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….
