July 2006 Archives

Critics are often told that we’re the eunuchs at an orgy, and actors and creative people routinely like to say that they don’t read us, either: the two hours we spend scribbling in the dark doesn’t truly reflect the weeks they’ve been stumbling around in the dark trying to put the thing on, and in any case, it’s only one person’s opinion that they take on board at their peril, whether favourable (in which case they become self-conscious about the moments we isolate) or critical (in which case they feel undermined).

But even if they don’t read us, we read them when they take the trouble to reply to what is written about them, and comedian Robert Newman got a full page in the Guardian last week to launch a broadside attack on comedy critics and their own failure to have evolved what he calls “a critical language” to discuss the art form, as the rock music press he says evolved 30 years ago. “They have no critique with which to tell the readers how one gag is exquisite and one trite when both are ostensibly about the same subject matter. When they are watching Bill Bailey or Daniel Kitson, the comedy reviewers may sense, correctly, that they are in the presence of greatness, but they can’t begin to tell you why.”

Is there method in the comic madness? Of course there is – just as drama or music or art moves you and our job is to say why. But somehow it’s easier to describe what makes you cry than what makes you laugh. And besides, you run the danger of giving away the punchline if you quote the joke; or undermine it if you deconstruct it too closely. Instead, comedy critics take the fall-back position of quoting particular moments. But, says Newman, this isn’t good enough: “A reviewer might give an example of a bit that they noticed went down well, and which seems somehow representative of the sort of thing this performer does best, but no one ever analyses a routine or sketch in the way that music reviewers absolutely insist on having you understand just why the inverted chords in Joy Division’s Atmosphere or the flattened fifths in Louis Armstrong’s Strutting with Barbecue are meaningful or original, or why the middle eight of a Joni Mitchell song is wrong because it’s bucking against the lyrics. But why go to such absurd lengths with comedy? I mean, it’s only comedy, right? It’s not as if it were something important like a play.”

That’s Newman’s own self-esteem issues talking, I fear, rather than the critic’s alleged failure, for which there may be a far more practical reason why it doesn’t happen: deconstructing an entire routine or sketch takes space – which most journalists don’t have the luxury of being given. Nor is it a critic’s fault that the press night wasn’t full and that it didn’t get as many laughs as the previous show that the critic had seen had done. Newman petulantly asks: “Why didn’t the reviewer come when the audience came?” (Answer: he came when he was invited to do so. It was the management’s job to fill the place). Newman goes on, “If he had, then he’d have known what a graphic equaliser knows, which is that the audience made three times as many vocal eruptions of that inchoate kind known in the biz as ‘laughter’ than in the previous show.” Comedy, like theatre, is in the moment; and there’s an implicit understanding that the review is of a particular performance. Critics, too, are often attacked for raving about something that, the night a reader goes, doesn’t fly. “Did the critic see the same show?”, they ask. The answer of course is that you never do. That’s the nature of live performance.

All of which is about to be put to the test later this week when this year’s Edinburgh Fringe starts, and comedy – a Cinderella of the arts pages – finally gets to come to the ball and is treated to the kind of column inches in the papers that it fails to get the rest of the year. No doubt there will be many more disgruntled comics complaining about the reviewers missing the point of their shows – but at least they’ll be getting written about. Which is something they spend the rest of the time complaining about failing to be.

Tourists, whether from home or abroad, are often cited as being the lifeblood of the West End; but though any and all theatregoers are always welcome, wherever they come from and however they get here, there’s a special breed of seriously committed fans whose engagement with our theatre scene puts them in a league of their own. These are the travellers – tourist is too casual a term to recognise their commitment to it – that put the theatre at the very centre of why they come to London. There’s one company, London Arts Discovery, whose entire business is about co-ordinating tailor-made travel plans for parties of visitors from membership groups of some of America’s leading regional and off-Broadway theatres. And this year, I have just come into professional contact with another long-running bespoke theatre scheme, the “Inside the London Theater Scene” programme presented under the auspices of the University of California’s Berkeley Extension “Travel with Scholars” programme, and found it as invigorating for me as it was hopefully for the participants.

The way it works is a lot of fun, but also a serious commitment for all parties. Participants, who come from all over the US and not just the programme’s home state of Northern California, come to London for three weeks, and are accommodated in student halls of residence near Russell Square. Their subscription includes tickets to specially selected performances throughout their time here; and the morning after they see each play, a London critic leads a seminar with them about it, before a guest attached to the theatre or production they’ve seen comes in for the second hour to discuss it with them some more.

While Matt Wolf – a long-time veteran of the programme on the critics’ team – led their first and third weeks, I was the man in the middle, leading their second week. While going for the theatre for a living means I see everything already, I invariably do so both to the schedule set by the producers – the first night – and without undue influence from knowing what the reviews are, since they’ve not been written yet; indeed, the job description is to make my own mind up as I go along, and pass that judgement on as concisely and intelligently as I can within the strictures of the various outlets I write for. And by the time my colleagues’ reviews (and mine) appear, we’re well on our way to the next opening. So there’s little time to stop and pause and think again, though a few of us occasionally get together to verbalise our thoughts on theatrevoice.com, a website that records critical discussions between critics like Matt, Charlie Spencer, Kate Bassett, David Benedict, Jane Edwardes, Heather Neill and myself of some of the latest openings and posts the results for the world to hear. And though I also sometimes meet creative personnel and cast members attached to a production for feature material, this again invariably happens during rehearsals and previews, not after the opening when I’ve actually seen the show.

So leading the Berkeley programme was a rich and surprising opportunity to do something else beyond the usual night job: to take a look back, in pleasure (hopefully) and some leisure, at things that I’ve seen; to set them in context where possible (as regards the author and creative team, etc); to engage with professionals from the productions concerned in a lively, intimate and open way as I led Q&A’s with them; and most importantly, to see the riches that the group was sampling as much through their eyes as I was trying to guide them through mine.

During my week, I led them through discussions of shows as diverse as new plays like Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and JT Rogers’ The Overwhelming, contemporary revivals of Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years and John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father, and one classic, the Shakespeare’s Globe staging of Antony and Cleopatra. And for each, we had guests that ranged from the Royal Court’s literary manager Graham Whybrow, offering a fascinating background to the ethos and management behind the Court’s play selections; to actors Danny Sapani (from The Overwhelming) and Michael Simkins (from Donkeys’ Years), offering the actors’ perspective of the work in question and their unique stage-side view; and directors Dominic Dromgoole (for Antony and Cleopatra) and Thea Sharrock (for A Voyage Round My Father). Each shared willingly and openly – though this was a “public” stage in one sense, it was also a closed shop of theatre-interested parties, so they were forthcoming in a way that was frequently surprising and revealing. I shall not breach the confidence of their revelations by writing about them here, but this was very much the “inside track” of how theatre works, and its rare for a critic, let alone an audience member, to be privy to it as closely as this. This, more than anything, sets the programme apart from the kind of theatre tour visitors could perhaps plan for themselves. And for their final week, their Hay Fever guest was Judi Dench: even though I was not facilitating, I had to go back to hear Matt interviewing her, and it was as delightful and privileged a theatrical encounter as I’ve ever heard. (Awaiting her arrival before the session began, one of the party summed it up aptly to me: “We’re all a bit nervous – it’s a bit like waiting for the Queen to arrive!” But when she did, she put all at ease with effortless grace and delight).

