August 2006 Archives

Seeing bad shows obviously doesn’t stop after you leave Edinburgh. It’s an occupational hazard of being a critic, I know, where no (mental) health and safety laws exist as far as entertainment thresholds go to be reached or breached. But sometimes a show is so bad that you wonder how it ever got near a paying, let alone a critical, public, especially one that comes under the umbrella of an artistically-led organisation.

I’ve been pondering whether to name, and duly shame, the organisation concerned. On the one hand, the work in question is so raw, shapeless and formless that it truly defies criticism, and it is produced by a young company – who are evidently just a notch up from youth theatre – whose efforts I don’t want to crush completely. It’s difficult not to sound patronising by suggesting that giving kids a forum for their artistic (and political) expression is a noble ambition, but subjecting the paying public to it is another matter. So, on the other hand, I would be failing in my journalistic duty if I don’t warn readers off from spending their time (and money) there.

So here goes. Admittedly, the omens were not good going in to BAC’s Studio 2. The title may give you pause: “Hitler Wrote 20 Pop Songs… Have You Heard them?” And the inauspiciously named company presenting it call themselves Theatre de Cunt. Obviously they’re setting their stall at being provocative. But the programme suggests loftier ambitions: “Their work is a blend of satire, politics, theatre, humour, street ballet and hip-hop”, it says. “Their aim is to create a new style of musical theatre to inspire a new audience.” And it therefore compels you to ask if it succeeds in any of those ambitions. Sadly, the answer is not at all.

BAC’s press office admittedly tried to fend my attempts to see it off at the pass, suddenly announcing it was being re-branded as a comedy sketch-show rather than a theatre one; but even on those more limited terms, it fails since it is simply excruciatingly free of laughs, even though there are lots of attempts at tasteless comedy about terrorism, racism, mental illness, immigration and oral sex, amongst other things.

BAC’s programme – which advertised it as “a fast, aggressive satire on the state of the nation” from “a terrifyingly young company” – has unduly promoted it as part of the kind of innovative work BAC is famous for supporting. But it does no one any favours to expose it in its current tasteless, shapeless form; it either needs to be kicked into shape or kicked into touch. BAC are famous for their developmental process with artists; but this show and these performers have been shown long before they are ready, which on the current reckoning, they may well never be.

I have been to theatres everywhere from Adelaide in Australia to Stockholm in Sweden, and there isn’t an operating West End or Broadway house I’ve not been in, but somehow, in 27 years of regular theatregoing in London, I have never been to the far end of the District Line and the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch before. This modern, glass-fronted 70s theatre has been in London a little longer than I have – it opened in its current purpose-built premises in 1975, four years before I arrived here — and currently operates as a producing theatre with a resident company of actor-musicians, under the artistic directorship of Bob Carlton, who present eight in-house productions a year. At a time when the work of British director John Doyle is all the rage on Broadway – with his production of Sweeney Todd there about to close this weekend, but to be replaced in October by another of Company – Carlton has been exploring a similar genre of actor/musician shows in a far more unsung way for some years now.

It feels weird to find a new theatre on my doorstep – well, an hour away at any rate, through the Rotherhithe Tunnel and along the A13 – this late in my theatregoing career, but though I have always known of the Queen’s, somehow it sounded far away. Maybe it doesn’t help that if you go by tube, it is indeed quite far away: after the long District Line trek, there’s another 15 minute walk at the other end. But the pleasant surprise is finding a large, comfortable theatre on one level, with good, steeply raked rows that afford good views to everyone, that is being strongly supported by its local community: unlike West End theatres that don’t necessarily feel they belong to anyone, the joy of places like Hornchurch is that the audience and theatre feel like they belong to each other.

The show that finally dragged me there was the premiere of It’s a Fine Life!, a musical scrapbook of the late composer/lyricist Lionel Bart’s rags-to-riches-and-back-again-to-rags life, as told through the songs he wrote for musicals from Oliver! (inevitably) and Blitz! to the show that helped ruin him, Twang!!, even as his own behaviour was set to self-destructive mode. In its current shape, it may not give the Queen’s an immediate West End transfer, but doing an original show like this finally put it on my map, at least.

Meanwhile, earlier yesterday I received details of the full cast for the forthcoming West End musical Dirty Dancing, and was intrigued to see listed amongst the secondary casting someone called Richard O’Brien. I called the PRs to check: was this the Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror fame? It turned out it wasn’t – even though he shares the same name and spelling, he’s an Australian actor who was in the original production there, and therefore doesn’t belong to British Equity that would have prevented the name overlap.

And funnily enough, the British Richard O’Brien was at Hornchurch last night – so I was able to warn him not to be surprised if people started asking him about Dirty Dancing. “I hope he’s good!”, Richard replied. “And cute, too!”, I suggested.

We’re all at it now – blogging, that is. Though it was the Daily Mail’s indefatigable Baz Bamigboye who in his weekly Friday entertainment column first revealed the news that Andrew Lloyd Webber is planning on turning Mikhail Bulgakov’s great Soviet novel The Master and Margarita (written in the 30s but not in fact first published, and then in a highly censored version, until 1966) into his next musical, Lloyd Webber has used a blog on his personal website to clarify and amplify on that statement. It sounds like the revelation may have been somewhat premature: he reveals in one thread, “I obviously have to talk to collaborators before this is possible,” and adds in another, “I am very aware that this will almost certainly be the most ambitious undertaking I have ever embarked upon. It will therefore almost certainly falter and will depend on who my collaborators are. At the moment I have not approached anyone.”

But more intriguing is his vigorous reply to Baz’s other comments that suggest that “working on it will surely help take his mind off the nightmare that is How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, the trainwreck of a show that runs on Saturday night.” Baz suggested that those working on the production are not enamoured with what they have seen on the programme, and so have “contracted actress Emma Williams as an alternate Maria”, to perform two or more performances a week. In addition, says Baz, an understudy has also been hired. Baz suggests, “You can be sure that Ms Williams will end up playing far more than a mere two performances a week,” and adds, “The idea of casting a major West End show through an end-of-the-pier type programme thoroughly debases the theatre. I wouldn’t pay a tiddly five pence to see this Sound of Music, let alone £55. Lloyd Webber certainly wouldn’t cast his own shows – those he has composed himself – in this tawdry manner.”

