March 2007 Archives

Whenever Jeffrey Bernard missed a column in his days on The Spectator, usually brought on by overindulgence in alcohol, the magazine would publish an explanation: “Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell”. That, of course, became the title of a play by Keith Waterhouse that has also provided a lasting epitaph to a man who is not only unwell now but in fact dead. Most of the “posh” papers, of course, employ second (and in some cases even third) string critics to cover the first string’s absences, and these usually go unmarked in the dailies. But the Sunday papers still guide their readers on a lead critic’s absence, so The Observer last week, for instance, had “Susannah Clapp is away” posted below Kate Kellaway’s theatre round-up. (Susannah was back yesterday, however, with — amongst other things — a belated rave review for Rupert Goold’s RSC production of The Tempest. The only pity was that it had closed the day before).

Now it is my turn to be away: regular readers of this blog (and I know there are a few of you) should know that I won’t be posting any entries from today (Monday March 25) to the following Monday (April 2). Normal service will be resumed from Tuesday April 3. I am actually taking a holiday!!! Although I have been away from time to time since launching this blog in August 2005, I have never taken a holiday from writing here, except for the occasional day I’ve missed along the way, as I have invariably made trips only to places where theatre has still been on the cards (and boards) for me. But this time I am taking a week in the sun (hopefully!) of Gran Canaria, where there will be no theatrical distractions, I hope, from actually taking a proper break…! See you again in a week’s time.

Nearly 35 years on from when they first performed Sizwe Banzi is Dead as a piece of underground political protest theatre in Cape Town, John Kani and Winston Ntshona are back in London, performing the piece again – this time at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton. It’s a long journey that has brought them back in every sense to a city where they first performed it in 1973, and much has changed in the intervening years: the iniquitous pass laws that the play revolves around are happily now a thing of the past there — though as more than one review (including my own) has noted, may yet be a feature of our own lives in Britain if ID cards are introduced, and apartheid is dead. But also both actors have, of course, conspicuously aged – a fact poignantly underlined by a photograph in the programme of the two of them with Athol Fugard, whom they co-wrote it with, taken when they first brought the play to London’s Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1973 (It subsequently transferred to the main house downstairs, and then on to the West End and Broadway, where they took the rare distinction of being jointly awarded the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play).

The role of photography in providing a history of people’s otherwise unrecorded lives is one of the themes of the play, since Kani’s character is a photographer. But their play is also a snapshot of something else: a particular time and place in history, but also one with wider resonance to the world beyond it. Indeed, as I also noted in my own review, “Peter Brook is also bringing his own Theatre des Bouffes du Nord production of the play to the Barbican’s BITE season in May (where it will be performed in the Pit in French with English surtitles). Brook clearly recognises the universality of this very specific story of identity; but at the same time the creators of it – now veterans both of the political struggle in South Africa and elder statesmen of its theatre – bring an utterly unique and tangible connection to it.”

This is a piece of personal, political and theatrical history, and I hosted an onstage talk with both Kani and Ntshona after Thursday evening’s performance for the National Theatre’s gold corporate members. It was personally extraordinary for me to share a stage with the two men – not just after witnessing their phenomenal performances in the play that night, but for the role they have played in my own personal, political and theatrical history, too: for I, like them, hail originally from South Africa. (Though, being white, I never had a passbook myself, I vividly remember the fact that black people had to carry them at all times – something it never even entered my teenager mind to question. The play, however, has made me question it and much else). And although a lot of the early theatre I was raised on was “white” boulevard imports from the London and Broadway stage (or at least plays not subject to the cultural boycott), the biggest part of my theatrical education was provided at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, and that’s where I saw them in a production of Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith.

Kani has been having a busy time in the British theatre lately – last year he was part of director Janet Suzman’s South African cast production of Hamlet that came to Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the Complete Works Festival, playing Claudius; and in February, he appeared at Hampstead Theatre in his own debut as a solo playwright, Nothing But the Truth, that will also begin an extensive UK tour at the end of next month at Newcastle (see http://www.ukarts.com for details). That play, poignantly, is about the clash of those who stayed in South Africa to fight apartheid – and those who fled. As someone who fled – though not of my own choice, since I was only 16 at the time – it, too, had a special resonance for me. Watching Kani in that play, wrestling with the idea of forgiveness, was incredibly moving.

And to be able to share a stage with these two wonderfully generous and warm-hearted actors was even more so. I felt part of my life coming full-circle – who would have thought that, 28 years on from watching them as a teenager on the stage of the Market Theatre, I would be on one myself at one of the world’s pre-eminent English theatres with them?

Only the other day I was saying that “The arts, of course, are about people more than they are about buildings, and Sheffield has proved that you can even make a difficult one work”. I was talking there about Graham Sheffield, artistic director of the Barbican Centre, not Sheffield the city; but today I am writing from the latter, and the same holds true here, where first Michael Grandage and then Sam West have galvanised the fortunes of the Crucible Theatre to make it one of the most consistently interesting theatres in the country. I came here last night to see Jonathan Miller’s new production of The Cherry Orchard – his first UK stage production for a decade – and if the curmudgeonly old man of the British theatre is notoriously as thin-skinned about criticism of himself as he is voluble about making his own judgements of others, he proves here that it is, ultimately, the work that counts. And Sheffield have indeed been lucky to secure his services.

As they were of Sam West, as Grandage’s successor. But as I blogged here in December, he is leaving after just two years in post. As I wrote at the time, he “was an intriguing choice for the post, since he had never run a theatre before, and had directed comparatively little as well… But Sam, who like Mark Rylance at Shakespeare’s Globe, was a popular classical actor who knew how to galvanise the troops; and he made some bold artistic statements, such as his early decision to give Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain its first major revival since the original highly controversial National Theatre production in 1980. He also provided one of this year’s most powerful and poignant evenings when he was joined by his father Timothy in Caryl Churchill’s A Number – to play father and son(s) in this extraordinary play about the genetic cloning.”

The achievements have stretched beyond Sheffield – as Sam notes in his final programme note, “I’m proud that many of our shows are being seen outside the city. As You Like It played to full houses in the Swan in Stratford; The Caretaker transferred to the Tricycle in London and Don’t Look Now has just opened at the Lyric Hammersmith.” Here was a local theatre clearly being put on a national and even international map.

The official reason for his departure was the Crucible’s closure for refurbishment from January 2008 to March 2009. But as I also noted here back in December, that should not have been a surprise to West, “or at least I hope not – he should have been an active and integral part of those plans. In any case, it doesn’t mean the work had to stop. During the Young Vic’s two-year refurbishment, for instance, David Lan became building manager as well as making sure that the company kept its profile high with its ‘Walkabout’ season elsewhere, doing some 22 shows at 41 different venues. The Arts Council’s Christopher Frayling, who had recommended a shut-down during the refurbishment, ate his words publicly on the opening night, saying that it had been a huge success to keep its work going over that period.”

