February 2007 Archives

There’s sad news about a news man today, as personable young Tom Teodorczuk signs off from the arts correspondent’s patch on the Evening Standard to follow his lovely wife in relocating to New York where she has a new job (and a new baby, on the way). I’m going to miss him, and not just because the first time I met him he told me what a fan he was of this blog! But rather, the theatre needs its advocates in the press, fighting our corner; and the arts correspondents – who, of course, are charged with covering the waterfront of the arts from a news angle – are a very important part of that armoury. As a critic who also reports news (in an opinionated way on this blog, and elsewhere purely factually), I come into contact with most of the arts correspondents of the national papers regularly at press conferences and the like. But it’s the ones you also see regularly at the theatre that impress me – since they’re not necessarily on duty but doing it for pleasure, too.

And the two most diligent, in my experience, are The Independent’s Louise Jury and Tom. And that kind of passion – not to mention the inside-track knowledge they therefore bring to their reporting – marks them out as more than mere hacks. Of course, they have to work within the constraints of their paper’s agendas and Tom may not always get the space he deserves, but Louise constantly proves she knows her onions – and gets the access (and space in the paper) as a result. Only last week she secured a rare interview with Harold Pinter.

The importance of the arts correspondent, of course, is particularly magnified by events such as Equus that finally opened last night. With “event” theatre like this, the critics are only the afterthought – the final bit of validation that a production seeks as it hurtles across the finishing line. But along the way, it’s the arts correspondents that stock up and stir the interest in them.

You have to wonder, though, about the agenda that allows some of them to so slavishly buy into a clearly-manufactured story. When David Pugh produced the dismal Ducktastic! a few years ago – that featured a live duck – the papers dutifully reported its dramatic theft from the theatre. Even the police were apparently called. Myself, I’d have thought there was a prosecution available for wasting police time.

And yesterday’s Times reported a story of the mob scenes outside the stage door of the Gielgud nightly as the crowds gather for (another) glimpse of Daniel Radcliffe. I’ve seen this for myself, and indeed walked past the stage door on Saturday night around 11pm where a very large crowd had gathered. (It reminded me of West 45th Street when Julia Roberts was appearing there last year in Three Days of Rain – it was brought to a standstill after the show every night by the crowds besieging the stage door).

But somehow The Times got fed a story that the crowd on Saturday – the same night I walked past – was so large that it had to be dispersed by the police, and though Radcliffe was escorted to his car safely, two of his co-stars – Jenny Agutter and Richard Griffiths – were trapped inside. Producer David Pugh tells The Times, “Richard and Jenny had to get out through the side window by the box office on Rupert Street”… and adds a little ungallantly, ““You try to get Richard Griffiths out of a back window. It was a bit touch and go.”

Actually, the theatre always had well-practiced plans for dealing with the Radcliffe factor. Last week I asked someone connected to the show how they dealt with it, and was told that he comes out of the stage door every night and signs autographs for a few minutes – then goes back inside and makes an exit elsewhere through the building. So do his co-stars. I very much doubt any windows are involved in the exit strategy. But it makes a good story.

Good arts journalists like Louise and Tom wouldn’t have bought it. Lazier ones do.

Running, as I do, to an invariably tight diary, where there’s far more to see than the time available in which to do it – and aren’t we lucky in London that this is always the case? – I seldom find myself at a loose end. But if I try to run my life to a schedule, the world doesn’t always run to mine, and twice in the last couple of days I’ve been out-manoeuvred. On Sunday afternoon I was heading to Jermyn Street Theatre to see the final performance of American singer Maude Maggart’s one-week run as part of the American Songbook in London season there, when I turned my phone on to find not one but two messages: from both the season’s PR, Sue Hyman, and the theatre’s administrator Penny Horner, to let me know that Maude had lost her voice and would no longer be appearing! Shucks – and since this was the last show, there wouldn’t be another opportunity to catch her. (That’ll teach me for leaving things to the last minute).

But Jeff Harner, the season’s producer who kicks off his own week as part of the season tonight, was stepping into the breach – so I went anyway. It wasn’t the afternoon I was expecting, of course, but it gave me the chance to see a set I was probably going to miss otherwise. And the theatre not only made a conscientious double effort to get the news to me, but they had also contacted the rest of the audience they could reach in advance, too – most of whom also turned up to see the replacement. This is a theatre that is clearly run to a tight ship – and has a loyal audience as a result.

Unlike last night, when I had scheduled going to see Proof at the Arts Theatre. The press night had been the previous Monday, but I had to cancel with due warning the Friday before – but not wanting to let the show’s PR down completely, asked to be booked in instead for a week later, which was the earliest opportunity I had to go. The review would be a week late, but better late than never. It was confirmed back to me, so I duly turned up last night. There was a mob scene at the door, and I have to admit that I felt a bit surprised that the play was proving so popular. Except that it wasn’t on. Instead, there was some kind of invited cabaret showcase.

My guest Paul – who also works for The Stage – and I beat a hasty and perplexed retreat. How could I have had a confirmation – “you are re-booked for 26th” – in that case? Perhaps I should thank them: we headed for dinner instead and had a rare night off from the theatre, which was actually very welcome. I won’t, however, now get another opportunity to see Proof, as my diary is now full for the rest of this week and the moment has passed. Which, to judge from the comments of some of my colleagues, it has for the play, too. So perhaps we had a lucky escape.

Judy Garland lived again at the London Palladium last night. Or at least her spirit did, reincarnated in a wonderful act of homage and cultural appropriation by singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright. Last summer Wainwright brought her back to Carnegie Hall, to recreate the legendary 1961 concert she gave at that hall, song-by-song, as I blogged here at the time, and about which New York Times critic Stephen Holden wrote, “What unfolded onstage was a tour de force of politically empowering performance art in which a proudly gay male performer paid homage to the original and longest-running gay icon in the crowded pantheon of pop divas…His courage to stand as a surrogate for every audience member who ever gazed into the mirror and fantasized slipping into Dorothy’s ruby slippers spoke for itself.”

I was extremely sad that I hadn’t been there myself, especially when a friend, Bill Rosenfield, who was, wrote to tell me:

“For a lot of us it was truly a profound moment in the Gay Pride movement. Let’s face it that album for a certain group of gay men is part of our DNA and yes we all mimed to it alone in our rooms in front of mirrors. However, more than that Judy was/is this source of strength and inspiration and to sit in Carnegie Hall –where it all originally happened - and see an openly gay man and a singular entertainer on his own – sing The Man That Got Away with her original pulse pounding arrangement – was an act of political and social liberation – he was there on that stage because SHE was there on that stage – for us all. It was as if he was saying : Thank you for making us possible and inspiring us to achieve this moment.

And that was just the first act.

In the second act he sat down on the apron of the stage and introduced his mother who entered and sat at the piano – and he sang ‘Over the Rainbow’. And there it was – he topped the first act stuff because now we were seeing an openly gay man, singing Over the Rainbow with his Mother’s blessing – what was once a dream of acceptance had become a reality for all of us little boys out there who didn’t fit in and felt unbearable loneliness all those years ago – here at last was Mom saying: You’re my son and I love you and whoever you are going to be.

And the fact that musically it was thrilling as well didn’t hurt. This was no stunt – this was powerful politics.”

Well, last night that phenomenal act of artistic and political power was reprised at the London Palladium – another room forever associated with Garland (and daughter Liza Minnelli – I never saw Garland here, as I was only seven when she died, but how well I remember watching Liza in her 1986 tour here, perched at the front of the upper circle). Sometimes buildings themselves can hold the history of the performances that have taken place within them – and right now, a performer who had once held centrestage here so unforgettably was brought back, for two nights only (Rufus also did this concert last Sunday, but it clashed with the Oliviers), and the past, present and future collided for two and a half hours, for this will surely, too, join the pantheon of historic performances that have been witnessed here.

Of course there’s nothing new about tribute shows – this very stage recently hosted Sinatra at the London Palladium, in which restored film footage of the singer brought him back into the room floating on moving film screens above and around a choreographed floorshow. But there was something necessarily “manufactured” about that – Sinatra’s presence was absent. Wainwright’s audacious show attempts something far bigger: to channel Garland in one of the most thrilling acts of homage ever. And there are also extraordinary affinities between them that made it all the more moving: Garland, of course, was part of a whole showbiz dynasty, and so is Wainwright, whose parents and sister are all performers; and Wainwright, like Garland, has had his own well-documented battle with drugs. Rufus also revealed that his dad had had a childhood crush on Liza – they both attended Beverley Hills High School together and would hang out together!

And on hand last night were members of both families: Rufus’ mother and sister; and Judy’s “other” daughter, Lorna Luft. “Thank you Rufus for doing this in my mom’s memory”, declared Luft last night, giving the event an official seal of approval. But then Luft has herself spent much of her career memorialising her mother: a few years ago she brought a solo show to the Savoy that she even had the nerve to make the connection explicit in the title of: Songs My Mother Taught Me (One wag wittily redubbed it at the time, “Songs My Mother Taught My Sister While I Was in the Room”; and in one of the most caustically trenchant reviews I’ve ever read, the Time Out review referred to the shoulderless dress she was wearing in the second act and said it was designed, presumably, “to reveal the absence of a chip”).

But last night there were no axes to grind – just a full-on celebration of one performer’s love for another that took us on a rollercoaster of associations and emotions.