Lloyd Webber, in turn, has replied that the column – headlined “Webber’s bid to escape Maria’s Trapp” – “was almost complete fiction”. He writes, “It was made clear from the outset that we would contract an ‘alternate’ Maria to play two shows a week in The Sound of Music at the London Palladium. Casting an alternate in a major singing role of this kind has been custom in many West End musicals. I instigated this in 1978 for Evita and also for The Phantom of the Opera.”

It may indeed have been done so for major, operatic “sings” like those two shows require, but Maria is hardly in that league. She has just one solo, the title song; two songs with the children – ‘Do-Re-Mi’ and ‘The Lonely Goatherd’; another with them joined by her husband, ‘Edelweiss’, plus a reprise for ‘So Long, Farewell’; and a couple of duets – ‘My Favourite Things’ with the Mother Abbess and ‘Ordinary Couple’ with Captain von Trapp, plus a reprise of ‘You Are Sixteen’ with Liesl. Mary Martin had no problems handling the workload.

But Lloyd Webber also declares himself to have “total confidence” in the BBC programme “which was my idea and I am loving being a part of it,” so much so that he adds ominously, “I am absolutely prepared to cast my own shows in the same way and am currently planning to do so both in the UK and the USA.”

“Star searches” have always been part and parcel of the magic of theatre – finding and importing Elena Roger in Argentina to headline the revival of Evita here has proved a major calling card – but to continue to use television shows to groom members of the public to play leading roles (and getting the public to choose who wins, too) can only lead to the brand being undermined in the end. This controversy is clearly set to run and run… though the shows might not if it continues.

For last week’s film release of Snakes on a Plane, British film critics were not afforded the customary privilege of an advance screening, so have had to line up with the rest of the cinemagoing public to buy tickets to see it – and pass judgement after the film had already opened. According to a feature in The Guardian last week, this is part of a growing trend in which studios have released a record number of films this year without any screenings for US critics. And according to a separate news story, this wasn’t because it’s a stinker of a film, but rather part of “a deliberate strategy to cash in on the internet frenzy surrounding the movie.”

The web has done their marketing for them – critics, in the scheme of things, don’t matter anymore. And the backlash against critics doesn’t stop there: film critics are not only being actively prevented from doing their job, but their very role is being questioned. As the article says, “The media have been full of stories questioning the relevance of print critics in an internet era that has ushered in a new democratisation of opinion. The prospect of babbling blogmeisters becoming the new kingpins of cinema has’ left many critics in a sour mood. But old-school critics get little sympathy from their internet brethren. The founder of the influential and top-selling magazine Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jarvis, who writes the provocative BuzzMachine media blog, recently suggested that newspapers get rid of their critics, allowing their readers to share their opinions instead. ‘If I launched Entertainment Weekly today, I hope I’d have the sense not to propose starting a magazine by hiring a bunch of critics,’ he said.”

So could the writing be on the wall for critics? The head of marketing at New Line, Russell Schwartz, points out the irrelevance of critics for younger moviegoers, “who want the immediacy of text messages or voice mail. A review from one of their peers is more important than a printed review from a third party they don’t know, which is how they would describe a critic.”

The theatre has been slower to adopt the “new” media age, but as it and its audience increasingly do, there could well be a shift away from the power and influence wielded by critics there, too. Toby Young, pointing out the fact that his play A Right Royal Farce has apparently been playing to full houses at the King’s Head in spite of what the critics said, cheekly wrote in The Guardian this week, “Mind you, this is worrying to us as critics. Our revered profession now looks almost redundant.”

That line, of course, comes from Adelaide’s Lament in Guys and Dolls when she sings of the permanent influenza she seems to suffer from; but somehow it also popped into my head last night watching a play of an altogether different ilk at the ever-enterprising Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court, currently hosting a New British Plays season. The play is called Viral Sutra by David Carter, one of the theatre’s playwrights-in-residence, and it’s one of the most astonishing autobiographical plays you could ever see. Carter, who has spent time in a treatment centre for heroin and crack addiction after contracting the HIV virus in 1998 and subsequently channelled his experiences into a trilogy of plays, has written this one from a point of view literally inside his body. As he says in a programme note, “This is a story about a virus, my virus. It came to live with me on a dark and stormy night in late August 1998.”

He duly appears in the play as a character himself (though played by another actor), with three actors representing viral genomes within him that are jockeying to attach themselves to him and replicate themselves. There have, of course, been numerous plays written about the HIV and AIDS crisis, but none from such a peculiar, and particular, viewpoint.

But Adelaide’s lament about her viral load also came back to haunt me in a memory of a benefit performance for the late Ian Charleson, who died of an AIDS-related illness and had played Sky Masterson in the National’s 1982 production of Guys and Dolls. As Matt Wolf reported in the New York Times in 1994, on that occasion the line “elicited sobs as well as laughter”.

I found myself at Footloose at the Novello again last night, for reasons too complicated to explain (okay, I was curious to see David Essex on stage again: between the original casts of Godspell and Evita – also now coincidentally back in town – he was once a leading man of British musicals as well as a sometime pop idol, both of which were enough to propel his own dreadful musical Mutiny! to the stage of the Piccadilly in 1985, after which he left West End musicals behind him for the next twenty years. But now, considerably older and greyer and paler, too, he’s back, and looking understandably baffled at how it has come to this).

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it confounded some of my expectations and reaffirmed others. For a start, I was amazed to find the house full – to the top of the four level house – on a Tuesday evening. It’s become that West End surprise – an unaffectedly unpretentious summer hit. This is an audience who don’t read or care about what the critics have said. And though The Guardian and Metro, plus my own Sunday Express notice, reflected the spirit in which the show was conceived as a crowd-pleaser in which familiarity sells itself, others were not nearly as complimentary.