I have heard that West put it to the board that the Crucible should do the same thing, but those plans were rejected. He was left with no choice but to go. But as Benedict Nightingale noted in his review of The Cherry Orchard in The Times yesterday, the production is “not only admirably detailed by good enough to leave one feeling fearful. What’s the Crucible’s future after its renovation starts and its director, Sam West, leaves? Let’s hope the nation’s most enterprising regional theatre doesn’t lose its artistic momentum.”

That’s a momentum that has born fruit not just on the stage, but also in the audience: I have never seen the Crucible as packed as it was last night on a cold, wintry Wednesday evening. It proves there is a hunger and appetite for this kind of work – though it probably helps to have Joanna Lumley in the cast to bring in the punters, too.

It’s not just Konstantin in The Seagull who is seeking “new forms” in the theatre, or claiming (as he did in Christopher Hampton’s recent Royal Court translation of the play), “the theatre’s on its last legs. Once upon a time there were mighty oaks, now all you see is tree stumps.”

Theatre practitioners are increasingly straining at the leash and pushing against the walls of the buildings that have been confining them to burst free towards new ways of creating work. The National Theatre of Scotland, for instance, pointedly doesn’t even have a building: it exists wherever the work does, whether that’s an airport terminal, a forest, an army drill hall, or a theatre. The NTOS are re-defining ways of working for themselves, and new trees, to continue Konstantin’s metaphor, are growing as a result.

So are site-specific, “immersive” companies like Punchdrunk, whose production of Faust in a vast warehouse building in Wapping is nearing the end of its run. Producer Colin Marsh and artistic director Felix Barrett came to talk to the Critics’ Circle last week, and it was fascinating to hear of the kind of process – and meticulous planning – that creates a work that seems to unfold so spontaneously, but in fact with utter rigorousness. While the audience each make their own individual journey through the event, choosing where to go and who to follow, the actors have every moment “scripted” to the soundtrack that plays out to tell them where to be and what to do.

While “conventional” theatre making sticks to the existing classical repertoire and seeks to add to the canon with new writing, there’s a whole world now beyond those confines. And two new brand-new festivals – one in London, the other in Manchester – are pointing the way to new ways of respectively showcasing and making that work.

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with Robert Pacitti, an experimental theatre maker in his own right who is launching the first Spill Festival of Performance (http://www.spillfestival.com) with a season of 52 live performances, featuring artists from Australia, Brazil, Belgium, France, Germany and the UK, across five venues (the Barbican, Southbank Centre, Soho Theatre, Shunt Vaults and Toynbee Studios), from April 2-22. The work being showcased includes six world premieres, four installations, a number of “feasts”, and various symposiums. This is theatre that is thinking outside of the box – not to mention the proscenium arch. And conventional time frames, too: Forced Entertainment’s show, On the Thousandth Night, for instance, is described as a “six hour durational performance where the public are free to come and go as they wish throughout the performance” (at the Purcell Room on April 15). Pacitti’s own work in the festival includes a Grand Finale, in the Shunt Vaults on April 21 and 22, that combines “elements of installation, video and photographic work” to “further blur the boundaries between gallery and stage, activity and page,” in its abstract version of Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin. Meanwhile, Julia Bardsley – one-time co-artistic director of the Young Vic with Tim Supple – returns with a show, Trans-Acts, for audiences of just twelve, in which visual, theatrical and sound combine to forge what the programme calls “an intimate dialogue between the audience and the performer, the artist and the creative process, the live presence and the visual art object” (at Shunt Vaults from April 7-17). These are just three of the shows I want to see.

And yesterday, I went up to Manchester for the press launch of the first Manchester International Festival (http://www.manchesterinternationalfestival.com) that is billing itself as “the world’s first international festival of original, new work”, and runs from June 28 to July 15. Curated by festival director Alex Poots, it is offering a smorgasbord of some 25 major theatrical and musical commissions and an international music series that stretches from appearances by the Happy Monday and Lou Reed to The Fall and PJ Harvey. There is also a series of debates and discussions, a range of free activities to provide entry points for people who might not think that the festival is for them, and a massive club night for 20,000 people at Manchester Central (formerly the G-Mex centre) that combines VJ’s and DJ’s. Amidst much earnest talk of individual aspirations for the work being created, Johnny Vegas was on hand to talk about his contribution to the festival – a collaboration with Stewart Lee called Interiors, in which audiences will be shown around a home he is trying to sell – and he confessed, “I feel so out of my depth… I just desperately want to do a Neil Diamond song and get out of here!”

When I got out of there, I went to visit a part of the festival that’s already on view. In February, artist Steve McQueen created a project called Queen and Country under the festival’s auspices that commemorates some of the British soldiers who have been killed in the war in Iraq so far. At the start of the project, some 115 families of the deceased were asked to participate by contributing a photograph of their lost relative that has then been turned into a page of postage stamp sheets that can be viewed on a pull-out wooden panel. 98 families agreed, and these panels form the exhibition so far. Sadly, of course, it is a work-in-progress, since more soldiers have died since, and whose families will now be asked if they wish to partake.

The exhibition is currently at the Central Library, and I stopped by on the way back to the station. The most poignant panels of all, I felt, were the blank ones, awaiting filling. But I was moved to tears by the simplicity and eloquence of this public memorial to lost lives: no judgement is being made on the cause for which they died, just a memorial of their passing. The exhibition will move to London’s Imperial War Museum in July. Already, the festival has created a major work.

On Broadway, they think nothing of previewing a new musical for a month or more (and invariably at full prices, too); but in London we have historically adopted a faster timeline between first preview and first night. But maybe not even more: the stage version of The Lord of the Rings kicks off previews on 9 May – and then doesn’t open officially until 19 June. That may be a sign of how technologically complex the show is – but also how high the stakes are too: after their original production in Toronto a year ago, they need to make sure they are delivering the best show they can, and need to give themselves time to do so. This is their last shot at turning it into hit rather than a miss.

But what’s the excuse for the RSC? They are soon opening a new production of King Lear in rep with The Seagull, both directed by Trevor Nunn and featuring the same acting company. King Lear opens on April 3 after previewing from March 24 – i.e. after eight previews. The Seagull, by contrast, starts previews on April 17 – but then doesn’t officially open until May 31. That’s 27 previews – and then there are only 13 post press night performances left to play.

The Courtyard does offer reduced price previews – tickets are £5-£20 for these, but £8-£38 thereafter. Except that the preview prices for The Seagull only apply to the first three performances. So thereafter, theatregoers are paying full price. But though the critics aren’t being admitted until nearly six weeks later, are these full price performances really still previews?

Critics honour the press night system out of courtesy and historical precedent: artists should be allowed to set their own timetable for preparation to enable them to be seen in their best light. But if, as here, the system becomes topsy-turvy, there could be a case for an open revolt and (assuming we can actually get the tickets, that is, since the shows are selling very well) some might be tempted to buy tickets and go in earlier.

