October 2005 Archives

Changes to National Insurance rules, introduced in 1998 to benefit freelance “entertainers” by increasing the NI contributions payable by their employers when they are in work and therefore be eligible to claim jobseekers’ allowance when not, are now plunging the country’s orchestras into crisis. The reform was in fact designed to benefit ‘resting’ actors, but it is hitting the employers of orchestral musicians as well.

These liabilities were only spotted a few weeks ago, and Michael Henson, chair of the Association of British Orchestras, has duly written to Tessa Jowell, secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to say that there is a “potential crisis facing the entire orchestral sector”, and that the backdated tax bill they face as a result of some £33m is “so vast many orchestras would close”.

According to a report in The Guardian today, “many orchestras, including the LSO and the Philhamonia, are composed entirely of self-employed musicians”, and in the case of the latter, for instance, “it could mean an extra £500,000 on their tax bill per year. The LSO arrears, meanwhile, would amount to some £8m.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) recently conducted an enquiry into five sample orchestras to assess the impact of the legislation on them, and found that “making the full payments would result in four out of the five going into liquidation.”

Presumably, too, the legislation therefore applies to pit musicians, too, for West End musicals; it will be interesting to see how this (literally) plays out….

Hell hath no fury like a critic scorned. Michael Coveney, until 18 months ago theatre critic for the Daily Mail, was unceremoniously ejected from a seat he had occupied for the previous seven years, and eventually replaced (after the Mail flirted with other candidates, including – bizarrely – actress and sometime novelist Nichola McAuliffe) by the paper’s own parliamentary sketch writer Quentin Letts.

In today’s Observer, he finally gets his revenge – as well as on the successors to two posts he might have hoped to have been in the running for, when the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph chief critics became vacant after the retirement of the Johns Peter and Gross respectively (though Peter has oddly clung on, still filing reviews as conscientiously as before for everything but the lead event of the week).

Of Letts, he writes, he is “not so much a voice of the theatre in the Mail as a voice of the Mail in the theatre”; and citing the appointments of Victoria Segal on the Sunday Times and Rebecca Tyrrel on the Sunday Telegraph, writes that this suggests “that theatre is now fair game for anyone who can turn a phrase.” But, he goes on, “Would a sports editor hire a soccer reporter who had not been immersed in the sport since his earliest years and never been to Old Trafford or Goodison Park?”

The result, he says, is that “even when the writing is stylish, reviews will often lack the knowledge that was taken for granted a generation ago. And increasingly, editors are sending in the critical clowns in the true joke spirit of contemporary journalism. These witty fellows are best, and worst, represented by Toby Young in The Spectator.”

Coveney makes a valiant cry not for clowns but for new critical ring-masters (and harder task masters): “I am not suggesting that today’s broadsheet – let alone tabloid press – should come over all high-toned and learned when confronted with a new Alan Ayckbourn comedy or the latest drug-fuelled shocker at the Bush Theatre. But let’s hear it once more for experience, knowledge and seriousness. What is needed is a new group of younger critics who will combine the enthusiasm of the aficionado with the rigour of the informed task-master. Such a group is nowhere to be seen.”

Although Coveney has, from time to time, turned up reviewing variously in the pages of The Observer itself (a paper he was previously critic of, before he was lured by the lucre of the Mail to replace the late Jack Tinker), New Statesman and lately The Independent, as well as on radio, his own critical voice is nowhere to be heard regularly. In the midst of his rallying cry against the devaluing of the currency of criticism, it is his own, unspoken loss of a permanent outlet that you also feel most keenly here.

And the great pity is that, outside of the continuing astonishing craft (and graft) of Billington (Guardian), Nightingale (Times) and Spencer (Telegraph), there are few equals in the trade of filing trenchant, worthwhile criticism “overnight” than Coveney.

Overnight, of course, is a misnomer, since in order to make it into the next day’s paper, there is no such luxury as a full night to write a review in, but it has to be filed within an hour or so of curtain down, sometimes less. (Which is why, as the curtain falls on a first night, you see a phalanx of critics scurrying up the aisle, on which they’ve handily been seated for exactly this reason. Of course, many of my colleagues who don’t “overnight” join them simply for a quick getaway).

But the web is creating new opportunities, and as well as my national paper reviewing responsibilities (which I do for the Sunday Express), I am also elsewhere now filing “same night” reviews – posted ‘live’ on the night a show opens, just as soon as I’ve written it, but invariably long before midnight. Apart from the instant radio reviews that are sometimes carried by programmes like BBC Radio 4’s Nightwaves, I think this could be a serious claim to being the first review of any to appear.

Familiarity clearly breeds content: never has a straight play opened on Broadway with a bigger advance — $21million – than last night’s premiere of The Odd Couple, reuniting Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane from their hit run in the original stage version of The Producers four years ago; and never has a show been more critic-proof as a result. But expect critics to bite back in the circumstances, since there are few things more likely for the familiarity to breed contempt than when a critic is officially rendered redundant.

