April 2007 Archives

The biggest threat to the future of the West End isn’t the rising ticket prices or the crumbling theatres – though both could wipe out both the audiences and the places for them to go, in time – but the absence of enough producers putting on shows to charge those prices and hire those venues at all. It has long been a dinosaur industry – not, in fact, unlike my own – that is still dominated by the same players who have been doing it for the last twenty-five years or more.

When, last summer, there were something like two dozen musicals and only a handful of plays on in the West End (and most of those long-runners), the absence of straight drama was largely caused by Bill Kenwright’s temporary absence from the plays market while he was concentrating on putting Cabaret on.

Of course, the occasional newcomer dips a toe into these treacherous waters, only to withdraw it hastily afterwards as they get burnt or they burn others. Beyond the new corporate model of producing – the old Clear Channel, now Live Nation, or Stage Entertainments and the like – the solo producer looks like he is a vanishing species. Of course, there have been a few “stayers”, though, and they’re interestingly mainly women: I’m thinking Sonia Friedman, Caro Newling, Kim Poster and hopefully Carole Winter, as well as Clare Lawrence and Anna Waterhouse of Out of the Blue, though they’ve gone quiet of late. And of the male “newcomers”, we have of course the invaluable Matthew Byam-Shaw (currently riding high with his first Broadway transfer, for Frost/Nixon), but what happened to Phil Cameron (producer of the original London production of Journey’s End that also happens to be on Broadway at the moment, but whose name isn’t on the Broadway producing slate of the show)?

But producing is not for wimps: it’s a Big Boys (and Big Girls) game. The stakes are high, and failure is more guaranteed than success. It takes nerve and guts and instinct to do it; it also requires scrupulous honesty and integrity. It was therefore distressing to see The Stage’s story this week that Paul Coxwell – a 22-year-old wunderkind of a producer – has been arrested for alleged VAT fraud. Of course, he is innocent until proven guilty, but an awful lot of mud is already sticking to him, following the collapse of a tour of a musical called Personals just as it was about to hit the road, and then his failure to meet his obligations to his co-producers of Underneath the Lintel that was his first West End venture and led them to cut him out of the show. Now many are left owing for his projected revival of Some Like It Hot, too.

It’s a familiar story: young producer overstretches themselves and ends up out of their depth. Young Coxwell isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to have an ambition that exceeded his reach. But it doesn’t have to always end badly. Kenny Wax is a young(ish) producer who got burnt several years ago when he brought a musical called Maddie to the West End — and then got burnt again when he revived Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. But he produced them responsibly, and though investors were out-of-pocket, that’s the risk they take. At least those who worked on the shows had their debts met. And so Kenny has continued to work, and has now built up a thriving touring business. It’s a salutary lesson.

Only the other day I was blogging about how quotes from “reviews” can be misleading and how muddied the waters are becoming thanks to the internet, where of course the fact that everyone’s a critic can now allow anyone to rush into “print” (or at least electronic space). Now, as reported online on this site yesterday and as the lead story on the front page of today’s paper, “Theatre producers who misleadingly quote reviews in show publicity material face the threat of legal action from the end of this year, when a new EU directive comes into force in the UK.” Under this legislation, “Material will be deemed punishable under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive if it fulfils two criteria. Firstly, it must fall short of the standard of care reasonably expected of a producer, and secondly, it must be shown to have influenced consumer behaviour. Misquoted theatre reviews must be shown to have had an impact on audience members’ decisions to purchase tickets.”

Quite how that fact will be quantified will no doubt be tested in the courts when the occasion arises. But it will at least put producers on guard – as Nicholas Allott of Cameron Mackintosh Ltd told The Stage, “If you take liabilities you’re asking to be shot down. It’s a running gag, but what this [legislation] is saying is that the gag must end.”

And only yesterday, precisely one of those liberties occurred: Dominic Cavendish reviewed the National’s Landscape with Weapon, and wrote of it, “If anyone was going to produce a scorching, blinding, lacerating play about the arms industry, I’d have put smart money on that someone being Joe Penhall.’”

