March 2006 Archives

Once again Maureen Lipman – who a few months ago was publicly claiming that seats for her current vehicle Glorious! were going unsold because ticket agencies were misleadingly representing it as sold out when what it was only their own allocations that had gone – has returned to the theme in her column in today’s Guardian. “I’ve had friends telling me they couldn’t get into our show when the house was only three-quarters full.” That’s because, she says, “the major ticket agencies allocate a few seats to each subsidiary agency, so when they tell you ‘there are no seats available for Glorious or the Blue Man Group, but we do have seats for Phantom of the Opera or Stomp, they are, at best, distorting the truth.”

She adds that, “some of the ticket agencies are owned by the theatre owners themselves, which in itself is worth investigating, perhaps (said she, looking nervously over one shoulder)”. It’s an interesting fact, of course, that the Duchess – home to Glorious! – is one of the new stable of four Nimax-owned theatres, whose co-owner Nica Burns I recently heard say that couldn’t afford to implement their own ticketing system, so they had continued with the existing arrangements the theatre had when it was still part of the Really Useful Theatres of outsourcing the ticketing functions to See Tickets, the agency owned by the Really Useful Group that Lipman was alluding to. Intriguingly, looking up the show right now online, I cannot find tickets listed for performances beyond tonight (and even that is off-sale), though the show is officially booking to April 22 (click through to performances in April, and it returns a message: sorry, your search found no matches in our database). Perhaps Lipman has a point.

She also laments the state of the theatres themselves: “The buildings are archaic, the seats maim you, the toilets are vintage and few (a throwback to Edwardian times, when women didn’t have bladders). As for the backstage areas – well, there are very few open days in London theatres, you’ll notice.”

While she gives credit where its due – “At least Cameron Mackintosh puts as much money back as a theatre owner as he puts in as a producer, and his recent renovations are monuments for future theatre-goers pleasure” – but says, “For some of the others, it’s just bricks and mortar on the outside, whatever tosh it takes to keep it open on the inside, and slap the inflation on the programmes and ice-cream bills”.

Tonight the latest Travelex £10 season kicks off at the National Theatre, which has more or less single-handedly revolutionised theatregoing in the capital: now, you don’t have to read the small print anymore or hope for standbys being available or go on Monday night for a bargain, but can book in advance at low prices for two-thirds of the seats for an entire Olivier Theatre season (and if you really want to splash out, the remaining third are just £27.50 – cheaper than a top price weekend ticket at the Donmar). Of course, there are still bargains to be had elsewhere, including at the National, of course, where front stalls in the Olivier for normal runs and the Lyttelton are just £10, too; while the Donmar top is £20 on Monday evenings and Thursday matinees.

But one of the best bargains I’ve just come across is surely at the Royal Court, where – apart from the long-standing Monday £7.50 nights – prices range from £10 to £25; but if you book online (at www.royalcourttheatre.com), the top price drops by a whopping £10 to only £15. That’s such a substantial saving that I worry that, should the Court find themselves transacting too much business online, their profit margins are going to drop significantly, so perhaps I shouldn’t be publicising it. But the Royal Court has much to celebrate, not just their 50th anniversary this year but also now – thanks to a newly smoke-free downstairs bar – one of the most inviting public spaces in town, complete with bookshop, bar, food and even WiFi access. (The last is a pleasant surprise, since one thing I don’t get in the subterranean basement is a mobile phone signal).

The theatrical déjà vu of this week’s London press openings (that has already kicked off with the return of Whistle Down the Wind in a new production just five years after it was last seen in London) continued last night with the return, two and a half years since it opened, of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with Christian Slater reprising his performance as Randle P McMurphy. Almost all the first string critics were duly in attendance again, even though Birmingham Rep was simultaneously offering a new musical, Promises and Lies, crafted out of the back catalogue of pop band UB40.

Only pop picker Charles Spencer absented himself from Cuckoo’s Nest to go to Birmingham instead, while the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts went even further off-beam, electing to attend a 50-minute play by Amy Rosenthal (“a youngish writer who has been securing herself some attention of late”, he says, without mentioning that she’s the daughter of Maureen Lipman and the late Jack Rosenthal, which partly accounts for it) at Camden Town’s Etcetera Theatre that no national first string critic has graced in years, I’d guess. Quentin explains that, “rather than plod along to last night’s West End relaunch of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which I liked moderately well a year ago, but had little desire to revisit)”, he voted instead “for new talent” and opted for Camden and Rosenthal’s Henna Night.

Good for him; its certainly interesting that the Mail is turning into Time Out and prioritising a pair of unknown actors over Christian Slater. The rest of the week also sees us chasing our tails, called back to see the new cast of The Producers tonight, and re-visiting the Royal Court’s production of My Name is Rachel Corrie on its West End transfer tomorrow. Sometimes, though, you need to find your own fresh discoveries away from the official cosy London first night circuit. The number two critics, of course, usually have more latitude to do so, which is why the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner and the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish are such valuable voices. But while Charlie was last night doing the regional shuffle that is usually Dominic’s domain, they swapped roles and Dom was to be found at the Garrick.

But if such exchanges provide refreshing changes of perspective, last week saw one of the most interesting ones of all: as Benedict Nightingale took his seat at the Toronto premiere of The Lord of the Rings, he was there in support of his son Christopher, the show’s musical supervisor and co-ordinator, rather than critic. Instead, one of his regular deputies, Sam Marlowe, was sent to Toronto instead to file a review for The Times. And it was intriguing to see a critic “on the other side”, acutely nervous of what the reviews might be like. Christopher was sitting behind me, and when I introduced myself as one of his dad’s colleagues and told him of how nervous his father was, he told me that he’d told his parents to treat it like a school play, only a bit larger than usual!

