Stage News

Israeli authorities have shut down  two theaters, one Palestinian-run, and one Israeli, for performing cultural theater performances that Israel considers to be critical of its political agenda and policies.

The affected theaters are the El-Hakawati Puppet Theater in East Jerusalem, and the Khan Theater in West Jerusalem.

The Puppet Theater was scheduled to begin this summer with a festival (the 19th annual El-Hakawati Puppet Festival), but the Israeli minister of internal security, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, shut down the festival by claiming that the El-Hakawati Puppet Theater was somehow connected with the Palestinian Authority. The theater owners vehemently deny that any of their funding came from the Palestinian Authority, and have opened their account books publicly to verify this fact.

The puppet festival was supposed to open on June 22nd, featuring Palestinian, Nordic, French and Turkish puppeteers. But the ruling by Aharonovitch prevented the festival from taking place as planned.

Over 1300 Israelis, including many actors, directors and artists, signed a petition condemning the shutdown of El-Hakawati Puppet Festival and Theater.

A Maltese theatre company had planned to stage the play Stitching by Anthony Neilson. However the play was banned by the theatre censors. The controversy has resulted in the theatre censors being disbanded, but the play is still banned in the country. The legal dispute is continuing, now heading towards the highest court in Europe.

Unifaun Theatre Productions have now taken the case of the banned play Stitching to the European Court of Human Rights. This is in response to the Constitutional Court of Appeal upheld a ban on performing the production last November.

Unifaun had planned to stage the play at St James Cavalier in Valletta in 2009 but it was banned by the now defunct Film and Stage Classification Board. The board banned the play because of what it perceived as blasphemy, contempt for Auschwitz victims, dangerous sexual perversions, a eulogy to child murderers and references to the abduction, sexual assault and murder of children contained in the script.

The company said it was turning to the ECHR having exhausted all domestic judicial remedies.

Russell Brand has cancelled several gigs in the Middle East on safety grounds. Russell told Radio 5 Live's Richard Bacon show: The venues contacted us to say we can no longer guarantee your safety.

The comic's Messiah Complex world tour includes routines inspired by historical figures including Malcolm X and Gandhi and originally included dates in Abu Dhabi and Lebanon, but they have now been cancelled.

A modern production of Richard Wagner's opera Tannhauser is causing a stir in Germany because of Nazi-themed scenes showing people dying in gas chambers and members of a family having their heads shaved before being executed.

The opera had performers inside glass chambers, falling to the floor as white fog billowed. After a half hour, the music stopped and a family stepped on stage. The parents and their children were having their hair shaved off and then they are shot dead.

Monika Doll, a spokeswoman for the Dusseldorf opera house said that members of the audience booed and were shocked by the opening performance. She said Deutsche Oper am Rhein is debating whether to censor the provocative parts, added to the original by producer Burkhard Kosminski.

Michael Szentei-Heise of the city's Jewish community told The Associated Press that the adaptation at the city's Deutsche Oper am Rhein was tasteless and not legitimate.

The director, Christoph Meyer, said: This is not about mocking the victims, but mourning them.

The original Tannhauser opera is set in the Middle Ages.

Update: Censored

10th May 2013. See  article from  guardian.co.uk

The production, by director Burkhard Kosminski has now been unceremoniously pulled, with the theatre admitting it had been too much of a psychological and physical strain for many opera goers. For artistic reasons , Kosminski steadfastly refused to change the most offensive scenes after an initial barrage of complaints following the opening night on Saturday.

A new theatre censorship scheme has been announced by Singapore's Minister for Communications and Information, Yaacob Ibrahim. It is expected to take effect early next year, following amendments to the Public Entertainment and Meetings Act.

The Media Development Authority said that devolving the regulatory function to arts groups was in line with its principle of co-regulation and greater partnership with industry players.

The new term licence scheme will give out yearly licences to stage performances, instead of on a per-event basis, and allow arts groups to classify some or virtually all of their own performances without the need to submit scripts to the authority.

The yearly licensing scheme divides arts groups into two tiers. Tier1 groups can self-classify performances with a General rating and without racial, religious or political content. Groups with a good track record selected for Tier 2 can self-classify all scripted performances.

But their licence to do so is subject to an annual review, in which the authority will evaluate whether licensees have complied with regulations and classified performances 'accurately'.

The three types of ratings for theatre remain: General, Advisory and R18, restricted to audiences aged 18 and above. For works containing racial, religious or political content, an advisory of mature content or a rating of R18 may apply. An advisory attached to a performance is meant as a guide to help audience members make an informed choice when buying tickets and does not restrict admission.