Throughout the three weeks, the party were urged to consider nominations for the favourite things they’d seen, and yesterday at the final farewell lunch, they cast their votes and then Matt and I announced this year’s Berkeleys, as they’re known. I am delighted to share them here – a snapshot of what a troupe of 38 theatregoers thought of what’s currently playing in London.

• Best Overall Production: Rock ‘n’ Roll
• Best Actress: Judi Dench in Hay Fever
• Best Actor: Simon Russell Beale in The Life of Galileo
• Best Director: Thea Sharrock for A Voyage Round My Father
• Best Sets: Sunday in the Park with George
• Best Costumes: Hay Fever
• Best Supporting Actor: Andrew Garfield in The Overwhelming
• Best Supporting Actress: a tie between Samantha Bond in Donkeys’ Years and Belinda Lang in Hay Fever

How sad it is that the Sound Theatre on Wardour Street will soon be no more, as first reported in The Stage last week. Visiting it again last night for the return of the hit revival of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing that was originally premiered there earlier this year, I felt that this is not only one of the most comfortable of all fringe theatres – from the soft-cushioned benches, neatly raked to afford good sightlines to everyone, to the (thank God!) provision of proper air-conditioning – but also I am full of admiration for how Mig Kimpton, the theatre’s programmer since January, had quickly established an identity for it around gay-themed work that has already attracted a loyal following.

I interviewed him a couple of days ago for a piece I am writing for the newspaper that this website is helpfully connected to, and he told me how the policy had been arrived at by accident – the need to find product to fill the space quickly to pay the rent, when he took over its running at short notice after the previous lessees suddenly withdrew. But the more important fact is that, however it occurred, there’s obviously an appetite for this kind of high quality work still, and Harvey’s play is once again deservedly a sell-out hit. I hope this production finds another home after its run ends here on September 9; but I also hope that the Sound’s ethos itself finds another home after its lease as a theatre ends on the same day. It would be a pity to lose the momentum that has been achieved – not to mention those soft benches, too.

In The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown’s musical about the ill-fated marriage between a successful novelist and an aspiring actress that opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory this week, the actress has a song about attending an audition, in which she sings, “Why am I working so hard?/These are the people who cast/Linda Blair in a musical”. It’s a funny line, but no joke: The former child actress best known for The Exorcist did indeed do a stint in a mid-90s Broadway revival of Grease, taking over the role of Betty Rizzo, that was produced by Barry and Fran Weissler.

Those producers, who are currently represented on Broadway and in the West End by Chicago, have continued to be the King and Queen of stunt casting gimmicks like that – unexpected, off-the-wall casting that can help to renew press interest in an ailing, failing box office, and re-invigorate it, whether they come from Pop Idol or the ranks of those written about on Pop Bitch. It certainly keeps the show fresh, if not always honest or being performed to the peak of its possibilities by truly qualified musical theatre actors. But in the case of Chicago, which concerns itself with the cult of celebrity, such stunt casting could always be vindicated on the basis that it is merely a reflection of what the show itself is all about. Sometimes, of course, there are genuine surprises: Brooke Shields, another sometime child actor, has turned into a surprisingly mature musical actress through stints in Broadway revivals of Cabaret and Sweet Charity to the West End’s Chicago. And film star Melanie Griffith, too, did a well-received stint in Chicago.

But the floodgates are now open for lots of actors to seek the legitimacy once again of the stage. Tonight Patrick Swayze makes his belated, delayed West End debut, taking over in Guys and Dolls – he was due to take over originally on July 10, but suffered a chest infection and missed rehearsals. In fact, Swayze was himself a replacement Danny Zucko in the original Broadway production of Grease in the early 70s, and also did a stint as a “servant” and “dancer” in the original production of a short-lived 1975 Broadway musical Goodtime Charley, so he’s not exactly a musical theatre novice.

But that was over 30 years ago, and though, he too, has since done a takeover shift in the current Broadway Chicago, he’s now top of the bill in Guys and Dolls, in a show that exposes him to public and critical scrutiny. When the producers held a press conference a couple of months ago to introduce him to London, he expressed one fear about it: facing the critics. He said, “I gather they come the first night you’re on – it’s like being shot out of a canon, so you got to be ready to rock!”

In fact, the producers have wisely taken the precaution of setting up an official press night for August 7, which will hopefully deflect any papers who are tempted to review his first performance tonight. Once we’re officially invited, we tend to respect those wishes; but there’s nothing to stop any of us buying a ticket and reviewing him as he comes out of that canon tonight….

Of course the fringe matters; and of course the Edinburgh Fringe, in particular, that starts at the end of next week will get blanket coverage in the papers, and rightly so. But I’ve never before seen four full pages, plus the cover, of a broadsheet supplement devoted to reprinting the entire Act 1, Scene 1 of a fringe play, until The Independent did so yesterday for Toby Young and Lloyd Evans’ latest opus, A Right Royal Farce, that is now previewing at the King’s Head and imagines the power struggle that occurs after the Queen dies and Prince Harry aspires to the throne. Even the Indie has a few more readers than can cram into the tiny backroom of an Islington pub, so it’s a bit of a coup. But will it actually encourage anyone to go?

It may be different in the playing, of course, and I’m not going to judge ahead of next Monday’s press night, but some scenes are not exactly encouraging, like the one in which Prince Philip complains, in the wake of the state funeral, that the reception afterwards was ‘sheer torture – making small talk with a bunch of African dictators. Thieves and murderers, the lot of ‘em” and then mimes meeting one, “Pleased to meet you, President Mboto. Have you eaten any members of the opposition recently?” As he continues in his racist vein – “Get back to your mud huts, you bunch of spear-chuckers!” – and then, “Gate 16, now boarding. Heathrow to Bongo Bongo Land!”, I’m not sure how far the public school humour can be genuinely ascribed to a revelation of Prince Philip’s character and how much to the authors’ own braying prejudices. Satire is always a fine line, of course, but can it be an excuse to indulge the prejudice rather than criticise it?

