Stage Directions June 2017

Stage Directions

Ellen McDougall

'trying to understand better what it means to be alive now'

In this episode I discuss Donald Trump and performance with my brilliant colleagues Bryce Lease and Sophie Nield. I talk about a paradoxical and strange evening of theatre in January 1886. And I have a chat with the amazing Ellen McDougall about her first season as Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill.

Podcast outline:

• 00.00.00 Introduction
• 00.00.49 Donald Trump and Performance: Introduction
• 00.07. 57 Donald Trump and Performance: Discussion
• 00.35.54 Strange Evenings of Theatre: 27 January 1886
• 00.47.56 Interview: Ellen McDougall
• 01.15.02 End

Additional Information

You can find out more about Bryce Lease and Sophie Nield here:

• Bryce Lease
• Sophie Nield

In my essay on that evening of theatre, I refer to a couple of essays. These are the full references:

• Driver, Beverley R. "Herman Bang's Prose: "The Narrative as Theatre"." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 4, no. 2 (1970): 79-89.
• Bjørby, Pål. 'The Prison House of Sexuality: Homosexuality in Herman Bang Scholarship.' Scandinavian Studies 58, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 223-55.

And you can find out more about - and book for - the new Gate season here:

• Gate Theatre website

Music by Nick Powell and Nick McCarthy
Graphics by Liam Jarvis
Support gratefully received from Eloise Whitmore, Elaine McGirr and the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London.

NEXT EPISODE: Chris Megson and Nadine Holdsworth on Theatre & Brexit and Aoife Monks on An Octoroon and the cute, the zany, and the interesting.