Simon Evans Archives - North West End UK

Cyrano de Bergerac – RSC – The Noel Coward Theatre

26Jun

By Paul AckroydNo Comments

London

Cyrano de Bergerac – RSC – The Noel Coward Theatre

Cyrano De Bergarac is a classic 1897 play by French playwright Edmond Rostand, and has been performed numerous times and starred many famous actors over the years. This is a new version for the RSC by Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson, making its London transfer from the Stratford stage, and it is a corker! Evans and Stevenson have kept the original plot and managed to retain much of the poetic style while making it up-to-date, lively, very funny and fully engaging. Highly theatrical from the very beginning, Christian Patterson comes onto the stage as Ragueneau to welcome the audience and explain that in theatre we are separate from "The world out there, Us quiet in here". The cast makes full use of the theatre space, entering through the auditorium, appearing on balconies and in the box...

Staged (Series 2) – BBC iPlayer

The first series of Staged was one of the surprise successes of 2020, using the boundaries imposed by the pandemic and the shortage of new TV those limitations had imposed to create a low-budget and instantaneous reaction to the situation in six fifteen minute chunks. The overall narrative followed the attempts by fictional versions of Michael Sheen, David Tennant and Simon Evans (played by themselves) to rehearse remotely Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author during lockdown. The attempt is ultimately unsuccessful and the episodes themselves revolve around the different distractions and problems the trio face during this process. As we find ourselves in another lockdown (is this one the second? Or third? What are the criteria?), a second series did make a certain ...

Staged – BBC iPlayer

As lockdown measures begin to ease and businesses reopen their doors, there has been a lot of focus on the effect of quarantine on theatres and whether or not the industry will survive. The crisis has created a lot of negativity for theatres, as it has for many things in our society, but Staged, written and directed by Simon Evans, may be one of the few good things that has come out of this. The series focuses on exaggerated versions of David Tennant and Michael Sheen, who are rehearsing for a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, also directed by Evans, over Zoom. The beginning very much has the feel of The Trip as Tennant and Sheen show off their abilities to do accents, but quickly comes into its own originality. As well as the Zoom calls between the various charact...