Where, in another age, Garland would supply solace for generations of isolated gay men, she’s now just a source of celebration – and it’s wonderful just how much the world has changed. In the stalls last night, was one of the icons (if not agents) of that change, Ian McKellen – but he waited till he was well advanced in his career before coming out. The day before, I was in Manchester, and saw the Royal Exchange’s production of Coward’s The Vortex – starring out gay singer Will Young making his theatrical acting debut. The show has been selling out on the strength of his name. As, also in Manchester, has been the musical theatre debut of popular TV comic Peter Kay, playing Roger de Bris in the regional premiere of the stage version of The Producers – and singing “Keep it Gay!” as he does so. I saw that on Friday, and although this is a heavily caricatured role, there is something so warm and loving about Brooks’ all-embracing satire that we can’t be offended. Gay life is now so uncontroversial that we can laugh and cry with equal joy – and I’ve been crying with laughter and laughing through tears all weekend.

I’ve always wondered what’s so wrong about wanting to have your cake and eat it – and in the absence of bread, I’m more than happy to follow Marie Antoinette’s advice, “Let them eat cake!” But as someone who gains a great deal of intellectual and emotional sustenance from going to the theatre, I do sometimes want to attend to other, more basic, hungers, and preferably not to be ripped off in the process.

The West End’s catering has long been, at best, rudimentary, relying on overpriced, understaffed bars that attend to alcoholic needs, but very little to food ones. The subsidised sector has long won the battle on this front, but if the tickets are cheaper than the West End, they sometimes lose that price advantage in over-charging on the catering front. We’re not, of course, obliged to pay it – we can eat elsewhere before we arrive, or bring our own packed lunches with us – but it can still rankle.

At least the National offers a range of offerings – from the cheap(ish) and cheerful slice-of-pizza and salad bar inbetween the Olivier stalls and circle, to the Mezzanine restaurant. But if it’s just a pot of tea and a scone you wanted, there was only one place to go to: the Lyttelton stalls buffet. Except that its just been handsomely refurbished – and gone are the teapots (replaced by single servings of cups of tea) and also, more disastrously, the scones. (And whereas before they would also offer little plastic containers of fresh milk and also skimmed and semi-skimmed options, its now only UHT full milk that’s offered). These may be tiny things, but they matter: visiting the new buffet yesterday before going to the matinee of The Reporter, three members of the public complained to me about this.

And then I went on to the Young Vic for the press opening of The Soldiers’ Fortune, and ate at the restaurant for the first time there. While the old café there was a long, narrow room with catering by Konditer and Cook, the wonderful bakery who are based just around the corner from the Young Vic, the concession for the restaurant (which sprawls incoherently the public spaces, to merge with the bar crowd) is now being managed by someone else. And I miss the cakes.

The food offering is quite limited as well – and, given the democracy of this space that tries to make the theatre itself affordable – I’m wondering who the restaurant is intended to appeal to. There are lots of good dining opportunities in The Cut now that weren’t there a few years ago, and it seems a little over-priced of the Young Vic’s restaurant to be charging £9 for my sausage (South African boerewors, delicious) and potato salad, with sides like a green salad and chips at £2 extra each.

But at least I could eat. The only time you manage a snack before a show in the West End, unless you arrive early enough to go to a sandwich bar on your own steam, is when a producer thoughtfully provides one, as Bill Kenwright routinely does for the press at his openings. It’s a small touch, but a significant one; now maybe West End audiences could get fed, too, and not just by what’s onstage? It’s just a thought.

I wrote the above entry on Friday at 8am. Later in the day in the Evening Standard I see that columnist Simon Davis was preoccupied with a similar theme about the difficulty of eating — when, where and what — if you want to combine it with a trip to the theatre. He came up to town, he reports, to see Rock ‘n’ Roll: “The play started at 7.30pm, so to have dinner beforehand would have meant eating at 6.30pm. The only people, to my knowledge, who eat this time are the residents of old people’s homes, children and American tourists.” So he books a table at Rules for after the show. But he’s not done his research about when that might be. The interval arrives at 8.40pm and he heads to the bar, but though he’s feeling a bit peckish, “the only food on offer was dry roasted peanuts”. As he writes, “This is jus so short-sighted. London has some of the best restaurants in the world yet the food in its theatres is stuck in 1981. A friend visiting from Barcelona tells me that tapas is served in the interval at some theatres there. Why don’t West End theatres? It’s such a missed opportunity.”

The play resumes at 8.55pm, and he writes, “I assumed it would go on until about 9.45pm. But no, this being Tom Hard to Stop, the play went on until 10.30pm.” (Actually, they must have trimmed it a bit in that case — it used to hit the 3 hour 10 min mark before!) “By this time I was furiously lookingat my watch and started to huff and rumble to the annoyance of my wife and those around me. In fairness to Rules they were more than accommodating but I do not like eating at 11pm….”

There are, he concludes, “several possible ways around this problem. Not going to the theatre (a shame), taking sandwiches (weird), better food at the interval and, my favourite, shorter plays. Admit it, if there was a theatre that ony performed hour-long plays you’d go more often, wouldn’t you? We would, and we could eat at 8.45pm. Far more civilised.”

Actually, if he’d researched not just the running time of the play he was actually seeing but also those of others, he’d find that he’s already getting his wish at many London theatres, where the attention-deficit-disordered age we live in — and that he so proudly wants to position himself and his belly ahead of his mind — regularly dispenses with intervals altogether. Clearly going to the theatre is an uncomfortable penance to be endured before the pleasure of the meal afterwards to him; so perhaps he should head to The Dumb Waiter (55 minutes), or Generations (30 minutes), opening at the Young Vic this week, so it doesn’t interfere with his culinary pursuits too much.

In the 25 years since it opened, London’s Barbican Centre has gone from much reviled to nearly loved: it may not, ultimately, be the kind of place you would build if you had the chance to start again, but now that it’s here, and here to stay, both its programmers and the audiences who flock to it have learnt to make the most if it. And there’s the secret: there’s much to make of it. The layout may still be impossible to navigate – despite a £14million refurbishment of its foyer spaces that have now made it more of a Scandinavian boutique hotel than an airport terminal, but its worth the effort to penetrate the concrete jungle.

Actually, the centre is a bit of both: the arts events may be lining up from an international smorgasbord like planes coming into land at Heathrow, but instead of being a place to pass through your way to or from the city, it’s now somewhere you want to stay.

Of course, the South Bank with its seemingly organic spread of venues of different types and genres now running from the Royal Festival Hall all the way down to the Tate Modern and beyond to the Unicorn children’s theatre, More London’s outdoor Scoop space beside City Hall and the Design Museum, will always have the edge in terms of setting. But the joy – as well as difficulty – of the Barbican has been to bring so much of what the South Bank has across so many sites under one roof and one artistic director. As such, it is unique; and as Graham Sheffield – artistic director since 1995 – points out in a new publication, Barbican at 25, to mark the birthday, acknowledging the building’s problems is part of the challenge that it throws down to solve them: “We use, sometimes abuse, and confront the architecture, and we allow the arts to flow much more freely between spaces (music in the theatre, film in the concert hall, and so on). It is almost as if we square up to the building and say: Ok, you’re difficult, we are going to float the arts above and beyond your confining modernist spaces, and are going to implant an artistic ideal within the building that speaks of internationalism, diversity and excellence. And despite the physical challenges, we are going to create a superlative season of quality art, both accessible and thought-provoking. We shall seek out the new, re-imagine and reinterpret the past, and we shall unapologetically lead our audiences, using our combined knowledge of the business and the arts themselves.”

That’s quite some mission statement. As John Tusa, managing director of the centre (and soon to retire), wrote in yesterday’s Guardian listing an A-Z of arts-speak mantras, “M is for Mission. We all need one and we all need to put it into words. Doing so should clarify what an organisation is about. But if we tie ourselves in knots over whether we are an arm of social policy rather than a home for creativity, defining the mission can end up causing confusion.”

It ultimately has to be about the programming, not the policy – the proof of the pudding is in the eating. As Sheffield says in the Barbican at 25 book, “Creating a ‘dialogue’ with the audience – the modish political mantra – is all very well, but first you have to present a strong and credible programme in order to stimulate the debate. Collaboration with our key artists and partners is both vital and refreshing, as is a sense of responsibility to our audience; but, autocratic as it may sound, you must take ownership of your own programming decisions, otherwise you run the risk of losing the plot! Inevitably, a controlled and curated approach to the programme (a large proportion of which is now self- or partner-generated), means taking risks – with ideas, with artists, with the box office.”

Last night saw the Centre humming with activity as it threw a 25th birthday bash, and guests were invited to choose everything from seeing Hot Fuzz in the Barbican Cinema (the choice of the Stage news editor, Alistair Smith) to hearing an LSO concert in the Barbican Hall that included an amazing James McMillan piece and the astonishing Mitsuko Uchida performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 13 (my choice). As someone who spends most of my evenings in the theatre, there is something uniquely cleansing about an orchestral concert of this calibre: watching Uchida literally feel the music as she played was to see an artist connecting at the deepest level with her craft.

For evenings like this, the Barbican more than fulfils its unique place in London’s cultural life. Here’s the next 25….