How soon is soon enough to see a show again? Prior to its current West End production, Guys and Dolls was previously seen at the National Theatre in 1996 (in a revival of its own 1982 production), so that was a gap of less than nine years. Now Whistle Down the Wind has just returned to the West End, only five years after the original production closed at the Aldwych; and in October, Les Miserables will return to Broadway, just three years since its original run closed there. The gap is clearly closing.

At this rate, musicals like these will simply be in constant rotation through our repertoire, like some old Russian theatre company. Of course, you can never get enough of Guys and Dolls; but can we really say that we need Whistle Down the Wind or Les Mis back just yet?

But even if there was a practical reason to bring Whistle back – the theatre was available after the premature closure of The Woman in White, for a short period before Spamalot arrives in the autumn, and Bill Kenwright’s touring revival makes a pragmatic filler – one suspects a more emotional reason, too: that the composer (and perhaps not coincidentally, theatre owner of the Palace and therefore looking for a tenant) Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted to promote one of his underdog shows. Creative people are always inordinately fond of the runts of their litter: witness Lloyd Webber’s previous attempts to restore Jeeves (his ill-fated Ayckbourn collaboration) to the repertoire a few years ago.

But while Cameron Mackintosh has also, from time to time, sought to re-visit his less successful shows, like The Card and Putting It Together (which has fallen apart each time it’s been done), Les Mis already has a secure place in Broadway history, though in longevity terms, it has been eclipsed by both Cats and The Phantom of the Opera; will bringing it back so soon give it a new lease of life there (as it coincidentally becomes London’s longest-runner in the autumn), or simply prove to be greedy? Time will tell.

It’s a depressing fact of Broadway life is that plays have long been usurped by the ever-dominating musical. In the dark days (in every sense) of January and February, you are lucky if you can find one commercial drama playing on the Great White Way, though there is now more chance of a rival attraction or two from the institutional presence of Manhattan Theatre Club and Roundabout Theatre Company having permanent Broadway homes at the Biltmore and American Airlines Theatres respectively, though the Roundabout often do musicals, too. (Lincoln Center Theatre, too, make regular forays to Broadway away from their home base, as they are doing right now with Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing).

As a result, only a handful of contemporary American playwrights are ever seen regularly on or near Broadway – the late Wendy Wasserstein, Terrence McNally, and the increasingly ubiquitous Richard Greenberg, whose Three Days of Rain is about to be revived on Broadway with a cast led by Julia Roberts. (Greenberg, interviewed in the New York Times yesterday, was refreshingly frank about his previous most recent Broadway entry, A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, staged earlier this year under the auspices of the Roundabout at the American Airlines: “When someone writes a bad thing about a play that’s actually bad, how much can I protest?”)

But the spring always brings hope, and in addition to Awake and Sing and Three Days of Rain, there’s a sudden downpour, so to speak, of plays – several, of course, as usual that were first seen and acclaimed in London, like Festen and The History Boys (transferring in recreations of their Almeida and National Theatre productions, though re-cast for the first and with the original cast for the second), or a trilogy of Irish plays, Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Conor McPherson’s Shining City, being staged in new productions, plus a revival of Brian Friel’s The Faith Healer that returns Ralph Fiennes to Broadway, via Dublin where the production was first done. There’s only one original American play in all of this – Lisa Kron’s Well that comes from an acclaimed Off-Broadway run.

But is there an audience for this much straight dramatic fare? The audience for plays as opposed to tourist-friendly musicals in New York has been shrinking for years, as ticket prices have been rising; yet the home that plays were supposed to find off-Broadway instead has been compromised too, by the sort of rising production costs and the escalating ticket prices that accompany them that mean that audiences might as well shell out for a Broadway ticket instead: at half price, which most of them are invariably available for, it actually often becomes cheaper there than seeing a play off-Broadway. (Last Saturday, I saw a four-person musical, with no set to speak of and just a one-man band, that ran for 90 minutes, for $55; for the same price, I could have had a lavish Broadway musical from the Half price ticket booth).

Changes need to be made to make plays more attractive again; and I noticed one helpful start. The half price booth have made an interesting intervention in making it easier for people who want to see plays: instead of compelling them to stand in the interminable queues alongside the musical watchers, there’s now a dedicated ticket window for people who want to buy play tickets.

I did something last night I’ve not done for ages: I attended the first preview of a new musical, Disney’s new stage version of Tarzan that was kicking off a six-week preview period at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre. Unlike previous Disney Broadway efforts that have gone the more conventional route of out-of-town try-outs (Houston for Beauty and the Beast, Minneapolis for The Lion King, Atlanta for Aida, then in a different production again in Chicago before it finally transferred to Broadway, and of course for Disney’s co-production of Mary Poppins with Cameron Mackintosh, Bristol before the West End), Tarzan is opening ‘cold’ on Broadway.

But it is warming up via an interesting preview schedule that actually uses the audience as a key part of its creative process, to try-out the material on them and then suspend performances while further work is done. So after two previews last night and tonight, the show will be dark again till Thursday, giving them five clear days to do more work; next week will see previews from Thursday to Saturday only, before breaking again till the following Thurday, and so on, gradually increasing to a full schedule only by the end of next month.

The best bit for Disney is that they are getting their test audiences not for free but by charging them for the privilege of being part of that process; but at least there’s a significant price reduction (top price is $76.25 during this period, instead of a post-opening regular price of $111.25 — premium seating, of course, is more).

