October 2006 Archives

Unlike in New York, where the weekly box office grosses for Broadway shows are collated by the League of American Theatres and Producers and published in Variety and online, we have a cult of secrecy in London where no such data is officially available, but one has to rely instead purely on anecdotal evidence, whether gathered from direct experience or more usually, gossip, about relative business.

Of course, such talk usually surrounds how badly things are doing, rather than how well; but the result is that when the shows that are doing well try to advertise the fact, there’s no point of comparison for their claims, or possible means of validation of them, either. Dirty Dancing, for instance, boldly trumpeted about a £12million advance – the highest ever, they said, for a West End opening – and now Wicked has followed, claiming that last week’s gross of £761,125 was higher than any other West End show currently running and the highest weekly 8-performance gross in West End theatre history. But since we don’t know what the rest of the grosses are, this can only be an assumption, however well informed. The producers also claim that since previews began, the show has been averaging over 95% attendances; and for the month of October, grossed nearly £2.5million.

I suppose the gauntlet is being thrown down to rival producers to contradict the claims; and if they don’t, the record stands. But is it ever authenticated?

Meanwhile, talking of rebuttals: Sunday Telegraph theatre critic Tim Walker, who does double duty on the paper as its Mandrake gossip columnist, earlier this month reported that Kevin Spacey was giving Tony Blair coaching tips prior to his party conference speech. According to the column, a close friend of Spacey’s was reported as saying, “Mr Blair has long been regarded as a highly effective orator, but he seemed understandably anxious about this particular speech. He had what I suppose in this business we’d call stage fright. Kevin started out by giving him some very general advice but they were soon talking about specifics. He got Blair to pause a lot more than he does usually and did some work on his posture. He also wanted Blair to use his eyes to much greater effect.”

Sounds pretty specific, doesn’t it? But yesterday Spacey told Sue McGregor on Radio 4’s Start the Week that the story was “complete bollocks”, and said, “The only thing that surprised me is that it appeared in the [Sunday] Telegraph and we know the editor there and we know the people there. What does it take for someone to pick up the phone and ask whether a story they’ve heard is true?”

Spacey has had a rough ride from many theatre critics during his tenure at the Old Vic, but what we do is a subjective art, based on our own prejudices and preferences so – however passively aggressive or even openly aggressive they are — it is difficult for Spacey to challenge (and I can’t see him rising to the bait thrown down by the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts, who wrote, “Thanks partly to us newspapers, so much is now known about Mr Spacey that it is hard to believe in him fully as a heterosexual charmer. Not even his technical brilliance can overcome that”). But a theatre critic who does double duty as a purveyor of apparently unreliable gossip seems to be fair dues. Especially, in this case, since Walker’s was one of the few unfavourable notices. And, as it happens, quite a personal one: “One can’t blame Spacey, either, for something rather odd that seems to be happening to him. A lot of the time, even in the play’s supposedly-most heartrending moments, I found that the actor both looked and sounded like Mr Magoo. Again, he can’t blamed for this, but it is, to say the least, unfortunate.” So, it seems, is the disadvantage Walker seems to have been watching it at: “It’s as well that, towards the end, Spacey has a lot of shouting to do, which had the happy effect of rousing a rather large woman, sitting on my left, who had, for the play’s final 42 minutes, used my shoulder as a pillow.”

The Cardiff International Festival of Musical Theatre had billed a concert performance of Styne and Sondheim’s Gypsy as the “centrepiece” of its celebrations of Styne’s centenary. But just a week ago, disaster struck: Kathryn Evans, hired for the lead role of Mama Rose, was involved in a car accident and broke her collarbone. Joanna Benjamin, the festival’s director, seriously contemplated the prospect of cancellation.

This is, famously, the “King Lear” of musical theatre roles for leading ladies, and the actresses capable of rising to its challenges are few and far between, even more so at less than a week’s notice to learn, rehearse and deliver. But last Monday, Rachel Izen – a jobbing West End actress who was most recently to be found in the rather more intimate surrounds of Clapham’s Landor Theatre, where she appeared in Follies – stepped up to the plate and last night saved the day and the play in the vast surrounds of the 1,900 seater Wales Millennium Centre.

And even if it has to be admitted that she wasn’t always vocally equipped for the more expansive stretches of the score, she nailed the part both dramatically and emotionally. Weight, in every sense, was on her side: she’s a physically robust presence, which anchored the character’s gravity and desperation to live her life vicariously through her daughters even more poignantly. But she also brought an impressive level of commitment to the role, going entirely ‘off book’ for the occasion, as were the rest of the company of this slick, enjoyable presentation.

She, and the rest of the company that included a dynamic trio of strippers in Julia McKenzie (making a rare but hugely welcome return to the singing stage), Liz Robertson and Rebecca Wheatley, as well as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? runner-up Helena Blackman as Louise and Lara Pulver as June, were duly embraced by a very healthy house.

The show has, unaccountably, not been seen in the West End since a 1973 revival with Angela Lansbury at the Piccadilly, and it is high time it was brought back. I gather there are already plans to do so. Cardiff provided an admirable taster.

Having reviewed Liam Mower as the “original” Billy Elliot when the show first opened at the Victoria Palace in May 2005, I was also there at the end when Liam left the show last month, as I blogged about here. (I’d even paid for a ticket, since I felt it was sure to be something of an event, and it was). At the time, Stephen Daldry said of him, “He has been at the centre of Billy Elliot’s extended family for three and a half years now and his last performance will be an overwhelmingly emotional evening. As Liam hurtles towards adulthood we will be saying goodbye to one of the most celebrated child performers ever in the West End. An end of an era for us and the beginning of another huge adventure for Liam.”

But it seems this is going to be a long goodbye – as long, perhaps, as Barbra Streisand’s farewell concerts. Today it was announced that he’s to return for one night only on November 22 – for a special charity gala performance being hosted by Elton John that will benefit the Easington branch of the children’s charity ThePlace2Be that works in primary schools with children, parents and teachers from ex-mining communities.

Mower – whose own life briefly mirrored that of Billy, as he went to the Royal Ballet School to be trained as a classical dancer, but dropped out – has indeed become part of the public and critical profile for the show, since he’s the only performer we’ve actually been officially invited to review. But I’m not sure they’re right to continue to emphasise his ‘uniqueness’. Surely its time to concentrate on some of the newer boys who have now succeeded the original trio – the show is bigger than individual players within it, so its time not just for Liam to move on but also for the show to do so, too. I’m sure there’s PR value to Mower’s return, but does the show truly need it? At this rate, it could become an own-goal: a statement that the show’s success is indivisible from him.