“John Peter hasn’t got a f *ing clue…”. No, that’s not the sound that came out of me as I threw my copy of the Sunday Times across the room last weekend after reading his latest theatre round-up in the paper. I am more likely to swear after reading Christopher Hart or one of the other non-theatrically trained stand-ins the Culture section of that paper bizarrely uses for the lead review of the week instead of the diligent Peter, and indeed did so once again as I read the star rating that AA Gill attributed to his review of Boeing-Boeing. Since he’d given it only two stars, he saved me the bother of actually reading the review, since he clearly doesn’t have a clue, f***ing or otherwise….

But the headline comes instead from a blog entry that Tim Crouch has posted on The Guardian’s website, in which he reviews the reviewers of his show An Oak Tree that is currently playing at Soho Theatre. He points out something that I regularly do here: the vast dichotomy of critical opinion that can find in London, as with his show that has received everything from a four-star rave from the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner to one-star pans from The Independent’s Lynn Walker and the Sunday Times’ John Peter.

Crouch then points out, quite sensibly, “Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art. The critics’ opinions are as subjective as anyone else’s”.

But Crouch wants to have his cake and eat it: if there’s no objective truth to art, there’s no truth to the good review just as there isn’t to the bad one, surely. Crouch then goes on to suggest that sometimes critics “just haven’t got a f***ing clue. Listen, everyone, listen, John Peter of The Sunday Times hasn’t got a f***ing clue. How great is that? Now move on, keep working.”

On the one hand, he wants to engage in a critical discussion of the reviews: “When I was an actor, I would have been devastated by a bad review. As a writer, I am fascinated by how different people have engaged with the ideas.” But Crouch’s way of engaging with Peter’s ideas is simply to resort to a playground insult, that he doesn’t have a f***ing clue. And he quite clearly feels a whole lot better for it having said it. (“How great is that?”) End of discussion. But surely it should be the start of one if he’s really that fascinated by the contradictory positions being taken on his show?

The interesting fact isn’t that critics have different opinions, but how we express them. True, I didn’t even bother to check what AA Gill said to justify his on Boeing-Boeing – but the vast majority of reviews were overwhelmingly favourable: Charlie Spencer even managed to report how Michael Billington was reacting across the aisle! “One of the great things about this job is turning up at a theatre expecting very little, only to discover that you are having the time of your life. Within minutes of the start of this old farce by the Swiss-born, French-based boulevardier Marc Camoletti, I was in danger of falling out of my seat with helpless laughter, and so, by the sound of it, was almost everyone else in the audience. Even stone-faced Michael Billington from the Guardian had a phizog wreathed in happy smiles…”

But sitting along the row from me, the Daily Express Simon Edge wasn’t laughing quite so freely. At least, however, he has the good grace as a journalist to report the reactions of others around him, even as he defends his own position: “The original Sixties production of the French farce Boeing-Boeing lasted seven y ears in the West End, 19 years in Paris and 21 days on Broadway. Judging from the hysterical reaction of the first-night audience, this modern revival with an all-star cast will fly and fly. But I am with the Americans. If it were up to me, this painfully unfunny production of a witless piece would be locked away in its hangar after two-and-a-half hours. I cannot over-stress that other people - cynical fellow-critics and renta-luvvies alike - seemed to think this was the most hilarious evening they had ever experienced. The woman in front of me was literally crying laughing. I, too, was close to tears - but mine were of the ‘get me out of here’ variety as I wondered what they thought was so funny… Unlike the deliciously complex, onion-layered farces of our own Ray Cooney, for example, you can see exactly what’s going to happen.”

I wouldn’t say, in this case, that Simon hasn’t got a clue – just a different view. And he’s expressed it so honestly that surely no one can complain. And that, above all, makes for good reviewing.

Critics usually wait our turn patiently to see a show — we don’t typically go to previews (to which we are not invited), but last night I went in to see a performance of Equus a full week ahead of next Tuesday’s official opening. I must stress I wasn’t there to review (which I’ll be doing when I see it next week), but rather had been despatched to see it on a news assignment for a leading American showbiz magazine who wanted me to report audience reactions and moods to Daniel Radcliffe’s stage debut – a phenomenon that does transcend mere criticism. But was my presence there set to turn me into a spoiler now as well?

Just the fact that Radcliffe is there – and throwing off not just his Harry Potter mantle but also his clothes for what turns out to be a seven-minute scene (I had to time it) that he plays fully starkers — is making it into “event theatre”. Stars in the buff, of course, have long made headlines, from Nicole Kidman in the Donmar’s The Blue Room (that precipitated Charlie Spencer famously rising to the occasion, in every sense, to call it “pure theatrical viagra”, but without the benefit of a little blue pill to do so) to the round of leading ladies, from Kathleen Turner onwards, in the stage version of The Graduate. And on such occasions, normal rules of theatrical etiquette don’t seem to apply. I’m not the first, and I certainly won’t be the last, critic to go to an early performance like this (though I will refrain from casting a critical opinion for now, and by the time I do, will no doubt find that it’s all but redundant thanks to the advance press of which I am also now a part).

When Jerry Hall took over from Turner in The Graduate, even The Guardian’s Michael Billington wasn’t allowed to follow normal rules of waiting for a press night, but was despatched by his paper to review her very first public performance – and as he wrote in a feature in The Guardian last week about interest in stage nudity, now wanted to put the record straight: “Since my Guardian-purchased ticket was in row X, I took a small pair of opera glasses with me and was frisked on the way in. Rashly repeating this to a group of colleagues over dinner, I jokingly claimed that I was quizzed about the bulge in my pocket. Sadly, it wasn’t true, but the story appeared in print, branding me forever after as the Dirty Old Man of English criticism.”

Taking an interest in a mature woman, of course, is one thing; quite how many people will openly admit to taking an interest in a barely post-pubescent boy is another matter entirely. But the show’s advance publicity – with the advance erelease of nearly naked pictures of Radcliffe, as I’ve also blogged about here – explicitly invites us to take that kind of interest. As Billington also wrote last week, “What shows such as The Graduate really prove is that sex sells, especially when a big star is involved, and that the commercial theatre has a gift for Barnum-like bamboozlement.”

Does such bamboozlement, though, serve the play – or the audiences who will turn up to see it, perhaps for the wrong reasons? Actually, last night’s audience – heavily populated by groups of college-age students, some American and some British – suggests that it’s a good way to get them to the theatre. And far from not knowing how to behave when they got there, you could hear a pin drop amongst them during the key scenes. Earlier, it’s true, there had also been a bit of heavy breathing – but that was the sound of older members of the audience dropping off, not getting off.

The Olivier Awards may, of course, be the Industry’s own slap on the back (and occasionally, slap on the wrist, too), but for a body that is dominated by its commercial members, it’s interesting that all but one of the productions honoured last night came from beyond their immediate coterie: the biggest winner of the night, Sunday in the Park with George which took home five or the six awards it had been nominated for, started its life at the Menier Chocolate Factory; the National brought home four wins (including the one for Best New Musical for Caroline, or Change, eclipsing the commercial competition that included Monty Python’s Spamalot that went into the ceremony with the most number of nominations – seven – but left it empty-handed); the RSC took three awards; with The 39 Steps, Blackbird and Rock ‘n’ Roll (that respectively began their lives at West Yorkshire Playhouse and then the Tricycle, the Edinburgh International Festival and the Royal Court) taking one each.

Once again, the health of the commercial theatre is obviously predicated on the health of the theatre beyond it, and even the sole purely ‘commercial’ winner – the revival of Cabaret – was largely the work of performers and a creative staff who had learned their craft working on the subsidised front.

But if that is ever thus (and the film industry, of course, is in turn a major beneficiary of the British theatre system, too, as Nick Hytner pointed out at his press conference last week at the National), its also interesting to note how much consensus there has been between the various awards ceremonies this year that the Oliviers have brought to an end. Caroline, or Change reprised the honour for Best New Musical that it had already taken at both the Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard Theatre Awards; Rufus Sewell completed a similar home run as Best Actor across all three awards for his performance in Rock ‘n’ Roll; and Sunday in the Park with George (honoured a year ago by the Critics’ Circle for Best Design – in an award that I presented — after it was first seen at the Menier), now taking the same award in both the Oliviers and Standards. Tamsin Greig, who took the Critics’ Circle prize for Best Shakespearean Performance for starring in the RSC’s Much Ado About Nothing, added a Best Actress Olivier to her mantlepiece, and made the year’s funniest acceptance speech, too – “I’ve done a wee!”, she said excitedly – “and it’s running down my leg”.

She was probably not the only one to pee, metaphorically or otherwise, with excitement (or get constipated with disappointment). While Tony-winning shows and performances did not, with the exception of Caroline, or Change, reprise their award success here, a slew of Olivier Awards can only be to the good of Sunday in the Park with George as it heads to Broadway next. I have long hoped that both Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell would get to reprise their London performances there, and surely this double-header of Olivier Awards can only improve the case for taking them, too.

It was nice to hear Daniel paying tribute in his acceptance speech to his partner Daniel Crossley – “who stopped me from committing suicide in the third week of rehearsals”, and also of Dominic Cooke also mentioning his partner, actor Alexi Kaye Campbell, “who always believes in me, especially at the moments that I don’t.”

An Olivier on the mantelpiece is of course, a pretty good indication that others believe in you, too – but the insecurity of the profession is such that even Laurence Olivier, for whom the awards are named, would suffer such self-doubts, according to his director son Richard who represented the family there by presenting an award. Kenneth Tynan once said of his father that he “used his talent, but neglected his genius”, but Olivier replied that theatre is primarily a craft and it takes huge graft. Last night’s celebration of craft and graft was a testament to the amount of sheer talent and occasional genius that we have in our midst.

