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Stage Blood
In 1971, Michael Blakemore joined the National Theatre as Associate Director under Laurence Olivier. The National, still based at the Old Vic, was at a moment of transition awaiting the move to its vast new home on the South Bank. Relying on generous subsidy, it would need an extensive network of supporters in high places. Olivier, a scrupulous and brilliant autocrat from a previous generation, was not the man to deal with these political ramifications. His tenure began to unravel and, behind his back, Peter Hall was appointed to replace him in 1973. As in other aspects of British life, the ethos of public service, which Olivier espoused, was in retreat. Having staged eight productions for t...
Arguments with England
In the days when Australians called England 'home', Michael Blakemore, an eager young man en route to RADA, made the long sea voyage to 1950s London to find himself in a distinctly foreign country . . . And so began his struggle to come to terms with the realities of a less than perfect Promised Land. poverty in the North to his sense of excitement on reading the works of Proust and Webster, sit beside colourful escapades at drama school and recollections of working with characters such as John Osborne and Tyrone Guthrie. Rescued from the horrors of weekly rep by an exhilarating tour behind the Iron Curtain in Peter Brook's Titus Andronicus with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Blakemore recalls life as an actor before his directorial success with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg propelled him to the National Theatre and the start of a glittering career.
Arguments with England
'This beautifully written book by the director Michael Blakemore puts most such volumes to shame. It is full of both sharp insights and sudden shafts of wisdom. Often wonderfully funny, it is also touching and painfully honest. By the time you have finished Arguments with England, the author feels like an unusually wise and sympathetic friend.' Sunday Telegraph'Some of the most exhilarating writing about theatre ever committed to paper, a beady and original analysis of Britain (and incidentally British theatre) in the 50s and 60s, a profound account of the evolution of modern Australia, and a darkly frank one of the inner life of its author. His arguments with England are in the end arguments with himself, but they are utterly engrossing.' Simon Callow, Guardian
Copenhagen
An explosive re-imagining of the mysterious wartime meeting between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb.
Inventing Ourselves
Winner of the 2020 British Psychological Society Popular Science Prize Winner of the 2018 Royal Society Science Book Prize. ........................................................................................ Up to the minute brain science from a world class scientist. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains how the adolescent brain transforms as it develops and shapes the adults we become. 'Beautifully written with clarity, expertise and honesty about the most important subject for all of us. I couldn't put it down.' - Professor Robert Winston Drawing upon her cutting-edge research Professor Blakemore explores: · What makes the adolescent brain different? · Why does an easy child become a challenging teenager? · What drives the excessive risk-taking and the need for intense friendships common to teenagers? · Why it is that many mental illnesses - depression, addiction, schizophrenia - begin during these formative years. And she shows that while adolescence is a period of vulnerability, it is also a time of enormous creativity and opportunity.
Noises Off
“As finely worked as a Swiss watch and as funny as the human condition permits ... the zigzag brilliance of the text as the clunky lines of the farce-within-a-farce rub against the sharp dialogue of reality.” The Guardian A play-within-a-play following a touring theatre company who are rehearsing and performing a comedy called Nothing On, results in a riotous double-bill of comedic craft and dramatic skill. Hurtling along at breakneck speed it shows the backstage antics as they stumble through the dress-rehearsal at Weston-super-Mare, then on to a disastrous matinee at Ashton-under-Lyne, followed by a total meltdown in Stockton-on-Tees. Michael Frayn's irresistible, multi-award-winning backstage farce has been enjoyed by millions of people worldwide since it premiered in 1982 and has been hailed as one of the greatest British comedies ever written. Winner of both Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Comedy. This edition features a new introduction by Michael Blakemore.
Afterlife
Afterlife is Michael Frayn's first new play for the National Theatre since Democracy, which premiered at the National in 2003 before West End and Broadway transfers. Afterlife opens in the NT Lyttelton in June. Investigating the life of the Austrian impresario and founder of the Salzburg Festival, Max Reinhardt, Afterlife is a grand epic and a highly theatrical work that will be directed by Frayn's long-term collaborator Michael Blakemore. With his morality play 'Everyman', Reinhardt captivated first the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, and then the city itself, with the play opening the Salzburg festival each year from 1920 until the accession of the Nazis in 1938. As Reinhardt and his company are forced into exile, 'Everyman' is taken to America until life imitates art and Death comes for first Reinhardt's master of ceremonies and chief associate, Kommer, and then for Reinhardt himself.
Democracy
Three political parties, in and out of bed with each other like drunken intellectuals, fifteen warring cabinet ministers, and sixty million separate egos. All making deals with each other and breaking them. All looking round at every moment to see the expression on everyone else's face. All trying to guess which way everyone else will jump. All out for themselves and all totally dependent on everyone else. Not one Germany. Sixty million separate Germanies. The tower of Babel! Set in West Germany in 1969, DEMOCRACY follows Willy Brandt as he begins his brief but remarkable career as the first left-of-centre Chancellor for nearly forty years. Always present but rarely noticed is Günter Guillaume, Brandt's devoted personal assistant - and no less devoted in his other role, spying on Brandt for the Stasi. Published to tie in with major new production at the Royal National Theatre directed by Michael Blakemore starring Roger Allam, Conleth Hill, Nicholas Blane, Jonathan Coy, Christopher Ettridge, Paul Gregory, Glyn Grain, Steven Pacey and David Ryall.
Copenhagen
In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionised atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment, and ended in disaster. Why the German physicist Heisenberg went to Copenhagen in 1941 and what he wanted to say to the Danish physicist Bohr are questions which have exercised historians of nuclear physics ever since. In Michael Frayn's new play Heisenberg meets Bohr and his wife Margrethe once again to look for the answers, and to work out, just as they had once worked out the internal functioning of the atom, how we can ever know why we do what we do. 'Michael Frayn's tremendous play is a piece of history, an intellectual thriller, a psychological investigation and a moral tribunal in full session.' Sunday Times
Fondue
*** "[A] dazzling and immensely readable collection." Andrew McMillan 'never say / the best of summer's gone', the poem asks, a plea for permanence that sustains throughout Fondue, the second collection by A. K. Blakemore. In these louche, candid poems, bearing the marks of Mary Ruefle, Emily Dickinson and The Smiths, the inner life prowls, smoking a cigarette, as the fantasies of sex and violence allowed to play out in the subjugations that have long been the poet's concerns. Here they are exposed, interrogated and attacked with a fierce melancholy. These lines understand their power to manipulate: 'this is a poem about my mouth / intended to draw attention / to my mouth', the title poem in...