Only recently I celebrated the Barbican’s 25th anniversary here and applauded how the centre seems to provide a forum for cross-cultural pollination between the arts, rising above the problems of the building itself and maybe taking its cue from them to turn minuses into pluses. As artistic director Graham Sheffield put it, “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.”

But Sheffield’s vision – words that have repeatedly been translated into action with a programme that has seen him put the centre on the map in its own right and not just as a receiving house or home for companies like the erstwhile RSC that used to be based there or LSO – has been oddly rewarded: in an odd piece of timing, the very day after that anniversary celebration night, the City of London Corporation (whose fiefdom the Barbican is, as its landlord and principal funder) announced that they had selected an outsider to take overall charge of the centre, BBC Proms man Nicholas Kenyon, when John Tusa retires this year, instead of internal candidate Sheffield. Tusa’s own statement about his successor, that welcome him as “an old friend and colleague from the BBC”, makes pointed reading: “The Barbican Centre is at a 25 year high, largely due to Graham Sheffield’s artistic direction. I am confident it will continue to go from strength to strength”. (Weirdly, I’m told that the decision about his successor was taken after just one interview round.)

The arts, of course, are about people more than they are about buildings, and Sheffield has proved that you can even make a difficult one work. But its also striking how difficult this one still is, from the cosmetic and practical to more deep-seated problems. Arriving yesterday afternoon, for instance, for the final performance of the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg’s Platonov, the brand-new spruced up entrance way as part of the foyer refurbishments (achieved at a cost of some £14million, enough to build Hampstead Theatre) sported a warning, “floor may be slippery when wet.” So they’ve now got an unsafe skating rink for an entrance. There’s still a confusing number of box offices – enter at Silk Street, and an attendant is there directing people to ones in other parts of the building to collect same day tickets. There are now attendants helpfully crawling all over the building. But once you get to the stalls level theatre box office, there’s precisely one person dealing with pre-paid ticket collections – and a queue stretching across the foyer. Go to the main stalls gents loo in the interval, and several of the foot-operated water pumps at the basins don’t work: you barely get a sprinkle of water out of them. And so on.

That’s the public face of a building that needs to put on a better show if its to succeed, though the show it’s actually putting on is an unqualified artistic triumph: as Kieron Quirke noted in his Evening Standard review, “this version of Chekhov’s early, problematic play is total theatre: visually daring, perpetually novel and superlatively acted. Compromise yourself to attend.”

I took that advice to heart, though, and felt very compromised as a result: since the lovely Angela Dias, who looks after press at the Barbican, was away the day I e-mailed, I wrote to an assistant instead that an autoreply directed me to, and have never felt quite so rebuked in response. “Always worth a shot,” she said, “but I’m afraid BITE don’t give out comp tix.” Fair enough, if that’s the policy – but I didn’t need to being effectively told I was trying it on. (In fact, Angela put things right, but she shouldn’t have had to).

Clearly, the Barbican’s entrance isn’t the only thing that’s slippery about its welcome, to me – or worse, to Graham Sheffield, who has virtually single-handedly made it worth navigating and negotiating all the difficulties of trying to attend in the first place.

“I’m going to kill you for this!”, whispered my companion to me in the middle of the opening night of Attempts on Her Life at the National this week (but then he was in a bit of a murderous mood, especially afterwards when we discovered that Lambeth Council, who are thoughtfully resurfacing Stamford Street in the evenings at the moment, had “parked” us in on the other side of Coin Street. The only way to get out was to mount a steep ramp, and since my friend had a low car, it was no easy prospect, but there was no alternative, either).

It’s always exciting when theatre makes for passionate responses, though, and this is clearly a production that is going to divide as much as some think it rules. Katie Mitchell is a director whose work does that. At one time she was an extremely rigorous director whose productions used to inhabit a kind of hyper-naturalism, where audiences would complain about inaudibility as a result since actors spoke as if in normal conversation, not theatrical ones; but now she’s pushing the envelope on a new kind of work that is even more potentially alienating. With both her last National Theatre show – a version of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – and now this, she’s stretching the parameters of theatre’s embrace of technology to create work that is now entirely filtered through the intervening interpretive layers of film and sound. It is, I feel, a kind of anti-theatre: I go to the theatre to see drama and actors, not video blow-ups of the onstage actors being manipulated by the director as puppets of her (admittedly) fertile imagination.

But that’s not, of course, the only view possible on her work: Matt Wolf, for one, reckons it marks the “culmination” of Mitchell and playwright Crimp’s work together to date, and applauds the National for backing it. “Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre may well be remembered as, amongst other things, the regime that made a directorial star out of Katie Mitchell, the erstwhile iconoclast of small spaces like the Gate and the Pit who in recent years has gone for larger arenas big time. But even her track record to date can’t quite prepare one for the exhilaration that comes with seeing Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life on the vast Lyttelton stage in the kind of programming decision that makes you glad to be in England. (Were a comparable venture tried at a major New York not-for-profit address, heads would doubtless roll—if, that is, they weren’t lost in the stampede of people walking out.)”

Actually, I’ve read in one thread on a bulletin board that there’s been a similar stampede here already: “There were the most walk-outs I’ve ever seen in one go, which caused some disruption as there’s no interval so people were legging it mid-show and of course with no centre aisles at the Lyttleton there were multiple standing ovations. One bloke 2 rows behind me audibly said as he left ‘Life’s too short to sit through crap like this.’

In the Daily Express today, Simon Edge comments, “There is no interval because they know that half of us would leave.” But Matt Wolf, putting the case for the defence of the production, admits, “I’m the first to acknowledge that Crimp’s wilfully fractured, fractious play may infuriate those who like their theatre cosy, codified and cut and dried. But you’d have to have had no exposure whatsoever to what Konstantin in Crimp’s translation of The Seagull refers to as ‘new forms”’ to be entirely adrift. The production in every way marks the culmination of Crimp and Mitchell’s ongoing journey to date, and I, for one, would not have missed it for the world.” Alluding the experimental nature of the work, he goes on, “The extensive use of video confirms one’s sense that Mitchell is the closest this country has to the maverick work of the Wooster Group in New York—with the important difference that Mitchell is given access to a premier stage in arguably the defining English-speaking theatrical address in the world today, whereas the Wooster group denizens (whom this company’s Kate Duchene markedly resembles) continue to ply their wares in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, well away from the mainstream.” And he concludes, “It’s as if everyone involved has taken to heart a passing mention of ‘theatre for a world in which theatre has died’ and has shaken the form unforgivingly and in my view unforgettably back into life.”