His review, however, then went on to explain why this was, in his view, sadly not the case. But in an e-mail newsletter sent out by the National’s marketing department yesterday, they proudly trumpet the following quote from the Daily Telegraph: “A scorching, blinding, lacerating play. The performances are uniformly excellent.”

I think we have a test case right here….

One of my favourite times to visit New York – where I am heading again tomorrow – is when Fleet Week occurs (this year’s dates are May 23-30, so I’m too early), and the entire city is invaded by sailors, which is a bit like On the Town coming to 3D life! All those boys in sailor uniforms! All that testosterone! The town virtually burns up… or at least I do.

The next best thing, of course, is a production of On the Town itself – and ENO have just obliged by bringing back their hit 2005 production, though the sailors here are, on the whole, rather less butch than the ones you see on the streets in New York. But if ENO’s production of OTT is not exactly OTT in the scenic department – could there be a less New York-like realisation of the city than the few steel girders that are pressed into service here as everything from subway car to apartments and nightclub? – it doesn’t stint, of course, on the music, and its amazing to hear a full 40-something orchestra giving a score like this the full whelly.

These days, you’re lucky if you get a dozen players in the pit – I interviewed Henry Goodman yesterday, soon to play Tevye in the West End transfer of Fiddler on the Roof that was first seen at Sheffield Crucible last Christmas, and he spoke proudly of how the “village band” that creates the music is being supplemented for the West End, so they now have 12 musicians!

Sure, technology has changed since the days these shows were written, and you can get more with less – it was intriguing, watching the two-man orchestra of the Adam Guettel show Myths and Hymns (ravishingly receiving its British premiere at the Finborough for Sunday and Monday performances only, which I reviewed in The Stage on Monday), to note that there were times when neither of them were actually playing at all – the electronics were doing the work!

But there’s something about a live orchestral sound that can’t be faked. Nor the passion, vigour and rigour that a musical director like Simon Lee, yesterday holding the baton at the Coli, brings to their playing. It’s what makes live theatre alive – and lets it live!

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon famously hurl insults at each other: “Ceremonious ape!” “Punctilious pig!” “Moron!” “Vermin!” “Abortion” “Morpion!” Sewer-Rat!” “Curate!” “Cretin!” And then Estragon delivers the knock-out blow (Beckett’s stage instructions even go so far as to say that he says it “with finality”) – “Crritic!”

And in Sondheim and Furth’s musical Merrily We Roll Along (currently being revived at Derby Playhouse) that is set amongst showbiz folk, there’s an exchange at a party where one character is behaving drunkenly to the distress of the host, and one of the other guests asks another, “Isn’t she somebody?”. The reply says it all: “No, she’s a critic!”

These are neat reminders of the contempt some creative types hold my profession in. But it’s not, fortunately, universal – as Anthony Neilson said to me in correspondence last week, “I find it woeful that there is such an adversarial relationship between critics and practitioners, especially when we are bound by our love for an already besieged medium.”

We may be on different sides of the footlights, but we have a common wish: to produce and see good theatre, respectively. Of course, the tension in the relationship between us comes because we may have different ideas about what that constitutes. But one of the points of this blog – which I don’t have space to articulate in my other public outlets – is to at least get a conversation going between us. That’s also, incidentally, the point of Theatrevoice, an internet conversational outlet about the theatre, which initially set out to get critics talking to each other, with the conversations being recorded so that the public could download them, or listen online. As it has evolved, the site now records conversations with practitioners as well; and the critical forums that David Benedict and I alternately host there now take a wider v view, too. Last week I hosted a “Fringe Focus” session, looking at the place of the fringe, and critics Lyn Gardner of The Guardian and Kieron Quirke of the Standard, as well as Sofie Mason of the website offwestend.com that dedicates itself to promoting the fringe, we were joined by BAC’s David Jubb.