Noting that “decent seats are said to be had now only through extortion, robbery, the selling of a child or a body part or, more mundanely, the willingness to wait in the long, testy cancellation lines that form before each show,” the New York Times’ Ben Brantley duly cautions: “Think twice before giving up a kid or a left arm. You might need them for that apocalyptic day when Britney Spears comes to Broadway in The Sound of Music.”

He goes on to declare that if you have seen any of the more celebrated earlier productions – and he cites the original 1965 Broadway production, the subsequent 1968 film or the 1970s television sitcom – “you have probably already experienced a more authentic interpretation of this show. And if you were lucky enough to see Mr Lane and Mr Broderick in the hit musical The Producers, you have definitely already experienced more satisfying versions of the performances they are giving here.”

But for New York Post critic (and regular Stage contributor) Clive Barnes, they met and matched what was expected of them: “Burdened by nearly impossible expectations, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick proved the right couple for Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Wearing the albatrosses around their necks as jauntily as neckties, Broadway’s highest-paid double act performed impeccably in roles that bear the burden of theatrical legend.”

Intriguingly, this is clearly a play whose time has come again, because a production of it on the Edinburgh Fringe this summer also proved to be the biggest advance sale of all, thanks in large part to the casting there, too, of Bill Bailey and Alan Davies (however miscast many critics deemed the latter to be).

“Watch everyone else to soon start following suit,” I wrote here (October 6) when I noted that Monty Python’s Spamalot had hiked its top price to $110; and true to form, that’s what’s indeed has now happened with two of Broadway’s other best-performing shows, Wicked and Mamma Mia! “Historically,” the New York Times notes, “price escalation on Broadway begins with the strongest shows and then spreads.”

So, of course, do the explanations, with Jed Bernstein – the soon-to-depart president of the League of American Theaters and Producers (the Broadway equivalent to SOLT) – pointing out that whereas a film, once made, costs relatively little to show again and again, Broadway’s costs continue, even after recoupment of the capitalization: “With theatre, every time you do a performance, you incur more costs.”

And if that’s not reason enough, why not blame the punters themselves for pushing the costs up? “Viewers expect a level of sophistication in their entertainment that didn’t exist 30 or 40 years ago.” And in any case, why are they complaining? It’s a bargain! The average ticket price is slightly above $60, he points out, and says, “When you compare that to other competitive activities like sports and concerts and dining out, Broadway is actually very reasonably priced.”

But in fact a large chunk of the loose change that’s involved in putting on a show is spent in merely attracting customers to spend their money there in the first place. In a New York Times feature on the marketing push to draw Hispanic-American audiences – 12.5% of the US population, but only 4.4% of Broadway’s theatregoing public – to a new show called Latinologues noted that “the total capitalization for the show is $1.2million, and the marketing budget is about $500,000” – in other words, almost half!

Perhaps it’s time for Broadway to stop trying quite so hard to inflate the profits of media groups, lower the ticket prices and let the shows speak for themselves. One of the savviest of all British theatre producers, Michael Codron, famously eschews advertising, believing that a good show will find an audience. And conversely, no matter how much you promote a bad show, audiences aren’t so easily fooled. Right now, Joseph Brooks – whose self-penned, produced and directed show In My Life opened to disastrous reviews last week – is throwing good money after bad by committing some $2m more to promote it, trumpeting quotes like “One of the weirdest productions to reach Broadway in years” from the New York Times to do so in what must surely be one of the weirdest of all quotes campaigns! But he says, “Every single night, I’ve seen audiences loving the show. We are going to continue, and we’re going to have lots of ads that hopefully will reach the same crowds which have been cheering for us every night.”

One of the most enigmatic of all living American playwrights is the sometime movie star icon and writer Sam Shepard, who adds to his allure and mystery by refusing to fly: I once read an interview with him in which he wittily declared that not to be afraid of flying is a failure of the imagination. And a failure of imagination is the last thing you could ever accuse Shepard of possessing.

But even if he won’t fly, his work regularly does; and we seem to be in the midst of a mini-Shepard festival at the moment. Following the National’s revival of Buried Child a year ago (with a cast that included Lauren Ambrose, M Emmet Walsh and Elizabeth Franz), we now have two consecutive UK premieres for two of his most recent original plays. First up, there’s the Donmar opening of his latest, God of Hell, tonight (in a production directed by actress-turned-director Kathy Burke, who like Shepard straddles two worlds). First seen off-Broadway exactly a year ago when the author called it “a takeoff on Republican fascism”, Burke rejected the idea that it was an anti-American rant in an interview in The Observer last week: “What comes across to me is how much Sam Shepard loves America. It’s about how much the people in power are fucking it up.”

According to Jay Rayner, who conducted the interview, Burke “references Shepard often, says she is doing the play ‘for Uncle Sam’, and is proud of her gag.”

Then there’s the UK premiere of The Late Henry Moss to follow at the Almeida in January. I saw the US premiere of the latter five years ago in San Francisco, with a cast that Sonia Friedman or Bill Kenwright would probably kill for: Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson and Cheech Marin, all of whom alone would have been enough to sell it.

But in London, where Shepard himself once lived in the early 70s, Uncle Sam’s own reputation is sufficient to guarantee a receptive audience.

