It was a peculiar experience sitting on the (newly reintroduced) centre aisle of the Comedy Theatre last night – Nicholas de Jongh will be pleased — for the opening night of Donkey’s Years, set at an Oxbridge college reunion twenty five years after graduation, and notice that of the 14 critics ranged across the seven front rows, over half of us (Charlie Spencer, Benedict Nightingale, Michael Billington, Sheridan Morley Alastair Macaulay, Paul Taylor, Kate Kellaway and myself), to my certain knowledge, could all have attended one of these events ourselves, being all Oxbridge graduates (It could be more: I don’t know where the other six went). One of this number still even lives in Oxford, where he has also taught at the University.
But if critics are drawn from a narrow educational range, here’s something amazing that I discovered a couple of years ago: three of us even came from the same Cambridge college in the same decade! Robert Butler (who used to be critic of the Independent on Sunday), his successor Kate Bassett and myself all attended Corpus Christi, Cambridge in the 1980s. In a small profession to begin with, it’s an extraordinary coincidence that we have all ended up writing about the theatre having all gone to the same college, which also happens to be one of the smallest in the University, with an undergraduate population of not much more than 200 in total across the three years in residence. Perhaps there’s even a play in there somewhere.
Of the play we were watching, however, I did in fact go to a college reunion over ten years ago, ten years on from graduating. It was nothing like the one that occurs in the play – thank goodness – yet also recognised it entirely; Frayn is deliciously on the money about the collective embarrassment factor of such occasions.