Meanwhile, I’ve been harping on about the (lack of) temperature control in West End theatres during the current heatwave, but if it’s bad in town, spare another thought – and think again before you’re tempted to go – on the fringe. Last night’s opening of The Last Five Years at the Menier Chocolate Factory was like being trapped on a hot, sweaty train on the Northern Line at rush hour. The theatre has tried to import an ineffective air cooling system, and also helpfully issued patrons with small individual battery operated fans on the way in, but it was small comfort, in every sense. The great pity is that it’s a terrific show, and I don’t want to discourage people from going. But it’s no pleasure to watch a show in those conditions. And even worse for the valiant pair of actors, who perform magnificently under the hot lights and hotter room.

It’s an inescapable fact of life that critics – or at least some of the words we write – become part and parcel of the publicity and PR machine, with words of praise, however faint, being extracted for use on posters, front-of-house billboards and press adverts. And we’re not paid for our efforts – the whole point of these extracts is that they are supposedly impartial, and there’s an implicit agreement that, in exchange for our complimentary tickets on press night, a free programme and (sometimes) a free glass of warm wine, we agree to this. But just how meaningful are the extracts?

According to a news feature in The Times yesterday, “there is as much fiction on the advertising boards as on the stage.” I’m not sure how scientific their study of the West End billboards was, but according to them, “More than one third of West End theatres have been found to use highly selective quotations, from the optimistic to the downright misleading.”

The feature cites Sinatra at the London Palladium as one of the worst offenders. “This show claims to have been praised by The Observer as having ‘energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry’. A less concise extract shows the reviewer’s true opinion. As Sean O’Hagan really put it: ‘I couldn’t help feeling that, for all the energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry, the audience had been shortchanged.’ He also said it was the ‘longest three hours I have spent in a theatre’ and wondered if he had ‘gone to showbiz hell, a place where the show must go on … and on … and on’.

The Times review, by Clive Davis, was similarly boiled down to ‘I defy you to sit still during the orchestra at full blast.’ But the true tenor of Davis’s review comes from a comment that isn’t quoted: ‘The real mystery is why someone as gifted as [director] David Leveaux ever bothered to sign up for this shoddy venture.’

The feature quotes Anthony Pye-Jeary, Managing Director of Dewynters, the West End ad agency who are responsible for extracting the quotes for use in this way, as saying, “If the words are in the review, that is invariably fair game. If a show hasn’t got any good reviews, you put up the best you can from what you’ve got. We’d be a bit bonkers to use the negative stuff.”

The lesson to critics is obviously to beware what you write. And to punters, beware what you believe and buy as a result. Actually, there’s far more to the story than even meets The Times’ eye. Sometimes you will see a billboard with an apparently entire review being published on it, but I have had these to my name twice outside West End theatres in the last few years, and the negative comments have been surreptitiously deleted, so they’re not quite complete.

Again, beware the review quote that isn’t by-lined: you may well think that the quote comes from the paper’s theatre review, whereas in fact it comes from a columnist elsewhere in the paper. I was baffled when a favourable review appeared outside the Dawn French play My Brilliant Divorce attributed to the Sunday Express; but when I queried it — since I had definitely not written those words — I discovered they appeared in a column that Vanessa Feltz had written in the paper. Ditto, right now, there’s a bit quote outside Footloose attributed to the Sunday Express, but it didn’t come from my review; it came from the paper’s film critic, Henry Fitzherbert. Then there are the quotes that are personally attributed to me, except that I didn’t write them: it has frequently happened to me that words that appear in the headline – that I don’t write myself – have appeared front-of-house personally ascribed to me.

And beware the shows, too, that are so desperate for a quote, any quote, that they resort to using “puff” lines from sources like Sky News or an obscure website somewhere.

No one minds being quoted on something they truly endorse. One of the joys of the job is trying to encourage people to see shows you like, and if that means using your words to do so, that’s fine by me, as long as they’re quoted in context and in full, and properly attributed. The drama section of the Critics’ Circle – our own trade body, currently chaired by the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer — tries to stay vigilant about this, and regularly writes to producers who breach the protocol on using quotes accurately. But we’re running to keep up right now.

Vaclav Havel’s career – playwright, dissident, prisoner of the Czechoslovakian state, then its President – is surely one of the most remarkable embodiments of the collisions of the personal, the political and the theatrical, in which each has fed the other. While British playwrights, from Pinter to Hare, have been variously outspoken in opposition to government, they’ve never actually aspired to rule themselves (though the same isn’t true of some of our actors, like Glenda Jackson who effected a mid-career switch from leading actor to MP). Now Havel has come full circle to appear, variously disguised, in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll that has just transferred to the Duke of York’s after its sell-out Royal Court season.

In an interview in the Daily Telegraph last week, Havel spoke of his long friendship with Stoppard that goes back to the 60s, when Havel – then working at the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague — was planning to stage Rosencrantz and Guildestern Are Dead there. “In the end, we didn’t put the play on – perhaps some higher power intervened to stop it – but we gradually became friends, and, during the times I was in prison, Tom did a lot of publicity in my defence. When freedom came, we met and corresponded more frequently.”

Stoppard sought out Havel’s help and opinion on Rock n’ Roll. “He queried me on various details to round out his already considerable knowledge. Tom then sent me the manuscript, and wanted me to approve, or add material, or to correct things. I refused because it’s a special kind of literary fiction, and it seemed inappropriate for me to add anything.”

But what was Havel’s verdict on the result, that he saw on the Royal Court first night? “It strikes me as a very sophisticated work,” he says. But though there’s a character called Ferda – based on a non-conformist character that Havel created in his own image in a trilogy of one-act plays that he wrote for private performance – Havel insists, “They were one-dimensional, half-joking plays, written out of camaraderie; they weren’t comparable to the genre and intentions of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” He adds, “It’s hard to say that one of another of the characters is a portrait of me. Several of the characters share qualities and ideas that might be attributed to me.”

The interview certainly adds an extra dimension of interest to the already fascinating personal background to Stoppard’s play. Since I have not seen it myself since the very first preview, as I reported here, I am going to see it again next week.

I blogged earlier this week about the temperature readings the Evening Standard took on the tube and the buses, and said that “I’d love the Standard to run the same temperature reading exercise inside London theatres”. Either someone there is reading this avidly, or they may have thought about this themselves, but yesterday’s Standard duly headlined: “We’re all sweltering, and it’s not just Jeffrey Bernard feeling unwell….” Readings were duly taken at the Garrick, home of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, where they found an actual temperature of 35.5C (87F), which converts to an “experienced apparent temperature” (combining temperature and humidity readings) of 39.53C (103F). The exercise was repeated at the Prince of Wales, home of Mamma Mia!, where temperatures of 32.2C (89.8F) regular, or 34.99C (94.9F) on their alternative reading, were recorded.