But even this critic was shocked at the sloppiness and broadness of the level it is now being played at. That’s another danger with a long runner – it settles into a mediocre familiarity, and there’s no incentive to sharpen it up. But however lazy it has now become, it still knocks the audience’s socks off. I heard a girl enthusiastically phoning a friend in the interval: “It’s fantastic!”

And it reaffirmed another theory I have: that the battle with audiences to any show is to get them through the door in the first place. Once they’re there, they can’t – or won’t — tell the difference between something being done well or not. No wonder standards slip on stage as a result, since audiences, having paid their money, lap it up regardless. It becomes a vicious cycle.

But it’s a pity, since this has the potential to take over the slot formerly occupied by Fame — the Musical as the cross-generational teenager musical hit in town. It’s never going to be a great show, it’s true, but it could be a better one that the one being served up at the Novello at the moment. And soon audiences will have another show in this ilk, Dirty Dancing, to choose instead, when it opens at the other end of the same block. They may vote with their feet, in every sense.

Mel Smith famously tried but then failed to put Scotland’s new rigorous “no smoking in enclosed public spaces” rules to the test at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. As I blogged at the time, these stretch from the new “indoor” bus shelters that have sprung up all along Princes Street (thus blocking the pavements to the narrowest outdoor aperture) to theatre venues, so even though Smith was playing Churchill in a play called Allegiance, he was unable to light his fabled cigar onstage, and had to confine it to an offstage press photo op instead.

But at last night’s Donmar Warehouse opening of Frost/Nixon, Michael Sheen as David Frost does exactly that – and lights up a cigar not only onstage, but also supposedly on a plane as he flies with his producer John Birt (the real one of whom was in attendance last night) from London to the US to set up the famous interview with the former US President. It’s amazing to think of a time when you could smoke on planes, now that you can’t even bring water or toothpaste onto them. (Actually, as someone who flies quite frequently, I am surprised at just how many planes are still in service that have ashtrays in the seats; we complain about the fact that West End seats are rarely renewed, but they only see two or three hours service a night, whereas planes are in constant use and don’t have their fittings changed often, it seems).

But were you ever allowed to smoke cigars on board? Even when smoking has been permitted, I seem to remember that people were discouraged from smoking cigars. In the intimate confines of the Donmar, the smell from just one cigar permeated the stalls.

The bigger smell coming from the Donmar last night, though, was of a big thumping hit: Michael Grandage, the director with a truly golden touch, has – at the helm of only his second original play, after Mark Ravenhill’s The Cut earlier in the year – produced one of London’s most compelling new plays, galvanised by two monumental star performances from Sheen and Broadway actor Frank Langella in the title roles. For Langella, it is third time lucky in London: his first scheduled performance here, with a magic mystery thriller called Abradcadaver in 1990, was aborted out-of-town en route to Wyndham’s; then he walked out himself during his second attempt to tread the boards here in the Old Vic’s 2001 production of Over the Moon, though at least he opened in it. When I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, he frankly admitted of the first, “That was a disaster of epic proportions!”, and then of the second, “That was another disaster – it was 2 for 2, so I’m hoping now that Frost/Nixon is the lucky three.”

I’m sure it is. It can only be a matter of time before the West End and then Broadway beckons with it.

Just as another series of Big Brother reached its climax this weekend and another nonentity becomes an overnight star (and in this case, a poster boy for those suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome), so its effects on other walks of life continues to be felt with television’s first live West End public ‘audition’ continuing in How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? that’s offering the public the chance to choose which one of ten girls should lead the London Palladium revival of The Sound of Music in the autumn as Maria von Trapp.

The adversarial Pop Idol style studio contest isn’t doing its participants any major favours, though. Just as The Play’s the Thing recently proved that choosing a play on the basis of a TV documentary process doesn’t necessarily lead to commercial fortune when the winning play, On The Third Day, quickly closed, so choosing a Maria this way may not so much solve problems as create them. There’s a great deal at stake here, not just the professionalism (or otherwise) of the people in the contest, but also the integrity of the theatrical process itself. Putting them on public display in this demeaning way is no way to encourage raw talent forward; it merely exposes them in a very public way. And the serious training that professional actors put themselves through is completely undermined as well if that can be entirely short-circuited by a process like this.

But some performers are also their own worst enemies. To watch Belinda, knocked out of the show on Saturday, declare “Whatever!”, to the criticisms of one of the judges, Sound of Music producer David Ian, suggests not merely rank arrogance but also utter idiocy. Ian, with co-producer Andrew Lloyd Webber (who has the final say of who stays and who goes from the final two every week), would ultimately be her employer if she won through; and no one is going to employ someone with that sort of attitude.

This may well be the style of Pop Idol – a chance to answer your critics – but in the day-to-day working realities of the theatre, it has rightly knocked her entirely out of the competition, and if she persists with that kind of thinking, could knock her out of the industry forever that she is clearly hoping to join.

There’s also, surprisingly, a complete absence from the show of the one man who will actually have to work with whoever is chosen: the director Jeremy Sams. Whether he is consciously choosing to absent himself from the process, or is being absented, the integrity of both the process and production are both being fatally undermined by this, too.

I’ve already blogged here about how trailers, sent to people’s mobiles, are being used as a new marketing tool for theatre shows in Edinburgh, but now the cinema is using a theatre website to kick off its own marketing campaign: the National Theatre website is offering an exclusive preview of the trailer for the stage-to-film version of The History Boys. Since the play began its life at the National – before going on to Broadway, where it is currently playing at the Broadhurst Theatre, and is about to kick off a second UK national tour in Birmingham from 31 August – and the film features both the original National Theatre cast and is directed by the National’s artistic director Nicholas Hytner, it could be said that they’re simply blowing their own trumpet. But they’re helpfully giving distributors Fox Searchlight Pictures direct access to one of the core constituencies that the film will appeal to, so I wonder if Fox are paying for the privilege….