Though it’s not, of course, open for review at this stage — though having paid for my ticket, I’m as entitled to my opinion as the next man — I’m pleased to note the return, at last, of body hair to Broadway. Entirely missing from the previously hirsute Harry Connick Jr (currently appearing topless in the Broadway revival of The Pajama Game), it is a relief to notice that the loin-clothed title character is ‘au naturale’ (Josh Strickland), as is his surrogate ape dad, played by the bulky Shuler Hensley. But I better not build my hopes up: I also attended an early preview of Disney’s Aida when it first came to Broadway, and Adam Pascal’s chest was fully pelted then; by first night, it was entirely depilated.

Another aside: I bought my ticket online for this show, and for the first time, I actually printed out my own ticket to present at the theatre. Instead of having that print-out torn at the door, the bar code on it was simply scanned to gain me admittance. Yet another sign of the future….

While this year will see Broadway taking over London theatreland with the arrival, in turn, of Movin’ Out, Footloose, Avenue Q, Spamalot and Wicked, the biggest West End opening of the year has just taken place, paradoxically, 3,500 miles away in Toronto last night, with the world premiere there of an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings that has been brought to the stage by an almost entirely British creative team.

This was, of course, originally due to open at the Dominion this year — but when We Will Rock You refused to stop rockin’, the producers heeded the advice of the Village People to “Go West”. Toronto fought hard to get it, too — it’s a city with a strong theatrical pedigree for originating musicals (the Hal Prince revival of Show Boat and the original production of Ragtime both began there in the days of producer Garth Drabinsky, now criminally indicted and not able to step foot in the US anymore following charges of fraud), but it has lost its edge in the last few years and wanted something to put it back on the map. The Lord of the Rings has certainly done that in PR terms.

But some of the attention it has been getting today may be less than welcome: the reviews are now in, and many have been blatantly hostile. My own review will appear this weekend in the Sunday Express, and though I don’t want to pre-empt that, I have to say that I am rather shocked by the vitriol of some of the criticisms. For this is a big, bold, lavish piece of popular musical theatre, and on its own terms — delivering a knock-out visual and aural experience — it certainly delivers.

I fear that once again, as in Sinatra at the London Palladium, either I am seriously out of step with my critical colleagues or they are seriously out of step with the public they serve. No, of course a 3.5 hour stage version doesn’t have the breadth of the books or the film trilogy; but as a distillation of those cult books, it is a lavish and compelling treat.

But as well as overcoming the hostile reviews, the producers also have a larger difficulty in playing in Toronto, where the local population isn’t huge, the tourists aren’t as plentiful as they used to be, and the theatre seats 2,000.

John Doyle’s production of Sweeney Todd, that originated at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, transferred to the West End and is now on Broadway, has just announced that it has recouped it $3.5m investment in New York in nineteen weeks. Part of the (comparatively) low cost of capitalizing it and running it on Broadway, of course, is that the actors double as their own orchestra; a technique born of economic necessity in cash-strapped British regional theatre has been cleverly parlayed into an artistic choice. It’s the same philosophy that has underpinned the long-running success of the revival of Chicago, that has long outrun the original staging: the physically bare staging, originated from the production’s origins as a concert staging as part of the Encores! season, has become part of its selling point, as well as useful for keeping production costs down.

Now, of course, Doyle — who has been employing variations of his actor-musician technique for years in Britain, and with wildly varying success (his jazz adaptation of HMS Pinafore as Pinafore Swing in 2004 was simply awful) — has become one of the hottest names on Broadway. Now every Broadway producer is beating a hasty path to his staging of another Sondheim show, Company, that is currently running in Cincinatti, and it looks like it’ll be a cert to transfer to New York next season.

Meanwhile, Doyle’s production of Mack and Mabel that started at Newbury last year moved to the West End’s Criterion at the beginning of April. It is no doubt gratifying that Doyle is finally being recognised internationally after so many years of regional toil, but there’s a more serious worry that live dedicated musicians — already being shown the door thanks to technological innovations like Symphonia that electronically reproduce them — will be elbowed out completely at this rate. And while it’s interesting to see a technique employed like this a couple of times, innovation will soon become repetition if it continues much longer.

It probably happens in all industries, but when theatre meets the cinema tears usually follow over creative input and more importantly, creative accounting practices. According to a report in yesterday’s New York Times, Martin Richards — who produced the original 1975 stage version of Chicago and for which he sold an option to the movie rights to Miramax in 1994, who subsequently turned it into an Oscar-winning hit — is now suing them for his estimated $10million share in the film’s profits that he claims are owing.

In papers filed at Manhattan’s State Supreme Court, he is charging that he has been cheated by the system of contingency payments that are made to a movie’s participants that gives the studios an incentive to under-report revenues. Under this system, it is alleged that “the worse a movie performs financially, the better off the studio is.” And Richards claimed in an interview after the suit was filed, “I hve never seen a nickel of the profits” — for a film which generated gross receipts of about $300 million, including $170 million during its initial domestic release and many more millions from DVD, video and foreign distribution.

In the complicated ways the accounting is structured, there are two types of deal on the contingency accounts: some participants are awarded ‘gross deals’, based on the gross receipts for the film, but others receive ‘net profit deals’ in which it is alleged, “the studios typically decrease revenue and increase costs and expenses attributed to the movie.” Actor Eddie Murphy is quoted in the suit as saying that these net deals are “monkey points” — “only a monkey would expect them to actually result in any payment to the talent.”

Also cited in the suit is one Louise Ciccone — aka Madonna — as witness to the signatures on the deal between Richards and Miramax.