News reached me earlier this evening as I was en route to the theatre of the sudden passing of Sheridan Morley, who has been a part of my entire theatregoing life – first as an avid reader of his books, interview profiles and reviews, and latterly a colleague on the aisle (where he until the end of last year held the post of theatre critic on the Daily Express, sister paper to my own critical perch on the Sunday Express).

During a long and distinguished journalistic career, he has had regular perches at publications as varied as the late Punch magazine, the International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Lady and the Daily Express, doing what we all do, being a jobbing journalist whose job happens to be reporting on the theatre.

But Sheridan, more than most of us, was also a quintessential man of the theatre, not just by birth (as son of actor Robert Morley and grandson of Gladys Cooper), but in the expansiveness of his encyclopaedic knowledge of it and the rich, resonant tones of the voice with which he would hold forth about it, whether on the radio or in person at first nights. He also had more hands-on – and stage-on – experience of the theatre than any other critic, regularly pressed into service as a narrator of one show or another, and directing as well.

Though he has suffered a few health setbacks over the last few years, he has kept bouncing back and we thought he was indestructible. Though the final chapter of his life saw him committing to spend more time in New York where he and his wife, Ruth Leon, also keep a home, he was back in London at the time of his death, and we saw him at first nights just this week on both Monday (at Underneath the Lintel) and Tuesday (at The Glass Menagerie). It’s difficult to believe he won’t be at any more. My condolences are extended to Ruth (who has been a pillar of strength and loyalty to him as he overcame earlier illnesses) and the rest of his family.

This week both the Chichester Festival Theatre and the National Theatre called press conferences to announce their new seasons. But though the artistic directors of both had buoyant messages to impart, there was also a cloud on the horizon – and definitely proves that Nick Hytner doesn’t have his head in one, but is well aware of its encroaching shadows.

But even overshadowing that particular cloud which may or may not be positioning itself over us as we speak, of which more in a moment, there was a darker and more irrevocable one that connected both conferences: Hytner began his address yesterday by paying generous tribute to director Steven Pimlott – his oldest professional friend, since they had attended Manchester Grammar School together (though Pimlott was three years ahead of him), he can still remember his performance in a school production of The Visit – who had passed away the night before. Less than a week earlier, Steven was in rehearsals for a new production of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo that he had cast and conceived for the National – but for which it had already been agreed that Nick would take over should he become too ill to continue. (He has been battling lung cancer since last year, when he was forced to withdraw both from directing the winning entry of The Play’s the Thing contest to find and open a new play by a previously unproduced writer in the West End, and from directing Moliere’s The Misanthrope at the National). Hytner revealed that Steven was upbeat to the end, and insisted he’d be back in rehearsals next Monday, “to sort it out”. Alas, it was not to be.

His last artistic appointment, of course, had been as one of the triumvirate of directors who ran Chichester Festival Theatre until 2005. And on Wednesday afternoon, his successor Jonathan Church outlined his plans, alongside Mark Rylance, Philip Franks and David Jones who will all work in the new season, to a very select gathering of arts journalists: there were just four of us there! (The apathy of some of my colleagues is astonishing – yes, you can get the details from the press release, but not the sort of connections you can establish by actually speaking to the directors.) But while Church was pushing forward with an interesting-sounding and varied programme that will include appearances by Patricia Routledge in Alan Bennett (the perfect Chichester fit), Patrick Stewart in a Shakespeare double-bill (who is obviously definitely on a mission now to make up for lost time, as he revealed to me in an interview that appears in this week’s copy of The Stage), and David Suchet in a new play, it was also reassuring to hear that the spiral of decline that Chichester has been suffering has been arrested – for now.

Though he revealed that in its heyday Chichester could count on annual audience figures of 180,000-200,00, these had plummeted to just 106,000 over a seven-year period, and when Church took over the theatre, it was on the brink of insolvency. His first festival last year, however, took the figure back up to 142,000; and this year he is programming even more ambitiously by bringing forward the start date of the season to mid-April.

So things are looking up. And he is cautiously optimistic on the funding front, too, now that the theatre has been recognised by the Arts Council as a core client. But there’s obviously a lot of work to be done still in building the confidence of the audience still further… and building a new audience, too.

Those are perpetual ambitions, of course, for any theatre, and the National more than most puts a lot of effort into audience development. At Hytner’s press conference the next day, he noted that the Travelex £10 season had helped the Olivier – the National’s largest auditorium – achieve the highest percentage attendance over the year of 93%, but also said that after 5 years, the scheme would now have to be reviewed — £10, of course, doesn’t represent the same value to the theatre that it once did, so the price configuration may have to be addressed. (Last week at Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole committed himself to not tampering with the £5 groundling price, since it had become so iconic. I’d say the same applies to the £10 season, as it is universally known).

But if continuing £10 tickets represent a fall in ticket prices and income for the theatre as a result since that sum in one’s pocket doesn’t have the same value it once did, so Hytner was keen to point out that should standstill funding be imposed by DCMS in the next funding round, that too would represent a potentially disastrous cut to the National and their other clients. Pointing out that the arts had been transformed in the last decade thanks to proper funding so that it had recovered to where it was before the damage that had been inflicted on the arts world in the 80s, he was nervous that a step backwards may be about to be contemplated – and anticipating this possibility, he immediately distributed handouts in which four of this year’s British Oscar nominees (Dench, Mirren, Marber and Stephen Frears) spoke of the invaluable grounding that all of their careers had had in the subsidised sector, and continue to have. All acknowledged they would not be where they are today without it. So while the success of British films is currently very sexy – “and this government likes to have things like that in the papers” – that success is earned partly via the theatrical background that many of its practitioners have sprung from. Cut off that root, and the tree may stop being so healthy.

So the National doesn’t just build audiences – it also builds artists. Talking of which, Hytner also revealed that the Studio is on track to reclaim its home in the Cut after a £6million refurbishment in July or August. And while this is still primarily a safe place for artists to explore new work away from prying public eyes, there is, encouragingly, to be a new public face to it: its where the National’s archive will be held, which the public will have access to.

Another theatre that develops artists is BAC, recently under threat of closure thanks to Wandsworth Council’s desire to both cut its core grant and impose a new rental arrangement on the space it occupies. Nick Starr, executive director of the National and chairman of BAC’s board, revealed that most of the grant has now been saved — £85,000 instead of £100,000 a year has now been pledged; and the board and council are working on a plan to have the building taken over by an independent trust, so that it will no longer fall under the auspices of the council. Meanwhile, the existing rent-free lease ahs been extended to March 2008.

So although the arts community must always be vigilant to threats on its livelihood, it does seem that enough shouting and agitation as has been done over the last few weeks may pay dividends. And Hytner is therefore right to start the campaign for retaining current grant levels as they are before they are reduced.

Anna Maxwell Martin may be singing ‘Life is a cabaret’ right now on Shaftesbury Avenue, but for some, cabaret is a life – and a way of putting their own lives onstage. There’s inevitably a narcissistic element to most forms of performance – “look at me!” – but in the best kind of cabaret, you’re invited even further inside: “look into my soul”. And that’s why I love it so – at its best, that is. When it isn’t, it can become an exercise in the worst excesses of performance narcissism: you’re forced to look, but like joining the neck-craners at a car accident, it’s disturbing because you can’t look away, either, even though you probably should. Or, worse, cabaret can even be a weird kind of necrophilia, as we watch performers in the dying throws of their careers making one last grab for attention.

In London, its cabaret itself that’s in its dying throws – all but destroyed by a fatal lack of outlets in which to showcase it. Pizza on the Park used to be the venue of choice for the best of international cabaret artists – its where I first saw Ann Hampton Callaway back in the early 90s, and cabaret legends from Julie Wilson and Margaret Whiting to Maureen McGovern, Blossom Dearie, Andrea Marcovicci, Richard Rodney Bennett and the late Marion Montgomery.

But cabaret barely gets a look-in there these days; and if you want to build a cabaret career, it seems, you need cross-over appeal in jazz and popular song, where you’d be equally at home at Ronnie Scott’s or the Vortex as you would in the more rarefied world of cabaret. No wonder Callaway (the best of the all contemporary cabaret singers in New York) and Barb Jungr (our best exponent over here) have followed this route.

But though there’s definitely cross-over between jazz and cabaret, there’s also a lot that’s distinct: cabaret is more vividly theatrical and intimate, jazz is more about the expansive spontaneity of the music. Cabaret therefore thrives in settings that are more theatrical, and by a wonderful coincidence, there are currently two attempts in London to re-assert those possibilities.

As I wrote in The Stage last week in a review of Andrea Marcovicci’s return to London for the first time in nearly a decade , “The art of American cabaret may, like the Broadway stage that it is closely associated with, be something of a fabulous invalid. The plant may be dying but it keeps trying to sprout new leaves. Now singer Jeff Harner is attempting to revitalise its traditions in London by hosting, programming and appearing in a four-week season in the intimate surrounds of Jermyn Street Theatre, neatly turned into a cabaret boite with onstage tables and atmospheric lighting and plants.”

Marcovicci, I also noted last week, is a paradox: the season couldn’t, I said, “hope for a better advocate - or a more dire warning, depending on your point of view”, than her. On the one hand, she’s the kind of performer who has you in the palm of her hands by the force of her personality; but the voice is sometimes like nails being driven into the back of your head – or at least of her own being drawn, as I wrote, across a blackbird. But you don’t go to a Marcovicci gig to hear her sing. You go for her witty personality, her storytelling and her archival researching of material that means she doesn’t alight purely on the most obvious choices.