Meanwhile, I’ve also blogged previously about Toby Young’s shameless trumpeting of his own failures as recently occurred when his latest play A Right Royal Farce (currently at the King’s Head) received a right royal panning, which cleverly seems to put him in a win-win position with regard to whatever happens to him: success can speak for itself it if happens, but if it doesn’t, he can always speak for them himself, thus turning them into another revenue stream for himself and also simultaneously disarming anyone else who wishes to get a blow in (You can’t hit a man when he’s already knocked himself out). In fact, my own blog had clearly breached this piece of protocol, and Toby wrote to me last week to good-naturedly admonish me: “Stop revelling in my failure, you bastard. That’s my job.”

But Toby’s amazing capability of bouncing back has also manifested itself in a no less shameless piece of self-promotion: he has filmed some clips from the play and posted them on YouTube that you can link to from his own website. He told me, “I couldn’t think of a better way to rebut the accusation that the play isn’t funny.” The trouble is that, though there’s a smattering of laughter on the extract I watched, the grainy quality of the video is so poor that it’s difficult to tell what they’re laughing at.

I wish Toby would simply stick to the prose, rather than playwright or now videographer. He has also just sent me an advance copy of his second autobiographical tome, The Sound of No Hands Clapping, that follows his first terrific volume How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. As it chronicles some of his last five years that include his tenure as a theatre critic, there’s some rich pickings here. I’ve only dipped in so far, but I’ve already found some choice passages on Sheridan Morley – who launched an apparent vendetta against Toby when Toby usurped him as theatre critic of The Spectator – and on Rhoda Koenig, who had previously usurped Morley on Punch but gave Toby scant encouragement when they first met. And Toby is also very entertaining about his own foray onto the stage, when he played himself in the stage version of How to Lose Friends… at the Arts Theatre. You have to hand it to him: he has more nerve than anyone I know.

The Edinburgh Fringe may famously be a free-for-all, available to all comers with a chequebook and the nerve (if not talent) to put on a show; and there’s even a seemingly infinite number of spaces to do it in. One of this year’s liveliest new venues is a purple canvas tent in the shape of an upended cow, being promoted by the Underbelly team and therefore wittily called the UdderBelly.

In the West End, it’s also the chequebook that speaks louder than artistic considerations, but there’s only a finite number of houses available, so producers are often vying with each other for space far more competitively and theatre owners take the shows that they hope will yield the biggest returns.

But the summer invariably clears some room for more marginal shows to fill the vacuum that usually opens up when some inevitably fail. And some of those ‘fillers’ sometimes have a habit of turning into hits: hence the long-running success of Dancing in the Streets, which arrived as a July filler at the Cambridge last summer and is now onto its third West End address; and before it, The Rat Pack – Live From Las Vegas that was a Haymarket spring filler in 2003 and then seemed to tour the West End for years thereafter, only finally closing last weekend at the Savoy but still on the lookout to return again to another new home.

Seeing the touring version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers open at the Haymarket last night, I wonder if we’re seeing another example of this phenomenon; with not much in the way of production values or star names, it must be fairly cheap to run, and has a cheerful familiarity that could sell tickets. But is it a West End show? With tickets priced up to £47.50, it is certainly being sold as one; but it really is a touring property that looks more than a little poverty-stricken in town. In America, they’d call this summer stock – productions often staged outdoors, and recycling props and sets from previous years. The West End, however, deserves better.

The National Theatre of Scotland has no physical home, but it’s more than just an idea: already, just six months since its launch with a theatrical event that took over at ten different locations across Scotland, it has established a major presence at the Edinburgh Festival, uniquely producing simultaneously on the fringe and as part of the international festival.

Its already award-winning production of Black Watch has turned into the talk of the festival: the most widely acclaimed new play in town, Gregory Burke’s urgent, angry piece – based on interviews with soldiers from the 300-year-old Scottish army regiment who served duty in Iraq – has been vibrantly staged as a site-specific piece of theatre in a former drill hall. It’s a bold work that has a local, national and international reach and resonance; it’s just the sort of thing, in fact, that would dignify an international festival.

But working against expectations, that’s the show that’s on the fringe. Meanwhile, the experimental work – the one you would expect to see on the fringe – is part of the International Festival. That’s Anthony Neilson’s Realism that opened at the Lyceum Theatre on Monday, and I saw last night. Neilson’s cryptic, impressionistic play is difficult to get a narrative handle on; but that, at least according to Neilson in a programme interview, is part of the point: “I could do a very narrative-based play. But to do something in the Edinburgh International Festival suggests to me a slightly different type of show. There is a part of me that sees it is an opportunity to learn and to try and do something at the outer edges of my ability. I’d rather see an interesting failure than a mediocre success.”

Of course, it could be argued that the fringe is the place to work out those kinds of experiments, not a heavily funded international festival; but it also puts both the International Festival and the National Theatre of Scotland at the centre of a dialogue about new kinds of theatre that they are trying to produce. According to Vicky Featherstone, artistic director and chief executive of the NTOS, “It is an interesting and often challenging task creating what will become a national institution. We are the only major publicly funded cultural institution created since devolution; many people have a stake in our success and we have the responsibility both to the theatre community and to the public at large to make this project work. This is countered by our belief that success can grow only from encouraging artists to take risks, to surprise the audience, to be innovatory and to be part of creating a forward-looking rather than a backward-looking theatre.”

She goes on to say, “Realism sums up for me what the National Theatre of Scotland is about. The partnership with the Festival enables Anthony Neilson to feel supported and allows him to take risks and create the kind of work I am talking about. In our first year, it places us on the international stage at a great arts festival, alongside world theatre-makers and artists.”

Clearly the NTOS is already making its mark. But it has to persuade local theatregoers more than national and international visitors who are here for only three weeks of the year to follow it. Black Watch is a Scottish story of wider resonance that will do that; but Realism could well put them off.