But signature or not, the wake-up call of this story is that even when vast sums of money are made, those that hold the books and information therein also hold the ace card on future distributions from them. No wonder investors are wary of putting their money into theatrical endeavours: the first people to put their money in, they are invariably the last to get their money back out again.

I wrote this entry 30,000 ft in the air, as I travelled to Toronto (I would have even filed it online if I was flying Lufthansa, who now boast airborne internet access). Though I may have felt deprives of the web for the eight hours I was suspended in the sky, I wasn’t far from Broadway, at least: since I was travelling on Continental, who are the officially branded airline of Broadway, the put their audio channels where their mouths (and corporate sponsorship) is and offer a dedicated inflight “Live Broadway” channel.

It’s taken British radio stations long enough to cotton on the popularity of this genre, where Elaine Paige’s Radio 2 Sunday afternoon show on Radio 2, and Edward Seckerson’s Stage and Screen series on Radio 3, are the only regular games in town to treat the form seriously. Yet here’s an airline that dares to pay it similar respect; and the value is more than merely symbolic — that this is a genre as serious and substantial as the myriad pop, jazz and classical channels on offer — but also has a direct marketing value, too: the tracks are often tied to current Broadway attractions, and someone who either stumbles upon this channel, or makes a point of listening to it, could well decide on seeing a show after hearing it here.

Isn’t it time that British Airways was similarly persuaded that a West End audio channel might be a good thing?

Though the year is lining up to be a bumper one for new musicals, nearly all of them are in productions originating from the other side of the Atlantic, led by Movin’ Out, Avenue Q, Spamalot, Wicked and Caroline or Change. There’s also a local touring staging of the Broadway show Footloose coming to the Novello with a British creative team, plus the revival of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George transferring from the Menier to Wyndham’s. But Sinatra at the London Palladium had its origins in a show first seen at Radio City Music Hall, too, which means that the sole UK-originated West End entry in the “original musical” stakes will be the now-delayed Daddy Cool, based on the back catalogue of 70s and 80s pop group Boney M (and coincidentally directed by an American).

All of which makes for a depressing prospect for anyone British who might wish to write or otherwise participate in the creation of an original homegrown musical. (The closest we’ve got to one of those seems to be a stage version of Lord of the Rings that opens in Toronto this week, where I head tomorrow, which has an almost entirely British creative team marshalled behind it, though the two composing teams for its score are respectively Indian and Finnish).

But last night I saw a glimmer of hope in the midst of the apparent hopelessness of a situation that, outside Lloyd Webber, and latterly Stiles and Drewe (though their biggest success has been adding extra songs to the existing Mary Poppins) and Richard Thomas (with the most assured musical debut with Jerry Springer – the Opera since Howard Goodall’s over twenty years ago with The Hired Man), barely gives any opportunities to British writers. Notes from New York, an inspiring season of Sunday showcases that ran in 2004 of the work of the rich seam of writers from there that we know little of over here, returned and was re-branded, for one night only as Not(es) from New York, to celebrate the work of two local composers instead.

And to hear a series of haunting, funny, captivating new songs by Charles Miller and Grant Olding was to realise that here are two of our own who can give Jason Robert Brown a run for his money. Jason has acquired something of a cult following amongst aficionados over here, and rightly so, though his work is yet to penetrate to a larger audience; but Miller and Olding don’t even have that specialist niche in their sights yet. But someone should look them both up urgently; and get them working on a real musical rather than a showcase of work they’ve already written immediately.

A friend of mine in New York calls me a repeater. No, he’s not complaining that I endlessly say the same things again and again (though I probably do that, too!), but that I like to re-visit productions more than once. It’s not, of course, possible to go back to everything you enjoy, but I’m not a “seen it, done that” kind of person. If I like something, I’ll happily go back to see it again. And again.

Last night I went to see the current West End production of Guys and Dolls for the fourth time – since it only opened last June, that’s an average of once every couple of months. I obviously went to the first night; and then went to see it one more time before Ewan McGregor departed. (I even paid for my ticket on that second occasion). Since then, I have been to see each of the replacement casts that have followed.

And although it is absolutely no hardship to see this particular musical in any incarnation – it is well nigh indestructible, and probably the most perfectly crafted musical of all time – this production has been particularly rewarding to revisit. All attention first time around was inevitably on McGregor, and although he acquitted himself creditably, there was some anxiety watching him if he would live up to the part’s demands. It’s been far easier to watch Nigel Harman and now, especially, Adam Cooper, who are both more confident singers and in Cooper’s case, naturally, a far more accomplished dancer, too.

I’ve also enjoyed following the different interpretative shades offered by the Miss Adelaide’s of Jane Krakowski, Sarah Lancashire and now Sally Ann Triplett. This is probably the most broadly written of the show’s characters, yet each have found something of her truth and vulnerability.

While Douglas Hodge, Nigel Lindsay and now Neil Morrissey have rotated through the role of Nathan Detroit, the most interesting replacement is that of Sister Sarah, where Jenna Russell’s understudy Kelly Price has been promoted into the lead. Price actually had a baptism of fire in the role when she was forced to give the very first public performance of the show when Russell fell ill, even though she’d not had understudy rehearsals yet; but a really charming, unspoilt performer has been uncovered and given her chance to shine.

One of my favourite weeks of the theatrical year takes place every July when the National Theatre is suddenly overrun by armies of school and youth group performers doing their Shell Connections plays that have been specially commissioned and written for them from leading playwrights. Here, in living colour, is the future of our theatre and also the future of our world; and it’s wonderful that here, at least, they briefly collide. I usually go to at least one programme in the season, usually in the Olivier; and the space never feels more animated or charged than it does on this night. There’s a carnival-like atmosphere in the auditorium, filled to brimming with students from the other plays, parents and supporters; but this is no amdram night, either. There’s a hugely serious purpose to it, too, both in the message and the medium.