What they don’t say, however, is exactly where these readings were taken; heat, of course, rises, so pity the poor folk in the upper circle (or back of the dress, since the Prince of Wales doesn’t have an upper). But frankly, when theatregoers are paying up to £45 for Jeffrey Bernard and £55 for Mamma Mia!, the least they can expect is some modern-day comfort. It’s not like air conditioning is new technology. And age and antiquity of the theatre is no excuse, either: the Prince of Wales was only recently completely (and beautifully) refurbished.

As one punter tells the Evening Standard about her visit to Mamma Mia!, “We had to go out at the interval to buy some water. When we booked we hoped the theatre would be air-conditioned. We took it for granted.” But in London theatreland, just as with the British summer, you can never take anything for granted.

London is sometimes a dangerous place: you hear of stabbings all the time. Not too long ago, a young city solicitor was set upon just a few metres from his home in Kensal Green and stabbed to death in a case that made national headlines. And last night, I was witness to another stabbing, a mile or so away, on the Kilburn High Road. But this one happened inside the Tricycle Theatre, and was self-inflicted by Marc Salem, the American psychologist and professor turned popular entertainer, in a trick that went violently wrong, though not, at least, with fatal consequences.

Theatre, of course, is often a high-wire act, and some nights may fly while others crash – but there usually isn’t any real danger attached, except perhaps to the actors’ vanity and the audience’s patience; blood may be spilt, but it will usually be the Kensington Gore variety, not from the actors’ veins.

But last night, at the premiere of Salem’s latest show On Second Thoughts (and he may well be having a few himself, now) at the Tricycle Theatre, he did a “trick” I hadn’t seen him do before that involved a sharp knife being placed upright underneath one of three soft cardboard cylinders by an audience member. Salem told him to deny that the knife was under each of them in turn, and from his responses, Salem was going to work out where the knife wasn’t, and use his left hand to crush those two empty cylinders. (He had earlier warned the volunteer that the knife had to be put completely upright, because on a previous occasion it was put at a slant and as he crushed one cylinder he hit the adjoining one and the knife went into him). Except that this time his finely calibrated judgements failed him, and he brought his hand down on a cylinder actually containing the knife.

While this proved that the trick is absolutely for real – don’t try this at home, folks! – it both established the authenticity of the occasion but also fatally broke the trust that we put in his abilities. I am still both perplexed and astonished by what he does; but now I’m also on edge as never before. So was his London producer Andrew Fell, who came to his rescue with some bandages last night. He watched the rest of the show last night sitting behind me, and afterwards I wondered aloud to him whether it would affect his insurance premiums. In fact, his insurer was actually watching the same very performance…..

In the midst of London’s current heatwave, the Evening Standard reported yesterday that commuters on the tubes and buses are being transported at twice the limit for cattle, with the paper recording temperatures of 52C on buses and 47C on tubes in readings that combine heat and humidity. It’s clearly no fun being above or below ground on public transport; but if your destination is the theatre, your agony may be even more prolonged. Just as the tube’s ailing, failing infrastructure doesn’t allow for the easy installation of air conditioning – though other world capitals have had no such problems with their underground systems – so many of London’s theatres also signally lack a comfort factor of much more than the rudimentary ventilation systems that they originally opened with up to a hundred years earlier. Sometimes, it’s simply called opening a window. And the velvet warmth of many West End houses seems to simply soak up and hold the heat; conditions at last week’s press opening of The Canterbury Tales got pretty steamy, as I blogged here last week, and that was before it was even as hot as it is now.

Mind you, someone left the heating on last night at Shakespeare’s Globe, too – I kid you not. The theatre may be outdoors already, so the temperature is outside of their immediate control, but it certainly feels like its being amplified by the auditorium lighting that in this space is left on throughout, so that we share the same lighting space as the actors onstage and there is no division between us.

I’d love the Standard to run the same temperature reading exercise inside London theatres. Even the London Coliseum, that had £41m spent on it in its refurbishment, didn’t stretch to the extra “cool” million (in every sense) that might have been required to install a full air-conditioning system. Instead, there’s an old-fashioned reliance on air-cooling systems that circulate the air already inside the room, and an even more old-fashioned belief that our climate doesn’t really warrant the added expense. True, we only get these kinds of temperatures for relatively short periods; but the theatre is a year-round economy, and if it is to preserve that, it’s time for them to arrive in the 20th-century, let alone the 21st, to get us indoors at this time of year. One of the pleasures of going to Broadway theatres in the summer is the fantastic respite it offers from the heat outside.

Regular theatregoers do start to learn where you can safely go in London: the National is usually a safe bet, and the Victoria Palace – home of Billy Elliot – positively chilly. But the unwary may find themselves trapped in a kind of theatrical hell. And if its bad for us, spare a thought, too, for the actors, who are performing under heavy lights and heavier costumes.

After On the Third Day, the winning entry of television-led competition The Play’s the Thing to put on a new play by a previously unproduced playwright in the West End, finally opened last month, I wrote here: “This exposure of the difficulties of producing new plays could yet have its own disastrous postscript: can the play possibly survive for its scheduled 12 week run? And if it can’t, what does that say for the prospects of new talent reaching the West End again?”

And now that it has been announced that its run will be curtailed to close on July 29, not September 2 as originally planned, after a seven week run rather than 12, the surprise now has to be not so much that it is coming off than that it has even run as long as it has. Trumpeting its “success”, producer Sonia Friedman claims, “Plays produced in smaller subsidised theatres which run for six weeks and are seen by smaller audiences than the ones enjoyed by On The Third Day are routinely seen as a success. That is why I believe that a seven-week run for a production of a new play by a first-timer writer in the West End playing to audiences of 51% per cent should be seen as an achievement.”

But few new plays produced in those protected environments – except of course for the Nicole Kidman in-the-nude at the Donmar Warehouse moment a few years ago – have the benefit of the kind of sustained publicity that a four hour TV show afforded this play. The key difference, though, is that runs in those smaller houses are only ever planned to run for four to six weeks; they know that the audience demand for them is usually exhausted within that time, or if its not, further transfer possibilities or extensions may be sought. And that’s, of course, within theatres that know their audience and have built up a relationship and following with them: in the West End, you never know who is going to come through the door.

Of course, the West End has to budget to recoup, and its hard to do so in such a short run – even a star-led vehicle usually needs to run for at least 12 to 14 weeks to recoup its capitalization, so The Play’s the Thing had to be set up with that kind of timetable in mind. But like so much about The Play’s the Thing, from the way the play was actually chosen – from synopsis and scene only – to its patently over-ambitious production schedule, this has all been all about hope over experience. I was talking to the literary manager of a leading new writing theatre yesterday, and he poured scorn on the process – citing, in turn, the scorn towards writers it clearly exhibited. Far from supporting and respecting them, this process was staged for the benefit of the camera, where raised eyebrows and weary expressions behind the writers’ backs might have made good television, but palpably did not lead to the making and nurturing of good theatre. While new writing theatres have a process and experience of handling new plays on their side, The Play’s the Thing offered neither: just the morbid prospect of an expensively produced public hanging that has now come to pass.