With over £12million in the advance box office already, as I noted yesterday, seldom can a show have been quite as critic-proof as Dirty Dancing; and in any case, as a friend of mine once sagely remarked, “You can’t fight a hit”. Few of us have even tried to do so on this occasion, and as I also remarked yesterday, it has a double nostalgic familiarity to spread content.

At prices that hit a staggering £59.50 for weekend performances, the public want that kind of certainty. And if the vox pops that litter the new London free papers are anything to go by, it doesn’t matter what we say, anyway. In the London Paper, one punter, 29-year-old Helen Weavis, says, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. The dancing was fantastic – I was blown away.” And another, 31-year-old Caroline Jones, comments, “I loved every minute. I’d definitely come back – I’ll bring my whole family including my little baby, who needs to be initiated” (but maybe she’ll think again when she discovers there are no kids discounts).

Which isn’t to say that the critical response has been openly hostile – far from it. If reviews to massage the egos of the creative team were required – and that seems to the principal reason for them at all on this occasion – they will be taking comfort from the very kind reception of papers like The Times and Evening Standard (both four stars), The Independent (“In general, this is a very enjoyable evening”).

But what’s always quite refreshing about London is that – between the overnight daily reviews, the Sundays, the magazines and the websites – we have so many critical voices that no single source of them dominates. However, I’m a little puzzled by the efforts of Associated’s Standard Lite to contradict itself. While a great deal of the paper, of course, is re-purposed from the paid-for edition, they have a strange practice of employing their own theatre reviewers, but yesterday chose to ‘balance’ their own 2-star notice from Nina Caplan with a reprint for Standard critic Nicholas de Jongh’s four-star rave. Which, ultimately, proves that it’s the public who will have decide for themselves; and since they already have, neither verdict will actually matter. (Head to the listings page of the Standard Lite, where the Backstage Blogs appear and you’ll find that they put two contrasting public opinions back-to-back for it, too – one calling it “the best show in London!” that also says it is “the stuff that hen nights are made of” — — not exactly an endorsement but probably a good commercial reality — while the other points out another possible truth: “I didn’t like this much but my girlfriend did… I don’t think the audience were that interested in the performance as much as they were in singing along.”

Northampton’s beautiful Royal Theatre – officially re-opening last night after a £15million refurbishment for both it and the adjoining modern Derngate that makes the public spaces for both seamlessly one – was launched in a wittily ironic gesture by a new production of Sondheim and Goldman’s 1971 musical about the closing and demolition of an old theatre, Follies.

The show, which delicately pastiches musical forms of the past to deliver a knock-out emotional punch of its own about the unravelling of personal relationships as past and present collide, has long become a nostalgic cult in its own right: as we grow older with the show (and its themes of love, loss and professional and personal compromise resonant all the louder), it has taken on any number of layers that are impossible to separate from the show itself. It is a defining masterpiece of the genre, and I can only marvel anew at how each new production brings out new and piercing revelations.

Since there was a West End clash last night with the opening of another exercise in double nostalgia, Dirty Dancing – refracting the 60s from the perspective of 80s when the original film was first released – I went the night before to Follies, but seeing these shows back-to-back proved, if nothing else, that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Next to the dense layers of Follies, Dirty Dancing merely provides a surface facsimile of its source and period.

Yet Dirty Dancing is clearly the crowd-pleaser that Follies will never be: it already commands an advance box office of £12m, reportedly the largest in West End history. And just it was to be welcomed last week that there was room in London for both the riotous laughs of Spamalot and the earnest, revealing truths of Caroline, or Change, so I hope that there is room in a vibrant musical theatre for the likes of Follies and Dirty Dancing. But I also fear that the success of Dirty Dancing could finally send off original musicals forever. It’s bad enough that they musicals are almost always based on pre-existing film titles nowadays, but at least they have original scores. Now we’ve got an old film and jukebox score, a double familiarity to spread content.

I’ve already blogged about my own responses to some of my colleagues’ reviews of Bent here, and then of Simon Callow’s feature in The Times that also took these reviews to task, but now the dispute has escalated to the stalls – and in turn, to the media pages of The Independent. According to a report in Guy Adams’ Media Diary yesterday, the West End opening of Summer and Smoke last week was the occasion for a confrontation between Charles Spencer and Simon Callow as a result.

But notice the barely disguised homophobia of the reporting of the incident: “Callow, who had already accused Britain’s theatre critics of ‘homophobia’ in Monday’s Times, marched up to Spencer in the foyer of the Apollo and began jabbing an actorly finger in his chest. Handbags were duly exchanged.” Handbags? I saw Simon at the opening, and he wasn’t carrying one. But Adams goes on to report a witness saying, “It was a proper hissy fit. Charlie tried to defend himself, but he couldn’t scream as loudly as Callow, so it was all a bit one-sided. Spencer’s a gentle chap, and tried not to get involved in pushing and shoving. But if the bell hadn’t gone for the start of the show, he’d have been toast.” Adams very nearly has Simon being called a screaming queen here, what with the reference to hissy fits and screaming loudly, but it’s the report, not the argument, that was one-sided. Charlie, by contrast, is referenced as ‘a gentle chap’ (which he of course is, though if this is meant to be akin to ‘confirmed bachelor’, Charlie is anything but, as a devoted dad and family man).

But then there’s an even sourer conclusion that suggests that “Callow is particularly irked by the reviews of Bent because the director of the show, Daniel Kramer, is also his boyfriend”, and then notes that he may have taken off more than he can chew: “Whether he’s wise to pick a fight on the issue with London’s critics – roughly half of whom are themselves members of the gay community – remains to be seen.” The piece is even illustrated by a Tom of Finland illustration of two leather-jacketed and capped men in which one says to the other, “I’ll meet you later in the theatre critics bar.”

Out of the fourteen lead critics working for the national papers, I only know of four of us who are in fact gay. So it’ll be a small gathering in the theatre critics’ bar if that’s the case, and nothing like roughly half of our fraternity. Even if you add in assorted second and third stringers, the magazines and so on, the ratio doesn’t increase. It’s simply a stereotype, and it’s disappointing to see The Independent, of all papers, indulging it.

One of the occupational hazards of being a critic, and even more so as one who blogs, is the criticism that can come one’s way. Having put oneself in the firing line and available for comment, it’s no surprise, and of course one should be able to take it as much as give it, so I usually don’t complain. But the other day I was accused here of being a “blithering, uncooth idiot” (sic) for daring to criticise a play that the correspondent claimed held the audience “rivited” (double sic), who suggested, “go back to your Saturday TV cartoons… that’s more for a person of limited mental capacity like you.” The webmaster for this site makes sure that this kind of offensive commentary doesn’t usually make it online, though I actually have more of a problem with the offensive spelling than the words themselves. But the correspondent concerned had entered their e-mail address, so I did a google search on it – it was a fairly unusual handle – and it took me to a gay dating website, where I found out the following: “One interesting thing about me…I co-produce plays, and have one opening in London in mid-October…so, actors, dancers, writers, let me hear from you. I’m just an ordinary ‘over 50’s’ fellow who loves younger guys.” Could he, by any chance, actually have a stake in the production concerned? (I have just sent the link to a friend, and he’s been positively identified as being so).