But the plays can get a little lost – both by the space, of course (one that famously often defeats stronger directors and actors), and in the productions themselves, which have been drawn in from all over the country and therefore necessarily don’t link the plays together.

So it is inspiring that Nick Hytner has now programmed a return run for three of the ten Shell Connections plays in professional productions in the Cottesloe for the first time. And while this is both the National’s most experimental space, it is also – ironically – the auditorium with its greyest audience, since seats are sparse and the mailing list fastest off the mark for it.

But the National have cannily ensured that seats are still available for the younger audiences these plays are meant to attract, and priced them accordingly to do so with seats for £10 for under 18s, with a clever kind of marketing branding that might discourage older theatregoers (an unusual approach to marketing to actually work against a particular sector) but simultaneously appeal directly to the youth audience. And it has paid off: the under 18, £10 seats account for nearly 50% of the advance sales so far.

Turning its pages into something as much akin to a blog as it is to a newspaper, The Guardian runs an interesting exercise every week when it invites artists to respond to their reviews (usually of the negative kind) in its pages. Today David Leveaux has replied to what he calls Michael Billington’s “grumpy” review of his production of Sinatra at the London Palladium, that Leaveaux says “does a disservice to the energy of the West End”.

“How it can be called ‘glitzy necrophilia’ to create a show involving footage of Sinatra doing what he did best – singing – escapes me. And unless it is somehow ‘necrophiliac’ to screen any film involving a performer who ahs since died, it is surely complete nonsense. As Tom Stoppard once said of a similarly flip and easy argument: it’s like exercising on a lilo.”

But at least Leveaux is exercising his comments in print, not in the bar. A couple of years ago New York theatre gossip columnist supreme, the New York Post’s Michael Riedel, earned a particular badge of honour when he was punched to the floor by an aggrieved Leveaux for Riedel’s relentless badgering of his Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Critics have been threatened with physical violence from time to time, but Leveaux actually put his fist where Riedel’s mouth is. Billington should therefore consider himself lucky to have only been challenged in words, not deeds.

I noted last week how I felt when I was at odds with (most of) my national colleagues regarding Sinatra at the London Palladium, and sent a vote of sympathy to Nicholas de Jongh who was similarly isolated over Embers. That’s where one of us marches out-of-step alone; but what about the more extreme reactions that happen for the same show by different reviewers that fall outside the middling average we normally create overall?

On the one hand, Benedict Nightingale of The Times gave a five-star rave to Hampstead’s revival last week of The Best of Friends: “if you feel a hankering for a piece with a grace, mental elegance and literary distinction seldom found in our raucous, dumbed-down world, why not join Patricia Routledge, Michael Pennington and Roy Dotrice as they roam the first half of the 20th century?”

But The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner feels quite the opposite, with her one-star pan: calling it “the worst of theatrical experiences”, she says, “it is warm, intelligent and always elegant, but about as exciting as a cup of cocoa spiked with half a dozen Mogadon. Its place is on the radio, not in the theatre - although I did spend one scene quite happily admiring the abundance of William Morris wallpaper and Roy Dotrice’s fake beard.”

Did they see the same show? Yes – but they clearly saw different things in it. It’s a salutary reminder that theatre is always a personal experience, and that reviews, too, are personal to the people writing them.

And so, finally, to the presentation of the Europe Theatre Prize to Harold Pinter last night at Turin’s Teatro Carignano, in a ceremony of such mind-bending tedium that it makes the Oliviers seem like they have the excitement of an Olympic ski-jump like Turin recently witnessed. Lined up onstage, at a long table like they were recreating The Last Supper, an assortment of dignitaries and critics held forth on Pinter. At least Britain’s Ian Herbert – former publisher of Theatre Record and president of the International Association of Theatre Critics – had the sense to remember that brevity is the soul of wit, and got high praise afterwards for keeping it short. And of course, Michael Billington’s final speech before Pinter was brought onto the stage was also a model of craft and concision.

Pinter himself spoke but briefly, and once again used the occasion to pursue his current preoccupation with trying to get Europe to disassociate itself from America’s all-pervasive might and influence. “I would like Europe to follow the example of Latin America, resisting American force both military and economic. It’s a serious responsibility for something that calls itself Europe to stand up against the extraordinary power being used by the US that will probably destroy us otherwise.”

But if the some of the prior speeches went on (and on), the stage was then cleared for just four seats, to be occupied by Jeremy Irons, Penelope Wilton, Michael Gambon and Charles Dance – part of the team who celebrated Pinter’s 75th birthday in Dublin last October – to perform extracts from his plays and poetry. And after the boredom of what had preceded it, here we were finally released into the wit, wisdom and spare Pinter, where every word and gesture counts with utter precision and reverberates with infinite meaning.

Harold Pinter is indeed in town – Turin, that is, if you didn’t spot the last entry – whom I saw in his hotel bar late last night, holding court with a party around him whom, as my colleague Alastair Macaulay pointed out as we sat on the other side of the bar, looked happy: Pinter’s company clearly breeds contentment He is visibly frailer and more shrunken that the robust figure of old, but still dapper and on his feet again, at least, since sustaining a fall in Dublin last October on his way home from the Gate Theatre’s celebration of his work to mark his 75th birthday, which rendered him unable to travel in turn to Stockholm to deliver his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in person when the call came that he’d received it just days after getting home from Ireland.