Last year Peter Hall celebrated his 75th birthday. While the achievements of his dazzling career, from the original English-language production of Waiting for Godot when he was still in his twenties to founding the RSC in 1960 and running the National Theatre for fifteen years, put him at the front rank of living directors, what’s more amazing still is his seeming indefatigability that is seeing him even now tirelessly fundraising to complete work on the Rose of Kingston project. But he’s also, above all, a working director still, and for the last four years has made a summer home at Bath’s glorious Theatre Royal.

I went down on Saturday to see the two productions he is directing himself this year, Measure for Measure (that will return him to Stratford-upon-Avon when it goes there as part of the Complete Works festival) and Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus. While Shakespeare has long been his natural home, he’s never directed Measure for Measure in the UK before, so it was a kind of homecoming for him to finally do so here, in a production of enormous clarity and unfussy strength, a striking contrast to the constant directorial interventions of Simon McBurney’s recent Complicite version that was seen twice at the National. And it was also fun to see Hall let his hair down, so to speak, on Bennett’s classic comedy, though truth to tell comedy is not Hall’s strong suit.

Still, it’s fantastic that Hall still has a regular, annual home in Britain; but it will even better when he is finally able to open the Rose and realise another in his long list of accomplishments.

After the 25-minute Eh Joe (ending its run at the Duke of York’s tomorrow), and its top price of £20, the epic, two-part and nearly six hour new RSC adaptation of The Canterbury Tales is at the other extreme, and comparatively speaking, at least in terms of time and population, rather better value. The Duke of York’s merely offers the sight of a solitary – and mute — Michael Gambon, listening to the voice of Penelope Wilton for £20; whereas the RSC offers twenty actors, plus three musicians, for a top price of £41 for each show, or up to £65 for both parts if bought at the same time. (You can also see each for as little as £11 or £17 for the pair).

But the production costs must be far higher, and it’s a mighty commercial gamble that Bill Kenwright and Thelma Holt have taken on transferring this production to the West End. The pair have been the saviour of the RSC in the past, transferring Doran’s previous biggest RSC project, the Olivier Award winning 2002 Jacobean season, to the Gielgud as well, and losing in excess of a £1m in the process. But in return, they also secured Judi Dench’s sell-out Shakespearean return in All’s Well that Ends Well to the Gielgud that followed; and must now be hoping for Dench’s next RSC show, Merry Wives – the Musical.

Though press performances are not always representative of a typical audience, of course, yesterday’s double-bill suggested that boldness sometimes pays: certainly the stalls was full to the back for both performances, and I noticed that the upper circle entrance was also open. There’s always been a public appetite for ‘event theatre’, and if this can be marketed as such, it may well succeed.

But it’s also a huge commitment of time and effort, especially in the comparative discomfort of the as yet not fully refurbished Gielgud Theatre. “It is now our intention to restore the Gielgud to its former glory”, writes theatre owner Cameron Mackintosh in the programme. But he adds ominously, “This is likely to be a longer process than we have so far achieved as we will be working around future productions.”

On a hot day like yesterday, conditions became stultifying – I noted one of my newer colleagues entirely slumped down in his seat, his neck resting on the back of it as if he’d entirely passed out, which I hope is more to do with the heat than his view of the show. But sometimes the conditions you watch a show in are as significant to your enjoyment as the production itself. It’s hard to be inspired when you’re expiring. I hope the production doesn’t follow suite as a result. Cameron Mackintosh is to be commended for doing more for his theatres than any other theatre owner in town; but air conditioning is the single biggest priority as we have hotter and hotter summers.

A producer may finally take heart from the Standard’s curmudgeonly pair of Nick’s: even though Nick Curtis, standing in for de Jongh a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t exactly generous in his review and star rating of Avenue Q, the show nevertheless made the “Top Five Plays” box that cuts some editorial into the daily listings pages yesterday. In the age of the star rating, even a two-star review is obviously not as severe as it seems. But it surely also loses meaning if a two-star show finds itself named one of the top five a week or two later in the same paper.

The trouble with star ratings, of course, is that they don’t admit nuance and flavour; they’re simply a thumbs up or thumbs down (or, in the case of the three star review, a thumb in the middle). But as Avenue Q here proves, a thumb can change direction haphazardly, too.

It’s certainly true that star ratings are a convenient shorthand in our time-poor times for people to attempt to get a sense of the prevailing critical opinion without having to actually read the words, and various papers — the Guardian and Sunday Telegraph amongst them — do a weekly digest of the major reviews that aggregate them without having to review a single one. But since critics openly contradict each other, too — the current Royal Court Theatre Upstairs production of Woman and Scarecrow has run the gamut from one star (the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts) and two (the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner) to four (the Standard’s Fiona Mountford) — there really is no substitute for actually reading them, and ultimately making your own mind up about who to follow.

I blame Twyla Tharp. Yes, it’s true that I do have “The Stranger” and “Piano Man” on vinyl, not CD, so I go a long way back with Billy Joel, to my teenage days growing up in late 70s South Africa; but it was Movin’ Out that re-awakened my interests in Joel’s melodic and narrative gifts. So when it was announced that he would be appearing live in London for the first time in years — his previously announced joint appearance with Elton John, scheduled in 1998 was aborted when he fell ill — I went online the first day that booking opened and got myself a ticket — at a whopping £75 plus booking fee that took it to £83.25. (And people balk at West End prices!!) But at least it was for a seat on the floor of Wembley Arena, only 17 rows back, not in the back of beyond where they helpfully have to provide giant TV screens so the audience can actually see the person on the stage as more than a mere dot on the horizon.

But going to the gig last night reminded me of why I don’t go to gigs. For a start, that seat isn’t so much a seat as a plastic fold-down square, and of course, the moment the lights went down, the audience went up and the seat turned into standing room for the rest of the evening (People seated on the side blocks seemed to stay seated, but they had the unlucky experience of spending half the gig peering at the back of Joel’s head, since he was seated at the piano almost throughout; though he and the piano was positioned on a revolve so occasionally they swivelled it around and gave the other side the rear view). And the aircraft repair hangar-like Wembley Arena, even in its supposedly refurbished state, has all the charm and atmosphere of an abattoir. Which is kind of appropriate, since it made me want to kill.