The theatrical conversation shouldn’t, of course, be a closed shop between critics and practitioners, though; there’s an even bigger body we are both seeking to address, and need to bring into the conversation: namely the public of which we are all a part. And we ignore them at our peril. In one of my blog entries last week in which I wrote of Broadway producer Scott Rudin taking on the might of the New York Times with regard to their posting of public “user” reviews, one regular reader of this blog replied here, “Whilst I enjoy your blog very much I am disheartened that you have taken another opportunity to sneer at amateur critics. What is it exactly that makes your opinion any more truthful or relevant than theirs? Is it that you see a lot of theatre each week so you can automatically tell the good from bad? Well, as you like to point out there is often a lot of disagreement between newspaper critics themselves, so frequency of visit does not produce a reliable gauge of quality. So why are the views of the professional critics considered by you to be more incisive than the common man that goes to the theatre only for the love of the experience? You pointed out recently that not only did many of the critics go to Oxbridge universities but also many of them were in the same college as you? Is it this that marks their card as being a cut above the rest? Am I getting closer to the truth now, that class is the key to the respect to which you afford opinion?”

It was not, of course, my intention to ‘sneer’ at amateur critics — in fact, I don’t believe I did! It was actually Rudin’s words, not mine, to refer to them as “faceless amateurs whose only qualification to review a play is that they bought a ticket and have access to a computer.”

But that does get to the heart of the matter: not that I (or my colleagues) are “uniquely” qualified to offer our comments and commentary, more than anyone else — we are ALL critics, whenever we offer an opinion — but the difference is that we get paid for ours. Its not a question of class, but of pedigree: our reviews may be as wrong, annoying, or badly written as anyone else’s, and an amateur review may by contrast be far more “on the button” than our reviews, but because someone is actually prepared to pay us to write our reviews — and readers are prepared to pay to read them (at least if they buy a paper, that is, and don’t get them free online!), means that they literally have a “value”.

But what is that exchange of money buying, as opposed to the “free” reader reviews? I may be wrong about this, too, but I think the two most important qualities of a critic are passion and knowledge. When a palpable love and enthusiasm for the form is combined with the experience of seeing far more than most people, some (but not all!) critics earn a bit of “authority”, if not always-universal admiration. Again, this doesn’t prevent us from being wrong — or contradictory with each other (once again, last weekend saw the Sunday Telegraph’s Tim Walker marching out of step with the rest of the crowd – awarding a four star rave to the RSC’s new Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon, which he called “exceptionally compelling”—while in the Sunday Times, John Peter weighed in with a one-star pan, calling it “one of the worst productions of this disaster-prone play I’ve seen”).

But at least what we write has some kind of context and background. The other key difference to public reviews that can be posted anonymously, or under pseudonyms, is that we have our names attached to the reviews. Readers may disagree with us — I regularly disagree with Tim Walker, for instance — but at least I know where he is coming from, and realise that is likely to happen. But except in a few cases where discussion board users are so regular that they acquire their own identities, we don’t know who they are, or have built up a relationship with them, so we don’t know where they are coming from.

We live, of course, in a world of snap judgements and fast decisions; though writers, actors and directors may have slaved over their work for weeks and months, if not years (in the case of the writers), critics typically arrive for a 7pm curtain up – and by 9.30pm or 10pm, their encounter with and experience of that performance is over. And then they have to rush to judgement: in the case of the “overnight” critics, whose reviews will appear in the very next morning’s papers, that’s literally so, since their considered opinion will typically have to be delivered by 11pm.

Of course, some of us have a little longer to consider our verdicts, but there’s nevertheless a “judicial” side to the process as my use of the word ‘verdict’ indicates; we’re not talking shades here, but a simple guilty or not guilty, or to apply another metaphor, we’ll give it the rule of thumb – in this case, a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

There isn’t much time, in other words, to acclimatize yourself to new experience – but you have to (try to) be open to them when they come along. The history books are, of course, full of critics who famously got things wrong when they were first confronted by them: a Daily Telegraph critic, watching Ibsen’s Ghosts for the first time at its British premiere in 1891, called the play “an open sewer, a hideous untreated wound, a filthy act performed in public, a leper’s hospital with all its windows and doors wide open”. An Irish literary critic declared his countryman Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to be play in which “nothing happens, twice.” Both plays have, of course, become theatre classics.

