Creeping into Equusearly…..

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.