Meanwhile, having previously offered marketing and box office support for Shunt, the National Theatre are again stretching the template of what they embrace by including Punchdrunk’s latest show Faust, an “immersive” narrative “in which audiences can experience live performance in extraordinary spaces”, in their programme. Giving a fringe company this kind of practical support as well as endorsement is a bold step, since it will bring their work to new audiences that might not otherwise have made the journey out to a derelict, abandoned warehouse in Wapping. But while it is undoubtedly a lot of fun to wander around its five floors making quirky visual discoveries at every turn, it was a little difficult to discern, let alone find, the narrative thread, when I saw it on Saturday. This kind of environmental theatre making-as-art-installation project has been going on for a while now, most notably with director Deborah Warner’s brilliant reclamations of the St Pancras Chambers (now being turned back into a hotel) as part of LIFT a few years ago and the upper floors of the former Capital Radio building on Euston Road, but it’s now turning into an entire industry. And since the journeys you make are more personal than communal, especially with this one since you can go in any direction and any order, it makes the job of describing them critically even harder. It’s enough to turn me into “a blithering, uncooth idiot”.

Finally, the Theatre Museum – now facing almost certain closure at the end of the year – has late in its life found a way of packing the place to the rafters. Instead of being a theatrical mausoleum of artefacts that, off the stage, lack the life that is the very essence of live performance, it is as a live cabaret space that it is actually coming to real life at last. I previously blogged about seeing Liza Minnelli impersonator Rick Skye in the downstairs picture gallery, and last night I saw Paul Spicer bring his latest intriguing compilation of quirky, mostly American material there in Something in Common, a song cycle about friendship that he performed with his own best friend Clare Foster. I am reviewing it elsewhere for this publication, but I’m already beginning to regret that this room is going to be lost….

In today’s Guardian reprint of Charlotte Higgins’ “back-row blogger” column, she raises the interesting subject of owning up to nodding off during a show. “Nobody ever admits to dropping off during a performance, do they? Well, I am about to. I have managed to stay wide awake for marathons (nine and a half hours of Henry VI the other weekend, and I didn’t fall asleep when I listened to 16 hours of Wagner in one day), but I have been guilty, on occasion, of ‘resting the eyes’….” She admits, “I have slept through almost entire acts at the theatre and woken up just as the last corpse is being hauled off, the lovers reunited and the triple wedding under way without the foggiest notion how we got there. It seems strangely unpredictable: sometimes it’s your inner critic reacting to a bad show; sometimes it’s just a tired head in a warm dark room. What’s horrific is the fear you might have been snoring, dribbling - or worse.”

Charlotte is an arts correspondent, not a critic, so going to the theatre is a pleasurable extension of her job, but not the job itself. When it comes to critics, however, different rules apply. We’re there to review the entire performance, not just part of it, and so there are at least three essential requirements to doing so: arriving on time, staying awake, and staying to the end. Not much to ask, surely, given that we’re being paid to offer a commentary on the entire show, and we’re only committed to being there for somewhere between an hour and three hours, after what might be anywhere from two to eight weeks’ rehearsal on part of the people actually onstage (and many more months, possibly, from the creative team and producers who have put it together).

Yet we’re also only human, and as such, fallible creatures: I can’t honestly say that involuntary desire to surrender to sleep hasn’t overcome me, too, occasionally. As they say on motorways, “tiredness can kill – take a break”. You’re in a warm, dark place already, and rather than die of boredom, your body does just that. But either you need to be honest and say so in the review that results – a good critical shorthand for this is when a review notes that the production is “soporific”, which translates that it made the critic concerned drowsy — or not review it at all.

But though most critics do indeed stay alert and diligent – and I know of more than one that admits to taking an afternoon nap before they go to the theatre so they can ensure they are fresh – one or two of my more senior colleagues have been notorious for sleeping regularly. One, now retired, would sleep at virtually every single show he saw – I remember one of his reviews saying how the production had held him “riveted from beginning to end”, whereas sitting across the aisle from me, I knew that he had, in fact, slept through most of it. Another, still working, has perfected a style of slumping forward in his seat that makes him seem alert whereas he is soundly asleep (the tell tale sign usually being the fallen programme and other paraphernalia at his feet that are left unretrieved), yet still turns in impeccable prose afterwards. Perhaps a critical judgement of the performance seeps in through osmosis.

It’s not just the “old-timers”, though. Last week I was at the tiny Trafalgar Studios 2 seeing the one-man show Notes from Underground, and one of our youngest critics was just along the row from me – sound asleep every time I looked. It hasn’t stopped him declaring that the play “has good points, but isn’t as disturbing as it should be”. He neglects to mention that it failed to keep him awake, either. But perhaps he was right: I should have been looking at the stage, not him, but once you notice someone sleeping, it’s difficult not to. I remember one press night at the Cottesloe, for a production staged on three sides, and at the end of each row on the side block to the one I was in were three critics, each asleep. What must the actors have thought?

Of course, when you’ve paid for your ticket, you can choose how to spend the time you’ve paid to occupy the seat however you wish, as long as it doesn’t cause distraction to anyone else, of course, though it can leave you feeling a little befuddled yourself. As one punter replies on the Guardian’s back-row blogger, “I managed to catch some sleep during the ballet of Edward Scissorhands, which was a near miracle, given the discomfort of my seat. This does give rise to the terrible awakening, mid-auditorium, jolting upright, wide-eyed, wondering what on earth is going on. Reminds me of being at uni.”

And just last night, looking around the stalls of the opening night for Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, I noticed plenty of serial sleepers. They were, perhaps, the lucky ones.

In one of those little time capsules that humans are peculiarly fond of making, the National Trust yesterday created a one-day mass blog, One Day in History, to provide what a report in today’s Times called “an invaluable snapshot of British life to future generations.” And, it went on, “for most of us, apparently, in was a day of monotony. We woke up, still tired from the previous evening, commuted to work, spent the intervening hours thinking of home time and went to bed after a coup of tea in front of the television.”:

It’s enough to realise how lucky I am – my day was nothing like that. And although I’m a day late to join that blog-in, and in any case I already have the luxury of offering up my thoughts on a daily basis here, perhaps I should join the solipsistic throng to provide a sample day in the life of a theatre critic and journalist.

