The crankiest of interviews….

All journalists have a horror story about interviews they conduct. Usually there’s a tacit acknowledgement on both sides that there’s a job to be done – the interviewee’s to promote their product, the journalist to write it up in an interesting way – and most pass smoothly. But I’ll never forget a phone “interview” I attempted to secure with Nigel Havers two and a half years ago, when he was heading to the West End in See U Next Tuesday; unfortunately, he lived down to the play’s title by being one himself, constantly missing the appointments that were made to take the call, and then when I finally got him on the other end of a phone, running through my ten pre-prepared questions in roughly two minutes flat, with monosyllabic answers. The results were simply unusable, and a waste of time for everyone.

Mitigating circumstances were later presented: his wife was seriously ill at the time, and he was attending to her and her hospital appointments. In which case, however, the interview should never have been agreed to. It would have been clearer for everyone if it was simply denied. An interview, once agreed to, has to be graciously done. A colleague of mine once went to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane to interview Nathan Lane when he was in The Producers at an agreed time. Lane simply refused to honour the appointment and do the interview.

But I’ve never read an account so extraordinary as Time Out Theatre Editor Jane Edwardes’ interview this week with veteran film director Robert Altman, in town to direct the British stage premiere of Arthur Miller’s penultimate play Resurrection Blues. After Jane went into the interview room, she tells us she was asked briefly to leave it, “while a production meeting takes place.” When she returns, she discovers “that my script of Resurrection Blues and tape recorder have disappeared. The culprit turns out to be the American producer who creepily refuses to return the book, giving the feeble explanation that Altman gets very upset if any reference is made to the first production of the play in Minneapolis.”

When Edwardes duly does reference it – she tells Altman, “Your producer doesn’t want you to see that I’ve got a copy of the play” — he replies first that such a thing doesn’t exist, and then, that he “didn’t know there was a published version.” Jane hadn’t, as she points out, acquired one by subterfuge: “No sneaky undercover skills were required to get a copy of the play – I bought it in a bookshop”. But Altman, she says, “apparently chooses to believe he is directing the world premiere.” As she adds, “Are we in la la land?”

Clearly we’re in LA Land, though. Altman has been absent for too long from the theatre to perhaps recognise how it works anymore. And he’s certainly not up to speed on the value of good PR, either.