Last night saw the launch of the theatre programme of the International Festival, and next to the daunting scale and choice of the fringe, it’s easy pickings here: there are just five shows in all, spread comfortably over 3 weeks. Two are imports; three are brand-new productions, co-produced by the International Festival with other partners. The big centrepiece, however, and being accorded a two-week run ahead of joining the Complete Works season at Stratford-upon-Avon, is Troilus and Cressida, Peter Stein’s first English language production of Shakespeare.

But things didn’t get off to a good start last night though, either for me personally, or for the production itself. I’m usually very intolerant of latecomers myself – get organised, and be there on time, I say – and especially of the disruption they can cause to theatregoers who have managed to be organised and on time as they are shuffled in late. But I get even more irritated when that latecomer is me. I hate the sense of incompleteness that comes from missing the beginning, so would rather not be there at all. And last night I managed to be that annoying latecomer myself, misreading the start time as 7.30pm when in fact it was 7pm, so I got there around 7.10pm. My time in Edinburgh is limited, so I couldn’t bow out and come back another day, but had to join the latecomers clustered in the foyer to be shown in at a designated moment at about 7.15pm.

But then the production turned into its own latecomer. The interval had begun at 8.40pm; as the audience started drifting back into the auditorium around 25 minutes later, an announcement was made about technical difficulties and we were encouraged to go back to the bars. No further announcement was made until 9.45pm, when it was declared that the rest of the performance was cancelled.

So having missed the beginning, I also missed the ending, and will not be able to return again myself. These things happen. But there was a fatal lack of communication last night. There may have been nothing new to communicate; but a regular update and finally an apology and explanation of the particular problem from the stage might have been appropriate. A tannoy announcement wasn’t quite enough….

With roughly 1,500 shows to choose from, there’s inevitably a lot more chaff than wheat on the Edinburgh Fringe. And trying to find good new plays amongst all that chaff is probably the hardest job of all. The attempt is always one of hope over experience, but as I sat through two poor high-profile entries yesterday, and four more on Friday and Saturday with only Black Watch and Unprotected offering dramatic respite from the prevailing mediocrity, I wondered again why I’m ever surprised by the struggle to find good plays here.

After all, London’s new writing venues, from the Royal Court and National to Hampstead, the Bush and Soho, have trouble enough doing so, and they have a process of development and artistic selection behind their choices. But in the free-for-all that is Edinburgh where money talks louder than taste, anyone can put a play on provided they can fund it. It’s the West End and Broadway philosophy writ large. And in this world, it’s the survival of the slickest, if not fittest, that counts: whether a title with name recognition (Midnight Cowboy), stars (Les Dennis and Mike McShane in Marlon Brando’s Closet) or a personality (Rich Hall, crossing over from stand-up to writing and starring in his own play Levelland) that gets things on.

But audiences seduced into spending their cash on them may, up to £20 later in the case of Midnight Cowboy and £16 later in the case of Levelland, feel seriously ripped off. Not just because they’re bad – bad is bad at any price, even if free – but for the waste of time and talent involved, too. Of course, Edinburgh is a developmental space where artists should be able to learn and make mistakes; but nowadays they’re making them literally at our expense. And audiences simply cannot afford, in any sense, to indulge them much longer. This, more than anything, could ultimately kill off the fringe – as prices go every skyward, audiences will feel inhibited against taking a risk on new work, and will stick with what they know.

No wonder stand-up is so enduringly popular. You know what you’re going to get. But fringe comedy isn’t cheap, either. Rich Hall charges up to £14 for his solo show. And the higher prices go, the fewer the shows that people will be able to see. What’s the point having all this choice up here, if you end up not being able to afford to see much of it?

I had my first full day in Edinburgh yesterday, and in the parallel universe of the Edinburgh Fringe, I saw my first show at 10 in the morning…. and my seventh and final show of the day finished at 2.10am the next. No wonder that ‘fringe fatigue’ can set in fast; the twin dangers of exhaustion and saturation can quickly overcome you. After 23 years of coming to the festival, I have yet to come up with the ideal strategy for dealing with the insanity of being here – beyond one adopted by some of my colleagues, which is to trying to avoid coming at all – but the one I am following this year, as I’ve done for the last few years, is to do a short, sharp ‘taster’: I come for five nights that straddle the end of the first week of the fringe and the opening of the international festival, and then go home.

By now, word is out on some of the best of the fest; word-of-mouth travels faster in Edinburgh than anywhere else I know. Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, presented by the new National Theatre of Scotland, was almost instantly anointed the play of the fringe, and immediately became the hottest ticket in town. So I made sure it was one of the first things I saw on Friday night after I arrived. It’s being presented under the umbrella of the Traverse programme, but not at the Traverse itself – instead, it’s at a ‘found’ space, a former army drill hall, that makes the play resonate even louder and more authentically.

One of the enduring wonders of the fringe is to find and make new venues every year; a large purple canvas tent, in the shape of an upended cow and called the UdderBelly (since it’s an initiative of the Underbelly nearby), has plonked itself down this year in the middle of Bristo Square – thus displacing the armies of skateboarders that usually turn this into the South Bank of Edinburgh. In the process, Bristo Square – already home to the Pleasance Dome outposts and the Gilded Balloon – and the adjoining George Square (home to the fringe’s most comfortable permanent theatre, the George Square Theatre, and the fringe’s liveliest and most beautiful installation, the two Spiegeltents that inhabit the square itself), have become the epicentre of the Edinburgh fringe. Even as I staggered away at gone 2 this morning, the square was packed; I even had to queue for my ‘midnight snack’ of a banana crepe.

That’s a quintessential Edinburgh experience; but then it was a quintessential sort of Edinburgh day. It began with a powerful ‘verbatim’ play about prostitution at the Traverse at 10 – Unprotected, transferred from the Liverpool Everyman – and ended with La Clique, a fringe burlesque cult at the gorgeous Spiegeltent that holds its audience in a collective, giddy euphoria. As a succession of astonishing acts take to the stage, it offers the kind of fringe drug that we all go in search of every day but seldom find; and once again, the venue is part of the magic, creating its own special vibe and ambiance in its intimacy and beauty.