So it was that many critics got it “wrong” again when confronted by the work of the late Sarah Kane for the first time, when her play Blasted was premiered at the Royal Court. The Guardian’s Michael Billington has even publicly admitted, “Sometimes one gets it hopelessly wrong…. I made an idiot of myself over Sarah Kane’s Blasted.” (What he originally called “puerile tosh” he later decided was a work of “moral seriousness”, and he wrote her a letter to say so. He subsequently said, “I just regret we never had a chance for a rapprochement, or for me to say to her face what I’d said in the letter. ‘I got your play wrong.’”

A few weeks ago, when Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia opened at the Royal Court, I reported here on some of the contradictory responses it had elicited, from out-and-out raves (five stars in Metro) to my own more critical one. A lively debate followed on the blog itself, to which Neilson himself contributed; one correspondent, who was bipolar themselves, wrote to say how accurately the play reflected their own experience: “as someone who has been diagnosed with BiPolar and sought out its positives to lead an engaging and fulfilling life you and your superb actors really caught the nub of the dynamic of what it is to be mentally ill”. It made me resolve to see the play again.

Neilson and I have since been in private correspondence; and since that correspondence was private, I won’t quote from it. But he took a lot of trouble to explain his impulses for writing it in the way he did. Of course, the play is ultimately what you see on the stage itself, and it lives or dies by the lived experience of watching it, as much as the lived experiences that it is in this case reflecting, rather than what the author says about it. But I nevertheless appreciated both the seriousness with which he had clearly approached the subject – and the seriousness he also attached to the criticisms I had reported and others here had also felt.

And seeing it again on the last day of its London run on Saturday – though it now continues on tour – I have to say that I’m not about to do a Billington and change my mind entirely; but at the same time, I now see more clearly what it was trying (and in my view, not entirely successfully) to achieve. After a first act that takes you directly into the landscape of a woman’s disturbed mind that operates like a dream (or nightmare) of the imagination, the second act is a documentary-like study of her treatment in hospital after a breakdown.

For me, the first act – despite flights of comic invention and imagination – never really gels. While one of my colleagues wrote that it was “the funniest play seen in Sloane Square for a very long time”, I barely laughed. By contrast, however, seeing the second act again I very nearly cried. Not, as at the first time, from an excruciating sense of boredom or alienation, but from feeling completely engaged in the story. Part of this could be mood and context – you do not come to theatre, however, hard you try, as a blank slate, but lots of things will influence you there. In this case, and I’m absolutely not blaming my guest (who had a self-evidently even worse time than I did, as he wrote in response to my original blog), but his highly critical opinion of the play started to rub off on me.

But I still take responsibility for how I responded; and I have to say that by the end of it, I was so frustrated that I could not wait for it to end that first time. And as a result, I managed to miss the power and poignancy of what it actually achieves, particularly in a closing moment of exquisite staging and writing. [Spoiler alert: Should you be planning to catch the play elsewhere on its tour, skip the rest of this paragraph]. As the woman whose life we have been following recovers I hospital, we see her embracing a moment of tenderness with a soft toy bear; and the stage – which has been a clinical white throughout this act – is suddenly flooded in glorious coloured lights; she is literally finding colour in her life again.

And I found much more light – and shade – in the play as I watched it this second time. Of course, most people don’t have the luxury of seeing a play more than once, and it should ‘deliver’ the first time around; but sometimes one just doesn’t get it in one viewing. Critics, of course, have a duty and a responsibility – we create the public ‘record’ of the play, and my review is now part of that record in a way in which this blog is not.

It was an accurate review of how I felt about the play at the time I wrote it; but seeing the play again has made me think about it some more, and it has been an instructive, even chastening, exercise. I wouldn’t say I “got it wrong” the first time — with theatre, and with the reviews it reflects, a recurring theme of this blog is that there is no right and wrong, just moments and opinions of them caught in time — but that the experience changed on a second viewing. The play may or may not have (each perfomance in the theatre is unique, too); but I did.