And Joel, for his part, seemed merely to be going through the motions, rather than the emotions, of his songs. Sure, he’s sung them a million times before, and it must be wearying to revisit the same repertoire again and again. Concert life for him is a kind of permanent groundhog day. But that’s also where the comparison with Movin’ Out, the show, finds him so lacking. Whereas that provided a vibrant and exciting new context for the songs to find new meaning in, and also a visually beguiling form of dance to resonate against, Joel’s own live show hasn’t got much in the way of visual distraction or variety. And next to the stonking live onstage band of Movin’ Out, his concert show even sounded musically undernourished. Could it be an additional heresy to suggest that the Piano Man of Movin’ Out — Michael Cavanaugh on Broadway an James Fox over here — actually brought more power to the songs, too, than Joel does? And Tharp also definitely chose the pick of Joel’s bunch of songs, not some of the dodgier hits; by the time Joel got to ‘Spanish Harlem’ , I was ready to leave, and did.

Yet Wembley Arena was packed to the rafters last night, and it made me wonder: where were all these fans when Movin’ Out was limping to an early grave at the Apollo Victoria? Of course, they didn’t get their idol in person there — and the point of rock gigs is, no doubt, the communal experience of re-visiting songs you’ve grown up with, being performed by the artist who created them — but as far as this fan was concerned, I got something more, much more, from Movin’ Out than I did last night. Tharp’s next show, The Times They Are A-Changin, set to the songs of Bob Dylan, has just announced its Broadway bow for October 26 (at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, following previews from September 25), following a try-out at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre at the start of this year, and I for one can’t wait. But I won’t be rushing to see Dylan live afterwards this time.

Last week’s news that Robyn Archer has resigned as artistic director of Liverpool’s year as 2008 European Capital of Culture, citing what were referred in The Guardian to as “personal reasons” following concerns over “the health of her elderly mother in Australia”, has left a big hole in the programming there. “It increasingly seems that Merseyside may have a fiasco on its hands,” declared The Independent. Going on to write about Liverpool’s difficulties in lining up events and venues for the festivities, the Independent’s story cites how she has been “an elusive figure to many”, and that there was “widespread resistance to the kind of artistic programming she was developing.”

Whatever the truth of the situation, matching civic and artistic aspirations for events of this kind is always a fine balancing act. When I had lunch with Brian McMaster the week before last, prior to his fifteenth and final year at the helm of the Edinburgh International Festival, he reiterated that the programme is ultimately about the taste of one person: himself.

Personally, I was intrigued by what Archer, a performer as well as previously a director of festivals in Melbourne and Adelaide at home, would have brought to the festival. At the Adelaide Cabaret Festival (that she merely appeared at, rather than curated) in 2004, she gave me one of the greatest cabaret events of my lifetime in a solo performance – in every sense – entitled Whispering.

If the essence of great cabaret is to make the spectator feel like the performance is being directed at them alone in an ecstatic embrace of shared intimacy, then this event – more an encounter than a show — took that idea as far as it could possibly go: it was literally a one-on-one cabaret experience. After being led on my own by a uniformed female maitre d’ into a darkened, deserted cabaret space, and shown to a table, I was offered a glass of champagne. The only other human presence appears to a pianist, gently tinkling the ivories in the background. I was then presented with a menu, which contained a list of eleven songs from which I was invited to choose to ear one performed. The maitre d’ took my ‘order’ – I chose the Gershwin classic, ‘Our ove is Here to Stay’ — and disappeared. Out of the shadows, a singer appeared. She wandered slowly over to the pianist, whispered to him what my choice was, and then she came over and sat down at the table right next to me. Holding my gaze, she started to sing. After a couple of minutes of the most sustained intensity – a transaction that merely comprised a singer, a pianist, a song and me – it went even further. She invited me to dance with her as she continued singing. As the song concluded, she gestured for you to sit down again, kissed my hand and disappeared into the shadows from which she’d come once again.

Archer is a one-of-a-kind cabaret artist, as anyone who was lucky enough to see her bring a one-woman show, A Star is Torn, to Wyndham’s Theatre in 1982 can testify. But while that show superbly recreated some performance greats, from Garland to Holliday, here she distilled a lifetime of cabaret experience into as brief, personal, ecstatic and unforgettable an encounter as I think I’ll ever have.

But what of Liverpool now? Perhaps Brian McMaster could come to the rescue now that he’s departing Edinburgh. The Guardian report that the Liverpool Culture Company – an offshoot of the city council charged with running the event – “will have to decide whether to hunt for a new director or rely on consultants”. Not entrusting it to an individual could lead to a disparate disaster, with no sense of identity at all – but any individual who takes it on will also have to know how to play the corporate and council game of juggling the demands of the various vested interests in it.

Even as Disney proudly boasts of having set the house box office record last week with a take of $1,225,189 for their production of The Lion King at its new Broadway home the Minskoff, where it moved from the New Amsterdam last month, the same week saw attendances on its newest show, Tarzan, sliding in capacity by over 5%, from 97.5% to 92.4%, though curiously its box office take actually went up a bit, from $816,598 to $820,348, which suggests fewer discounts being offered. In fact, Disney’s third current attraction on Broadway, Beauty and the Beast, still holding its own after some 12 years on the Rialto, is currently being seen by more people — 11,180 – than Tarzan’s 9,754.

No wonder the wags are already talking. In the New York Post, Michael Riedel claimed on Wednesday that “Around Broadway, the word is that show, which was pummeled by critics and snubbed by the Tonys (it got a single measly nomination for Natasha Katz’s lighting), is in serious trouble” and “could wind up being Disney’s first mega-flop in the New York”.

Disney, however, deny such doom-mongering. “Speculation always runs amok when there are so few theaters available,” Disney Theatrical’s Managing Director David Schrader is quoted as saying. “But because we came in with such a strong advance, the glass, we think, is very much half full. I don’t mean to say our work is done. We look at the numbers every day. But we’re building word of mouth.”

And it’s putting its faith in the audience, who ultimately decide. On exit surveys, they have discovered that, “people are responding to it. It looks fun, and they like the music, which is not your typical Broadway music. What’s really interesting is the range of people we’re getting - families, corporate types, lots of 9-year old boys who like the adventure aspect of the show. It’s not just one audience, and that’s a really good sign.”

But the figures in the coming months will speak for themselves as to whether those signs are translating into real box office clout. In New York, you can run a show but you can’t hide from the figures – and without them riding high, you can’t run, either.

A lot of time, energy and money is spent by theatre companies on getting the press to bite their PR bullet and write about them, whether in news, feature or review coverage. Yesterday, we were lured to the “almost ready” new Young Vic for what was called a special press briefing to announce the opening season; but though no one told us we were going to see the theatre itself, you could feel the anticipation in the room dispel the moment that David Lan told us we were not going to be shown inside, but were going no further than the shell of the new “Maria” studio that the press event was being held in – and instead would merely hear of the opening slate of productions.