But this morning he was on the stage of what surely has to be one of the world’s most beautiful theatres, the nearly 300-year-old Teatro Carignano, to be interviewed before a packed house by Michael Billington. Such public events with Pinter are a rarity nowadays – I can’t remember the last time he did one in the UK, though at yesterday’s conference, one of the speakers enumerated some 125 newspaper interviews this famously reticent writer has given over the years, which as Billington wittily remarked had once led Pinter’s wife Antonia Fraser to comment, “Oh Harold, another of your exclusive interviews!”

Today, however, really was an exclusive, and with Billington’s gentle nudges, Pinter spoke at length and in detail about his recent bouts of illness since that fall – “life has been literally full of ups and downs” – but also about a rare skin condition that hails from the Brazilian jungle, though he’s never in fact been anywhere near it, but which left him in intensive care, “on the point of death for the first time”. He described this brush with mortality — that manifested itself in a great difficulty to breath — as similar to drowning: “you’re caught in a current that you cannot control and is controlling you”. Asked if he was aware of what was happening, he replied, “There’s no time to think – you don’t think at all, you just experience it. You’re desperately fighting to stay alive – to insist on breathing, and not to lose the ability to breath.”

As a result, in order to record the Nobel lecture, he was taken by wheelchair from the hospital to the studio, and then back to the hospital, never leaving his wheelchair. Billington referred to how his energy visibly rose as his moral indignation fired him up, and Pinter replied that his speech definitely “grew in intensity as it went along”, and raised once again a theme that has lately been preoccupying him, to do with the US foreign policy (entirely to do with serving its own interests, not those of the countries it is affecting) and Britain’s own recent role in supporting it. “Blair’s subservience to Bush is shameful and disgusting and also more than that, a disinclination to even accept the fact that if one drops bombs on thousands of people in a sovereign state, whatever you think of that state, is an act of mass murder and a war crime.” Asked what politicians he didn’t feel contempt for, Pinter replied, “I had a high regard for Robin Cook, but he died very sadly; he was an admirable man.”

In a reversal of the order of his Nobel Prize speech, having dealt with the politics, Pinter was then asked to turn to the process of writing; and what is conscious and unconscious in it. It seems that for Pinter the process happens outside of himself to begin with: “One of the most exciting parts of writing is finding the life of characters you’ve never met before; you’ve got to let them have their own life.” With The Homecoming, he pointed out, “I really didn’t know what was going to happen. As I found these two figures in a room, I had no idea what was going to happen to either of them.” Once the characters lead the way – in this case, it was the wife, Ruth, whom he calls “one of my favourite characters” — he is only then able to intervene: “I work hard on the text once I’ve got it to a certain point.”

Politics, of course, has been a big part of Pinter’s life and more recent work, and Billington quizzed him on other political writers, from Brecht (“I admire him very much; a terrific poet and an important figure”) to David Hare (“Stuff Happens was a very good piece of work, and so was The Permanent Way; I admire his rigour and honesty and his insistence on looking for truth”). The question turned next to the subject of verbatim theatre and the suppression of My Name is Rachel Corrie, constructed from the own words of the late peace protestor who died under an American-made bulldozer in Israel, whose imminent New York run was cancelled at the last moment; Pinter called that “a clear case of self-censorship” amidst a political atmosphere of the “suppression of dissent and the suppression of truth”. In the case of Behzti, the play that was cancelled in the midst of its run at Birmingham Rep following public protests outside the theatre, Pinter called that “mob rule”. Beyond the world of the theatre, Pinter also cited the case of a woman, arrested for reading out the names of the British army war dead outside Parliament, “to remind those inside parliament that they were responsible for those deaths”.

Finally, Billington referred to Pinter’s rich body of plays, films and poetry, and asked him if the urge to put pen to paper was still strong inside him. “It’s a question of form; I find myself moved more towards writing poetry now.” He’s not ruled out further plays completely, “but it’s unlikely more are going to arrive. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: I’ve written 29 damn plays; isn’t that enough? But I will be writing poetry till I conk out.” And is theatre still relevant? “Theatre has a unique, singular kind of excitement as no other media can or does. The mere fact of it being alive – there’s life on stage and in the audience – rather than a recorded experience of it like film or TV, there’s nothing like it. So I have a shaky faith in it still.”

Yes, I’m about a week late. The Winter Olympics have come and already gone. But there’s a cultural kind of Olympics taking place this weekend, centering around the presentation of the 10th European Theatre Prize, whose honoree this year is Harold Pinter and is expected here tomorrow to give an interview.

Pinter is only the second Brit to be thus honoured, after Peter Brook (who of course works on the continent anyway nowadays rather than Britain); the others thus far have been Ariane Mnouchinkine and the Theatre du Soleil (presumably, not to be confused with Cirque du Soleil); Giorgio Strehler; Heiner Muller; Robert Wilson; Luca Ronconi; Pina Bausch; Lev Dodin and Michel Piccoli. Many of these names will be familiar to British festivalgoers, if not regular theatregoers, since their work appears at places like Edinburgh; but it’s also remarkable how insular British theatre is – or at least my own view is – since I can’t honestly say I have seen much of any of their work.

Yet here in Italy there is a lively appreciation of the theatrical arts in all its manifestations; and it’s taken seriously. There’s a three day symposium on Pinter, chaired by our own Michael Billington (Pinter biographer and Guardian chief critic), to coincide with the honour; and speakers include our own Alastair Macaulay (who kicked off proceedings this morning with a very erudite examination of Pinter’s Women, spoken with notes but off-the-cuff, while those that followed him simply presented readings of academic ‘papers’) and Benedict Nightingale.