Context is all, too; this was strikingly brought home to me by the appearance in La Clique of the Caesar Twins, a pair of identical peroxide-haired gymnast twins who are also doing their own full-length show at the Pleasance Grand. I’d seen that earlier in the evening, and for all their undoubted skill, their show was so tackily packaged that it undermined what they doing. And the venue – a vast industrial hangar of a space – created no atmosphere at all. But in La Clique, they were tantalising and magical.

I arrived early at the Spiegeltent for another vaudeville variety show from Arturo Brachetti, the Italian quick-change artist who conjures an astonishing range of characters in the blink of a eye. Seeing him here in Edinburgh was like a blast from the theatrical past; those with long-range memories of the London theatre scene like me may remember the debacle of ‘i’, a West End vaudeville that was announced to open at the Piccadilly, but had become re-named ‘Y’ by the time it did in 1983 – but tended to prompt the question ‘Why?’ instead. Brachetti was the star of it, and it was amazing to see him again, seemingly undiminished by the years.

When I went to Las Vegas last year, I was astonished to find a London fringe comedy company called Spymonkey providing the clown element for Cirque du Soleil’s erotic spectacle Zumanity; and seeing that they were back in the UK, under their own auspices, presenting an old show called Cooped (at the Assembly Rooms) made me want to see them in their own guise, and I’m glad I did. They’re far funnier unconstrained by Cirque du Soleil’s packaging.

One of the best theatre blogs in the business is that of Paul Miller, a young(ish) director who has worked regularly at places like the Bush, Hampstead, Royal Court and National, and whose blog provides as personal and revealing a look into the backstage processes of a director as you’ll ever read. He’s free, frank and ruthlessly honest about his life and work. He’s not Trevor Nunn, rushing from one job to the next, but as he recently put it, finds himself carrying on “in this weird half-working, half-not kind of way”. Indeed, it was to reflect this that he orgiinally started his blog: “One of the original purposes of this blog was to show that directors are in just the same position essentially as everyone else in the theatre: bobbing along on a sea controlled (apparently) by some other force. We are not the inspired masters of destiny which popular myth depicts. Well I’m not anyway. On the one hand expected to clamour for attention like a mixture of the dockhands in On the Waterfront and Max Bialystock, on the other to be these discriminating, scrupulous and sensitive artists, no wonder most are hopeless.”

And here’s a real gem I found looking over some recent entries — he mentions Toby Young’s new play (A Right Royal Farce), and wrote back in July, “I will break with convention here and say that I turned it down - I’m damned sure I wasn’t the first and quite likely not the last: you’ve never read anything like it. Well, at least Paul proves himself discriminating, scrupulous and sensitive! He also had a very lucky escape, as I’ve blogged about already last week….

I should declare an interest here: when I started this blog, Paul found it early on and we started exchanging e-mails, then met for a convivial lunch. So you could call this a mutual admiration society. But it’s also wonderful proof of the power of blogging: though I knew his directorial work (I was a big fan of his production of Jonathan Harvey’s Hushabye Mountain at Hampstead Theatre, that i actually saw twice, and ditto Roy WIlliams’ Sing Yer Heart out for the Lads at the National), we only connected personally through our blogs.

Only yesterday I was reporting on a new way of mobile phone marketing on the Edinburgh Fringe that didn’t involve sacrificing forests to print flyers that are mostly discarded on the streets or bins. In a self-confessedly less-than-scientific survey in today’s Guardian, Leo Benedictus has actually run an exercise to see if the old-fashioned method of flyering actually works. He spends an evening at three locations – the Royal Mile, the Pleasance and the Udderbelly – distributing flyers that attempt to lure people to come to contribute to The Guardian’s blog at a cybercafe that he has booked for the next morning.

No one shows up, and he writes: “I have learned three things from the experiment. First: flyering makes you feel as though you have accomplished something, even when you haven’t. Second: making sales on the spot is the only reliable way of knowing how you’re doing. Third, and most important: whatever you do, never underestimate the laziness of students.”

It may, of course, be that he wasn’t exactly offering a particularly compelling attraction. Even so, in the marketing mania of competing against 1,499 other shows, you need to establish some kind of visibility. The more professional producers don’t send their actors out – as one says here, “Nothing is more certain to destroy your mood for performing than a day of flyering”, so it may actually be counter-productive if they do – but employ what are called “street teams”. Corin Christopher, the manager of a team of four leafleteers for a comedy production company, explains that there are two weapons in their armoury – quantity and persuasion – but they’re not of equal power. “Volume flyering I don’t have a great deal of faith in”, she says. “Just giving out flyers on the street doesn’t guarantee anything. Chatting is the best way.”

And indeed Benedictus actually finds a couple of punters from Inverkeithing who don’t plan what they’re going to see, but are open to persuasion from flyerers. They’re on their way to see on the strength of a performer’s pitch earlier that day: “He was nice to us,” they say.

There’s no single strategy for building audiences at Edinburgh, and the chance take-up of a pitch like this is not to be sniffed at. But does it really justify the effort? As Corin Christopher points out, “You’re giving out flyers all day, smiling all the time, talking to so many people – and then it doesn’t make any difference to sales. When it’s your own show you’re doing it for, and you flyer all day and then perform to two people, it must be awful.”

No wonder electronic marketing takes on a new appeal. At least someone who actively chooses to watch a trailer on their mobile phone has already shown a commitment to spending a couple of minutes listening to the pitch. But if this becomes the new norm, you may not have time to actually go and see any shows: you’ll be too busy watching trailers all day.

Mobile phones may be an irritant to Richard Griffiths when they interrupt performances. But now they’re being used to promote them… and gather vox pops reviews, too, at the Edinburgh Fringe.