The news of the death of American actor William Hootkins on Sunday, after a battle with pancreatic cancer, might have barely registered on British theatrical radar, despite the fact that he trained at LAMDA and lived here for many years, but for an absolutely unforgettable performance in Terry Johnson’s Hitchcock Blonde that opened at the Royal Court in April 2003 that subsequently transferred to the Lyric.

Playing the British film director with an unappeasable appetite for food and blonde women, his astonishing onstage filleting of a fish and seduction of Rosamund Pike’s blonde was a wonder to behold. It was the performance that made the play.

But Hootkins also had a peripheral fame for the early demise of the character he played in the Star Wars trilogy, Jek Porkins, with a website devoted to him alone: http://www.jekporkins.net/

But it’s another homepage that speaks of his fame: on http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6774/, the correspondent writes, “All I have to say is this: PORKINS IS STAR WARS. Without Porkins, the movie just wouldn’t be worthwhile. I mean, this guy had flames on his helmet, and he even refused to wear his chin strap. Could he be much more of a bad ass? I think not. Ladies and gentlemen, I think it’s time to give a moment of silence for Porkins.”

And it’s time to give a moment of silence to Hootkins, too.

This week the West End takes entirely new looks at vintage work from the first half of the last century.

With both an old Agatha Christie novel and a 1930 play by Luigi Pirandello (unseen in the West End since 1934) being given contemporary make-overs, will these productions mark a return to theatrical favour and an expanding of the repertoires for which both are known?

Christie, of course, already has a substantial dramatic repertoire, most famously represented in the world’s longest-ever theatrical run of The Mousetrap that opened at the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre on November 25, 1952 and has been running ever since, though it transferred to the St Martin’s Theatre, literally next door, in 1974.

But this week sees the launch of a major new way of looking at her work through contemporary eyes and sensibilities, when playwright Kevin Elyot (who has previously adapted Christie’s Marple and Poirot books including Death on the Nile, A Body in the Library and Five Little Pigs for television) sees his new version of And Then There Were None open at the West End’s Gielgud Theatre tomorrow.

In the words of Mathew Prichard, Christie’s grandson and chairman of her estate says, “If Agatha Christie is to be as popular in the 21st-century as she was in the 20th, we have to be open-minded about interpreting stories in modern ways, much as Shakespeare is reinvented for successive generations.”

Elyot has duly turned not to Christie’s own stage version (last seen at the Duke of York’s in October 1987) but gone back to her original novel for his adaptation.

Meanwhile, for Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me), opening at the Playhouse on Thursday, Hugh Whitemore has provided the new translation for a production that stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Bob Hoskins and Margaret Tyzack.

The news that the Barbican Centre has shown a record turn-over (see http://www.thestage.co.uk/news/newsstory.php/10126) for the last year, with box office receipts topping £8m in an increase of more than a quarter from the previous year’s take, must be heartening news indeed for MD John Tusa and artistic director Graham Sheffield, whose bold programming has been transforming the centre into a destination attraction in its own right, and I don’t mean the long-standing joke of actually being able to find it anymore.

What they have shown is that, in order to compete in such a vibrant artistic marketplace as London is with so many rival attractions competing for attention, it pays dividends to offer something unique that no one else does: and with BITE they have proved not to have bitten off more than they can chew, but have actually given the centre a theatrical identity in its own right and not just as the one-time London home to the RSC.

BITE, of course, began as an artistic response originally to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of the RSC from the Barbican Theatre for six months of the year, which led later to then-artistic director Adrian Noble’s total withdrawal of the company from the centre (but infamously without setting up a London home for them to actually go to, thus precipitating possibly the company’s largest-ever crisis that it is only now starting to recover from). And even if the RSC fell out of love with the centre, other companies have now become only too happy to make their homes there, with both Cheek by Jowl re-establishing themselves there (after a period of hibernation) and Michael Clark as resident artists.

The current Young Genius season, in association with the Young Vic, has also proved that it is possible to reconfigure the Barbican Theatre for the interesting new shapes and intimacies demanded by some of today’s theatre makers, from Robert Lepage who launched the season to the Icelandic company Vesturport whose Woyzeck is just ending its acclaimed run tonight.

All of this is being accomplished in the midst of the £12.25m foyer and public space refurbishments that promise to make the centre a much more inviting place to visit, but are currently making it even more horrible than usual!

But while the Corporation of London, who own, fund and manage the centre, have funded the refurbishment scheme, their funding of the centre overall is being gradually diminished, with a drop of £1.6m projected over the next two years from last year’s £17.8m, and a further drop of £1.9m by 2008/9, as the centre is expected to generate more of its own operating income.

Some shows you just know are doomed virtually from the moment they are announced. An RSC-produced musical theatre adaptation of the Stephen King novel, Carrie – turned by director Terry Hands into a Greek tragedy with songs by the boys who wrote Fame – had people expecting blood on their hands, and not just because the title character’s onset of menstruation that sets the plot in motion. But that was, at least, an act of professional insanity: it was produced and staged by a company with solid theatrical credentials (which also made it even more baffling).

