The Play Podcast Douglas Schatz

Episode 066: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh 
Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Professor Eamonn Jordan
Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We’ll discuss the play’s origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.
Martin McDonagh’s 2004 play The Pillowman is an unsettling mix of gruesome fairy tales, child abuse, and murder, overlaid with McDonagh’s signature black humour. McDonagh’s blend of extreme violence and ironic comedy divides opinion, although the popularity of the current revival of the play in London’s West End is testimony to its enduring fascination.
I am joined in this episode by Professor Eamonn Jordan, to help us come to terms with the impact and intent of McDonagh’s work.

Episode 065: Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo and Franca Rame
Host: Douglas Schatz
Guests: Tom Basden and Daniel Raggett
Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We’ll discuss the play’s origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.
Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo and Franca Rame is both an hilarious farce and a biting satire. Written in 1970 as an “act of intervention” in response to the unexplained death of a prisoner in police custody in Milan, it became a huge global hit.
An acclaimed new adaptation that updates the setting and scandal to modern-day Britain is currently playing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London, and I’m delighted to be joined by its writer, Tom Basden, and the director, Daniel Raggett, to talk about their adaptation and the enduring relevance of Fo’s original.

Episode 064: A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Emma Smith
Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We’ll discuss the play’s origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has all the ingredients of classic romantic comedy: a magical setting, a merry-go-round of earnest young lovers, a fairy King and Queen, and a troupe of hapless comic actors, all given a supernatural spin in the course of a single moonlit night. But is the dream-like world of the wood outside Athens as benign a place as we imagine?
As we record this episode a new production of the play is part of the Summer season at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, with Michelle Terry giving an outstanding performance as the sardonic sprite Puck.
My guest to help explore Shakespeare’s wondrous ‘visions’ is Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford.

Episode 063: Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Josie Rourke
Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We’ll discuss the play’s origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.
Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.

Episode 062: Private Lives by Noël Coward
Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Oliver Soden
Welcome to The Play Podcast where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. Each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We’ll discuss the play’s origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.
Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.

The Play Podcast - 061 - Sea Creatures by Cordelia Lynn
Host: Douglas Schatz
Guest: Cordelia Lynn
The Play Podcast is a podcast dedicated to exploring the greatest new and classic plays. In each episode we choose a single play to talk about in depth with our expert guest. We discuss the play’s origins, its themes, characters, structure and impact. For us the play is the thing.
Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.
I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.