No new plays good enough for the Standard
For the first time in its Awards' 44 year history, the Evening Standard has not made a Best New Play award. Editor Max Hastings, chairman of the judges, said, "We felt it would diminish the award to give it to a new work that did not live up to the extraordinary achievments of the past."
He went on the say that the West End has a bleak future if "West End theatres are not presenting serious work as well as incessant musicals."
Director Mike Okrent has died in New York, aged 53. He had been suffering from leukaemia for some time.
Best known for his work on the musicals Crazy for You and Me and My Girl and Willy Russell's Educating Rita, Okrent has been in the top rank of UK directors for many years and, just before his death, was working on pre-production for two Broadway shows.
"The DfE is doing nothing," claims Robinson
In spite of a seeming change of mind (see our feature of ), the Department for Education is making no effort to disseminate the Robinson Report, produced by Professor Ken Robinson and the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. School standards minister Jacqueline Smith has said that the government cannot afford to have copies of the report sent to every school (at a cost of around £4000), and, although numerous organisations such as the National Union of Teachers have offered to cover the printing costs, the government will not allow them to do so because of concerns over copyright, even though the complete report is available from the DfE's Website in .pdf format.
Robinson says that the DCMS has been much more positive in its reaction and believes that this has led to a cabinet split, as the contents of the report do not fit easily into the DfE's current preoccupation with literacy and numeracy.
In a remarkable U-turn the Federation of Scottish Theatre has decided to lobby the devolved partliament to set up a National Theatre of Scotland. It seems that they believe that, rather than setting up a building such as the RNT on London's South Bank, the new SNT should be a commissioning organisation based upon the Edinburgh International Festival.