A Damn Fine Espresso: February 2026

The show must go on: our recent podcast episode on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead got Sam and Matt thinking. While there’s a long-standing link between the stage and the screen, theatre and cinema are nonetheless different forms of art. What makes theatre tick differently from film? What translates well from one format to the other, and what is lost in the process? Where could a lot of cinema perhaps learn from the stage? What films are there based on stage plays that survived the transition from one medium to another – and perhaps even benefited? And what movies escape the conventions of cinema and bring a dollop of theatrical magic onto the screen?

P.S.: For more theatre talk at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, make sure to check out last year’s March espresso, in which Sam talks to Julie about putting Clare Boothe Luce’s Broadway play The Women – famously made into a film by George Cukor in 1939 – on the stage. And for a discussion of Miloš Forman’s brilliant film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, may we recommend A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #53: Exactly the right number of notes – Amadeus (1984)?

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #61: Festival!

Summer is over, as is our Summer of Directors – and this also means that the main festival period of 2022 has come to an end. The last few years, festivals have been greatly affected by the pandemic, and especially in 2020 and 2021 many of the big festivals were vastly reduced or didn’t happen at all. But this year they came back – and after our five big courses focusing on directors, from Jane Campion via Ida Lupino to Martin Scorsese, here’s a palate cleanser in which Alan, Julie and Matt talk about their own festival memories and experiences. Whether it’s the classic open-air music festivals of our youth, contemporary arts or local film festivals: what are our thoughts on the format? Do festivals change how we enjoy culture? What are our favourite memories? How essential are schedules and spreadsheets to the perfect festival experience… and just how damn middle-aged have we become while we weren’t watching?

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #38: It’s (a)live!

At A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, our wheelhouse is mostly films, TV series, books – the damn fine cups of culture that you can enjoy at your own leisure, in your own time, at the turn of a page or the push of a button. There is an entirely different world of culture out there, though: live performance. Join Julie, Matt and our guest for November, Nicolette Kretz from AUAWIRLEBEN, the theatre festival happening annually in Bern, Switzerland, as we talk about why we love live performance, what some of our favourite live performances have been, and how 2020 – the year of COVID-19 – has been an opportunity for many to rethink what makes a piece of culture live.

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