According to a news story in The Times today, theatre companies are texting invitations to watch trailers for their shows to mobile phone users who pass within 100 metres of a portable transmitter set up in the city centre. If they reply yes, they are then sent a clip of the show to view.

Apparently 250 festival goers have so far requested the downloads, and as Dan Pursey, one of London’s youngest breed of publicists who is behind the scheme, it’s also “more environmentally friendly than printing 10,000 flyers”. Everyone knows they are the bane of walking the streets in Edinburgh, and most end up underfoot or littering every other available surface.

But the sound pollution of arriving text messages may replace it in other ways, too. According to the same Times story, mobile users are also being invited to turn into instant critics. Audiences who order their tickets through The Times Fringe Box Office are being sent a text message fifteen minutes after their show ends, asking them to give it a star rating and a four-word review.

And if these mobile phone numbers are collected and stored, yet another whole new raft of marketing opportunity presents itself. It seems the future of arts marketing has arrived…. and maybe the future of reviewing, too.

The Edinburgh Fringe has long been a battleground for the sensitivities of the local population against the freedom of artistic expression; and every year, more for PR purposes than for provoking real outrage, you feel, fringe companies have deliberately stage-managed such confrontations. After all, anything that gets you publicity at this time of year is good, so the thinking goes. One legendary Edinburgh City Councillor Moira Knox – the Mary Whitehouse of the fringe — could always be relied upon to fan the flames of controversy at the slightest provocation. So much so that, 11 years ago, there were plans to give a ‘Moira’ award to the Fest’s most outrageous show; and a bunch of lesbian acrobats, labelled a “dirty-minded disgrace” by her even though she had not seen it, proudly boasted, “Any group Moira Knox condemns is laughing all the way to the bank. A sticker saying, ‘disapproved of by Moira Knox’ is a sure-fire way to sell tickets.”

Nowadays, however, it’s the Scottish Parliament, not just the local council, who are in on the game. Having passed a law, the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Act 2005, that came into force in March and prohibits smoking of any kind in all enclosed public spaces – from bus shelters to sports venues, theatres and film sets – it has just been put to the test on the Fringe. Mel Smith, playing Winston Churchill in a play at the Assembly Rooms called Allegiance, was insisting to the last minute that he’d defy the ban and light up a cigar, as his character was of course famously fond of doing. But his high profile insistence on defying the law back-fired, and yesterday the venue was visited by the council’s chief environmental officer, “who said he would shut the venue”, according to William Burdett-Coutts, director of the Assembly Rooms. Not only would the venue be held liable if a performer smoked, but their performance licence was also under threat. Burdett-Coutts protested to no avail: “I think it’s absurd. In the context of an international festival like this, it’s crazy. It’s integral to the part of Churchill and doesn’t affect other people.”

In the stand-off, Smith capitulated – telling The Times, “I was speechless, I thought that it was unscrupulous charmless and stupid.” During the performance, he held his lighter to the cigar but snapped it shut before lighting it. He said afterwards that he took particular relish in one line: “I have no liking for those puritans who seek to curb us from drinking and smoking.” Instead, he lit up inside the venue after the performance and lent out of the window for a photo-op.

Now everyone knows he’s doing the show, at least. But meanwhile, an important point of principle has been established: the law’s the law, and actors will have to live with the ban. As Sheila Gilmore, a city councillor quoted in The Times, says, “I think actors act all sorts of actions on stage. You don’t expect people to draw blood when they stab somebody in a fight scene just to prove it’s really realistic. We are simply asking actors to do what they are really good at.” And Paul Gudgin, director of the Festival Fringe, seems to concur in an interview with The Guardian: “There are a lot of people who feel very strongly that it’s a freedom of expression issue. But there are other performers who welcome the ban. After all, so much of what you do on stage has to be a representation. Why should smoking be any different?”

One comedian Reginald S Hunter is quoted in the Guardian feature as welcoming the ban, because it will help him give up smoking. But another, Doug Stanhope, protests that smoking onstage helps his art: “Without a cigarette, my train of thought isn’t as tight. I’m not as comfortable.” And saving Scottish lives, which the legislation is intended to do since it avoids the dangers of passive smoking, is no compensation. “If you want to save people’s lives, give them something to live for. Make the place less depressing.”

Next year, England and Wales follow suit on the non-smoking legislation, and it will be interesting to see if it applies to the stage.

The Edinburgh Fringe kicked off over the weekend, so the arts pages are already being saturated by coverage of the world’s largest arts festival. But though there’s also seemingly an army of critics doing duty in Edinburgh, it’s the time of year when papers trundle out assorted stringers to cope with the onslaught whose names you don’t necessarily see at other times of the year on those pages. Yesterday’s Observer, for instance, already had a comedy round-up by Stephanie Merritt who appears every year in this slot, but at other times works on The Observer’s literary desk.

So it’s difficult for readers to establish real relationships with the tastes and styles of the different reviewers that is as essential to interpreting the reviews that they write as the words themselves are. The Scotsman, of course, becomes one of the more familiar reviewing brands at this time of year, mainly because of the scale of its coverage, but only a few of the critics who review there regularly take on a style of their own. Partly this is a question of space – it’s difficult for them to do so in the short space that individual reviews are accorded – but also one of familiarity. A couple of names – chief critic Joyce McMillan and Edinburgh fringe regular Kate Copstick – become reliable yardsticks only because we’ve come to know their work over the years.

Ditto Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, who becomes Queen of the fringe at this time of year, partly because of her undiminished enthusiasm for chasing down new discoveries, year in, year out, but also because of the authority she has as a champion of fringe work throughout the year in her role as second string critic of the paper.

But where are the first string critics? Many confine themselves nowadays to covering the International Festival only that starts next week, with perhaps a dip of a toe into the Traverse programme, the fringe’s main outlet for an artistically led emphasis on new plays.