But as a performer who has chalked up an astonishing 20 year annual residency at both of America’s premiere cabaret spots – New York’s Algonquin and San Francisco’s Plush Room (probably my favourite cabaret room in the world now), she must find it weird that Jermyn Street is now the best we can do.

Or at least I thought so, too, until I went to the Shaw last night, to see Eartha Kitt who is doing a week-long, sell-out season there. Formerly buried within what was a public library building on the Euston Road, the Shaw rather more auspiciously now has its own entrance and two bars – and is now surrounded by a luxury hotel, for which it serves double-duty by day as a conference facility to. And in the lounge-like comfort of its airline-style seating, and the intimacy of its auditorium, it could well be an ideal home for prestige cabaret.

Eartha, of course, is a one-of-a-kind performer: “I may be 80,” she says, as she reveals a still-shapely leg from the slit of her dress, “but I’m still burning!” Which was thrilling to see again, since on her last London solo first night nearly 18 years ago (at the Shaftesbury Theatre in March 1989), she very nearly crashed and burnt. I remember vividly how the audience were kept waiting about 45 minutes before she finally came on; and midway through the second number, lost the lyric, started the song again, lost it again, and then virtually lost it entirely: she stopped the band and said she couldn’t go on. She started to cry. The audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats. After what seemed like an age – but was probably only a matter of seconds – someone shouted out from the stalls, “We love you, Eartha!” It was all she needed to hear. She composed herself, started again, and all was fine.

That last solo show, of course, was in the wake of her London appearance at the same Shaftesbury Theatre in Sondheim’s Follies, where she first gave what has become one of her signature songs – and truth to tell, the signature song of every performer d’un certain age – “I’m Still Here”. And opening a set that also included that other indelible anthem to survival, “I Will Survive”, she certainly proved both of those facts. Like Marcovicci, it isn’t about the voice, but about the delivery. As she prowled and growled her way gracefully around the stage, she was in her element. And the audience, which included Dame Shirley Bassey sitting right behind me, was clearly in theirs.

While Eartha has gone on in the years since Follies to appear in shows both good (The Wild Party on Broadway in 2000) and terrible (last year’s off-Broadway Mimi le Duck, that I only lasted to the interval of before fleeing), it was great to see her owning a stage so powerfully in a way that the best kind of cabaret allows. (A friend of mine wittily uses Eartha Kitt’s name as Cockney rhyming slang for needing to perform a particular bodilyfunction — as, in a different rhyme but to the same purpose, is “taking an Ivana” (Trump), but there was nothing excremental about Kitt’s performance last night, nor was the venue she was appearing in a dump, either!)

Cabaret can also, of course, be a chance to simply let your hair down; and fresh from the Shaw, I went to the Prince of Wales Theatre’s beautiful Delfont Room – the long stalls bar – for a late night Valentine’s Day charity cabaret put together by the company of Avenue Q. Though these occasions are inevitably a little ragged, they’re propelled by the goodwill of both the performers (there to give some party pieces, here ably assisted by their puppet personas, that earns them a break from the regular night job) and the audience (there to cheer them on). It’s also wonderful to see a West End theatre living beyond the normal curtain down time in this way; and outside of the luxurious formality of the Shaw, this room could well turn out to be best cabaret spot in London.

It re-thinks cabaret outside the box (and confines) of the sort of rooms you usually hear it in. The crisis in cabaret isn’t just about the talent on offer – and Avenue Q’s company shows that we have talent in spades in the West End – but more to do with the available outlets for it to be performed in. Even in New York, where the genre clings on more ably than here, things are confined to rooms at the extremes of being: the over-priced exclusivity of places like the Algonquin, Carlyle and Feinstein’s, versus the free-for-all indulgence of Don’t Tell Mamas, which anyone can book for a fee regardless of whether they’re any good. And I was saddened to notice a couple of weeks ago when I was in town that another New York room has been lost: Danny’s Skylight Room on W46th Street – the regular home of Blossom Dearie – has shut shop.

No wonder that I now feel offers a life (and home) for cabaret is thousands of miles away from both London and New York — in Adelaide, Australia. I have been to its annual Cabaret Festival every June for the last three years running — I’m going to pass this year, but its the one place I know where cabaret is still taken seriously — and given the room to grow.

Like many a “show queen”, I grew up, in every sense, to my collection of cast albums – I can still remember the very first one I bought, the Broadway recording of A Chorus Line, as a young teenager of about 14 in Johannesburg, South Africa (where I grew up) and falling in love with it on my record player, long before I ever got the chance to see it! (By what turned out to be a rather wonderful bit of symmetry, seeing the London production of A Chorus Line at Drury Lane – at its final Saturday matinee in March 1979 a couple of years later – was also the first show I saw in the West End after my family emigrated to Britain). I still have that album; as I do the South African cast recordings of shows like Pippin, Godspell, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and Maltby and Shire’s Starting Here, Starting Now – and the indigenously created South African show Ipi Tombi that became an international hit. Not only did I develop a sophisticated palette through them early on, but also, I realise now, we saw some fairly sophisticated shows in Johannesburg back then…

But the important thing about all of those albums for me is that they were albums, not CDs (that we didn’t even know about then, imagine that!), with their large sleeves into which the vinyl disc, protected by a dust cover, would gently slide, producing an eager glow of anticipation as you drew them out of their berth to play, or of satisfaction as you put them back away again afterwards. The rush of that nostalgic memory came flooding back to me this week when I received a special limited collectors’ vinyl edition of the cast recording of the current Broadway hit The Drowsy Chaperone – reportedly the first cast album to be released on vinyl in nearly twenty years!

The show – which comes to London’s Novello Theatre in May, prior to opening on June 6 – is a valentine to old Broadway musicals and the kind of people who love them in which a devoted fan plays a 1928 cast recording in his living room and finds it coming to life right in front of him. When I saw it in New York last year, I blogged about it here and wrote, “it strikes a unique chord amongst those, like me, who have found a particular kind of consolation in musical theatre over the years”. Referring to the fan, I said, “I absolutely identified with his passion, and felt a keen prick of recognition over his obsession to make sense of a particular moment in the second act whose meaning isn’t entirely clear on the album. I am exactly the same over ‘The Babylove Miracle Show’ number in The Grass Harp, a seven-performance 1971 flop that I never saw, but I re-live constantly through the album, wondering again and again what it’s all about….!”

And to now have The Drowsy Chaperone on vinyl (with a CD version helpfully included inside, in case you don’t have the equipment to play vinyl anymore), is to be able to re-live it as authentically as possible. The vinyl version of this show-within-the-show has been beautifully packaged to resemble a vintage album of the period, with some lovely credits on the back that include its original opening night (September 18, 1928) and theatre (the Morosco – long since demolished, in fact to make way for the modern monstrosity where The Drowsy Chaperone is playing on Broadawy, The Marquis). This version of a valentine to Broadway musicals will make the perfect valentine’s gift for lovers of the genre when it officially goes on sale tomorrow.

But cast recordings, though they’re part of the heritage of musical theatre that has kept it alive across the decades, are an increasingly endangered species. They cost so much to put out, and the returns on them are so low, that lots of musicals simply no longer get recorded. One of the US labels with the most distinguished pedigree in cast recordings, RCA/BMG, has long disbanded the dedicated department that used to look after them, and Sony have recently followed suit.

The big labels only want the big hits now. The record industry awards, the Grammys, still recognise cast albums – at this year’s awards, presented on Sunday, the 49th annual Grammy for Best Musical Show Album went to Jersey Boys (beating out, coincidentally, The Drowsy Chaperone and other Broadway nominees, The Color Purple and recordings of revivals of The Pajama Game and Sweeney Todd) – but its becoming harder and harder to persuade anyone to record them. Rising ticket prices are, of course, the biggest threat to the future of original musicals – but they won’t have a past, either, if they stop being recorded.

What constitutes a “regular” theatregoer? Is it someone who goes to the theatre once a week – or once a month? If you’re paying for your tickets, “regular” might just be as often as you can afford. Theatre critics, of course, at least don’t have to buy our tickets, and ideally we draw on as wide a range of experience as it’s possible to encompass. But from a practical point of view, there are still usually only six nights a week – or, at a push, seven, if you can find shows playing on a Sunday (invariably on the fringe) – on which to go to the theatre, and a usually finite amount of space to write it up in; so the typical marker for theatre critics is going somewhere between three and five times a week.

Most of my Sunday colleagues, with the exception of the indefatigable John Peter of the Sunday Times, stick to filling their columns with the fruits of the three things they’ve got to that week – which means that huge numbers of openings simply don’t get covered there. The quality dailies do better – particularly the Guardian, Telegraph and Times with their diligent deputies, Lyn Gardner, Dominic Cavendish and Sam Marlowe – who get out on the fringe and into the regions far more than the London-based first stringers.

Even so, it’s impossible to cover everything. Even if, as I did this past week, I went to ten shows in seven days. (But then, as one West End producer recently told me, “Mark, you’re a f*ing junkie!” Perhaps it should be my epitaph – or I should go into rehab!) Did I need to saturate myself in this amount of theatre? Perhaps not, but there are lots of bases to cover – and as a one-man band (who doesn’t have a deputy), I try to get around… and about.