For Michael Coveney, the production is a “brilliant, updated (with instant video replay, projections, microphones and music) application of Brecht’s alienation effect”, but for others, the result is simply alienating. Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail reads signs of our increasing passivity in putting up with it at all: “People used to say the British would not tolerate totalitarianism. We were too bloody-minded, individualist and sensible. Given how an audience put up with two hours of debasing trash at the National Theatre last night, that may no longer be the case. Any society which can endure such fare without shouting ‘rot’ and angrily demanding a refund is a society in severe decay, a society which will take force-feeding like a tethered French duck…. The management asks me to state that this production is part of the Travelex season of £10 tickets. That means you pay the theatre £10 – not vice versa as it should be”.

Simon Edge’s Daily Express review gets more specific: “In order to make the point that events only have meaning in the modern world if they are televised, the actors video everything on stage. This means all you are looking at is people moving cameras and lights on tripods (half the time the lights are shining in your eyes) and the only thing to break the visual tedium is the edited videos on a giant screen. So a play lambasting the video packaging of society relies on precisely the same technique. Do me a favour.” He feels the play similarly tries to have its cake and eat it elsewhere: “Crimp shows his true colours in a scene satirising highbrow TV impersonations of Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin raise a welcome laugh but making them talk psychobabble is a cheap shot. It means that society is damned both for dumbing down and dumbing up. This is not serious comment. It is the yah-boo-sucks nihilism of Catherine Tate’s ‘Do I look bovvered?’ Lauren.” At which point Simon goes ya-boo-sucks: “In the final scene, someone in the wings presses a button that makes the entire cast disappear through the floor. I couldn’t help wishing they had pressed it a lot sooner.”

It’s a production that, at least, will clearly be stirring debate and strong passions. In The Independent, Alice Jones tries to deal with the contradictory impulses that both the play and the production set off: “How to sum up Attempts on Her LIfe? Perhaps it is an attempt, as suggested by one of its nameless speakers, at a play for a world ‘in which theatre itself has died’, where the ‘outmoded conventions of dialogue and so-called characters’ are done away with, leaving something fragmented and enigmatic in their place. Martin Crimp’s play eschews easy interpretations in any case, presenting ‘17 scenarios for the theatre’ in which contradictory accounts are given of a central character who never appears….” She goes on, “Katie Mitchell takes up the challenge of Crimp’s script. An ‘open text’, it refuses to assign lines to specific characters and notes only that it should be played by ‘a company of actors’. It’s a dream ticket for Mitchell, a keen practitioner of director’s theatre. And she really goes to town here, dealing with the play’s transfer from its original intimate setting to the cavernous Lyttleton stage with a large cast of 11, all kitted out with face microphones and cameras.” But she concludes, “by the end of two hours of close-ups, I began to crave some human warmth from the stage, rather than just scurrying around setting up cameras. At times this piece about the spiritual vacuum at the heart of Nineties, and now Noughties society, felt just like an art installation – slick, chilly and a little shallow. But, then again, perhaps that was the point.”

But as critics try to find the point, perhaps we’ll finally be exposed as pointless, too. It’s a play that demands you to make up your own mind – whether there’s a point or not to it.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote here about the fact that though there were lots of Broadway musicals lining up for the West End then (as there still are now), there was little sign of any original British musicals on the horizon for the West End. That situation, a year on, is also little changed, though the British-created (but Indian/Finnish composed) Lord of the Rings – then about to open in Toronto – is heading for Drury Lane this May.

Last year, I saw one glimmer of hope in a one-night cabaret event, Not(es) from New York, and last night I saw another, also thanks to a late night cabaret outing. At the Prince of Wales’ Delfont Room, a West End cast led by Avenue Q’s Jon Robyns presented a ravishing showcase of the work of a bunch of young British composers, which proves, at least, that there are several out there. Only one – Laurence Mark Wythe – was able to present work that had already had a theatrical outing: his show Tomorrow Morning was seen at Hampstead’s New End last year, and is now awaiting further development. But as another of the showcased composers, Matt Brind, said last night, “We all need this in London – so much of it goes on in New York”.

As Oscar Hammerstein II so sagely put it in a lyric in The Sound of Music, “A song is no song till you sing it.” And a show is no show till you produce it. A whole generation of aspiring British composers are being denied the valuable opportunity to learn and grow through production. But last night, at least, we heard that a few of them can at least write good songs, like Craig Adams – juggling a night job performing in the tour of Mamma Mia! – Susannah Pearse, Ian Sapiro and Charles Miller.

But if they all jostled to share the same one-hour bill, another promising young talent gets an evening all to himself this Sunday and Monday at the Arts Theatre, when the work of Leighton James House is presented in a show called A Little House Music. Actually, he’s been promising for quite a long time now. I remember seeing his first show, Lifts (written when he was just 17) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1998. I missed his more recent Edinburgh entry, Only You Can Save Mankind, based on Terry Pratchett’s novel that was seen on the fringe in 2004 – but can he save the British musical?

Someone has to rescue it from our endless preoccupation with recycling old pop hits as new musicals, of which the latest – Never Forget, based on the repertoire of the recently reformed boy band Take That – was announced yesterday. I have always hoped, perhaps forlornly, that the man would be Howard Goodall (whose Days of Hope comes back next week, when it is revived at the King’s Head). But though he writes glorious music, he’s yet to strike it big with a musical. Instead, we’re losing him to the Classic FM airwaves, where Alfie Boe’s beautiful rendition of Goodall’s setting of ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ is currently riding high on the playlist.

A couple of weeks ago I was at Camden’s Roundhouse for the National’s spectacular FastForward Fundraising gala, in which the vast Victorian engine shed was turned into a glamorous dining room for a seated banquet. And for the Roundhouse’s re-opening last summer, it hosted a thrilling promenade production, Fuerezabruta, that turned it into a playground of the imagination. At the time, I wrote, “This vast circular, industrial ‘found space’ is exactly the kind of infinitely flexible environmental setting that shows like Fuerzabruta need to come alive in – audience, playing space and performers become one, moving to the show’s weird but distinctive rhythms that redefines movement as harnessed performers fly through the air and then unharnessed ones throw themselves about in a watery pool lowered directly above your head. It did, however, mean that the restorative work on the Roundhouse itself was hidden from view. But though the venue itself should have been the star itself last night, there will be other opportunities to see it close up and more personally.”

That chance finally came last night when the venue hosted the London premiere of Tim Supple’s “Indian Dream”, as the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he created under the auspices of the British Council in India and was first performed in the UK as part of the RSC Complete Works Festival, has become dubbed. The space has been seamlessly turned into a semi-circular amphitheatre – complete with temporary seating that is, thank God, actually comfortable (there are even armrests and cushioned seats, not the dreaded plastic football stadium installations that are the bane of the Edinburgh Fringe and some venues in London). The seating (for some 1,300 people) wraps around a large, high and wide stage, perfect for epic productions like this (and with the cast clambering over a climbing frame of the rear wall of a set, there were echoes of a former Roundhouse tenant, De La Guarda).