But it’s the amateur and/or vanity productions – from people with little musical theatre experience but who have monumental faith in their own material, and more importantly find the (usually naïve) investors to agree – that inspire the more morbid fascination. Shows from the infamous Bernadette – funded largely by public subscriptions – to the more recent Beautiful and Damned (brought to the stage thanks to a family who made their fortune in signage) and Behind the Iron Mask earlier this year, have all-too-predictably faltered in the warm lights of the West End night.

Costs are, of course, even higher on Broadway, and such projects have become sadly far more rare there. But last night one finally arrived in New York again, a new musical called In My Life entirely written (book, music and lyrics), as well as directed and produced, by Joseph Brooks. As Ben Brantley has remarked in his review in today’s New York Times, “Mr. Brooks’s head-to-toe participation here may be the most complete example of auteurism ever to enfold a Broadway musical. This means that you get to step inside the mind of the man who wrote the 1970’s pop mega-hit ‘You Light Up My Life’ (and directed the schmaltzy hit movie of the same title) and jingles for Volkswagen and Dr. Pepper ads. If only that mind had more interesting furniture.”

Calling it also “a musical Hallmark card, a pastel blend of the twinkly teddy bear and sentimental sunrise varieties”, he wrote of “drowning in a singing sea of syrup”.

Expectations of a flop were, admittedly, signalled from the moment word first got out of what it was about. In the words of the New York Post’s Clive Barnes (and also Stage contributor), “Any musical featuring a hero with Tourette’s syndrome and an ad-jingle composer called Al (who’s wisely kept his day job as God) sounds distinctly unpromising.” And, he notes in his review today, the result “fulfils every unpromise possible”.

But it sounds like it might be unmissable for those aficionados who have to collect notorious flops. As Variety’s David Rooney says, “this astonishing misfire will be a must-see for all the Broadway tuner-train wreck completists who still speak wistfully of Carrie.”

I will be there in New York next for a week from November 3, and my only hope is that it will still be running then….

Broadway producers have always kept a firm eye on what’s happening in the West End (just as West End producers routinely look across the water to what’s happening over there), since a ready-made success is always safer to produce than beginning a show from scratch. Broadway is duly about to see transfers for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White and John Doyle’s reduced actor-musician production of Sweeney Todd (that began its life at the tiny Watermill Theatre in Newbury) this month, while the National’s production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys has just confirmed a Broadway opening at the Broadhurst Theatre next April, produced by Boyett/Ostar Productions who have invested in the National precisely in order to secure them a first option deal in taking things from there to a further life.

But the West End is also, increasingly, a first port-of-call for Broadway producers looking to actively invest not just in such future possibilities but also in their current ones on their home territory. So it is that three consecutive openings this week, of Heroes (at Wyndham’s on Tuesday), Duckstastic! (at the Albery yesterday afternoon) and the transfer of the Donmar’s Mary Stuart (to the Apollo last night) have American producers above their titles: the all-powerful Shubert Organisation in the first case, influential film and theatre producer Scott Rudin in the second, and Arielle Tepper in the third. My money, however, is only on the third show actually going across the Atlantic.

From today, the XML feeds that we supply for news reader and blog reader programs have changed slightly. We’re using FeedBurner to make them easier for humans to read, and to make it easier for you to subscribe to.

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While news that Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre is to launch what’s being billed as the biggest playwrighting competition outside London with a total of £45,000 in prize money being given annually and the promise of productions in the theatre’s main house and studio for the winning entry and runner-up also on offer, and West End producer Sonia Friedman is currently engaged in a Channel 4 search called The Play’s The Thing to find a new play by a complete unknown and nurture it under the gaze of the television cameras to a West End production, playwright Mark Ravenhill has provocatively hit back at the British theatre’s now nearly fetishistic preoccupation with chasing the holy grail of new writing.

It hasn’t always been thus, not even in Ravenhill’s own short time as a writer: “When I first started working in theatre in the late 1980s, the new play was seen by us newcomers as the least exciting medium. Reinvention of the classics, with Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl leading the way, was the pinnacle of fashion, alongside the physical theatre of Complicite and DV8,” he wrote in The Guardian this week.

Then things changed. “It was only later, in the middle of the 1990s, that a new generation of playwrights (I came late to the party) made the written play seem to have exciting possibilities again. But that was 10 years ago.”

And he gets to the nub of the problem: “Not every year throws up an exciting batch of new plays. Artistic directors of theatres now feel they can only be fully ‘moral’ if they’re producing new plays. So, some rather dodgy plays get produced. And audiences have some rather indifferent evenings”.

Of course, the problem is particularly acute for theatres who specialise in new writing. Whatever their procedures might be for searching out new plays and new writers, and nurturing and developing them if and when they find them, the realistic truth of it is that there just aren’t that many great new plays around. And competition to find them is fierce: in London alone we have the Royal Court, Bush, Hampstead and Soho all almost exclusively chasing new work, with fashionable theatres like the National, Almeida and Donmar also in on the parlour game.