As a freelance writer, no two days are ever quite the same, though, and yesterday – which begins with an appointment to the doctor to test my blood pressure, and continues with a trip to Guy’s Hospital to have an ECG done (both, fortunately, normal) – saw “real-life” intervening on more than one occasion. So it’s not just luvvie-land that I inhabit all the time! Though it does sometimes seem that way….

Both before and after medical matters are attended to, my first proper job of the day is to complete and file the first — of four — reviews I’ll be writing of Monty Python’s Spamalot that opened the night before. As a freelance writer, I don’t “belong” to any one publication, so I multi-task for various papers and websites, and I try to make sure that I don’t repeat myself too much between them, though its inevitable that some phrases and thought-processes will get reprised. But given that each outlet has a different tone, voice and word-count, I try to create a balance between them and come to each as freshly as I can.

Often I’ll have begun a review the moment I get home from the opening, to get the creative juices rolling (and getting the hardest bit – where to start – out of the way first); but I do find it’s better to sleep on it (or rather, awake to it) so that I have the perspective of rest, rather the immediacy of the moment after the curtain call, to commit my thoughts to paper (or the web). The first review of the day tends to be the template for the others: the place where I work out how I feel about a show. And that, at least, is accomplished without “interference” from reading the other overnight reviews. It’s inevitable that one could get influenced by one’s colleagues, unconsciously or not; and particularly since one of my other jobs requires me to compile a digest round-up of the principal reviews for a website, which I do next, it helps me to discover where I stand in relation to the others! But the good thing about London is that since there are so many of us, by the time you add in the Sunday press (of which I am also a part) and the magazines (ditto) we seldom produce a true consensus; rather, there’s a range of opinions expressed and you find yourself somewhere on the map alongside them.

So I tend to read all of the main daily papers every day – if I’m in a hurry I might search for the reviews online, but I still prefer the immediacy of newsprint if I’m not, and working out of an office I share, next door the Menier Chocolate Factory near London Bridge (roughly a 15-minute walk from my current home), I get the four main broadsheets there daily, plus I’ll buy the Mail and Express if I’m expecting reviews in them. (I used to buy the Standard every day as well, but since the advent of the deluge of free afternoon papers, I simply search for the Standard review online).

I then write the second of my Spamalot reviews, before doing some online research on the career of Tonya Pinkins, the American actress who reprises her Broadway turn in Caroline, or Change at the National Theatre this week, before going to the National to interview her at 12.30pm. Like a lot of American performers, she makes the job easy for me: she has her own dedicated website, http://www.tonypinkins.com, that not only has full biographical details of her entire stage, film and TV career, but also a cuttings gallery of past interviews. From these, I glean something of the astonishing way she has turned her life around in the last four years: from a single mother-of-four (two of whom she lost to their father in a custody battle over) and was living on welfare, to headlining on Broadway and at the National. I am looking forward to meeting her, but also have a little trepidation: how open will she be about this chapter of her life?

It turns out that she’s completely delightful, and comes to meet me at the stage door personally to escort me up to her tiny dressing room. There, we chat openly, freely and frankly for around 45 minutes; meeting fascinating performers like this, with such a unique story to tell, is definitely one of the perks of the job. (It can also be a penance, when they are not quite as forthcoming and it feels like drawing blood from a stone, but today I’m lucky).

I then walk along the river back to my office – another of the pleasures of living and working in this part of town – and grab a baked potato and some fruit for lunch en route. Back at base, I now file a news story on a new musical coming to the King’s Head for one of the websites I work for; and then write up yesterday’s entry for this blog. As you know since you’re here already, I attempt to update this blog most days, and the although its sometimes a challenge to find something fresh and new to write about every day, I manage to find something to say most of the time (even if today I end up writing about myself!). It is, of course, billed as a ‘newsblog’, so I try to confine it matters that pertain to newsworthy events in the industry, though today’s day-in-the-life-of-a-critic is more personal than that. But the point of a blog is to get personal; and I try always to make it also as immediate as possible, so today I am only making a belated attempt to join the National Trust initiative!

I also have to set up future theatre dates and interviews. As a freelance, I am a one-man band – I am my own secretary, receptionist and invoicing clerk, as well as writer, so there’s a lot of administration to do, from dealing with the avalanche of post that comes in most days with press releases and of course e-mail. Today I discover that I need to file a feature on Spamalot for this Sunday’s paper, so I start setting up interviews for that. And I book a couple of train tickets, to get me to Cardiff this Friday (where I am hosting the Stage-sponsored Educators’ Conference as part of the Cardiff International Festival of Musical Theatre there) and Sheffield next Wednesday (to see the Crucible productions of The Caretaker and A Number). As a national critic, I frankly don’t get out of town nearly enough, but there’s always so much to see in London that it’s difficult to do so, plus I have – as you can see above – a very full-time day job juggling it all that keeps me here too!

Then it’s a quick walk home and some more e-mail, before driving into town for the opening of The Cryptogram at the Donmar. As long as I get there around 6.30pm (when parking restrictions are lifted), I can always find a secret parking space – don’t ask me where I’ve hidden them! – and it means a fast getaway after the show. The great thing is that I can be home in barely five minutes.

Tonight I’m going to be home even earlier than expected: The Cryptogram runs for just 65 minutes, which means we’ll be out on the streets just after 8pm! What luxury! It does mean, though, that there’s little time for the ‘social’ side of the theatre, when critics get their ‘water cooler’ moments that people in normal offices get every day. Even though we’re on ‘rival’ papers, there’s definitely a critical camaraderie, based on the fact that we see each other most nights and our mostly shared passion for the theatre, and in the enforced intimacy of the Donmar, we’re even right next to each other. I look forward to the Donmar, because I’m invariably next to the Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett, and it’s become our ‘date’. (Though tonight she breaks the rules and brings a colleague, but we’re still next to each other!) Before the show, Michael Coveney steals me off for a drink at the downstairs bar next door to the theatre, so I have a short water cooler chat there. And walking back to my car afterwards, I exchange a few words with the Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer, about the critical controversy around Bent that I’ve previously blogged about here and is now erupting into a major story thanks to Simon Callow’s contribution to The Times on Monday.