“Pull quotes” from reviews are a standard way of promoting shows in ads and on signage in the front of the theatre. The Critics’ Circle have long been urging producers to attach critics’ names to the quotes where possible, not just as a matter of ego for critics who want to see their names adorning West End marquees, but also for attribution purposes: if a critic’s name is attached, the producers are less likely to brazenly misquote or (at least quote selectively), since a critic will complain if their name is attached to something they didn’t actually say. But if a publication’s name only appears, it could come from anywhere it appeared in it – say a feature article, or even a columnist. (I’ve seen quotes attributed to the Sunday Express, of which I am theatre critic, for Footloose and My Brilliant Divorce, neither of which I wrote, and when I checked where they had come from, I was told the quotes appeared in columns that had been written by the film critic and Vanessa Feltz respectively).

But it’s possible, in theory, for even a reader’s letter to be the source of a quote. Leading American theatre producer Scott Rudin, annoyed at the penchant for newspaper websites to now indulge in “reader reviews” (published from the moment a play begins performances, not just after they have officially opened), has made his irritation public by now using quotes from those “reviews” for his production of The Year of Magical Thinking (starring Vanessa Redgrave) in his advertising, citing the New York Times online as his source – much to the irritation, in turn, of the New York Times.

Michael Reidel, in his column in today’s New York Post, provocatively publishes extracts from the exchange of letters that have passed between Rudin and an assistant managing editor at the paper who is in charge of “ethics and standards” at the paper, the latter of whom claims that what he is there to uphold has been duly breached. When Rudin was challenged on the use of the reviews, Rudin replied, “I am at a loss to understand why you are questioning the sourcing of these quotes, since they are, in fact, directly taken from the New York Times Web site, and credited thus. The Times obviously feels these reviews have substantive credibility - otherwise, clearly they wouldn’t appear on the New York Times’ Web site … despite the fact they come from a random selection of faceless amateurs whose only qualification to review a play is that they bought a ticket and have access to a computer.”

The New York Times retorted, “We think that when you attribute a quote to “The New York Times Online” … readers are entitled to trust that the appraisal came from someone actually employed by the New York Times - not from a letter from a reader. The New York Times Online did not describe your play as ‘an evening of magical theater.’ A reader, not vouched for in any way by the New York Times, said that…. Lots of things that are published in the Times do not reflect the judgment of anyone at the paper. That is, not everything in the New York Times is of the New York Times.”

Rudin in turn replied, “That, as you say, ‘lots of things are published in the Times that do not reflect the judgment of anyone at the paper” is radiantly clear to all of us who read it… . You refer to these online reviews as ‘letters from a reader.’ They are not letters from any reader. They are reviews. You - the paper - label them reviews. There is something deeply corrupt about the Times’ professed offense at our using these reviews to sell a production of a play. If you continue to run them, you can expect to continue to see them in our advertising.” And when he failed to get a response from the New York Times to a further letter he sent them, he stung them further with another letter: “While it’s nice to receive lectures about ethics from the paper that brought us Judy Miller, Jayson Blair and the Duke lacrosse team, it’s not really what I was looking for.”

At a time when it has become an increasing practice for papers here, too, to publish readers’ reviews – from London Lite to The Independent – the same thing could start happening here. Its cheaper, of course, for a paper to just sit back and wait for a reader to file a review themselves than to send a critic. There was no one from The Independent at last night’s opening of Merrily We Roll Along that I went to in Derby — but there is an overnight review, of sorts, since a readers’ three-star review appears in today’s paper.