When Max Stafford-Clark ran the Royal Court, he would regularly put on lots of plays that were not quite equal to his masterful gifts as probably the best director of new plays in the country, but made them always look better than they were. Now that he runs his own touring outfit, Out of Joint, the pressure on him isn’t so great to keep finding them; he only needs to do one or two a year now.

But revealingly, too, he mixes and matches – though new plays continue to dominate, his production of Macbeth – so vital and alive that it made it feel like a new play – was one of the best productions of Shakespeare of last year. And Ravenhill, whose Shopping and Fucking was directed by Stafford-Clark, notes, “There are huge dangers in cutting ourselves from the historical continuum that the ‘canon’ offers. I can forsee a not too distant future where, apart from the major Shakespeare plays (which seem indestructible), we have a theatre of new work. This would be a bad theatre.”

Instead of widening the ‘canon’ to old plays from different cultures and different backgrounds, he notes that “we seem to have narrowed the range of work we produce in our theatres, until we’re trapped in an eternal present.” But, he adds, “the great thing about a really good play from another time, another place, is that it allows us – directors, actors, audiences – to think and feel differently. And an audience that can do this is actually the audience we playwrights would like, too.”

Thus he concludes, it’s time for a shake-up – “for a new wave of energy in our theatre”; and it’ll come, he suggests, not just from new work or just from the classics. “The best actors and directors have always worked in both. They present different challenges. It’s only by having a theatre culture that continues to explore and expand our relationship with the past, as well as presenting the best of the present, that we’ll have a theatre that is fully alive.”

After the news of the fast recoupment of the capitalization of Guys and Dolls in the West End noted here on Saturday, but dire notes about the spiralling costs of production on Broadway reported yesterday, comes news of another fast payback – Monty Python’s Spamalot, too, has just paid back its investment, just six and a half months after opening at Broadway’s Shubert Theatre.

Which makes their recent decision, also reported here on October 6, to hike the top price up to $111.25 even more disheartening: it’s clearly simply a fleecing exercise, to derive more profit from something that’s profitable enough already. I suppose, though, its pure business economics, too: you charge what the market will bear. But amidst such exercises in corporate greed, is it any wonder that the entertainment unions who, in yesterday’s report, were being urged to make various concessions to prop up the ailing invalid of Broadway might be just a bit suspicious?

A leader feature in the New York Times yesterday noted that the ever-spiralling costs of production on Broadway are threatening its very existence. In the words of William Goldstein, a film and theatre composer, “Production costs are out of control. A musical that cost $300,000 to produce 50 years ago costs close to $10 million today. And a play that was produced for $75,000 in 1944 would now cost about $2 million. Even after accounting for inflation, today’s costs are as much as 4.5 times greater than they were half a century ago. While production costs are about 33 times higher than they were in the 1940’s, ticket prices are only about 14.5 times higher. As a result, a show that 50 years ago might have paid off its backers after three months now needs to run for nearly two years to break even.”

This has led to a situation where, understandably, producers have become what is known in the trade as “risk averse”. The risk is also increasingly spread around. “In the 40’s and 50’s, a single person could produce a play; now it takes a half-dozen and corporate backing. Thus, nearly half as many plays are produced.”

Goldstein proposes a set of solutions. First of all, he suggests tax breaks: “New York gives tax breaks to large employers to keep them in the city. Why not offer similar tax breaks to Broadway?” He proposes the setting up of a fund, drawn from property tax revenues, to aid ailing productions, lending at zero percent interest, to cover a show’s operating costs for up to four weeks; if the show recovers, the money would be returned to the fund.

More radically, he also suggests actors and musicians could share the risks – as well as rewards – of production; and that the unions support the hiring of more of their members, so instead of chasing higher salaries and benefits for the fewer and fewer actors working there, they could agree lower rates in return for more of them being employed per production. “When a show is in trouble and royalties are waived, actors and musicians would be required to work at half their salary for up to 60 days or until the show returns to profitability. On a hit show, producers would pay bonuses to all performers and stagehands above current scale. These bonuses could come from a predetermined percentage of the show’s profits.”

These schemes, he suggests, would “keep more shows open and more people working”.

Some of this may be a pipe dream; but some of them are also worth serious consideration. Broadway has long been characterised as “the fabulous invalid”, one that keeps surviving (and indeed, even thriving) against the odds. But the parameters of its successful operation are growing narrower and narrower, and if its unrealistic to expect it to ever return to its heydey in terms of number of productions on the boards, it is at least healthy to examine the business models it operates under from time to time. And we could learn a lesson or two from that in the West End, too.

Though an appearance in this column is not intended to imply my agreement with what is being said, these were amongst the most trenchant or provocative of this week’s theatrical reviews.

• Reviewing Monday’s opening of High Society, Susannah Clapp in today’s Observer writes of its model-turned-actress Jerry Hall’s way with a dress, but is less sure about her way with anything else. “A chignoned Hall looks amazing in a lilac hat slapped to the side of her face; she even triumphs over a gathered rosebud skirt. But she moves as if she’s left the coat-hanger in her clothes, and she sings, Rex Harrison-style, semi-speaking, only occasionally bumping into a tune”.

