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.