But there’s nothing new in the practice of “quoting” from “critics” who are not, in fact, critics. One of the most brazen stunts ever done by a producer was David Merrick’s legendary attempt to counteract the hostile reviews he’d received for his 1961 Broadway musical Subways Are For Sleeping. He found seven people who had the exact same names as those of the leading New York critics, invited them to see the show, and produced an ad with extracts from their comments on the show alongside their names – and photographs. The ad was due to run in all the leading New York papers until one editor noticed something incongruous: the picture of critic Richard Watts was of a black man, whereas Watts was white. The editor duly notified the other papers and the ad was pulled – except for the Herald-Tribune, which had already gone to press!

Merrick had apparently wanted to pull off this stunt for many years – but couldn’t do so because he couldn’t find a person who was also called Brooks Atkinson, the theatre critic of the New York Times. When Atkinson finally retired, Merrick seized his chance.

In the online world, of course, there are now many more opportunities for quotes to be sourced. Can it be long before a blog is quoted?

There is, after all, sometimes not only truth in advertising, but also in a title – and occasionally, truth in both. Menopause – the Musical, that opened last night at the Shaw Theatre to continue its unstoppable international trajectory, is exactly what it says on the tin – and as a condition that affects at least half the world population at one point in their lives (and more particularly, a point at which they are free to buy theatre tickets), no wonder it has a nearly universal appeal.

But the title is not the only thing about the show that’s revealing about what’s inside the box – so does the indescribably awful cartoon being used for the poster image. On the tube ads, it is accompanied by a New York Times quote, “It’s impossible not to laugh”, to which should be added the words, “at this poster”.

Actually, all is not all truth with that particular piece of advertising – I looked up the original review in the New York Times in 2002, and its important to know the context within which critic Anita Gates makes that surprising declaration. In the preceding paragraph she had just written how, at times, “the rhymes are almost embarrassingly strained, as if the writer just didn’t feel like trying harder” and cites a couple of examples of Jeanie Linders’ work: “In Beauty’s Only Skin Deep, Ms. Linder writes, ‘’As you age, you question your life/And give it meaning that’s too full of strife.’ In ‘Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places,’ which becomes Looking for Food in Too Many Places,’ the singer bemoans her low appetite control with ‘Don’t know where it started or where it might end/I turn to a milkshake and call it friend.” And then, and only then, comes the declaration of the impossibility of laughing: “But sometimes the first line of a song fits the subject under discussion so perfectly that it’s impossible not to laugh. (The same phenomenon has been observed in audiences at Mamma Mia!, the Broadway musical built on Abba songs.)”

But if the title of Menopause – the Musical might give some men (and women) pause about whether they’d be interested in seeing it, another off-Broadway musical revue called Naked Boys Singing is enough to give you a hot flush. It, too, is exactly what it says: a bunch of men singing – and occasionally dancing (though not all body parts obey the choreography) while naked. The attraction, however, quickly palls, even for a paid-up member of the ogling club – though even I can succumb to a piece of stunt casting. When I was in New York earlier this year, I very nearly went to see it again because a gay porn star, Spencer Quest, had joined the cast – but he was out the weekend I was in.

But by the same token, I’ve studiously resisted another off-Broadway show called Altar Boyz thanks to its title. It’s not just the spelling of Boyz (which is also, coincidentally, the title of one of the free weekly “gaypers” in London) that offends, but also the title of the show that revolves around a bunch of choirboys turned boyband tells me what the show contains, too.

But if that title put me off, the stage version of Dirty Dancing that originated in Australia managed, on the strength of its name alone, to rack up the biggest advance in West End history ahead of its opening at Aldwych last year — and now shows every sign of repeating that success as it goes on its worldwide journey. When the box office opened for single ticket purchase in Toronto on Monday, it racked up an astonishing single day take of 1.8million Canadian dollars — nearly £800,000 — of which producer David Mirvish, who is bringing the show to the Royal Alexandra Theatre there, said, “This is by far the biggest sales day we’ve had”.

Going to a first night you sometimes wonder if you’ve turned up at the wrong party. Looking around the stalls at the Duchess Theatre at last night’s opening of The Hound of the Baskervilles, I was very puzzled: where were all my usual colleagues? There was no one from the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent or Daily Mail – or Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Observer, Independent on Sunday or Mail on Sunday, either. Had they all decided to snub the show? Or had they reviewed it already at Leeds in January and had decided not to re-review it?