Kate Bassett, reviewing Hall in today’s Independent on Sunday, also had this to say: “…She can’t act for toffee. Or sing or dance. Yet she’s oddly endearing. It’s like watching a little girl in a school play, hopelessly awkward but smiling sweetly — aw, bless.”

And then there’s this hitherto unpublished comment from my partner, who said of Hall as we left the theatre: “When she grins, it’s looks like a horse having its hooves tickled.”

• Reviewing Tuesday’s opening of Shoot the Crow at the Trafalgar Studios, Michael Coveney (returning to reviewing as he stands in for an indisposed Paul Taylor in The Independent) goes against the tide of praise it has mostly received elsewhere to damn with very faint praise to declare that it “has the virtues of a reasonably good night out at the Bush Theatre, or the Hampstead, or the Royal Court in its present dreary incarnation, but no appeal beyond that pathetically limited constituency”. He also levels heavy criticism of the venue: “The Trafalgar Studios is a monstrosity of development, changing the art deco auditorium of the old Whitehall Theatre into a ‘functional’ space and a silly ‘experimental’ venue below: all this in the name of ‘democratisation’ and ‘new audiences’ who might want to avoid ‘West End’ values and will, certainly, now.”

• Reviewing Wednesday’s opening of Woyzeck at the Barbican Theatre, Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph writes, “The trouble with the production - and it isn’t a complaint you will often hear from me - is that it is too much fun. Gísli Örn Gardarsson’s production is so spectacular, with its acrobatics, aerial ballets and beautiful sequences in which the characters swim underwater in a giant aquarium, and make love in its turbulent waters, that you lose sight of the anger, gloom and psychotic terror of the original.”

“You can make a killing, but you can’t make a living” in show business, said the Broadway playwright Robert Anderson, a maxim that should be emblazened on every aspiring producers’ pillow. But there are still rich killings to be made, and the latest example is that the star presence of Ewan McGregor in the current revival of Guys and Dolls has, according to a report in Variety, been slaying ‘em at the box office of the Piccadilly Theatre – so much so that, in what is claimed to be a record recoupment over such a short period of time, it has paid back its £3million capitalization in just 17 weeks.

That’s, of course, after the deduction of weekly running costs – so it’s clearly been doing what Variety-speak would call “boffo” box office.

This will cheer up co-producers Ambassador Theatre Group (who own the Piccadilly, and have just spent another chunk of loose change buying the Savoy Theatre this week) and David Ian for Clear Channel Entertainment (who have been slashing costs at their London HQ with the dismissal of a large number of staff this week) no end.

But whether the momentum of this production can be retained beyond December is another question, when McGregor leaves and will be replaced by EastEnders’ actor Nigel Harman.

Yesterday’s news that Sir Harold Pinter has just added to his accomplishments by being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature received a blissful moment of the simultaneously absurd and embarrassing that could have been lifted from one of his plays, when – according to the Evening Standard – “A Sky News presenter announced at 12.01pm that Harold Pinter had died, before correcting herself, after a Pinteresque pause, and saying that he had in fact won a Nobel Prize”.

But then Pinter, who has just turned 75 this week and escaped a brush with death when he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus three and a half years ago, would have probably enjoyed the blunder. But the report also contains two words that are amongst his biggest legacy and also encumbrance: “Pinteresque pause”. He has long held such an iconic and distinctive place in British playwrighting history that the word Pintersque alone has come to define a particular type of play; but the alliterative addition of the word pause is something he’s widely credited as patenting.

It’s what is between the lines as much as in them that counts in a Pinter play, or even a Pintersque one that might be inspired by him; his plays are finely tuned models of trying to articulate the gaps between the spoken word and what people actually feel. His output lately, however, has been as sparse and minimalist as his dialogue can be, but after a playwrighting career that began nearly 50 years ago, he announced earlier this year that he is unlikely to write another: “I’ve written 29 plays. Isn’t that enough?”

Certainly that body of work continues to be produced widely, with a West End revival of one of his earliest plays, The Birthday Party, most recently seen again at the Duchess Theatre earlier this year, and Old Times revived at the Donmar last year. But he’s not given up the theatre entirely: only earlier this week, Ian Rickson announced that Pinter – who often acts in his own plays and sometimes directs the plays of others, notably Simon Gray – will return to the Royal Court as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations next year to appear in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

The only honour that is overdue now is having a West End theatre named after him; but then, unlike on Broadway where theatres are re-named at the drop of a hat (and where the unlikely candidates for thus honouring include drama critics, a legendary newspaper caricaturist, and the current head of the Shubert Organisation who owns a big chunk of Broadway’s theatrical real estate), we are remarkably slow to rise to the occasion.

It is only now that Noel Coward and Ivor Novello, nearly 33 and 55 years after their respective deaths, that their names will finally be up in lights forever outside a West End theatre (the Albery and Strand respectively), and not just when one of their shows are playing there, though Novello hasn’t even had that honour for many years now. A few years ago there was talk of re-naming the Comedy Theatre for Pinter, after a series of his plays ran there; but it came to nothing. Isn’t it time to follow the Nobel lead and now honour him formally in the West End?