I head off home, driving over Waterloo Bridge, and notice that the National’s fly-tower is a lit in a bright yellow hue that I’ve never seen before. This drive is another of the pleasures of London life, and I always drink in the view. But tonight, seeing the National ought to have reminded me about a commitment later tonight: I am due back there after tonight’s performance of The Alchemist, to host an event on behalf of the development department events team there, where I’m due to interview a couple of the actors from the show – Lesley Manville and Amit Shah – in the Olivier stalls foyer for their members. Only I have clean forgotten. I go home, my partner cooks some pasta for dinner, and I begin my first review for The Cryptogram – then decide to have an early night. I’m in bed just after 10pm. When I should be at the National! At 3am, I wake up, bolt upright – in a cold sweat – remembering where I should have been, and how impossible it is to turn the clock back. So I get up and try to appease my conscience by sending an e-mail apology to the lovely Development Events manager Denise Yeats. (I can only imagine what she must be thinking….) Later, when I get up again, I’ll have to call her, and also send notes of apology to Lesley and Amit…So the tasks for the next day have already begun….

There was a time, of course, when the first night was the first night: it still is, in fact, for opera and ballet performances, where critics are invited to the first paid, public performances. But nowadays it is standard practice in the theatre to cut the producers some slack, and allow them to determine their own “first” nights following a period of previews, entirely at their discretion, in which to get the show right before we see it. Since critics are (usually) guests of the production, we generally do as all good guests are supposed to, and that’s to await our formal invitation, rather than gatecrashing the party early (which, of course, there is nothing to prevent us from doing so, should we choose to buy a ticket).

But the terms of engagement are gradually changing. Producer Sonia Friedman has tried a couple of times to separate the first night from the press night, inviting critics in a night earlier than the official gala opening. But without any arrangement to embargo our reviews till after the opening, it did mean that the production then went into the first night already knowing their critical fate. So no one has tried it again until last night, when the transfer of Monty Python’s Spamalot from Broadway once again invited us in early, and tonight will duly glow in the comfort factor of their (mostly) favourable reviews. But though the producers of Spamalot might have been quietly confident of their likely reception over here, it could have gone the other way, and a first night under those conditions might have been rather less good fun for all concerned. (A fun aside: on the way there, I got a call from a colleague, eager to confirm exactly where the Palace Theatre was. How long have you been a theatre critic, I asked? Of course, Les Mis had run so long there that the critic concerned hadn’t been there for over 19 years, until The Woman in White moved in, but since then we’ve also been to Whistle Down the Wind there, so its location should have settled in the memory by now…)

On Broadway, they hold what are called “Critics previews” ahead of the opening night – for which critics are invited to choose when they will attend from a range of two or three final previews. But in New York there is an agreement to hold reviews until the day after the opening itself, which also means that the critics get a much longer time for reflection before they have to produce the words, so there’s no unseemly scramble for the exit that the overnight critics have to do on London first nights. Of course, this does mean that the New York critics aren’t reporting on the immediacy of the first night and offering an instant judgement on it, so their reviews lack ‘news’ value. No wonder they are always confined to the arts pages, whereas in London a big opening may make a news splash much earlier in the main body of the paper…

Last night’s press desk, meanwhile, had the combined forces of the efficient Premier PR office on duty – a role they’ll have to return to provide tonight, to marshal the teams of photographers and diary columnists who will no doubt be out in force for celebrity sightings that we were thankfully spared last night – but also New York’s most indefatigably conscientious theatrical PR, Adrian Bryan-Brown of Boneau-Bryan Brown, who look after the show in New York. I have known Adrian for years now, and the pleasure of running into him, either here or on his home turf where we invariably have breakfast, is his undiminished enthusiasm for this business we could show. It must be all too easy to become jaded by demanding clients and shows, but I know no one more intensely knowledgeable about the inside workings of the theatre industry, on either side of the Atlantic. He knows who all the English critics are, and cultivates his relationships with us in a way that’s entirely genuine and completely accommodating.

Talking of critics, I’ve blogged already about some of the critical responses to the new production of Bent , but now I’m pleased to see that the dialogue has been continued in The Times, no less, with a feature by Simon Callow yesterday that points out that some of the reviews, “in addition to the critical judgments of the play, to have brought forth something I had hoped gone for ever: homophobia”. In addition to the two reviews I singled out, he also cites the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer for “approvingly” quoting Peter Hall’s dismissive comment that the play is “a Manhattan fag’s fantasy”. Says Callow, “The phrase ‘Manhattan fag’ — the playwright Martin Sherman is American — whether in 1979 or in 2006, is offensive by any standards: replace it with ‘Manhattan kike’ or ‘Manhattan nigger’ and see how it sounds.” But Charlie at least addressed what he perceived to be play’s shortcomings as drama, not making judgements about the lives or history being portrayed.

As Simon eloquently puts it, “What is offensive is that these reviewers seem to twist the facts depicted in the play, and suggest that Sherman is perverting the truth of the Holocaust for purposes of gay propaganda. But everything in the play — whether or not you like the way it’s handled — is based on documentary evidence. Homosexuals were the lowest of the low; they were despised by their fellow inmates; they were given the most demeaning tasks. No one is saying that numerically the Jews did not suffer vastly more than any other group, but a substantial number of gay men were meted out particularly harsh punishments. Is that not worth saying? They did survive on humour, which in their case, naturally, was queer humour. And they did manage to create some sort of sexual contact. The famous sex scene in which the two men talk themselves off is dismissed as masturbatory: if it were between a man and a woman, I’m sure critics would be delightedly throwing their hats in the air at their clandestine orgasm as a triumph of the human spirit — precisely Sherman’s point. But apparently not for homosexuals. In fact, Sherman is making the very same point that Tom Stoppard so eloquently makes in Rock’n’Roll: the only real defiance of totalitarianism is by refusing the terms of the tyrant, by creating a reality beyond the reality of politics.”

“I have never looked forward to a theatrical event more than Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape”, wrote Paul Taylor in a preview piece in The Independent about Samuel Beckett last week, and in today’s review of the production that has now opened at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs, The Guardian’s Michael Billington comments, “It is easier to get a cup final ticket than one for Harold Pinter’s performance in the Theatre Upstairs.”

And there’s the problem – it’s in the tiny Theatre Upstairs, and only on for 10 scheduled nights in all. Last Friday’s performance was apparently lost when the theatre had to be evacuated, so that means that, with an audience of just 80 per performance, a total of just 720 will see this landmark performance. No wonder the entire run sold out in a reported 16 minutes. Is there a place for such elitism in a publicly subsidised theatre?

Certainly Saturday’s press night was probably the most rarefied opening I’ve ever been at: once the press were crowded in (after drinks and very good canapés beforehand), the rest of the tiny audience were mostly well-known faces, from Peter Hall and Kristin Scott Thomas to Samuel West, accompanied by playwright Laura Wade, as well as Mark Rylance and Bill Paterson (whose wife Hildegard Bechtler designed the production). I’m thrilled, of course, to have been among them; but also – as we were disgorged after the disquieting, intense performance onto the street just 45 minutes later – I also wondered what exactly the point of making this event so exclusive was. Couldn’t it have been done in the main house? Perhaps Pinter didn’t want to do it there. Or for a longer run? But then Pinter’s health may not have permitted it. We should be grateful that he’s doing it at all, I suppose, but the great reviews he has now duly received adds insult to the injury of all those who can’t actually see it.

