in the cobbled courtyard of the Théâtre Municipal, hundreds of festival-goers sit on wooden benches beneath a darkening sky. On stage, a strange and hypnotic tableau unfolds.…
Federico García Lorca’s theatre unfolds like a folk song that turns into a scream. He was a Spanish poet-playwright who infused the real stories of rural Spain with surreal imagery and lyrical symbolism, creating…
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