Now I know how Nicholas de Jongh often feels. I was going to write a blog entry about how divergent his reviews sometimes are, and in particular, about how his heartfelt rave for last week’s opening of Embers – “I rate it as one of the major experiences of my theatre-going life” – was at odds with most of his colleagues, such as Charles Spencer’s declaration in the Daily Telegraph that was its polar opposite, “There are few surprises here, just great acres of terrible tedium and verbiage to negotiate. You consult your watch, expecting at least half an hour to have passed, only to find that the hand has advanced by only three minutes.”

But today I can’t afford to be quite so smug. I filed a very enthusiastic notice for last night’s opening of Sinatra at the London Palladium – “it distils the songs through an eye-poppingly lavish multi-media experience that contributes interpretative layers and textures of its own that make you see and hear these mostly familiar, classic songs in a new choreographic and musical light” – only to turn to today’s papers and find that few of my peers agree, and of which Paul Taylor’s review in The Independent is a representative sampling: “There is something decidedly rum about a theatrical event where everything – the 24-piece orchestra, a 20-strong dancing troupe – is live apart from the star.”

I’m not going to use this blog to defend my review – it’s out there (or soon will be, when its published on theatre.com later today, and another version appears in the Sunday Express this weekend), and speaks for itself. But it does raise an issue that only last week I was speaking about to a group of students who had come to a session called “Play the Critic”, organised by the Mousetrap Foundation at the Old Vic, in which a pair of critics – I was joined by Michael Coveney – and a director (David Grindley in our case) talk through the process of criticism, and the students then go away to write their own review of something they have seen that we will then have an opportunity to look over with them ourselves.

What I was keen to point out that there is no such thing as a “right” or “wrong” review; just a cogently argued review or not. Ultimately what we do is always a declaration of taste and opinion; and there’s no objective criterion for that. But we hopefully draw on our extensive theatregoing experience and informed opinion to do so. Now the reader may or may not agree with us – but if they follow us across a period of time, they will soon learn our prejudices and idiosyncrasies, and know whether to heed or discard our views.

But I think that the critical response to this show also highlights something that Matthew Gale, the producer of the critically lambasted production of The Creeper (by most everyone, including me) wrote in yesterday’s Guardian about its reception. “Everyone involved in the production wanted to do this play, because we saw something in it that the critics didn’t. I think audiences see more of what we do than the critics seem to – the response when we tried The Creeper out in the autumn was terrific, and that’s why we brought it to London.” He went on of his star, Ian Richardson, that he “likes to say that he’s not just an actor but an entertainer, and that’s how producers think of themselves, too. We’re there to put on plays that audiences, not just critics, want to see. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t survive in the commercial world. At times I feel that critics are narrowing the choice for their readership, by attacking plays like this. The Creeper may not be a cutting-edge modern drama, but it is an entertaining traditional play. If audiences are going to have a diverse choice of shows, they should be able to see old-fashioned plays like this, too.”

Ultimately, of course, it’s also the public who decides: they voted with their feet (and credit cards) to make We Will Rock You into a hit, despite what the majority of the critics said. And I think they may well do the same with Sinatra at the London Palladium.

The public war on the circumstances surrounding the cancellation (or indefinite postponement) of the New York run of My Name is Rachel Corrie wages on. After I reported here the comments of Katherine Viner, Guardian journalist and adaptor of Corrie’s words with director Alan Rickman, and New York Theatre Workshop artistic director James Nicola’s reply, the Royal Court itself has now replied even more trenchantly.

“We have been surprised to read recent assertions made by James Nicola, they say, and “there are many factual inaccuracies which we would like to address”.

Replying to Nicola’s assertion, “we asked a rather routine question, or so we thought, to our London colleagues about altering the time frame,” they have replied: “Plans for the production of My Name is Rachel Corrie were definite. Representatives of the Royal Court met with NYTW in New York to finalise arrangements seven days before learning that Mr Nicola wished to postpone the run indefinitely. The production schedule had already been laid out by the NYTW on January 31st, with the first preview scheduled for March 22nd and closing night for May 14th; a budget had been set; a press release had been mutually agreed; flights had been booked and paid for, all with the knowledge of New York Theatre Workshop. Furthermore, ticket information was already listed on the site of the US ticketing agency Telecharge on February 23rd, 2006 with the correct information about dates, times, original creative team and casting. Asking for a postponement at this stage in the planning can hardly be described as ‘a rather routine question, so we thought, of our colleagues’ as Mr Nicola says in his statement on the NYTW website.”

Again, in reply to Nicola’s assertion that the timetable for production had been driven by director Alan Rickman’s pre-existing film commitments that gave them “less than two months to consider mounting the production, the Court replies: “In fact, Alan Rickman first visited the New York Theatre Workshop to discuss the possibility of staging My Name is Rachel Corrie in November 2005. The dates of the production were determined by availability at the theatre, and Mr Rickman’s film schedule was to be ordered around this. He held back from making any film commitments until after the dates were offered and confirmed by NYTW.”

The Royal Court also reports a conversation between Nicola and their general manager, Diane Borger, in which it is said that he “would be willing to reassess the political climate in a year’s time and decide then if he could produce the piece with a companion work that would offer an alternative perspective.” This was not acceptable to the Court, as “he gave no commitment at this time to revised dates for the production at NYTW. The Royal Court and the Corrie Family have always believed that the play speaks for itself. In the words of Rachel’s father, Craig Corrie, “No one should have to take a poll to do this play; it is a work of art.”

