This is the 400th entry on this blog — so it’s appropriate that I’m today reporting on another list with a hundred entries of its own. As you can read online today, and in tomorrow’s issue of The Stage, Andrew Lloyd Webber and David Ian have jointly topped the annual Stage 100 list of the year’s most influential theatrical personalities, on and offstage. This follows a bit of a head-to-head stand-off last year when Lloyd Webber was toppled from pole position by the ascendancy of Ian, only of course to come together professionally this year to co-produce the runaway hit of The Sound of Music – with a little bit of help from television friends and the casting-by-public-vote of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
Now that they’re in harmony at the top of this year’s Stage 100, they’ll part ways again to go head-to-head in another bout of reality TV casting next year when they respectively use this new casting tool to cast revivals of revivals of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Lloyd Webber, via the BBC) and Grease (Ian, via ITV1) that they’ve both previously done.
As our editor Brian Attwood comments, “It will be interesting to see how they both fare next year when they are competitors with two separate TV shows, rather than collaborators.” But while there’s an inevitable subjectivity and intrigue to the way lists like these are drawn up – and the public, by the way, is being encouraged (in the spirit of the times) to cast its own vote for whom they deem to be the most influential in a survey here – this is a fun survey of who’s in and who’s out and the changing fortunes of the people who make the British theatre one of the most compelling places on earth.
This year, for instance, Jude Kelly hurtles back into the top twenty list – after a five year absence from it – in her new role as artistic director at the South Bank Centre. That’ll sharpen the differences that are, if a report in The Observer a couple of weekends is anything to go by, are already erupting over there. According to the Observer, “The maverick vision of the artistic director, Jude Kelly, has prompted a series of ‘stand-up rows’ between her and the chief executive, Michael Lynch, over what will be staged at the venue”. It further reports one executive (who wishes to remain anonymous) complaining, “We just don’t know what kind of business we are in yet”, and another former employee saying, “There is still no clear programme. People are feeling a bit leaderless.” But if Kelly is yet to show her hand – and another executive quoted says, ‘It is as if everybody is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nobody wants this place to fail, but this is a time for working out the nitty-gritty, and nobody seems to be doing that” – she will hopefully feel empowered and emboldened by her placement so high in the artistic firmament again to finally make some of those ideas public.
But if the South Bank Centre is floundering a little, it’s also refreshing to find Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany of the National Theatre of Scotland amongst the new entries to the Top Twenty. Here’s a thrilling new initiative – a national theatre without the boundaries of a building-based programme to fulfil – that has, since its first performance less than a year ago in February 2006, already put itself at the forefront of British theatre. It has been involved in creating some 28 productions in 62 different locations – from theatres to ferries and forests – and the amazing Edinburgh hit Black Watch is now due to hit the road in the New Year.
Also new to the Top Twenty list is Jonathan Church, who has astutely put Chichester Festival Theatre back on the map in his first year at the helm of a theatre that was seriously floundering under its triumvirate of artistic directors before, while another newcomer to the list, director Rufus Norris may have suffered a rare directorial misstep when his hit West End production of Festen floundered badly when it went to Broadway, but he’s still top of the freelance directorial tree for shows like Market Boy at the National and the current West End production of Cabaret. Dominic Cooke, the other directorial new entry, made a stonking West End hit of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible when his RSC production transferred to the Gielgud, and of course now takes over in the New Year from Ian Rickson at the helm of the Royal Court, where his unique parallel talents for new and classic plays will be acutely tested.