Meanwhile, another rather quirkily ‘exclusive’ theatrical event saw the presentation of this year’s TMA Theatre Awards at Hampstead Theatre last night. With just 325 seats for nominees, presenters and guests – but the widest potential reach of any theatre award in the calendar, since it covers productions throughout the UK – it seems weird to confine it in such a small venue. Yet the nominees and winners are also drawn up from a weird “democratic” process that sees nearly 200 members of the public invited to judge more than 1,000 productions around the country, whose recommendations produce a shortlist of potential nominees, from which a professional panel then vote on the winners. While the theatre panel includes the very conscientious second string critics of the Daily Telegraph and Times – Dominic Cavendish and Sam Marlowe respectively – joined by Belfast’s Grania McFadden and Scotland-based Mark Fisher, I wonder if they all managed to see all of the nominated shows to draw their winners from?

Out of thirty nominations in the theatre categories, I surprised myself that I’d seen 14 of them, including all three of the nominees for each of the Best Performance in a Musical and Best Touring Production categories, and two each of the Best New Play and Best Musical Production nominees. But while my own limited experience of work outside London had included some of the nominations at Sheffield, Leicester, Derby and on tour, I’d actually managed to see most of them in London – the two best new play nominees I’d seen were only seen here (at Hampstead and the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs), two of the Best Touring Production nominees had come to Soho and the National respectively, while Road to Nowhere (winner of the Best Musical Production) was seen only at the Lyric Hammersmith. All of which suggests an inevitable metropolitan bias.

Since these awards are specifically designed to reflect the best of British theatre from throughout the country, it seems disappointing that London therefore features so strongly. Surely there are enough London-based awards – the Olivier, Standard and Critics’ Circle (which though drawn from a vote of members nationally, is inevitably London-centric too) – to make the TMA Awards reflect their far wider constituency more fully.

The news arrived by e-mail yesterday morning: the editor of The Stage, Brian Attwood, wrote to staff and contributors, “There is no easy way to put this. Sadly, Peter Hepple died last night in his sleep. It’s a huge loss to all of us who had the pleasure and the benefit of knowing him and of course to The Stage, to which he made such a key contribution for so many years.”

I have never known The Stage without him. When I first started reading it in 1979, he was, of course, its esteemed and prolific editor (a post he held for some 20 years), and his by-line and personality was all over it. Later, as he held the role of The Stage’s principal West End critic and became a colleague and a friend whom I would see, sometimes but not always with his wife Josie beside him, at first nights all the time, I came to value his warmth and especially his acerbic wit.

It is difficult to imagine the paper without him. Absolutely one-of-a-kind, he had a passion for journalism and the theatre industry rooted in an affection for being there every night. He died on Wednesday night and was in the office only the day before. When I ran into a West End press agent yesterday, she told me that Peter reviewing a show that she was handling next week; I had to tell her the news that Peter would not, after all, be there. But I know he will be there in spirit – he never missed an opening if he could help it.

But there is no funnier tribute to him that I could imagine that more perfectly captures his essence than the description Michael Coveney offers in his out-of-publication 1994 diary, The Aisle is Full of Noises: he meets Barry Cryer on a Edinburgh Fringe chat show hosted by Ned Sherrin, and he reminds Barry “that the last (and indeed first) time we met was at a retirement lunch in the Savoy for Peter Hepple…. I try out my Peter Hepple impersonation on him, he replies with an even better one, and we indulge for a few moments of celebratory Hepple-itis, scrunching our noses and shoulders, and intoning slowly our preference for a mediocre night of entertainment at the Rat and Vole Niterie, Thanet, over the prospect of a new play in the Cottesloe or the Bush. One or two people steal a pitying glance at two madmen apparently engaged in some terrible, argumentative ritual.”

The Young Vic has returned – on time and on budget, as artistic director David Lan’s mantra has it – and as Professor Christopher Frayling, chairman of the Arts Council observed in a speech at last night’s re-opening, these are not words that Frayling gets to say very often, either. Frayling, going on to call the work the best value for money of any of the rebuilds in recent years, also pointed out that the rhetoric of access, inclusion, diversity and participation is often detached from the reality of what goes on, but the Young Vic actually gives meaning to those notions.

In short, the Young Vic is like a prized pupil: a model theatre that meets the beaming approval of its prime parent sponsor. Frayling even admitted that the Arts Council got one thing wrong: during a rebuild, theatres either close their doors and work for the duration, or continue their work at different venues (the Young Vic did 22 shows at 41 different venues during its closure); and while the Arts Council had suggested closure, the Young Vic went on walkabout – and kept all but one of their senior management team on board – to return now fighting fit.

David Lan told the audience that Jude Law, patron of the fundraising campaign, had told a journalist that being part of the project was the proudest thing of his professional life, and Lan repaid the compliment by saying that having Law as part of the project was the proudest thing of his.

And after the foyer speeches, it was into the auditorium for the first performance in the new building – one that ticked all of Frayling’s boxes of access, inclusion, diversity and participation, with the community opera Tobias and the Angel, featuring a choir of some 140 performers drawn from the local area. But more than that, it also showed off the new building in all its new literally heightened glory: as the choir gathered in the new second gallery, the old familiar space – preserved in its perfect dimensions – could be seen to have risen higher. Otherwise, though, we felt entirely at home, even down to the restoration of the old bench seating. It was wonderful to be back there, in what was once meant to be a purely temporary space but is now a permanent fixture in London’s theatrical ecology.

The bane of Broadway is now fast becoming the bane of the West End, too: the kind of idle, unmediated “chatter” of bulletin boards that casts a pall over a previewing production and creates a climate of unease around a show. Of course, one of the joys of the internet is that it creates a democracy of opinion and free speech; but it can be dangerous to follow it too closely. I know that a lot of producers are unnerved by internet chatter, and indeed from time to time have been known to go onto these boards and correct misapprehensions. (Only last week, James Dreyfus – star of the new production of Cabaret – put the record straight on his own health record during the run of The Producers on one of them. Of course, since the board concerned doesn’t require pre-registration, there is no guarantee that it was indeed him, but the posting had the ring of authentic truth. And that’s the trouble, too: you can never be sure what’s genuine and what’s sheer mischievousness).