There were two “biggies”, in terms of profile – Nicholas Hytner’s latest reworking of a classic play into a majorly modern one, The Man of Mode; and Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, which were essential by any reckoning. But then I also went to Hampstead for Nothing But the Truth (on a night that clashed with the Tricycle opening for The War Next Door, and if there was one, it was decisively won by Hampstead, where most of the national number one’s were in attendance rather than in Kilburn — but which I had stolen a march on by going in early, the previous Saturday); Andrea Marcovicci’s opening of the American Songbook in London cabaret season at Jermyn Street Theatre; caught up with Don Johnson going into Guys and Dolls; saw Stratford East’s return run of The Harder they Come; added in two Edinburgh transfers at Soho, Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree and Phil Nichols’ it.comeddies award-winning show The Naked Racist; saw a matinee at Richmond of the latest production from the new Agatha Christie Company, The Unexpected Guest; and also caught John Mortimer’s stroll down memory lane, Mortimer’s Miscellany, at the King’s Head. In a busy week in London theatre, all of these (except for Guys and Dolls) had also had press nights, and unless I’d done my weekend catch-up, I would never have been able to get to them all. And, for one reason, outlet or another, each were worth seeing.

I’ve not been able to give each the kind of coverage I would like to, at least not yet; but between various outlets, I managed to squeeze five of them into my weekly Sunday Express round-up; reviewed The Man of Mode and The Dumb Waiter additionally (and at greater length than I could in the Sunday Express) for theatre.com; reviewed Andrea Marcovicci for the Stage; and The Harder they Come for What’s On in London. So none of the trips were wasted.

But the job of a theatre critic (or at least this one!) doesn’t just start in the evening or even matinee: by day, this week, I was also at The Lord of the Rings launch on Thursday; and conducting interviews later after the Thursday matinee of The History Boys with Steven Webb (who plays Posner) and at Friday lunchtime with Jenny Agutter at the rehearsal rooms for Equus.

As a result, pretty much every waking hour has me immersed in theatre – when I’m not at it, I’m writing about it or interviewing people about it! Is that too much of a good thing? I’d say no: I’m the luckiest person alive! And if some would say I should get a life, I’d say that its difficult for me to imagine a fuller one!

Tolkien’s big, bold, epic The Lord of the Rings is an adventure quest of a very unique order; and so, it seems, is the attempt to bring it to the stage. Yesterday the latest chapter was being written with a press conference at Drury Lane to introduce the 50-strong cast and creative team to the press. As Matthew Warchus, director of the stage version, said, Peter Jackson’s three part film version is the longest movie ever made. But when this production had its first incarnation in Toronto last year, it became one of the longest single-part stage productions in living memory, running at nearly four hours.

I was at the first night of that production, and was impressed by its scale, ambition and originality. But the Toronto production was, in the end, a financial if not artistic flop, and closed before the year was out. That was not, however, the end of the story.

The material has been duly looked at again, and following two more workshops that took place last May and November, it has been streamlined still further. 80% of the show, insisted Warchus yesterday, was successful in Toronto; but now problems in the remaining 20% have been addressed, including the running time which undoubtedly proved a deterrent, if not literally a pain in the butt for potential audiences. Now, with the running time brought down to what they promise will be less than three hours, they’re trying again.

It’s another bold, brave step in this production’s history. On the one hand, they might just be throwing good money after bad – having already spent £12.5 million in Toronto, a further £12.5 million has now been raised in investment to revise and remount it here. (The Toronto investors, revealed lead producer Kevin Wallace, may yet see a return on their investment, of course, if this production recoups, but their share is now proportionately only one fifth of the value of the new money that has been put in, which will be repaid first).

Warchus is undaunted, however daunting the overall project has been (and for which, he revealed, he has had to drawn on his background in maths, such is the logistical effort of co-ordinating it all. I quipped in reply, “So what are you drawing on for Boeing-Boeing?”, referring to the sex farce that he brings back to the West End next week for what he called “a good antidote to Lord of the Rings” – was it his bedroom?). Characterising the show as “Shakespeare meets Cirque du Soleil”, he said that his only concern is the artistic one, of translating this story to the stage. As for the financial one, “important, wealthy, influential people have taken a brutal business decision” – they’ve made “a calculated assessment of the risk” and decided to have another go at doing it. “We wouldn’t be here if the Toronto experience wasn’t positive enough. It revealed how close we came to getting it right and what needed to be recalibrated.”

Toronto, he says now, was a “stepping stone” to where they are now – albeit an expensive one. But he says, “it got the best audience response there of anything I have ever directed”. Toronto may have been the wrong place, ultimately, to have launched a project so big: “Toronto is a city with a population that is smaller than Manchester,” he pointed out. Mistakes were made and lessons learnt. Now, however, he is under no illusions about the stern new test it faces: London audiences can be a tough one to please. “British audiences know their theatre and will know the value of it.” But Warchus – who also hopes that it will convert a whole new generation to the act of theatregoing, by showing them “everything that theatre can do” – thinks that it’ll also usher in a new kind of show: “After the rash of spoof shows, this is the return of storytelling to the theatre.”

Warchus is a serious but hugely likeable man, and the team that he and Wallace have gathered around them is one of the best in the business, from designer Rob Howell to choreographer Peter Darling. If anyone can pull it off, it’s them. It’ll be fascinating to watch it evolve.

Theatre critics are a funny lot. Sometimes we just can’t resist writing about each other. This blog, of course, is regularly a testament to this kind of navel gazing. The pages of Theatre Record, the fortnightly journal that reprints all of the national reviews in one place, are launched every issue with an editorial from its compiler, Ian Shuttleworth, in which he regularly observes critical trends and dissents. And for someone from outside the throng who looks even more obsessively at us, you need to go to rcubednews.com for a collection of newsletters (now numbering 158, and all archived for retrieval) that Ian Senior has been writing about us since December 2000, throwing down a gauntlet to those he disagrees with. As an economist, he has also devised a rather bizarre formula for assessing the financial impact that our negative reviews can have on a production. (It can’t have worked for We Will Rock You, however he works it out). Right now, there’s also an interesting discussion taking place on the Guardian’s arts blogs about the role of critics, especially now that the blogosphere has allowed the public to add their own voices to ours.

But given how squeezed we are for space in our regular columns, it’s rare for us to use our few words to talk more generally about the critical discourse, let alone each other. But in his review of the National’s new production of The Man of Mode in yesterday’s Daily Mail, Quentin Letts wrote of star Tom Hardy that he did not, “despite his tattoed abdomen and much pelvis-rotating, did I find him entirely convincing as a piece of male phwoarr.” And then he added, “Maybe I’m not the best judge. We’ll have to see what the queen bees of the Critics’ Circle make of his allure.”

Since I was only seeing the play last night, I sent Quentin an e-mail yesterday, saying that I would duly let him have my verdict today. But quite apart from the assumption that gay men might all share the same taste in male totty, there’s also the implication that there are a lot of queen bees about amongst our throng, from which he is also keen to let us know that he is not a part. The Independent media column also made a similar suggestion a few months ago, following the fracas over some of the homophobic reviews of Bent that then added a new level of homophobia in their reporting of a row between Simon Callow and Charlie Spencer that had taken place at a subsequent first night. The Independent asked, “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 was 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.”

As I wrote at the time, “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.”

But what of it? Nowadays we know there are gay people in all walks of life, not just the obvious professions, and even then not as many as you’d think (though as a friend pointed out to me yesterday, we now have gay men at the helm of four of our most important London theatres – the National, Royal Court, Young Vic and Donmar – that still leaves plenty of theatres still being run by the straight majority). But if gay critics were to devote as much attention to describing the contours of Mr Hardy’s body as some of our straight brethren did, for instance, to describing Kelly Reilly’s breasts when she appeared in Piano/Forte at the Royal Court, we’d be accused of indecency. Charlie Spencer may have risen to the occasion, in every sense, when he described Nicole Kidman’s brief nude scene in the Donmar Warehouse production of The Blue Room as “pure theatrical viagra”, but I’m not going to stoop so low as to go Phwoarr! to Mr Hardy. At least not in public.

Yesterday I raced from Sloane Square to Bankside to hear two Dominics announce their theatrical plans for this year: at the Royal Court, Dominic Cooke, the incoming (but not entirely outgoing) artistic director started the morning by revealing his plans for his inaugural season, while two hours later at Shakespeare’s Globe, the other Dominic – Dromgoole – was busy pressing ahead with his second season at the helm.

The two couldn’t be more different – Cooke, with a natural reticence but exuding a gentle authority; Dromgoole, friendly but bullish and provocative — though they could, of course, easily do a job swap: after Cooke’s classical work over the last few years for the RSC, he could easily slip into Globe gear (in every sense), while Dromgoole, of course, established his reputation in new writing as artistic director of the Bush.

Of course the new story was the sexy one: what did Cooke have up his sleeve for a theatre that we all feel we have a stake in? No wonder there was a good showing of theatre critics (Billington, Spencer, Clapp, Coveney, Allfree) alongside the usual arts reporters (and in an act of the kind of inclusive democracy that is a hallmark of the Court, a turnout of the entire artistic staff, too).