However, unmiked and performed in six languages as this production was, it wasn’t always easy to hear the words; of course Supple’s approach is more about the visual and musical than the language on this occasion, but with such a voluminous vertical and round space to fill, there are clearly going to be acoustic challenges to straight drama taking place here.

But the Roundhouse has once again taken up an important role in providing London with an exciting home for work of a different sort. Ironically, however, its not one that the production specifically demands: it is going on an extensive autumn UK tour to more conventional venues, and it will be interesting to see how it plays in them.

Now that so many venues act like touts themselves, with remote phone rooms and a panoply of additional costs on the face value of the tickets, its difficult to tell sometimes who is a tout and who isn’t. But one of the dangers of using an “unofficial” agency is highlighted by a story in The Guardian today about the collapse of one such online ticket source, tickettout.com (who traded under the name Ticket Tout Ltd). I guess their name is at least an honest statement of their business model; but people who have purchased advance tickets through them have now been told their orders will not be fulfilled. “Regrettably, the company will be unable to provide these to you as it is not in possession of the tickets.” Of course, it was in possession of their customer’s money, parted in good faith that the tickets would be forthcoming, so a kind of fraud has been perpetrated. They have sold what they haven’t, in fact, got.

While the travel industry protects its own reputation – and customers’ ability to buy in good faith – via ABTA, the ticketing business is still largely unregulated, or at best self-regulated, via organisations like STAR – the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, whose members subscribe to a code of practice that ensures that they (in the words of their website):

• Clearly identify the face value of the ticket purchased and any additional booking fees.

• Highlight any terms and conditions, including transferability, cancellation and viewing restrictions.

• Handle bookings in a polite and courteous manner, giving the highest standards of professional service.”

That’s all good and well as a statement of good business practice. But does it provide more than a smokescreen of respectability? Getting the STAR seal of approval doesn’t actually cost a ticket agency much: the application fee is £500, the joining fee is a further £500, and then the annual membership is on a sliding scale of charges based on annual turnover, from £630 (up to 100,000 tickets a year sold) to £5,040 (over 5million tickets a year sold).

But though STAR’s own declared policy is to inspire “consumer confidence” by offering its members “the right to display the STAR logo, an indication of confidence to the customer, on all products, catalogues, stationery, sales literature, websites etc” and offering “clear distinction from less scrupulous ticket sellers”, there’s something crucial missing: building consumer confidence is very laudable, but there’s still no ultimate consumer protection built in there against collapses of the Ticket Tout Ltd sort (though I very much doubt they were members!).

As The Guardian news story about it suggests, “This latest collapse of a ticket firm will pressure the government for a ban on the resale of tickets, which would, in effect, kill touting. Last month, culture secretary Tessa Jowell said she did not believe there was a need for such legislation.”

Last Thursday the Queen (and I don’t mean Helen Mirren) paid a Royal visit to the Theatre Royal, Brighton, as part of its 200th anniversary celebrations, so I went down a day later to pay my own respects (and even if I don’t qualify as visiting Royalty, there are some that would say that I make a good effort sometimes at acting queenly. Though, this being Brighton, one is hardly out of place…).

Actually, Brighton is on a convenient circuit of touring theatres near London – led by Richmond, Wimbledon and Bromley, of course, for me but also embracing Guildford and Cambridge – that I visit on a fairly regular basis throughout the year. Though touring, either pre or post-West End, or sometimes with no immediate West End ambitions in its sights but as an end in itself – is relatively unacknowledged by most of the national media, a production that travels on an extensive tour can reach many more of my readers in the Sunday Express than, say, a production that originates and only plays at Manchester’s Royal Exchange or the Birmingham Rep. So I like to cover as many of them as I can.

And theatres like Brighton that reek of the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd are the essence of a particular kind of touring: there’s a kind of faded, tatty glamour to the building that brings with it a powerful blend of associations on both sides of the footlights, with a dedicated and loyal local audience that support it all the time. But though I do once remember interviewing Richard Briers in the Number One dressing room backstage (opposite dressing room 1A, which in one of the subtler moves of the management there means there is no No 2 room), I have previously confined my visits to the auditorium, and that’s only the public part of this theatre’s story.

As a special souvenir supplement of the local Brighton Argus to commemorate the anniversary puts it, “Although it’s the architecture of Theatre Royal Brighton’s exterior and auditorium that is most obvious, the backstage areas are in some ways more interesting and certainly more complex.” Last Friday, after lunching with the theatre’s current Chief Executive Julien Boast and his deputy and Head of Marketing Tracey Shaw, I was taken on a guided tour of the backstage area, and discovered a building – literally falling apart in places, and leaking all over the place (buckets are everywhere) – that has been stitched together from different periods to make the fantastic relic it is today of some 200 years of resourceful (lack of) planning. For instance, the dressing rooms are reclaimed out of former fishermen’s cottages; while areas of the front-of-house are carved out of the former home of the Nye Charts, the theatre’s 19th-century manager Henry Nye Chart and, after his death, his wife Ellen Nye Chart who took over; it was the latter who introduced “flying matinees”, in which an entire London production would travel by train to Brighton, put on their show there, and then go straight back to perform it again in London in the evening!

So, where you see a domestic fireplace, for instance, in the dress circle bar, this is in what was formerly the Nye Chart’s drawing room. All of this affords what the Argus supplement refers to as “tremendous visual evidence of the theatre’s organic growth, giving it almost unparalleled character.” As Boast himself says, “It’s remarkable for any theatre to reach 200 years old, given their tendency to burn down, thanks to the combination of timber and gas lighting. But what’s particularly amazing about Theatre Royal Brighton is her growth has been pretty much uninterrupted throughout the reigns of nine monarchs and architecturally she’s pretty much untouched. Several theatres of her age or older have had a lot of money put in and the infastructure changed.”

No wonder he tells me he is reluctant to make those kind of interventions here: as custodian of the building for what is, in the scheme of its 200 years, only a brief tenure (he has been here five years so far), he doesn’t want to have to make decisions that will cover (up) its history. Instead, the building is gently held together, in some places by scaffolding, as in what used to be his office where the windows were warping dramatically – and when the frames were taken off, it was discovered that the building it was housed in was entirely timber.

But the glorious thing about theatre, of course, is its endless pursuit of the new and the innovative; and even if the building may be 200 years old, the production I saw on Friday night was bang up-to-the-minute: a new touring version of The Hound of the Baskervilles cleverly combined a new version of a classic Sherlock Holmes story with a new technology to tell it that summonsed set changes by video projection.