No wonder there was a nearly unanimous silence when, after outlining that season and inviting his key personnel to join him on stage, Lan asked for questions, and just two journalists – I was one – actually asked them. The theatre would have given us something tangible to see; as it is, we had only heard of the promise of things to come, and Lan outlined them in such detail there was nothing left to ask.

Nevertheless, I was curious about the naming of the theatre’s two new studios as the Clare and Maria, in honour of the late director and designer of those names respectively, Venables and Bjornson; what had either of them done at the theatre? Lan replied merely that they had “inspired us” – though only Bjornson had actually done some work there, at the start of her career. But while the sentiment is honourable, I wonder why the honour wasn’t accorded to artists with a more intimate connection to the theatre – say, founding director Frank Dunlop, or David Thacker, who did so keep the theatre on the map in the 80s?

Later in the day, I found myself tussling with two venues about seeing their shows. The now annual Peter Hall season in Bath is a serious treat, in every sense, and invariably a pleasure to attend. But it’s quite a commitment to go: staged as a mini-festival, three productions open over two days next Wednesday and Thursday, so you have to stay over – an expense I don’t usually run to! But also this year the RSC two-part Canterbury Tales has now ignored Hall’s prior claim to the day and scheduled a clash against it, also transferring to the West End to open on the same Thursday; though such an unfriendly gesture – especially against the RSC’s founding artistic director – is surprising, it also throws a Sunday newspaper journalist like me into disarray: since I can’t be in both places at once, I have to choose between them as to who gets covered in that weekend’s paper. The West End has to come first in those circumstances, but I’ll do right by Bath by going there on Saturday week instead, and write about it the week after.

Then I got an e-mail from Jermyn Street Theatre’s indefatigable and combative administrator Penny Horner, who have a new production opening this week but are having great trouble drawing critics there. She wrote, “Jermyn Street Theatre is rapidly disappearing from sight of everyone in the reviewing world! Just to let you know that if it carries on in this vein (i:e no-one bothering to show up) we will be closed down by next year!! So much for 12 years hard work. What for?? What do we have to do to get ANYONE to show up here to review our productions!! Put that on your BLOG!”

I am duly obliging. I have to admit I’ve not been to Jermyn Street for a while myself. But there’s no magic formula to what gets me (or my colleagues) interested in attending, except a combination of past experience and future hope (which you can’t quantify, but the Menier, for instance, seems to have at the moment: we’ve had good times there before, so we can justifiably hope for more of the same next time around, and even if not, there’s the prospect of a good meal in the restaurant beforehand to lure us). And then of course we also have to weigh what else is around that needs to be covered, too: there are approximately 105 venues in London, and only five working nights a week (although I often go out on Saturdays and Sundays, too), so we can’t go to everything. Choices have to be made. And not just for time reasons, but also for space: even though I do see a lot, I don’t usually have the space to do it all justice in.

Going to the theatre four (or more) times a week — and I sometimes go six or seven — as a critic has to be more than a job; it is a passion, even an addiction. I was speaking to Bill Kenwright a few weeks ago — a man not without his own obsessive-compulsive passions of his own, in particular for football — and when he asked me what I was seeing that weekend, he eloquently replied, “You’re a f*ing junkie!” Actually, I don’t deny it; the great thing about being a critic is I get someone to pay for my habit! (I have what they call in the therapy business lots of “enablers”). But I was doing this even before I was a critic; for as long as I can remember, I consumed theatre as avidly as I do now. God knows how I would afford to sustain it now, though, if I wasn’t going (mostly) for free.

Most of my tribe no doubt feel the same; a few weeks ago I spoke to one of them who told me he had an evening in and really didn’t know what to do with himself; it was a very unfamiliar sensation. Reviewing On the Third Day (the winning entry out of Channel 4’s The Play’s The Thing series) in the Sunday Times last weekend, Robert Hewison noted, “A theatre critic who watches too much television isn’t doing the job, so I have missed The Play’s The Thing”. I hardly watch any television at all myself, and though it does mean I miss out on “water cooler” chat, since I don’t have an office water cooler to collect around, that’s not usually a hardship. But it does mean that I’m not as well plugged into popular culture as I ought to be.

How many of us critics, however, go to the theatre for sheer pleasure, not just work? Yesterday afternoon I went to see Southwark Fair at the National again, it’s penultimate performance, and ran into Alastair Macaulay, the FT’s chief theatre critic, who like me was catching it one more time before it closed. When I first got to know Alastair a few years ago, he marked me out as a fellow enthusiast in the critical pack who will sometimes go to the theatre for the pleasure of doing so, so it was not surprising to find him back at the National like I was. This was not a play, moreover, that had been universally admired by our colleagues; but we both had loved it, and were putting our time where our mouths (and pens) had been to see it again.

Freed from the constraints of having to form an opinion this time around, we were able to simply sit back and enjoy; and Samuel Adamson’s beautifully textured and layered play admits you to its intensely observed panorama of South Bank life even more richly the second time around. You also have the pleasure of seeing performances that had grown, too, over the course of the run; Rory Kinnear, so good the first time, was now simply sublime, and the fantastic reunion scene with a former lover, based on a case of mistaken identity, was newly charged with fresh pain, embarrassment and irritation.

Wayne Rooney may still be on the warpath, according to yeserday’s Standard, after being given a red card that sent him off during the World Cup match on Saturday, but West End theatre producers may be quietly breathing a sigh of relief: now audiences can come back to the theatre undistracted by the competition. One producer I spoke to last week bemoaned that he’d never seen it so bad in town, and vowed to me that he would never produce against in the summer because the fight was just too big. Yet — in the absence of reported box office figures, which producers here do not make available unlike their American counterparts — we have to rely merely on anedcotal or the personal evidence of our eyes.

I was duly surprised to attend Saturday 7pm performance of Michael Gambon in the half-hour Beckett play Eh Joe with a very substantial audience, even as that fateful match was being played off. I thought that this was going to be a hard sell at the best of times — how do you sell half an hour’s worth of theatre, in which Gambon sits mostly motionless and doesn’t utter a word all evening but whose face, simultaneously being projected onto a screen, simply reacts to what he’s hearing of a taped voice? But an audience was there for him. Perhaps, it could be argued, that the audience for Beckett and the World Cup football are rather different animals.

And last night I also finally caught up with Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at the Apollo, with Juliette Lewis and Martin Henderson — the now annual attempt of American (or America-based) screen actors to claim legitimacy, in every sense, on the London stage. I thought London audiences might have tired of this trick by now, and in any case, the stars are not that big. Nor were most of the reviews of my colleagues that encouraging, either. Yet the stalls was entirely packed, and on a very hot night too, which is another reason often cited for keeping audiences out, in every sense. (Given the lack of airconditioning in so many theatres, the decrepit Apollo amongst them, it’s not exactly a comfortable place to be). But against these odds — and minus the further distraction now of the World Cup — it is clearly holding its own at the box office. Good for them. There is sometimes no guessing what makes a popular hit; but the evidence last night clearly proved that I should not have discounted the appeal of this show or its stars.