But this is a theatre we all get personal about – we all have our own associations and fond memories of evenings spent here — and it was nice to hear Dominic speaking of that kind of intimate connection himself: “This theatre means a lot to me, not because I am now running it but because I went to school nearby and it was the experience of watching plays here that really shaped the way I see the world.” And, with his predecessor Ian Rickson’s final production of The Seagull currently on the mainstage which includes Konstantin’s cry for “new forms” in the theatre – “we need new forms and if they’re none to be had, we’d be better of with nothing at all” – it was good to discover that Cooke is a respecter of the writer as the primary artist of the theatre (and the primary importance, too, for this theatre to find new ones is asserted by the opening season including six first plays). But he also boldly proclaimed the need for experimentation that the Court is going to invest in by setting up a developmental studio in which writers and directors can explore ideas collaboratively – a collaboration that audiences will also be a part of when works-in-progress are presented in a twice-yearly Rough Cuts season to the public.

Another new initiative is the introduction of a new £5 ticket scheme, with 500 seats being available at that price across the run for those 25 and under, as part of what the press release calls the Royal Court’s “ongoing commitment to widening theatregoing audiences.”

Of course, across town at Shakespeare’s Globe there are hundreds of tickets available at every performance at £5 for anyone – it doesn’t get you a seat, but it gets you the best view and atmosphere, as a groundling standing in the yard. As Dromgoole said, “the £5 thing is iconic, and the energy you get from the yard is really what makes this place”.

And the energy you get from Dromgoole is what makes a press conference there. What other artistic director would refer to his first year at the helm as “a glorious mind-fuck of a year”? This Dominic definitely likes to shake things up. Speaking of that year, he said that highlights included the theatre forecourt being turned into a “field hospital” during the run of Titus Andronicus, when up to 30 people a night collapsed and had to be carried out when they were overcome – “a testament to the power of live theatre” (but also probably the extreme heat of last summer, too!). He also remembered fondly both the first night of the pirate play Under the Black Flag – which was attended by a party of 60 people dressed as pirates that night – and the last night of In Extremis, when 1,300 people cheered playwright Howard Brenton to the rafters at the curtain calls. And he also remembered the informal Jonathan Cake fan club that developed during his run as Coriolanus: “one American woman came seven or eight times, and at one performance got hold of his ankle and refused to let go!” Now that’s participatory theatre…! (Daniel Radcliffe better watch out at the Gielgud – especially since there’s going to be an onstage audience, but hopefully West End audiences may be better behaved than those at the Globe).

Last night Rosie Millard – theatre critic of the New Statesman – was wrapped up warm against the evening chill as we walked into Hampstead Theatre for the first night of Nothing But the Truth, and I couldn’t resist saying to her, “It’s good to see you with your clothes on again!” No, we’ve not been having a critical tryst, but rather her naked form was available for the entire nation – or at least the readers of the Sunday Times – to see. The day before, she’d written a feature about her experiences as a nude model for a life class in Florence. (And she happily told us about her relief at having remembered to shave her armpits before arriving in Italy when she was asked to put both her arms overhead. “These are lowly things that go through your mind when you take all your clothes of before about 20 beady-eyed strangers. As for other judicious hair removal, let’s just say that I had those bases covered, too”).

Though the arrival of the summer invariably brings Nicholas de Jongh out in various states of undress (and Michael Coveney sometimes sports a fetching pair of shorts), most critics stay buttoned up and fully covered, and with good reason: we’re not the prettiest breed, by and (in my case) large(ish) – though the ladies invariably turn themselves out considerably better than the gentlemen. But Rosie is clearly going to set new standards, both dressed and undressed, for us: in 2001, when she was the BBC’s arts correspondent and got the nation’s pulse racing when she reported from the Cannes Film Festival “inside (and mostly outside) an £800 Vivienne Westwood strapless number” (as John Walsh reported in a profile of her in The Independent), it was Michael Buerk back in the BBC studio who quipped on air, “That was Rosie Millard in Cannes, winner of Best Supporting Dress”.

ACTORS GOING AWOL….

There’s a very good reason for theatres to put actors under contract, as in any other kind of employment: it spells out the terms of engagement for both parties, and allows the theatre company or producer to plan for the future.

What, however, to do you do when actor clearly breaches it, simply because a better offer comes up? According to a report in The Times on Saturday, Ben Barnes – the young actor who was playing the lead role of Dakin in the West End transfer of The History Boys – has suddenly taken leave of the production: According to the report, “He abandoned the production this week, telling his fellow actors that he had been offered the title role in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Disney’s £50 million sequel to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. With no time to rehearse a new actor for the role, the National has flown Jamie King, the previous Dakin, in from Los Angeles, where he had been filming the TV docudrama The Tudors with Sam Neill and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. A source close to the production team at Wyndham’s Theatre, where the second revival of The History Boys has been running since December 2006, said: ‘Ben told everyone that he had been offered a three-film deal to play Caspian. It’s the chance of a lifetime, but the National are furious at him for leaving them in the lurch and are thinking of suing him for breach of contract.’

This is unusual, but not unprecedented: Hollywood, as Don John says in Much Ado About Nothing, waits “for no man’s leisure”. And who can blame young Mr Barnes for seizing the chance? But though there’s a risk that the theatre world will look warily upon him in the future, if he comes back a star they’ll grab him again anyway…. and all will be forgiven. (If he doesn’t come back a star, though, he could find himself run out of town).

But what about illness, or even death? Stephen Fry, of course, famously walked out of Simon Gray’s Cell Mates when suffering from chronic depression, and disappeared to Bruges. Gray turned Fry’s departure into a book that was far more entertaining than the play, called Fat Chance , As Aleks Sierz wrote in a review of the book in the New Statesman, “Gray has penned a 126-page hate letter to the actor, in which he lays into Fry’s personality, his acting and his lack of moral fibre”; but it says more about Gray’s obsessive (if obsessively critical) own narcissism that he couldn’t extend any forgiveness to him. Mark Lawson’s review in The Guardian also got it right when he said, “The result — pitched at a sustained level of hostility that makes Mommie Dearest read like a Mother’s Day card — will be a gift to future compilers of anthologies about the theatre, but even more useful to those editing collections of writings on betrayal and revenge.” Gray’s co-star, Rik Mayall, is similarly unforgiving: he told me recently when I interviewed him about his West End appearance in The New Statesman, “You don’t leave the trenches—especially if the other actors become unemployed and they’re poor anyway. Selfishness is one thing, being a c**t is another. I mustn’t start that war again. But then, I don’t start them, I finish them!”

More recently, the return of Stones in His Pockets to the West End’s Duchess Theatre last November was completely scuppered when one of the two strong cast, Hugh Lee, fell ill and couldn’t go on. The understudies were sent on, but it was impossible to recast properly at short notice, and the play’s run was drastically curtailed. I met the play’s director David Bownes at Hampstead Theatre last night, and commiserated with him: it was an exercise that cost the producers some £200,000.

In 2002, the opening of Christopher Hampton’s The Talking Cure was also postponed when the actor playing Freud, James Hazeldine (opposite Ralph Fiennes at Jung) fell ill and then subsequently died. And Daniel Day Lewis famously walked off in mid-performance of a production of Hamlet at the National, haunted not just by the ghost of his character’s father but also of his own. He was replaced by Ian Charleson, who was seriously ill at the time – and didn’t complete his run either. (His understudy, however, was Jeremy Northam, now a film star, so audiences who saw him got an early taster of a major talent).

No sooner than I blogged about the damning reviews for Pinter’s People at the Haymarket that appeared last Friday, than several of the Sundays yesterday appeared to directly contract them, and putting them beside their daily colleagues provides a very interesting contrast.

For the Sunday Times’ Christopher Hart, “(Bill) Bailey strikes you as not only a great comedian, but a fine actor. Kevin Eldon is a bit too manic at ties, but excellent as a deranged know-all in a black polo-neck in That’s Your Trouble (1959), haranguing Bailey, who, as so often, looks like a bewildered gnome. McNulty does a marvellous line in accents, and Sally Phillips has a tremendous party piece as a drunken Sloane, Tess, her ear pitch-perfect (“it” becomes “et” and “apparently” is pronounced “pahntly”)…. Bailey deserves every praise for reviving these old but never creaky sketches. Between them, the cast and the director, Sean Foley, understand precisely how Pinter’s pauses are often comic, the funnier for being excruciatingly drawn out.” That four star rave for these performances has to be put beside Benedict Nightingale’s comment in the daily Times, “Last night I was sickened by some of the coarsest performances I have ever seen in a London playhouse”.

Then again, for the Independent on Sunday’s Kate Bassett, “The comedians’ timing is spot-on and they bring out a remarkably charming, humane warmth in Pinter’s writing too. Some of the early sketches actually make him seem akin to Alan Bennett as he captures the near-surreal chat of tramps and other mindlessly banal conversations. Bailey is fine-tuned and particularly touching as the blankly staring, teasing but also patient caff owner in Last to Go, talking in laughably slow small circles with Eldon’s simple-minded newspaper hawker. These two are again wonderfully funny and then chilling as the infuriated radio controller and weirdly taciturn minicab driver in the brilliant farce/psycho thriller, Victoria Station.” By contrast, the daily Independent’s Paul Taylor wrote, “This is not an enjoyable evening and indeed there are sequences where it is barely endurable, but it is an instructive one. It proves that you don’t make Pinter funny by failing to trust the words and engaging instead in a lot of desperate mugging… The performers opt for crude clowning instead of finding the truth of the situation from which the comedy, the poetry and the pathos spring.” He also writes, “Geraldine McNulty and Sally Phillips make a pig’s ear of the timing [in The Black and White], as do Bailey and Kevin Eldon in the wonderfully observed vignette Last to Go where a newspaper seller and a coffee stall holder spin out an aimless conversation because neither wants to be the last to go home.”

