Simon Callow’s notes on the changing nature of stars in the theatrical firmament (a delicate ecology already much altered by the global warming towards Hollywood) and Canadian critic Richard Ouzounian’s brilliant recipe for a West End commercial cocktail (“add a dash of reasonably high-profile celebrity in a smallish cast play for a limited run”) have both been explored previously in this blog. This week, Peter Hall rushed into the fray, claiming that the search for West Coast glamour is stifling innovation and good writing. “I would be asked by a producer what I wanted to do,” Sir Peter was quoted as saying in The Independent. “Now I’m asked, ‘Who can you get? Somebody from Los Angeles?’ This is the wrong way round. You must start with the play, you really must.”
Others immediately pointed out that Sir Peter doth protest too much. “”I love Peter Hall, but he does make me laugh. Peter loves stars as much as I do,” said Bill Kenwright, who has produced Sir Peter’s shows in the West End. “Peter and I did about 13 or 14 productions together over the last eight years and I can’t think of many instances where a star has been found and then you find a play. It was always the play that came first with Peter and I.”
In today’s Observer, the paper’s theatre critic Susannah Clapp asks: “Hang on a minute. Last week, Peter Hall argued that a concentration on big names is smothering adventurousness in the theatre. Is this the Peter Hall who nine months ago directed Kim Cattrall in Whose Life is it Anyway? - or his swapped-at-birth changeling brother?” She goes on, “Hall has of course got a point, a big one, as his own direction of Cattrall proved: she wasn’t strong enough to make a deficient play look interesting. Playing a prone body in a bed in a particularly recumbent way, she was flanked by two actors - Ann Mitchell and Janet Suzman - whose subtlety was a rebuke. Still, this is hardly news - and only Hall, whose genius for publicity has served the theatre well, and himself better, could make it seem so.”
Citing some of the endless parade of Hollywood names that have come to the West End in the last few years, she comments, “It doesn’t seem to me ridiculous for people to want to see in the flesh what they’ve seen only on celluloid (in the flesh is, after all, part of the point of the theatre) but let’s not call all of these things plays. They are star vehicles.”
But her real gripe is not with the actors per se – “some movie actors, after all, can act”, she grudgingly admits – but rather, “What really needs attacking is not the stars themselves but the phoney, pious-seeming argument that they will bring ‘new’ audiences into the theatre. For a minute, maybe: but not audiences that are likely to return. The work of enticing different people into the stalls is being done more efficiently by other means. By lowering seat prices, as Nicholas Hytner has done at the National, or by expanding the range of what’s on offer.”