It’s a critical edict that you should never make assumptions about any play you are going to see before you actually do so. But it’s sometimes tempting: when the leaflet copy begins, “It’s the eve of Europride and Nigel and Jamie’s tenth anniversary,” your heart sinks. Here we go, I thought, another Gay Pride play that will use the festivities of that day to uncover some not-so-proud moments about our lives as gay men and our relationships with each other.

But Matthew Todd’s play Blowing Whistles, is actually worth blowing a whistle for, rather than blowing the whistle on, for it cuts deeper and more meaningfully below the surface glitter of a lifestyle of sex-on-demand to shine a critical torch on a relationship that’s only being tenuously held together by those easy distractions. Todd, whose first play this is, is associate editor of Attitude magazine that is part of the “lifestyle” culture that his play criticises, so he knows whereof he speaks; but he also knows that the ‘commercialisation’ and ready availability of that culture has come at a great personal cost. In the midst of this weekend’s Europride festival that saw the streets of Soho teeming with gay partygoers and refreshingly outnumbering the football fans, this play was a chastening and welcome reminder of the true meaning of Gay Pride, which is to be proud in yourself.

When Neil Henry’s Jamie finally makes an attempt to reclaim his self-respect from his philandering, neglectful boyfriend Nigel (Joe Fredericks), it’s a sad but triumphantly truthful moment for self-pride to assert itself. It may be an unfashionable message in the midst of the party celebrations, but it’s one worth cheering for.

A cross feature in today’s Guardian from columnist Martin Kettle rails against two shows that have just opened in London: Katie Mitchell’s production of the Chekhov’s The Seagull in a new version by Martin Crimp at the National Theatre, and Mark Morris’s new staging of King Arthur for English National Opera at the London Coliseum. As it happens, I saw them both myself on consecutive nights this week, The Seagull two nights after press night.

Though both past experience of MItchell (and Crimp’s) work and the reviews of my colleagues had prepared me for a Seagull quite unlike any other I had previously seen, I found it a compellingly dark (in every sense; Mitchell likes to play things in a naturalistic gloom) and characteristically intriguing take on a classic play. It’s by no means a definitive account of the play; but as filtered through the sensibilities (if not sensitivities) of its creators, it asks fresh questions of the play and our response to it.

Quoting Crimp’s intentions (in the published text to his version), as being “to strip away some of the apparatus of 19th-century drama, with the aim of making the play fully connect with a contemporary audience”, Kettle, however, complains that — since the action has been shunted forward in time but fails to acknowledge the political changes of Russia over that period — “we are left with an updating that floats free of history, and is thus fundamentally misleading. In the ostensible cause of fully connecting with a contemporary audience, Crimp disconnects from reality — and from Chekhov.”

Kettle allows that “some of the most brilliant productions involve updating” — and cites Baz Luhrmann’s film of Romeo + Juliet, and Jonathan Miller’s Little Italy Rigoletto and his art deco version of The Mikado as evidence — but goes on, “Some writers’ work lends itself better to such treatment than others — and these distinctions should be respected. It always requires a sure grasp of history — theatrical as well as political and social — to play with a text in this way. Get it right, stay historically disciplined, and the right piece can be enhanced. Get it wrong, as Crimp has done, and you breach disciplines that are sacred. Do that and you become part of the turgid postmodern heresy (sanctioned by too many artistic managements) that says that, in the end, the writer’s is only one view of the piece.”

He then goes on to cite ENO’s new version of King Arthur as the latest example of a production that advances this argument: “it is a production that basically tells us that Purcell’s piece cannot be trusted to work without the radical intercession of the director.” Again, Kettle quotes Morris himself in the programme saying, “I chose to discard the spoken text (which I don’t like) and keep all of the music (which I do)”. But for Kettle, “you must trust the playwrights and composers to be the best judges of their own cases. But in today’s directorland, that presumupotion of authority has been overturned. Chekhov, Purcell, and their luckless like have been relegated to optional, even inconvenient, extras. They have become artistic hostages in the hands of overindulged meddlers”. He concludes, “It is time that writers and composers were rescued from such deluded captors.”

Some work, however, needs to be freed from overprotective authorities that only want them to be seen in one way. Samuel Beckett, of course, has famously injuncted that his own work can only be seen as he prescribed them to be done, and since he measured out every beat and movement in his stage directions, there is only one way to do them. Even the stage version of his 1966 play Eh Joe, originally written for TV, that is currently having its London stage premiere at the Duke of York’s (to 15 July) is faithful to the way he notated it, since the actor (MIchael Gambon in this case) has his face projected onto a scrim so that he’s ready for his close-up when Mr Beckett requires it to be. But when Fiona Shaw and her director Deborah Warner famously turned Footfalls into an enviromental piece of theatre that took place in different locations around the Garrick, it fell foul of the Beckett strictures that it take place in a clearly defined space (the actress was supposed to pace “downstage, parallel with front, length nine steps, width one metre, a little off centre audience right.” ) A subsequent tour of the production was banned.

But this wasn’t the only time the Beckett estate has sought to intervene to insist on the author’s precise instructions being obeyed. In 2003, the estate threatened to close a production of Waiting for Godot in Australia because the director Neil Armfeld had added music to it. Armeld subseqauently commented, “In coming here with its narrow prescription, its dead controlling hand, its list of ‘not alloweds,’ the Beckett estate seems to me to be the enemy of art.”

Not everyone agrees. Playwrights, as you might expect, rally to the support of other playwrights. In a feature in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Edward Albee commented, “There is something called copyright. When you have written a play you copyright it, which means that not a word may be used without your permission and without you being paid, and no changes are permitted. American contracts say very specifically not a word may be changed … without a playwright’s permission. Every playwright has this protection. Beckett, if you read his plays carefully, is so specific and clear — and I’ve directed several of his plays — and so right — he is so right on target that not only is it illegal to do other than what he wants — it is also foolish.”

But perhaps there’s a balance to be struck between wholesale disapproval of a new way of looking at something and giving it a fresh lease of life. Chekhov, like Shakespeare, is so frequently performed that his work can surely withstand a fresh approach; his work has also been so absorbed into the culture now that it doesn’t suffer (though audiences may) the occasional diversion. Even if it doesn’t work, there’ll be another production soon to banish its memory. With King Arthur, however, Purcell fans may justifiably complain that its not seen often enough to have its one English opera house showing compromised in the way it has been. On the other hand, work is only done when artists want to do it; and since Morris had found a way of doing it that meant he could do it at all, perhaps that fact should be celebrated.