But Tim Auld in the Sunday Telegraph admires the playing in the sketch Last to Go: “…Once Bailey stops playing for laughs and lets Pinter’s writing do the work, the production hums, and his performance in Last to Go, about a man behind a tea-stall and a newspaper seller groping for conversation in the evening gloom, is a comic masterpiece, encapsulating Pinter’s method in miniature.” Yet for the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, “Pinter demands restraint, perfect timing, and a superb ear for the rhythms and poetry of everyday speech. The present cast offer funny voices, silly accents and desperate mugging. Every gesture is overdone, every line over-emphasised, as if the performers don’t trust Pinter to do most of their work for him. As a result all subtlety is lost. At times, one simply stares at the floor in embarrassment, especially when Phillips is playing a drunken Hooray, or Bailey goes into a ridiculous head-nodding routine like one of those novelty dogs you still sometimes see on the parcel shelf of cars. And the scene in which Phillips and McNulty play a pair of old women exchanging small talk in an all-night cafe takes one into a realm of actorly exaggeration that ought to be banned by Equity….”

In The Observer, Kate Kellaway refers to “one of the great pleasures of the evening” being that “is that it is possible to see that, right from the beginning, Pinter was unmistakably himself. The sketches are sad as well as funny, sometimes sinister - light and dark”. But in The Observer’s sister paper The Guardian, Michael Billington — who called it “a woeful evening” — notes by contrast, “Individual sketches are also totally misunderstood”. At least they agree on one thing: the performance of the sketch Night. For Billington, “A few items rise above the general flailing incompetence. The beautifully subtle Night, in which a couple reveal their disjunctive memories of past erotic encounters, is quietly performed by Bailey and McNulty with beneficial results”; while Kellaway singles it out, too: “Night, which ends the first half, is particularly choice. A couple sit on a sofa, avoiding eye contact. In terms of their marriage, it is more dusk than night. And through the penumbra of middle age, they relive their first meeting. But they cannot agree on details, they cannot even pin down the same location, the scenery keeps shifting. And as they look back to their love for each other this, too, seems comically - and sadly - compromised. Bill Bailey, whose splendid idea it was to put the evening together, has perfected in this and other sketches a resigned expression that also contains the dazed hope that something might happen or that he might find something transformative to say. Geraldine McNulty plays his wife with a subtle mixture of complacency and bewilderment.”

So who’s right? Did the Sunday critics see a different performance to the daily ones? As a matter of fact, they did: the Sunday Times and Independent on Sunday both have early deadlines, so Hart would have had to go in by Tuesday night at the latest and Bassett by Wednesday night. (Kellaway could have come on Thursday, but I didn’t see her there, so I’m assuming she went in early, too). Of course, there’s a critical convention that we’re supposed to go on the same night, but the rules are regularly bent: conflicting diaries, early deadlines and the like mean that PRs do accommodate us early, if possible, though of course we go early on the understanding that we’re indeed seeing a preview (I did so myself on Saturday, going to see the matinee of The War Next Door at the Tricycle. The director, Nicolas Kent, was sitting behind me, and when at the end I sought clarification of a particular plot point from me, he duly explained it to me – and said it should have been revealed sooner! That, as he said, is what previews are for, and he was now going to make it clearer before tonight’s press night).

But whether or not we did a markedly different show or not, its striking that the opening night critics for Pinter’s People have been so markedly more critical than the ones who went on a different night. Indeed, the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts – an overnight critic but who went to a preview, too, and noted the number of people fleeing at the interval (which didn’t happen on the first night) – was more receptive to it, too; whereas his Sunday counterpart, Georgina Brown, who was there on Thursday, gave it a zero rating: no stars at all!

So perhaps this is a show that benefited from being seen with regular punters and not the false bonhomie (of the audience) and anxiety (of the performers) of a first night. Indeed, in New York critics are invited to a choice of three or four previews in the final run-up to the official opening, but agree to embargo their reviews until the day after the opening, which gives them both more time to write and consider, but also less irritation as they have to stumble to their seats amidst much air-kissing from a first night throng…. It’s just a thought.

But meanwhile the public are left floundering: who exactly amongst the critics is right? Of course you have to say that none of us necessarily are: it’s a subjective opinion, after all. But a review is also, ultimately, a capsule of a particular performance seen – one that will never be repeated just like that — and a show may well vary from night to night, as this divergence of opinion might just prove.

Filing my tax returns, as I had to do earlier this week, reminded me that there’s one substantial saving I make in my line of work, and that’s the price of theatre tickets. Frankly, my theatregoing habit would be literally unsustainable if I had to pay for it all. We may complain about some of the stuff we have to see in the name of work, let alone art, but at least we do not have to pay for the privilege (or pain). But it also got me thinking, as I often do, about the financial value that the price of a theatre ticket represents. On the one hand, it’s capable of purchasing you something you’ll remember for the rest of your life – and who can put a price on that? But sometimes it’ll buy you entry to an act of theatrical purgatory that you’ll long to escape from. Quentin Letts, who in today’s Daily Mail reviews one such act with the premiere of Pinter’s People last night at the Haymarket that he attended at a preview, noted that, “Maybe it’s all this global warming but large drifts of the audience melted from this Harold Pinter revue show at half-time. I don’t think I have seen so many people hurry into the night at the interval, not to return. They fled without embarrassment, which seems odd but may tell us something about this age. Some of the other patrons standing outside the Theatre Royal watched the escapees with a glower of envy….”

I guess buying a ticket at least gives you the right to vote with your feet (though I suspect that many of these escapees were in fact comped, in which case it’s a little discourteous to walk away from a gift horse’s mouth). If you have bought a ticket, though – for up to £40 – I suppose you write off the financial loss and at least buy back the time for yourself you would otherwise waste by staying put. But critics have no such luxury. The cost of being given a free ticket, and having to write about the show, is that we have to sit it out.

And this was one of those uniquely terrible evenings where a look sometimes said it all. Though critics don’t, routinely, exchange notes about the show we’re watching in the interval, last night I got a roll of the eyes from one of my most senior colleagues that was uniquely articulate. A couple of others were even more forthcoming: one told me she was going to give it “no stars”, while another said it was making him want to kill himself.

Those were generous comments. The reviews today range from the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer calling it “one of the most punishingly unfunny evenings I have ever endured in a theatre” and adding that, “at times, one simply stares at the floor in embarrassment”; to The Indie’s Paul Taylor who says, “This is not an enjoyable evening and indeed there are sequences where it is barely endurable”. The Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh declares, “There are some theatrical evenings over which it would be best to draw not only veils but also gags”; the Times’ Benedict Nightingale notes, “Last night I was sickened by some of the coarsest performances I have ever seen in a London playhouse”; and the Guardian’s Michael Billington, who calls it a “woeful evening”, concludes, “Pinter’s people have been turned into lurching grotesques and the result does a grave disservice both to the writer and comic acting.”

At least the reviews do the public a very good service, which is the simple consumer function of warning people off from spending their time (and money) there. Though I feel bad about losing the time I wasted watching it (which are hours of my life I will never get back) – let alone now having to write about it – imagine how much worse you must feel if you’ve actually paid for the experience.

Last week, I saw a revival of Jack Shepherd’s atmospheric jazz-band play, Chasing the Moment, at the Arcola, and though there was an interval, the actors didn’t get one: after spending the first act preparing for a club gig, it ended with them performing their first song – but then they continued to play a set throughout the whole interval. (The programme helpfully advised us, “Please feel free to come in and out of the theatre space and to bring in drinks”). So there was no break for them; and the unusual situation of the theatre staff ushering us back in from the bar since they knew there was only one more song to go before the play itself resumed….

But while an interval can be a break for both the actors and the audience to replenish their energies – and attend to biological functions, if necessary (“to drain the radiator”, as a friend suggests, or as George says in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, to visit ‘the euphemism’, or take what Americans sometimes call a ‘comfort break’) – it can also dissipate the energy in the room, and the actors, having worked it up for the first act, have to crank the audience back into gear again for the second.

So lots of productions test the bladder instead by dispensing with intervals entirely. Last night I saw Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Gate, and it kept the energy alive by being played straight through. Sometimes, of course, intervals are plain silly: when David Mamet’s The Cryptogram was first done in the West End at the Ambassadors, one was inserted into a play that, with the interval removed, runs for just 65 minutes anyway, as we discovered at the Donmar Warehouse last year.

But there’s a price to be paid – literally: theatres like intervals because of course there’s valuable bar revenue to be earned, which is lost when there isn’t one. A producer of a West End-bound play that doesn’t have an interval recently told me that there’s an extra item on her contra (the costs in addition to the theatre rental) of £500 per week for the loss of the interval.

For audiences, however, there’s another important function of the interval and that’s the social aspect of theatregoing. Of course, we’re there to commune with the play – though on first nights it may seem that the audience is there only to commune with each other – but an evening without an interval does sometimes feel curiously incomplete. We need the social interaction that it affords the opportunity for. Not to mention the chance to buy an overpriced drink or ice-cream. (As one theatre owner once told me when I complained about the price of the latter, “If you’re dumb enough to buy them, I’ll sell them to you….” In other words, it was a useful profit-centre.)