But the chatboards, though valuable for the public to have their say, are probably far from representative of the public at large – only the dedicated sector of fans (and foes) who traffic them. So it’s best to take them with a pinch of salt. And it certainly proved to be the case with last night’s opening of Cabaret, that advance internet word was spelling doom for, but has today wowed almost all the critics. Of course, too, a lot of work has no doubt happened during the preview process to sharpen the production up to the point it was seen at last night; which again makes the instant judgements of bulletin boards so harsh.

But if anyone ever thinks the critics are too harsh, they only need to read the bulletin board chatter on a show like this; though who’s to say that the critics are right and the posters wrong? There’s one key difference, though: at least the world knows who the critics are and can write and engage with them if they disagree. Bulletin boards, where posters hide under the cloak of anonymity and pseudonyms, offer no such integrity checks.

A few weeks ago I joined Sofie Mason, who has launched a website called offwestend.com that consolidates all the major London fringe theatres to promote them free under one banner, to extol the virtues of the fringe to a group called the London Ladies Club, a group who gather weekly at Chelsea’s Sloane Club for a talk and coffee. We found some spirited theatregoers amongst them, including one American woman who spends a couple of months at a time in London and whenever she does, spends every single night at the theatre with her husband. But this group, who gather under a banner of natural, spirited curiosity in which they actively seek to have their horizons expanded, seemed definitely up for more, and yesterday Sofie organised a three-stop coach tour of some of West London’s best fringe theatres to bring them close-up and personal with them.

With some 25 ladies on board, I joined them on their visit to the Lyric Hammersmith, the Bush and Gate, and although they are venues I seem to have visited all my theatregoing life, even I found out new and fascinating perspectives on them all, as each theatre laid on staff to provide background and a guided tour of each. At the Lyric, for instance, we were led through the pass door and actually onto the stage, for a close encounter with the set of the current production of Metamorphosis that I had only seen last Friday. Having seen the astonishing Gisli Orn Gardarsson apparently flying free of gravity and footholdings for most of the performance, it was intriguing to see how it was achieved in the grips of the cut-out holes dotted throughout the set. The infinite mystery of theatre is actually enhanced rather than diminished by seeing the ingenuity with which its effects are achieved.

And when I visited on Friday, I had already admired the beautifully refurbished main foyer and bar area, that now resembles a swish boutique hotel foyer with soft lampshades and comfortable leather sofas dotted around, rather than the functional tables and chairs of old. Yesterday I discovered that this impressive act of interior design was commissioned from stage designer Ti Green.

On to the Bush, and I finally saw for myself the outdoor fire escape spiral staircase from which Bush actors have to descend from their single (but comfortably appointed) dressing room to make a backstage entrance. And at the Gate, the Ladies were able to quiz the all-lady team – “the sisterhood”, someone referred to them as! – who comprise some of the theatre’s senior staff, from its producer and literary manager to education officer and development manager.

Allowing potential audiences to make personal connections in this way is a sure-fire way to inspire them to visit the venues in the future. And offwestend.com is a brilliant tool for leading them to what to see.

While religious and racial difference is now, rightly, embraced and not celebrated rather than criticised, there seems to be a last frontier where prejudice is still blatantly acceptable. I’ve already blogged about the Daily Mail’s response to Bent - but at least it gave the production four stars all the same, which was an acknowledgement of sorts of the power of the play despite his misgivings. But in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Christopher Hart takes an even more alienating line in his one-star review. Now, it’s not enough to wonder, as Letts did, if gays didn’t have it as bad as Jews did in the Nazi concentration camps; Hart suggests they brought it upon themselves.

Judging the gay lifestyle portrayed on stage to be “seedy, boring - and a little insulting”, he asks, “Are gay men always so childishly hedonistic and self-absorbed?” (No more so than the average theatre critic, I’d say) He then suggests, “We’re supposed to see Gay Berlin as wonderfully hedonistic and liberated, a happy place of sexual permissiveness and excess before the beastly Nazis shut it down.” And then comes the killer blow: “There is no recognition that the individualistic anarchy of these solipsistic bores often leads to a tyrannical backlash.”

But the tyranny of this kind of grand-standing opinionated commentary doesn’t review the play so much as tell us about the prejudices of the critic. And it’s astonishing to see it being paraded so openly in the pages of a supposedly liberal paper (at least more liberal than the Daily Mail, at any rate).

Though Quentin Letts may claim in his Daily Mail review today of last night’s opening of a revival of Martin Sherman’s Bent that the play no longer has the “shocking novelty value” that it might have had when it originally premiered in 1979, his review proves that the play is as necessary as it ever was, since it’s the ignorant and ugly prejudice of that review, not the play, that now shocks me to the core.

Protesting, perhaps a little too strongly, that his avowedly “heterosexual heart” was not “entirely stirred by Bent’s love theme”, he goes on to suggest that his sympathy was held in check by “the suspicion that the suppression of homosexuality — even when it was this brutal, was not quite as bad as the agony suffered by Jewish people in Hitler’s concentration camps”.

The relative moral merits of different victims of the Nazi atrocity is nailed, in his view, by being measured against the suffering of children: “Max and Horst are lone adults with the option of choice. Jewish parents had to see their children sent to their death.”

With such blatant prejudice still being paraded in 2006, we could easily be back in Nazi Germany, and the play – and its potent rallying cry for the dignity of love amongst all humans, rather than classing one rank above any other – is still as important as ever.

Last night’s opening, meanwhile, was given an added poignancy by the curtain call revelation of playwright Martin Sherman that Tom Bell – who created the lead role of Horst in the Royal Court’s original 1979 production – had died the night before; and an extra frisson from the appearance in the audience of one Monica Lewinsky. She made history, of course, for notorious reasons of her own; but this play’s heartbreaking reclamation of a particular and disturbing era of gay history is far too important to be trivialised by the likes of Letts.

Last week I wrote here about the sometimes-disruptive behaviour of fellow audience members, and someone replied, “Can any audience response ever be inappropriate?”

Obviously they’ve never sat in front of Christopher Biggins at a comedy show. At last night’s first night for Little Britain Live, I had to watch the entire show filtered through the near-hysterical, hyena-like braying gurgling of his reactions booming from behind me. The low rumble of recognition as each character presented themselves would quickly erupt into a high-pitched squeal of apparent comic delight. And there’s nothing that can kill one’s own laughter as quickly as someone else over-reacting. Of course, Biggins – as he is universally known – is a fixture at such openings; no envelope has ever been opened without him being present. The same is true of Su Pollard, and she, too, is a whole show in herself whenever she’s at one (since she’s rarely these days actually in one).

Of course, people in the ‘business’, or its periphery, often feel they need to be ‘on’ all the time. But actually the desperate attention-seeking displays like this, whether conscious or not, are not much of a performance; and do nothing for the performance we’re actually there to watch.