And the Court concludes, “A postponement at any time, but especially at this late stage, is not the action of an organisation committed to producing My Name is Rachel Corrie. The Royal Court cannot be confident that the political climate will have changed in a year’s time, and we are deeply saddened that New York Theatre Workshop feels unable to let the play be seen now. However, the Royal Court remains committed to bringing My Name is Rachel Corrie to a US audience at the earliest opportunity.”

Expect the Royal Court, therefore, to be seeking a new producing partner for a US run.

The words “theatre” and “museum” side-by-side have also struck me as odd bedfellows: a live art that lives first and foremost in the moment of its production doesn’t lend itself easily to being commemorated in artefacts that are put behind display cabinets. But of course, that’s not the only way a museum could or should operate: the Science Museum, for instance, has proved that it’s possible to make something live and interactive of our ever-changing understanding of the world we live in; but there’s no substitute for catching theatre “on the hop” than by actually going to one. See a Robert Lepage show, for example, and you will see distilled the kind of theatrical innovation that leaps not off the page but off the stage as it should. (But if you are really intent on visiting a museum, there’s a perfectly creaky one available on West Street: the St Martin’s Theatre has The Mousetrap now in its 54th year).

In the midst of the competition of seeing the real thing being put on display in other buildings in the area, why should anyone want to go to the Theatre Museum that first opened in 1987 as a West End branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum, dedicated to celebrating the performing arts?

That conundrum has never been properly answered in nearly twenty years. I have a good friend who is now in his 70s, goes to the theatre four or five times a week, and has been to the Theatre Museum precisely twice. If he doesn’t find a compelling reason to visit regularly, who else would? One might visit the National Gallery several times a year, but there you’re encountering the art first-hand; would you visit the National Gallery if it merely displayed versions of the art – on biscuit tins, say, or chocolate boxes or place mats – instead, especially if there were places nearby that offered the real thing?

Successive directors of the museum have tried to stress the “liveness” of the place by emphasizing the changing exhibitions; but they don’t change often enough. And the current big display of the state of the West End may have a few set models of West End theatres – you can get a sneak preview of what the Sondheim Theatre, planned for above the Queen’s, may look like – but otherwise is mainly words blown up on the walls.

To access the permanent displays, however, entails a depressing descent into the depths of the museum, down a long, never-ending ramp that makes you feel like you are entering some kind of nuclear fall-out shelter. And if your ultimate destination is the studio theatre (as it was for me on Sunday evening), you have proof positive of the Theatre Museum’s ultimate and most symbolic failure of all: the fact that a building that calls itself a theatre museum has such a negligible and unhelpful theatre. Like a carpeted hotel banquet room, pillars are unhelpfully stationed right in the centre of the room to sabotage any attempts to give it a theatrical feeling (or a versatile one: to put a play on here means putting it on in a narrow area inbetween those pillars).

No wonder that the Heritage Lottery Fund has twice now turned down the Theatre Museum’s applications for refurbishment funds: the funds required to transform their current building would not repay the investment made, they say, given the limitations of the building.

The V&A are therefore now conducting their own review of the best way forward, which could include the closure of the museum. Why not re-site the best parts of the collection inside a living theatre, like the National? Of course, the National has its own, rotating exhibitions programme (almost always more interesting and relevant than those at the Theatre Museum), but at least the building is open for over 12 hours a day. Perhaps one floor – the Olivier exhibition area, for instance – could become a permanent showcase for the Theatre Museum’s best offerings, and tied in to the National’s repertoire where possible?

The gap between expectation and reality that is even bigger than that between fantasy and reality that theatre usually trades in has come to the fore once again at the Old Vic last week, with the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s penultimate play Resurrection Blues on Thursday that has been trampled upon almost unanimously by the critics. “It is the most terrible embarrassment. Who could possibly thought it a kindness to stage a play that can only do grievous damage to the dramatist’s posthumous reputation?” wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, adding, “I doubt whether the Old Vic has seen quite a fiasco since Peter O’Toole gave his notorious Macbeth at this address 25 years ago.” The Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, also calling it “a towering embarrassment”, assigned it “a one way-ticket to the theatrical mausoleum”.

And both the Independent’s Paul Taylor and the Mail on Sunday’s Georgina Brown asked even bigger questions about how this production happened at all: According to Taylor, “Once again, the taste and judgement of Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic regime are called into question”; while Brown simply states, “Once again, Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic has bungled.”

Interestingly, of course, this is a production that Spacey himself doesn’t have his name on as director (as he did for Cloaca) or actor (National Anthems, The Philadelphia Story, Richard II), yet it is right and proper that if tickets are sold and bought by his name association, then living by that sword, he should die by it, too. And as artistic director, everything that takes place on his ‘watch’ is also, ultimately, an expression of his taste and judgement, even if he employs others to execute it, in this case the veteran film director Robert Altman who only last night was presented with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement.

This latest Old Vic fiasco may only be a career misstep for Altman, but for Spacey it is turning into a catastrophe. On paper, it all looked so promising: a late Miller (that he was apparently revising right to the end of his life), a brilliant film-maker returning to his theatrical root, and a cast of major movie actors. But like all but Richard II from his first season’s work (for which Trevor Nunn was brought on board as director), it has been all promise and no fulfillment.

But why have we been at all surprised that Spacey’s Old Vic isn’t delivering? Though Spacey served an early theatrical apprenticeship as a stage actor, he has no qualifications beyond movie star charisma for actually running a major theatre. Of course, since this is a commercial operation, not a subsidized one, they can choose whoever they wish to do so; and the allure of Spacey’s name – and the helpful sponsorship it can attract, in t