Brighton, too, is similarly a wonderfully eclectic mixture of the classical and venerable and the hip and new. Even the guest houses are being made over. While the seaside B&Bs, with the cosy familiarity of a similarly tarnished air to them that the theatre has, are still there, I stayed at a fabulously reclaimed one: The Amherst, in Lower Rock Gardens in Kemptown, looks like one of a number of guest houses in the street from the outside, but you enter a smart, fashionable world inside, with DVD players in every room and fluffy white duvets to collapse into – and cooked breakfasts that are brought to your room. It doesn’t get better than this.

I’ve spoken before here of the difficulties of finding out how shows are actually faring commercially, since unlike on Broadway, West End producers do not make their weekly takings public in the pages of Variety (or here in The Stage). But you can sometimes get a sense of what’s hot, and what’s not, simply by opening your eyes – not just in the time-honoured way that experienced actors are said to be able to do as they “count the house” from the stage or the other way around from the stalls if you’re a member of the audience that is actually already there, but simply by walking past the Half Price booth in Leicester Square and seeing what’s up on the boards.

But nowadays you don’t even need to leave your armchair to do that – the Society of London Theatre’s website (www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk) gives a daily listing of the offerings there, and I’m surprised to see that even Dame Maggie Smith (the West End’s most bankable star, besides Judi Dench) is “boothing” at the moment for previews of her new play The Lady from Dubuque. Of course, to take advantage of the Half Price booth, you still have to turn up in person, and on the day itself, so you still need an element of flexibility to your planning should you want to do so.

However, for those who prefer to plan ahead, lots of theatres are offering cut-price deals to readers of particular papers. This week alone, I’ve seen offers for Porgy and Bess (at £35 instead of the advertised £55, in Metro), the National’s production of The Man of Mode (at £20, in the Evening Standard), Underneath the Lintel (£20 in Metro), Stomp (£20, in Metro) and the ENO’s production of The Gondoliers (£30 in the Standard). Clearly theatre tickets are like airline seats: they’re perishable goods, which if they go unoccupied lose all their revenue earning potential the moment the curtain goes up. So it makes sense to sell them off cheaper closer to the time. But nowadays there is such a plethora of offerings, we are heading to a situation akin to Broadway where regular or sensible punters will simply wait for offers to be made before booking.

The “liveness” of theatre is one of the main things we celebrate about it: the fact that it is being made afresh (or not so fresh, sometimes) in front of our eyes, by living people. But actors are only human. They fall ill. And if they’re in a long-runner, they need a holiday occasionally.

A recent spurt of high-profile absences from the stage, however, has focused attention on the fallibility of actors. Tonight Billie Piper is due to make her official West End debut in Christopher Hampton’s Treats – an opening that has already been postponed by a week – but she missed her penultimate evening preview performance two nights ago. And she also missed an earlier preview during the run, too. ‘I am quite stressed and having a tough time,” she told one interviewer, amidst pictures appearing in the press of her sharing a tearful coffee with her ex, Chris Evans – who then attended a preview to support her on Monday, after which the Evening Standard on Tuesday reported her saying, “I am doing really well. It is going well and I’m really pleased. It was really good having Chris here – I could hear him laughing. Bless him for being supportive.” But perhaps he was being too supportive – she failed to appear again on Tuesday night, and this time the Standard’s Londoners’ Diary reported yesterday, “Her agent said today that Piper is suffering from a ‘nasty bug’ and it is likely the official opening tomorrow will have to be put back once more.” The report went on, “Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea for Piper to go out on the town till 2am with former husband Chris Evans and her boyfriend Laurence Fox.” It will be interesting to see if she, or we, get to the opening tonight.

Meanwhile, Connie Fisher – propelled into the West End by TV public vote – is also currently out of The Sound of Music. Before she won the role of Maria von Trapp, there was a well-known plan to hire an alternate to share the role and responsibility, namely the considerably more experienced Emma Williams (Connie had never appeared professionally on a West End stage, whereas Williams had originated the role of Truly Scumptious in the original Palladium production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). But when Connie won, she made an elaborate public statement about wanting to be there for every performance, and the public, too, kept phoning the box office, insisting they wanted to see “that girl off the telly”. So she was upped to performing all eight shows and Wiilliams stood down; but now the strain has hit her… and after cutting back to six shows a week (as was the original plan), she’s out of the show entirely now for a two week “enforced medical absence”.

On Tuesday, the producers issued a statement, “Through a desire not to let the public down Connie Fisher sang through a heavy cold which has caused a vocal injury. The vocal chords are a muscle like any other and, as in the sporting world, when injured they require complete rest to recover. On her doctor’s advice Connie has to take two weeks off from the show starting last night Monday 5 March in order to allow the injury time to repair.” Yesterday, that statement was followed up by another from Andrew Lloyd Webber and David Ian, who “have decided that anyone who wishes to exchange their tickets for later dates should get in touch with the agency/box office from whom they bought their tickets. We regret that we may be unable to re-seat customers in the very near future (it may be as late as November) but we will be happy, in the circumstances, to re-seat as soon as we can. While Connie has now agreed to stay with the show through November to make this possible, you should be aware that many of the remaining original cast in the show may have left by then.”

The offer was further extended “to audience members who may already have seen the show this week (w/c Monday 5 March) without Connie and would like to go again”. I’ve never heard before of producers willing to give audiences a second chance to see a show for free. Perhaps this proves that Emma Williams would have been a valuable asset to the show after all.

But it’s not just actors who are new to the stage who are prone to such difficulties. Just days after last Tuesday’s opening of Equus, Richard Griffiths has been reported as being out of the show. On Monday, the Standard reported that he was suffering from a bout of flu, and failed to appear for either performance last Saturday. And his understudy, Colin Haigh, was reportedly not ready yet, but on book for the performances. Producer David Pugh explained to the Standard on Monday, “The understudies are with the company from the start but there are changes right up until the opening and the understudies have only been rehearsing the final script since Thursday. We found people were very understanding. It’s the first performance that Richard has ever missed in his life and he was devastated - but the doctor gave him the all-clear today so he should be back on stage tonight.” (As of last night, however, he wasn’t — a friend arrived at the Gielgud to find a sign saying he was still off).

Of course, at least the West End has understudies – there are none at the Royal Court, so when Carey Mulligan, playing Nina in the current production of The Seagull there, went out after suffering from appendicitis recently, Jodie Whittaker and then Anna Madeley subsequently stood in. They, too, were on book.

But when Kristen Johnston suddenly suffered an erupted duodenal ulcer during her run in the West End play Love Song at the New Ambassadors last December, the producers found a more novel way to replace her temporarily: they flew in Molly Regan, who had played Johnston’s role in the play’s original Chicago production earlier last year, to take over. That, at least, meant that audiences were getting a fully-fledged performance; but as The Independent reported yesterday, “While industry insiders argue that the seasonal ‘bout of flu’ is intrinsic to live productions, audiences have begun to voice their dissatisfaction over not seeing the big-name performers they paid to see.” And if you’re not going to get that performer, you should at least get one who is ready for the demands of the role they are taking over. The producers of The Sound of Music are at least able to offer that: as they have also said in their statement, “The Sound of Music is a fantastic production with an enormously talented cast and we are very lucky in that, in Connie’s absence, the role of Maria will be covered by Sophie Bould, who has been receiving standing ovations for her portrayal of Maria.”