Whether the fringe is only a young(er) man’s (and woman’s) game, and most don’t have the energy to put the energy required into looking elsewhere, is one question; but another is whether all the effort is worthwhile anyway. The good stuff floats to the surface where the younger critics will find it, and propel it to a further life elsewhere when it can be properly appraised, away from the crazy hype and hopes of Edinburgh.

Increasingly, too, there are calls for critics’ attention elsewhere. Just this week, for instance, we are being asked to be anywhere but in Edinburgh: tonight we’ve been invited back to Guys and Dolls to see Patrick Swayze making his West End debut; tomorrow the RSC are opening their new main house Tempest at Stratford-upon-Avon and their three parter Henry VI in the new Courtyard on Wednesday, with a full-day cycle (at 10.30am, 3pm and 7.30pm) that will make critics feel like they’re at Edinburgh in any case; and on Thursday the Royal Court have Tanika Gupta’s new play Sugar Mummies opening. And it doesn’t stop there: even as the International Festival kicks off next week, London has The 39 Steps at the Tricycle next Monday and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Haymarket on Wednesday week. The week after, there’s Frost/Nixon at the Donmar on Monday 21st; then a new production of Look Back in Anger, directed by Peter Gill, at the Theatre Royal Bath, as part of the Peter Hall Company season, the night after.

So we’re being pulled in several directions, and we can’t be in several places at once. And since in Edinburgh you’re defeated before you even begin, being required to be in 1,500 places at once, it’s no wonder that it’s tempting to stay closer to home and simply cover what’s more manageably being offered on our doorsteps. But there’s also something irresistible and irrepressible about the Edinburgh experience, so I’m taking a bite-sized chunk of it, going up this Friday for five nights and twenty-plus shows that may include two international festival events, but also stretches beyond….

In Michael Billington’s Guardian review this morning of the new RSC production of King John that opened at Stratford’s Swan Theatre last night, he applauds director Josie Rourke for giving it “a commendable visual coherence and, without wrenching it out of its period, reminds us of its continuing political relevance.” He then adds, “Following on from Marianne Elliott’s Much Ado, her production is also a reminder that there is a powerful new generation of female classical directors.”

It’s intriguing that the sex of a director is still worthy of comment, after the strides made by people like Phyllida Lloyd, Deborah Warner and Katie Mitchell to more than hold their own. But it is still a fact that the balance of artistic power is still held by men, particularly when it comes to leadership of the big London and national companies – the RSC, National and Royal Court, for instance, are each yet to be run by a woman. But things are changing: Rachel Kavanaugh was appointed earlier this year as the Birmingham Rep’s first female artistic director in its 93 year history.

Also on the inside track are Lucy Bailey (who directed this year’s Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe to some of the best reviews ever there), Thea Sharrock (who currently runs the Gate, but also works elsewhere and whose Donmar production, ending this weekend, of John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father moves to the West End’s Wyndham’s next month) and Melly Still (whose National Theatre production of Coram Boy returns this Christmas).

One of the songs in Avenue Q (currently at the Noel Coward) is all about schadenfreude. “What’s that, some kind of Nazi word?” asks Nicky. And Gary Coleman explains, “Yup! It’s German for “Happiness at the misfortune of others!” Nicky repeats it, and exclaims, “That is German!”

Talking of Nazis and Germans brings us neatly to Prince Harry and Prince Philip respectively, who are two of the characters in Toby Young and Lloyd Evans’ new play A Right Royal Farce that opened at the King’s Head this week. Young and Evans, moonlighting from their usual night job(share) as theatre critics for The Spectator, have turned playwrights for the second year running, after scoring a runaway hit with Who’s the Daddy? that set the merry-go-round of sex scandals that affected their own magazine to a dizzyingly-imagined farce.

But comic lightning, as The Guardian’s Michael Billington trenchantly observed, rarely strikes twice; and there can be few more appropriate instances of schadenfreude amongst London’s theatrical set this week than the skewering that its authors have now taken from their own colleagues. In the Daily Mail, Quentin Letts called it “one of the most embarrassingly unfunny things since Michael Barrymore’s attempted West End comeback” and added, “To call it a stinker does not do it justice. It’s smellier than that sewage works next to the M4 near Heathrow.” While he generously admitted to his fondness for young Toby, he delivered the killer punch to his friend: “Sorry, Toby, but you should pull the plug before any more of your friends have to sit through this shocker.”

It’s indeed one of those rare cases where reading the reviews turns out to be far more entertaining than sitting through the show. In the Daily Telegraph, Dominic Cavendish began his review by quoting Kenneth Tynan’s suggestion that “a critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car”, and then comments, “Judging by the appalling car crash of an entertainment currently occupying the stage of the King’s Head theatre in Islington, he was being too generous to his own kind by half - some critics not only can’t drive, they haven’t a clue where they’re going.” He goes on, “A Right Royal Farce manages to be both tasteless and timid while pulling off the near-impossible feat of being almost entirely devoid of laughs.” He concludes, “For reasons too tedious to go into, both William Hoyland, a fantastically louche Philip, and Tim Wallers, a forgettably hearty James Hewitt, have to suffer the humiliation of wearing giant strap-on erections beneath their nightshirts. At least those two phoney pricks do their job. Evans and Young, who fancy themselves god’s gift to comedy, can’t keep it up for a minute, let alone a few hours.”

In the Financial Times, Alastair Macaulay quotes another maxim: “To the theory about critics that goes ‘they only write reviews because they can’t do it themselves’, they give, in this play, a distinct boost.” And in the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh wrote that it “has all the shock-value of a pair of pubertal schoolboys caught fiddling with each other in the bike shed”, a metaphor that may say more about Nick than it does about the play, before reaching for another more appropriate one, that it “has all the bite and provocation of a toothless old corgi.”

In the Independent, Robert Hanks referred to the acting as “by and large village-hall Christmas panto standard, though its hard to see what they could achieve with this material”. He tries to reach for something to take away from it all, but admits defeat: “Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here: that iconoclasm is much harder work than you might imagine. But I’m struggling to extract something from this waste of an ev