Of course, actors are far from the only ones to do this. And maybe I’m just far too sensitive to those around me. I’m sure I’ve been guilty, too, and have been known to irritate other audience members myself – it’s the ebb and flow of being a member of the collective mass of an audience. The truth is, too, that going to the theatre as often as I do, I’m bound run into such irritations more often. But next time I see Biggins in the vicinity, I’m moving seats…..

The ambition and innovation of the fringe never ceases to amaze. After last year’s slickly immaculate yet heartfelt rendering of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at the Menier Chocolate Factory (that then deservedly transferred to the West End), another diligent regular provider of new and interesting musical theatre, the tiny and even more under-capitalised Landor near Clapham North, has now upped the ante and gone for broke, squeezing Sondheim’s most specifically theatrical musical, Follies, into its tiny space.

While it famously took this landmark 1971 Broadway musical nearly two decades to first reach London – finally opening at the Shaftesbury in 1987 in a re-worked version that added new songs and was wittily redubbed ‘Hello, Follies!’ in some quarters for its endless parade of senior women descending staircases – and has also been revived in a Royal Festival Hall production, this new, inevitably stripped back, staging does something far more potentially interesting than either of those productions: instead of being drowned in big production values, it peels away the layers of the relationships under scrutiny in James Goldman’s book with a powerful, close-up intensity that is becomes quietly overwhelming. This is the first time that I’ve felt that the book isn’t an encumbrance to the songs but rather an integral part of it.

There’s also something particularly poignant about seeing Claire Moore and Sarah Payne, two leading West End ingénues in their time, now playing former Follies girls who are looking back in regret at where their lives and careers have brought them as they attend a final reunion before the theatre they once starred in is torn down. In the case of the two actresses who once used to command the stages of Drury Lane or London Palladium, as each did in the original casts of Miss Saigon and the Tommy Steele version of Singin’ in the Rain respectively – life mirrors the art on display, if not in the personal lives being charted then at least on the professional front as they now appear in a venue that seats barely twice the number of people on its stage. Glamour doesn’t get more faded than this, life’s disillusionments more tangible. But it also doesn’t get more personal or electrifying, either. One of the special thrills of Robert McWhir’s production is that the stage and audience become truly seamless; we’re all inhabiting the same space, with the tableside nightclub seating applying to the actors onstage as well.

The only frustration now for audiences eager to lap it up will be actually getting in; the Landor only has 53 seats, and the run has long sold out. Unfortunately the theatre’s website still misleadingly seems to be accepting bookings; and the theatre is simply unable to cope with the administrative backlog of its answerphone and web enquiries. With a five-star review in today’s Times, and a Time Out critics’ choice recommendation, that demand is only likely to increase. Perhaps another transfer is in order; how about Wilton’s Music Hall, an appropriately crumbling edifice of a theatre?

The National Theatre has long been the leading provider of “quality drama” in London’s theatreland, now that the West End is more or less dominated by musical revivals, imports, jukebox shows and other long-runners. The handful of plays in town – invariably on limited runs – are transfers from the Donmar like A Voyage Round My Father (soon to be followed, no doubt, by the Donmar’s current hit Frost/Nixon), the Royal Court’s Rock n’ Roll or the Tricycle’s The 39 Steps, with only a couple of new productions (of long-established plays) originated with the West End always in its sights, like Bent (opening this week at the intimate Trafalgar Studios) or Summer and Smoke (now in Nottingham en route to the Apollo).

But if the National’s dominant market position is now unchallenged, so is its power. West End producers may well have resented being cut out of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the National’s biggest hit for years. After it opened on the South Bank two years ago, the National held onto its reigns tightly, keeping it in the repertoire there in order to maximise the return to themselves, rather than throwing it open to the commercial vultures to capitalise for their own profits (though under a pre-existing arrangement with Broadway producers Boyett Ostar Productions, who in return for upfront annual funding to the National have the first refusal on New York transfers, it was moved to Broadway under their auspices).

Now the news comes that, in the wake of last night’s Royal Premiere for the film version of The History Boys, the current national touring production of the play will come to the West End’s Wyndham’s in December. And once again, the West End is being cut out of the deal: the National is sufficiently confident of its own product that it is producing the West End transfer itself, together with National Angels Ltd, an Enterprise Investment Scheme company set up by a group of the National’s loyal supporters that is intended to give the theatre a bigger share of commercial profits when they are available.

Of course, there are no guarantees in the West End – the transfer of the National’s Democracy, also to Wyndham’s, failed to return a profit to producer Michael Codron, partly because it had exhausted its audience by the time it got to town after the National kept it in the repertoire of the South Bank and even moved it into the larger Lyttelton before it crossed the river, thus opening up many more seats. So the question is whether the appetite for The History Boys will continue to be as powerful as it has proved to be thus far, at higher West End prices and without the original company? I hope so.

At the final curtain call for Billy Elliot on Saturday night, there were some nine past, present and future Billy’s on stage – a veritable family gathering – there to send off the last of the original ones, in every sense: Liam Mower had, together with James Lomas and George Maguire, originated the role when the show first opened in May last year (and jointly shared the Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical), but it was Liam who gave the press night performance, and helped secure the show’s critical plaudits as a result. His own story was also the most directly biographical with regards to the show’s narrative: at age 12, he won a £28,000 a year scholarship to attend the Royal Ballet School at White Lodge, and combined classes there with taking on the lead in Billy Elliot.

But now with his departure from the show, he is also leaving the school and going back home to Hull. According to a story in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, his mother says, “The school did everything it could for him but he wasn’t happy. We got a phone call from him and he was sobbing. He was begging, ‘come and take me home’. They were giving him a much better education than he would get in Hull but it was the right decision because he was so unhappy and so tired. Happiness is the most important thing.”

Liam himself is quoted as saying, “The Billys don’t get enough time at home, in my opinion. I had not been to London before and, although most things have been absolutely brilliant, homesickness was the worst thing. I was really tired, taking ballet classes then going up to London from White Lodge to play Billy and getting back really late. I got really drained. It was the pressure. I did like the ballet school but they were saying to me, ‘Your bottom is sticking out. Your ballet isn’t very good’. There was lots of criticism.”

The pressures of combining performing a high-profile leading role in the West End with a demanding formal training were obviously substantial, but seeing this remarkably self-possessed and self-assured boy performing, quite radiantly, on his final night suggests he’ll be just fine. And he’s certainly got his head screwed on the right way: “I am very sad to go,” he says. “But my voice is changing and I don’t want to go through the experience of struggling to be a 12-year-old boy when I am not any more.”

And he’s going home, not just with many new friends from his time in London, but one special new friend that was presented to him at the final curtain call: a beautiful black Labrador puppy.