I have previously reported in a Stage news feature how frequent the turn-over in West End theatres is, and I’m not referring to what’s on their stages but rather who actually owns the bricks and mortar that the stages are housed within. At least three-quarters of our 40 West End theatres have changed owners in the last seven years alone; and the yesterday came the news that the Savoy has now been purchased by ATG, in partnership with the Tulbart Group (brothers Ted and Norman Tulchin, whose Playhouse Theatre ATG also already manage on their behalf, and Robert Bartner), therefore bringing their stock of West End houses that they are now responsible for programming to ten.

Meanwhile, having already disposed of four playhouses to Nimax (the new outfit set up by American producer Max Weitzenhoffer and Nica Burns), the fat lady may not yet have finished singing at the Really Useful Company as another fat cat lines up to contemplate swallowing her: according to a report in The Times on Monday, BBC Chairman Michael Grade is considering a return to the family business of theatre ownership that his uncle Lord Delfont did (who later partnered with Cameron Mackintosh to form Delfont-Mackintosh) by bidding for the eight remaining theatres that Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company jointly owns with Bridgepoint, as part of a package that is also seeing Grade bidding (with theatrical agent Michael Linnit) to purchase the intellectual property rights in the composer’s work.

Though Ken Livingstone seems to offer the West End promotional subsidy from time to time in the publicity campaigns he mounts on behalf of them, and a South Seas island, whose economy is driven by the proceeds of bird droppings, infamously funded the ill-fated West End run of the musical Leonardo in the early 90s, government usually wisely keeps out of commercial productions. But in what is now evidently a first, the Canadian province of Ontario has agreed to contribute some $2.5million of the $23million budget for next year’s Toronto world premiere production of a stage musical version of The Lord of the Rings, as reported yesterday in the New York Times.

According to Sandra McInnes the president and chief exec of the Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership Corporation, “We’ve never done anything like this. But this is one of the largest productions ever to come to Toronto, and we have a vested interest in seeing it’s successful.” There’ll be a knock-on effect to Toronto’s commercial infrastructure, because of course a successful show isn’t only about the money it brings back in ticket revenues, but in other associated industries: “Our estimation is that a 36-week run could bring in close to $40 million Canadian”, said president and chief exec Bruce MacMillan of Tourism Toronto’s president and chief exec, a private convention and tourism group financed mainly by the city’s hoteliers, who has also contributed a further $2.5million to market the show abroad. “Everything is a risk,” he went on, “but we did our due diligence.”

There’s clearly a lot riding on the success of this production, not least for the status of Toronto as a theatre centre: in the late 80s and early 90s, it became a major try-out centre for big musicals thanks to the now-disgraced impresario Garth Drabinsky (whose accounting irregularities brought down his LIvent empire), who started off productions like Show Boat and Ragtime that made their way to Broadway from there. The deputy minister for tourism in Ontario Bill Allen is quoted as saying, “We’d like to be second behind New York. Frankly, we lost a lot of our place in the theatre scene, and we see Lord of the Rings as a way to bring that back.”

Like all theatre investment, the money could come back assuming the show is successful – but would be lost if not. “While 8 of every 10 Broadway shows fail to earn back their money”, notes Bill Allen, “Toronto tourism officials argued that the cost of not investing might be higher. We realised in the last couple of years that if you don’t have new and exciting things to do, people go somewhere else. They want an experience they can’t find anywhere else.”

And to ensure that they can’t get it elsewhere, the deal struck by the Toronto investors with producer Kevin Wallace – formerly of London’s Really Useful Theatre Company – is that the city gets an exclusive run of the show in North America from its opening next March until the summer of 2007.

Even Cameron Mackintosh – who early on in his career did the unthinkable and persuaded the Arts Council to invest in his commercial tours of Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady in the late 70s – has never pulled off a government partnership of this scale. Jerry Springer — the Opera recently tried and failed to persuade ACE to invest in its forthcoming tour; but things seem to be much different in Canada.

At a press conference today to launch the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary celebrations that will take place next year, current artistic director Ian Rickson began by saying, “we usually let the work speak for itself”, but then spoke at length about his plans for his final season in charge (he has already announced his resignation from the post at the end of next year) which will partly look back, but mainly continue to look forward, as this “questioning theatre”, as he called it, continues to seek to do what it has done since the English Stage Company was founded in 1956: namely provoke and stimulate with new work.

He has assembled what, on paper at least, looks like a bumper season, with new plays promised by Tom Stoppard (Rock ‘n’ Roll, to be directed by Trevor Nunn in June in Stoppard’s first play in Sloane Square; in a postcard from the playwright that was read out earlier by Royal Court chairman Anthony Burton, he said, “I want to be part of the Royal Court’s history before I pack it in…. I don’t want to fall under a bus before having a play on its stage”), Terry Johnson (with a new play Piano/Forte, written specially for actresses Kelly Reilly and Alicia Witt), and David Hare, amongst others.

