The Naked Truth….

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.