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Stratford-upon-Avon main house—now called the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but originally built as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1932 – came out of the embers of the original theatre on the site that burnt down on March 6, 1926, just as the then-resident company was about to begin rehearsals for a new season that was being launched with a production of Coriolanus. The production went ahead despite the loss of their home, with the local cinema in Greenhill Street being pressed into service to house it.

Fast forward exactly 76 years, and last night – March 6, 2007 – the Royal Shakespeare Theatre saw the last first night for the theatre in its current form, with the opening of a new production of Coriolanus, to bring the story full circle. But this time the reinvention isn’t being precipitated by a fire, but by a planned three-year closure for what the RSC are calling a “transformation”, whose “aim is to create the best modern playhouse for Shakespeare’s works.”

There are some who say that it already exists – Shakespeare’s original playhouse, recreated at the Globe. Certainly, Peter Hall – founder of the RSC in its modern form – sees the virtue in going back to those kind of basics, with his own project the Rose of Kingston in the midst of its own building.

As Michael Billington noted in a feature in The Guardian recently, although the RST is “a Shakespearean mecca, it is one that has been vilified and attacked for most of its 75-year history.” He quotes one actor complaining of the lack of contact between the stage and the stalls (never mind the areas further away), “it is like acting from Calais to the cliffs of Dover”.

But he also quotes Peter Hall once telling him that what was surprising “is how such a supposedly rotten theatre can have created so much great work.” As with the famously problematic Olivier Theatre at the National, the space itself seems to throw down the gauntlet of its own challenges that directors either rise to or blame their failures on. As Billington concludes, “In short, Scott’s much-derided building was in itself neither good nor bad; it simply depended on the audacity with which it was used. But it strikes me as faintly ironic that one of the last Shakespeare productions to appear on this stage was Rupert Goold’s startling version of The Tempest”, he goes on, referring to the production that has just transferred to the Novello. “Here, if ever one needed it, was a justification for the picture-frame stage, in that the opening storm tableau gave way to an image of Prospero’s arctic abode and chilling vistas of polar crags. Goold, who cut his teeth at Northampton’s resplendently Victorian Theatre Royal, proved a fundamental point: that the structural shape of the stage matters infinitely less than the imaginative shape of the mind of the person using it. So, when the demolition squads move in on the RST, spare a thought for all the artists whose achievements lie buried somewhere in its fabric.”

But the re-design – which as Janet Suzman (appearing as Volumnia in the final production of Coriolanus there) tells The Guardian in a sidebar feature to Billington’s piece, is “not a bad good thing, it’s just a new thing” – is also about keeping pace with bigger changes and demands for our expectations of the theatre. Harriet Walter gets it right when she says, “The architecture can’t keep up with the changing style of acting. What is acceptable as naturalistic has been so modified by television, especially in programmes like The Office, that it becomes harder and harder to yell and be covered in blood.”

Last night, William Houston was doing both in the title role of Coriolanus, and rising to the challenge, filling the space with the force of his personality. And that’s what we remember most from nights here: actors who have taken charge of the theatre and made it their own. As Patrick Stewart – who recently did just that here with Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest – points out something significant when he says, “In the 40 years that have passed since I first went up to Stratford, fashions and tastes in performing Shakespeare have changed, so much so that nowadays the main house is regarded as ‘difficult’, and, I’m told, there are directors and actors who would rather not do their work there. But in the 1960s and the early 70s, the main house was the only place you could work, and I always found it thrilling. I like the drama of the big house and the epic nature of those wide-open spaces, and as a younger actor I liked the idea of the grand gesture. Nowadays, there is more emphasis on the need to find a naturalness of behaviour and an apparent spontaneity.”

After a double five-star review the Sunday before last, the Sunday Telegraph’s theatre critic Tim Walker has this week gone for a double one-star pan. “Some readers write to me from time to time”, he added, “to say that I seem to enjoy giving bad reviews. That’s not true at all. I will never again have the hours that I have had to spend sitting through mind-numbing rubbish like this,” he says, referring to the production of Equus under consideration. “I’d much rather go to great plays all the time and award them five stars, as I did to the two productions I reviewed in my last column.” (For the record, they were for The Reporter – which he was alone in giving five star status to – and Boeing-Boeing, where he was matched by Georgina Brown in a five-star rating). “That was, however, an exceptional, if not a phenomenal, week. This time around I got Mr Radcliffe, but then, I suppose, you have to take the buff with the smooth.”

You also have to take the accurate with the inaccurate in his reviews. According to Tim, “I accept that [the part of Alan Strang] has to be played by a young actor; but not someone who really is 17. Colin Firth was some years older when he played it in the National’s famous 1973 production, and had attended drama school and already undertaken a variety of roles on the stage.” Really? Colin Firth was actually just 13 in 1973 – and wasn’t even in it. Though the sight of him the buff might have induced what a friend has brilliantly referred to as “penile dementia” in some quarters, where late middle-aged men become obsessed by such naked adolescent flesh, it would have been rather suspect, if not illegal. In fact, Tim meant Peter Firth. Now we’ve all suffered from naming dyslexia – I once scrambled Nicholas and David Tennant in a review, and had the error pointed out to me by none other than Julia McKenzie! But the error here is particularly egregious, since Tim’s reference implies a level of research – that he’d checked out Firth’s drama school credits and subsequent professional work, too.

In news that will no doubt warm the cockles of hearts of both Richard Griffiths (who has stopped performances on both sides of the Atlantic when mobiles went off) and Sam Walters (who has threatened to do so and evict the offender), The Guardian today reports that Russia’s oldest theatre has become the world’s most innovative one: the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg “last month became the first theatre company in the world to instal jamming equipment, after previous attempts to get patrons to switch off their phones failed.” A spokeswoman for the theatre, Yekaterina Slepishkova, says, “We ask people to turn their phones off before every performance. But they simply don’t listen.” So now, “we turn the system on just before the performance. We switch it off during the interval and on again for the second half. So far it’s been a resounding success.”

And the Maly Drama Theatre in St Petersburg has now followed suit. “We expect our idea to be imitated elsewhere,” Sergei Dmitryiv, the Alexandrinsky theatre’s technical director tells the Guardian. “I’ve had colleagues in Moscow asking how we did it. It’s easy. You can buy the equipment on the internet.”

Mr Walters might want to take heed!

“It’s only a 15-minute train ride from Euston and a short hike down the station road: in a word, go,” wrote Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph a couple of weeks ago in his review of Alan Bennett’s rarely seen Enjoy at Watford Palace Theatre, so I did. And he was right. Except that I went to the last night on Saturday, so you can’t. At least not now. Someone ought to transfer it, though.