From the past, some 50 plays from the Royal Court’s last 50 years will be given rehearsed readings in a season in the Theatre Upstairs, kicking off with David Hare directing The Entertainer and former Royal Court artistic director Bill Gaskill returning to direct NF Simpson’s A Resounding Tinkle as a reading, as well as a full production of Sirens, an adaptation of the 11th chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Other returning Royal Court artistic directors for the season include Max Stafford-Clark, who will direct a new play by Stella Feehily (O Go My Man) and Anthony Page, directed a new play by debuting Royal Court playwright Simon Farquhar (Rainbow Kiss). And Harold Pinter is down to return to the Royal Court as an actor, to appear in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and Christopher Hampton will translate The Seagull for a new production to be directed by Rickson, who will also stage a revival of Cloud Nine by one of the Court’s most influential-ever playwrights, Caryl Churchill – a combination that he called both “Greedy but exciting”.

The big question, however, is who will take over? There’s been a big round of musical chairs amongst the artistic directorships of London’s major theatres in the last couple of years already that has seen the arrival of Nick Hytner at the National, Michael Boyd at the RSC, Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse, Michael Attenborough at the Almeida and soon, Dominic Dromgoole at Shakespeare’s Globe; so who next? I have a subversive idea: Trevor Nunn, directing the Stoppard in Sloane Square, could be setting up his stall to take it over. Having run the RSC and National, it would be a fitting place for him to now prove his judgement, finally, in new writing for which he was repeatedly criticised during his tenure at the National.

Further to my blog entries last week about the cancelled previews and press night for Howard Brenton’s Paul at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre following the illness of Paul Rhys in the title role, it has now been confirmed that he is withdrawing from the production. A new press night has just been announced for November 9, with previews resuming from November 1, with Adam Godley – currently playing a minor role in Mike Leigh’s Two Thousand Years – replacing Rhys.

Though critics try to claim some objectivity for our craft, based on our (hopefully) long experience and engagement with the theatre, there’s still ultimately no accounting for taste, and as a friend of mine is always fond of saying when it comes to the fact that some people like one thing but others another, “That’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla…. Or Baskin-Robbins has 28 flavours”.

It’s intriguing and salutary to find ourselves openly contradicting each other. One of the great things about London, at least, is that there are enough of us around to express this range of opinion, rather than the one-newspaper town (essentially) of somewhere like New York where only one critic counts.

Take two current London shows: Hair (at the Gate) has received reviews that have ranged from one (John Peter, the Sunday Times) and two stars (Benedict Nightingale, The Times) to four (Jane Edwardes, Time Out) and five stars (me, the Sunday Express!), plus raves from the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer and Variety’s Matt Wolf, neither of whose publications do star ratings. Ditto with Ryan Craig’s new play What We Did to Weinstein (at the Menier Chocolate Factory), the reviews have covered the full spectrum from absolute one star pan from Lyn Gardner (in the Guardian) who labelled it “an inept string of cliches, stereotypes and bad Jewish jokes strung together” to a rave from Nicholas de Jongh (Evening Standard) who wrote, “There is no more compelling or politically significant drama in town.”

The Guardian runs an interesting exercise every week since their re-launch in which they invite an aggrieved artist to reply to his or her review; and in this case, the director of Weinstein, Tim Supple, seized the chance with alacrity:

There were two striking aspects to Lyn Gardner’s review. Gardner questioned the judgment of those of us who had faith in the play. On what grounds, I wonder? Quality? It’s hard to measure this but we could look to the critics to help us. Gardner’s colleagues clearly disagree with her: their response varies from the superlative to, at worst, the good….Most extraordinary was Gardner’s suggestion that audiences “shouldn’t” see Craig’s play. Should critics wilfully promote or impede ticket sales? They will certainly chip away at the respect artists have for their opinions if they do…

Should a critic not look at a piece of work, see what it is doing, give us a vivid appraisal of how well it does it and then leave us to decide whether or not to see it? Should critics not strive to give us greater insight than their personal likes and dislikes? Should we not expect critics to search beyond mere opinion to a rigorous and probing assessment of our work? I cannot see why Gardner should try to stop people seeing work, simply because she does not like it. Where then is the debate - the rich mess of thoughts, discussion and feeling?”

Even if he accuses Gardner’s review of suppressing debate, it has certainly ignited another useful one: not about the play he has directed, but about the role of critics in the midst of all of this.

Daniel Kramer, the director of Hair, also offered a response to his reviews a couple of weeks ago that is also about the nature of debate:

The critical response is split, as with the original. This is a show intended to inspire debate. But some things have surprised me. Critics saying that Hair is strictly a period piece that should be done only in its original period. The fact that the production makes various members of our press feel old and dated: emotionally, physically, spiritually. Not to mention the obsession with nudity, 37 years later. Some things never change. But others do and must: the theatre, for example - the place where we go to create our living mythology, the stories of our time, our hearts. If we are to thrust theatre into the 21st century, surely we must be allowed to adapt the classics and give them not only today’s dress, but today’s language, today’s movement, today’s emotions, today’s world. If we do not, are we not doomed to Brook’s Deadly Theatre - museum pieces on stage that pander to the deadly sentiment of nostalgia?