Search results for ""Author David Lan""

A family day at the beach. There's a song, an argument, a dash across the white sand and into the high rolling waves. We're in Cape Town and David Lan is ten years old. Cut to 1969 and, visiting London fresh out of high school, he interviews theatre luminaries Sybil Thorndike, Tom Stoppard, Trevor Nunn, Paul Schofield before heading home to join the South African army. Now it's 1999. We're at the Young Vic where David is interviewed to be artistic director, a job he'd do for eighteen years, ensuring its flowering into a great world theatre. There's a redesign to be imagined, money to be raised, shows to be staged. And when the doors reopen in 2006 we meet the extraordinary artists he draws in: Ivo Van Hove, Jude Law, Richard Jones, Gillian Anderson, Patrice Chereau, Katie Mitchell, Stephen Daldry, the Isango Ensemble, Yerma, The Jungle, The Inheritance. We travel to Peter Brook's Paris, to Iceland in pursuit of a circus Romeo and Juliet,

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Lan shows that to understand the meaning that Zimbabwe's war of independence had for its people, the role of the spirit mediums must also be understood. Almost every anti-colonial struggle in the 20th century was led by an army of guerrillas, and no such struggle has succeeded without cooperation between the guerrillas and the local peasantry. This book examines what such 'cooperation' meant in the context of Zimbabwe's war of independence between 1966 and 1980 when hundreds of thousands of peasants provided the guerrillas with practical help and support. But throughout the country scores of spirit mediumsalso gave active support to the resistance, and with their help the scale of the war expanded into an astonishing act of collaboration between ancestors and their descendants, the past and the present, the living and the dead. North America: University of California Press

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David Lan evokes a unique theatre of life. Sometimes hilarious, always deeply felt we travel with him to Peter Brook's Paris, to Chekhov's Yalta, to Lithuania in search of his great grandparents, to Broadway for the Tony Awards. There's escaping the South African army, the Royal Court in the 90s, spirit mediums in Zimbabwe. And his years running the Young Vic, drawing in great artists such as Ivo Van Hove, Jude Law, Gillian Anderson, Stephen Daldry and shows such as Yerma, The Jungle and The Inheritance.'Exceptional. Rich, warm and sparkling.' Peter Brook'He is the Chagall of theatre, hurtling over his colourful life and the world, his shirt flying, dreaming on behalf of humanity.' Fiona Shaw'Sincere, passionate, vulnerable, open, serious, loving. A great read for fans of theatre and of humanity.' Ivo Van Hove

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The true story of the flourishing of a theatre in a wartime Jewish Ghetto. Winner of the Evening Standard Award for Best Play and the Critics Circle Award for Best New Play. Set in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania, in 1942, and based on diaries written during the darkest days of the holocaust, Ghetto tells of the unlikely flourishing of a theatre at the very time the Nazis began their policy of mass extermination. Joshua Sobol's play Ghetto was first performed at the Haifa Municipal Theatre in Israel and the Freie Volksbühne, Berlin, in 1984. This English-language version, adapted by David Lan, was first performed in the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre, London, in April 1989, directed by Nicholas Hytner. This edition of Ghetto includes Jeremy Sams' songs and music from the play, as well as extracts from the original ghetto diary.

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