It’s a play that I remember seeing in its original, short-lived West End run in 1980 at the Vaudeville Theatre, where it starred Joan Plowright and Colin Blakely. I also tracked it down in a revival at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 1999 – where the play itself is set, of course, so was doubly moving as it forensically observes an old couple facing re-housing from “the last back-to-back in Leeds”.

When Ian Shuttleworth reviewed that Leeds production for the Financial Times, he wrote, “Alan Bennett was derided for being wilfully surreal when, in 1980, this depiction was first seen of the inhabitants of one of the last back-to-backs in Leeds being transplanted along with their house to a museum park. His last laugh regarding his prophetic acuity has come at the expense of the eradication during the 1980s of the north of England’s industrial culture, but Enjoy is an uncannily prescient play in many respects (although not, sadly, in its vision of the almost universal acceptance of transsexuals).”

It’s interesting to see how time has changed once again. The play’s time truly seems to have come. As Dominic says in his review of the Watford production now, “Prescient and profound, Bennett here nails the Maoist tendencies of local government, Big Brother culture avant la lettre and society’s callous treatment of the elderly. The evening even segues into an inspired commentary on the patronising phoniness of the heritage industry.”

And of course, Bennett is a playwright whose star, too, nowadays is higher than ever. Isn’t it time to allow more people to finally enjoy Enjoy?

It’s a frightening thought to have a monetary value ascribed to you, but as a freelance journalist, you are, of course, partly what you are paid (or sometimes, not), so I suppose my time is already quantified in that way. But last night the National Theatre held their now-annual FastForward fund-raiser at the Roundhouse, where guests were treated to a lavish seated banquet and onstage entertainment, plus a live and silent auction of what they called “once-in-a-lifetime experiences”, such as appearing onstage at the National… or attending a first night there in the company of a theatre critic, with dinner afterwards!

That was the auction lot I signed up to being sold off as, but was rather nervous: would anyone actually buy me? I mean, I don’t want you to think of me as a sad loser, but going to the theatre every single night of the week (and often weekends, too), you can sometimes run out of friends to take. And they go for free!

As I was busy last night – at the theatre, of course, going to see the transfer of Whipping It Up from the Bush to the New Ambassadors – I missed the dinner part of the proceedings, but arrived with my guest Andrzej for the second part of the evening, FastFoward Backstage, a party on the upper level of the Roundhouse designed to introduce younger people to the National. And there I discovered that I’d gone for £2,700! Which is great for the National’s fundraising efforts – but now puts me under a bit of pressure to deliver an experience that matches the price paid….

I regularly already host events on behalf of the National’s corporate/development department, whose subscribers and donors are treated to post-show talks with members of the cast or creative team of the show they’ve just seen, and which I facilitate. (Just last week I did one after a performance of The Reporter with Richard Eyre, back at the National that he of course used to run, for the theatre’s American sponsors…. but Richard was so schooled at such events that he started without me!)

What goes on inside a theatre isn’t, of course, confined to what happens on a stage, or for the audience who pays to see it done there; but it’s fascinating to see this new part of the ecology of theatrical fundraising in action. Most American regional “institutional” or “not-for-profit” theatres run to this model already, since state subsidy is in short supply; but the National – already our most robustly funded state theatre – now has a finely-honed machinery for earning its own sponsorship income. And they’re very good on offering the “added value” that makes it worthwhile for sponsors to value the add-ons they’re getting. I just hope I now live up to expectation….!

Mind you, the high price needs to be put in perspective, and I’ve just read in today’s Londoners’ Diary in the Standard that the highest bid went for lunch at Sheekey’s with Nick Hytner and Helen Mirren, and was bought for £40,000 by Lloyd Dorfman, CEO of Travelex — the sponsors of the NT’s revolutionary £10 season that has been the biggest innovation (and success) of Hytner’s regime. I think Hytner should be taking him to lunch for free, myself…!

As Jeremy Austin sighed in the opening line of his review of Equus on this site, “Yeah, yeah - so, Harry Potter gets to flash his other wand around a London stage. Excitement over.”

Of course the much-anticipated nude scene is part of the story of the play – but an even bigger part of the particular interest in this production. And it’s interesting to see just how, er, prominent a place it takes in yesterday’s reviews. Caroline McGinn’s review in the freesheet London Paper opens with the statement, “Daniel Radcliffe’s penis made its West End debut last night,” before noting, “The debut made strange bedfellows of highbrow arts critics and hormonal teenage girls all a-tremble at the prospect of Harry Potter in the buff”.

Actually, she left late middle-aged hormonal arts critics out of the running there: “Never in modern times has such excitement been stirred by the prospect of viewing a very few inches of adolescent male flesh,” declared the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, who seldom in modern criticism has smirked so feebly or personally about such a fact in a very few inches of copy. (I’m surprised he didn’t get out a ruler and jump on the stage to check the measurements himself).

Yes, it’s relevant to note that the nudity takes place – as Quentin Letts wrote in his Daily Mail review, “All the pre-show hype, predictably, was about ‘Harry Potter’s nude scene’… So, yes, it can be reported faithfully that on Shaftesbury Avenue at half-past nine last night the star of Hogwarts, Daniel Radcliffe, removed every last thread of his kit. So did a pretty young actress (Joanna Christie) and the two of them had a prolonged fumble.” Quentin gets it right, however, to then note, “But that is less than half the story. Such is the force of this troubling, turbulent play that the nudity brought no frisson. There was no great moment of voyeuristic titillation….”

Actors, of course, go nude at their peril. They may be seeking to reveal something of the character, but they inevitably reveal something entirely of their own. When Ian Holm appeared naked in the title role of King Lear at the National’s Cottesloe, he recalls (in his autobiography, Acting My Life) that Mark Lawson “mentioned the shrivelled size of my manhood”. He admits that such comments have “stayed with me, so… I suppose they must have hit some kind of nerve.” But Holm gets his revenge: “Even disregarding Lawson’s own physical shortcomings (the liver lips, the pudgy plasticine face, the old man’s prematurely balding dome), I am not convinced that his no doubt enormous cock would not also have dwindled after a cold bath in front of several thousand people.”

I’m sure that young Daniel Radcliffe could likewise rise to the occasion, so to speak, far more impressively than Mr de Jongh’s limp criticism, in every sense, of his physical appearance. Perhaps we need a contest: an “I’ll show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours” could be staged in public – for a fee – and the proceeds donated to charity…

But then Nick also reviewed the 30-minute playlet Generations at the Young Vic in yesterday’s Standard, and perhaps he can take comfort from the programme note that he quotes in which artistic director David Lan writes, “Size or length are not the point. All that matters is the quality of the experience.” And that’s as true outside the theatre as it is inside it sometimes.