Based on this framework, arts groups will have to send a representative to undergo a training programme on how to classify performances.

Most theatre practitioners say this additional layer of checks, instead of liberalising the current system of regulation, betrays the lack of trust in artists, and as Theatre Practice's artistic director Kuo Jian Hong puts it, amounts to regulating how we regulate .

One practitioner who took issue with the yearly-licensing and annual review is Chong Tze Chien, company director of the puppet theatre group The Finger Players. He said:

Why only a year? And who is it reviewed by? Essentially, the MDA is saying that it is still putting terms and conditions to whatever it is that we are doing. They don't trust the artist, at the end of the day, to be responsible.

He suggested that the review panel be an independent one comprising artists and audience members, instead of an authority panel acting on behalf of a group of conservatives who may or may not exist in reality .

A performance of a play about the embattled Russian protest group Pussy Riot was disrupted in Moscow when immigration officials approached the Swiss director to ask for his travel documents.

Immigration authorities entered the Sakharov human rights museum, where the play was being staged, and harangued the director Milo Rau for holding a business visa that supposedly did not allow for work activity.

The play was later disrupted a second time when Orthodox Christian nutters and Cossacks gathered outside the venue to protest what they claimed was the play's antireligious content.

The play, called The Moscow Trials , tells the story of last year's trial of three Pussy Riot members for hooliganism after staging a protest against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral.

An incendiary play at this year's HighTide festival in Suffolk is to feature actors in blackface despite recent calls for a boycott of theatres that continue to employ the practice.

HighTide and the Nuffield theatre will present the UK premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's comedy Neighbours , which requires black actors in blackface to play a family of minstrel performers.

The festival's artistic director Steven Atkinson, who will direct the new production, said it was:

one of the best new plays I've read in six years of running HighTide.

It's a progressive, intellectual drama that looks at identity, specifically contemporary African American identity, he continued. The real innovation of this play is not just that it addresses head-on a contemporary taboo -- the past popularity of blackface -- but it's what the Americans call 'form forward'. It's a play that's bold in content as well as how it's told.

Promotional material describes the play:

Neighbors by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Black face, not on my doorstep, not today.

Richard Patterson is not happy. The family of black actors that has moved in next door is rowdy, tacky, shameless, and uncouth. And they are not just invading his neighborhood-they're infiltrating his family, his sanity, and his entirely post-racial lifestyle.

This wildly theatrical, explosive play on race is an unconventional comedy which uses minstrelsy both to explore the history of black theater and to confront tensions in post-racial America.

Charges against British theatre producer David Cecil were dropped by a Ugandan court on 2nd January. Cecil, who faced trial for producing a play with a gay theme without permission from the country's Media Council, told Index the magistrate had declared the case dismissed as the prosecution had failed to disclose any evidence.

Cecil was arrested in September last year, when his theatre company refused to halt its production of The River and the Mountain pending a content review by the Ugandan Media Council.

Index on Censorship and David Lan, the artistic director of the Young Vic, launched a petition calling for the charges against Cecil to be dropped which was signed by more than 2,500 people, including director Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig andactor Simon Callow.

Cecil told Index:

Evidently, there is a minority in the government and cultural industry who are willing to sacrifice the constitutional right to freedom of expression to their personal prejudices. However, the unsuccessful prosecution of this case is encouraging, and I pray that those working in the cultural industry are not put off by this oppressive and self-interested minority.

Mike Harris, Head of Advocacy at Index on Censorship said:

We're very pleased for David that the magistrate has dismissed this case --- but concerns remain over the state of free speech in Uganda. Since this prosecution, the Media Council has intervened to censor yet another political play. The government and its agencies need to do more to defend free speech.

Update: Deportation

9th February 2013. See  article from  guardian.co.uk

David Cecil, the British theatre producer arrested in Uganda in 2012 for staging a play with a homosexual protagonist, is being held in police custody after being threatened with deportation.

Immigration officers took Cecil from his home in the outskirts of the capital, Kampala, on Thursday to Jinja Road police station, where he is being held. Fridah Mutesi, a human rights lawyer in Uganda, said the government did not disclose the grounds on which Cecil was being deported, but that it had the power to deport individuals deemed undesirable .

In January Cecil was charged with disobeying lawful orders by the Uganda media council, which said he had staged The River and The Mountain despite being told not to. The case was dismissed owing to a lack of evidence. It is believed that the deportation order is a result of his staging the play, which Cecil has described as a comedy drama about a gay businessman killed by his employees . The producer's lawyer, Godwin Buwa, said the government was unhappy about Cecil's court case last month being dismissed.