In fact, the mystery was solved this morning, when I saw reviews for it by both Charlie Spencer and Benedict Nightingale in the Daily Telegraph and The Times respectively – but also overnight reviews for the RSC’s new Stratford production of Macbeth in the Daily Mail and Guardian. Obviously everyone else had gone to Stratford – shame on me for not doing the same (though to read Patrick Marmion and Michael Billington, perhaps I dodged a bullet)! – and had snuck into Baskervilles the night before.

Sometimes this is unavoidable. When the official opening night of Jonathan Miller’s The Cherry Orchard in Sheffield clashed with the London opening of The Lady from Dubuque, many of my colleagues went to Sheffield a night early – whereas I chose to go a night late! This meant that their reviews appeared promptly the day after the play opened – as if they’d been there all along – whereas they had got permission to go in early.

One of my senior colleagues has previously told me that he prefers not to have to do this, because it compromises you a bit. You’re on a dispensation to see a preview, albeit the final one, and allowances have to be made. Of course, also at Stratford – where Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear will have been previewing for nearly two and a half months before we finally see it at the end of next month – no such allowances ought to be made, but then after so studiously avoiding the press for so long, I doubt they’ll be making allowances for anyone to go in early, either. (When the RSC brought their Gunpowder season plays to the Trafalgar Studios, the plays – which had run for months at Stratford before they transferred to London – gave just two-week seasons. When one of them had just one preview, I asked the RSC for permission to go to that, since otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get it into my Sunday column, but they refused – so I ended up buying a ticket as I blogged here at the time).

But if it’s hard for us to keep up with all the openings, it’s also sometimes difficult to keep them apart, not just in time but in memory. The RSC’s The Seagull (currently previewing, prior to also opening at the end of May) is of course the third in the past twelve months, following the National and Royal Court productions. Even The Hound of the Baskervilles isn’t the only stage version of the Arthur Conan Doyle story doing the rounds: there’s also been a tour of a version that stars Peter Egan and Philip Franks. And tonight brings a second dose of menopause: after the British-originated touring musical Hot Flush that opened in Bromley last month, tonight brings the Off-Broadway hit Menopause – the Musical to the Shaw. All this juggling is enough to give me a hot flush….

It’s amazing how fast a rumour, published as “fact”, takes hold, especially in the internet age: a story appeared in the Daily Mail that the original screen Billy Elliot, Jamie Bell, is to take over from Daniel Radcliffe in Equus – and before you know it, it’s everywhere. A Google search turns up 14,700 results already that links Bell and Equus. But a fact check with the show’s London PR elicited this response: “I can confirm that Jamie Bell is NOT going into Equus - it’s a rumour and it’s incorrect!”

An availability check may have well have been run on him, of course – I’m sure the producers are running availability checks on every eligible young actor (and even some who are not eligible) whose nude appearance would sell tickets – and the word could have been put out (if it was) as a piece of wish fulfilment; say it often enough, and he might actually be seduced by the interest that has been shown in him. Of course, it’s a dangerous game – it pushes his negotiating price right up.

Alternatively, the producers might not be the source of the rumour, but the star himself: if his “people” put it out there, the producers might bite. It’s an established practice – not by Bell, I hasten to add, but by agents of actors trying to stir up interest in their client for a particular role, and by demonstrating the interest taken in him, will convince the producers to consider him.

But wherever it originates, the press, of course, lap it up. We become complicit in playing their games for them. It would be wonderful, of course, if journalists reported news – but in the days of Popbitch and Talkin’ Broadway, we’re now chasing stories that are merely conjecture, in the hope that the conjecture then becomes fact. Last year another theatre website was so keen to “get the scoop” on opening dates for the revival of The Sound of Music that they published ones that turned out to be wrong, as I blogged here at the time. But they had previously insisted they had “written – official – confirmation” of its “fact”, even though the producers had not yet decided the date themselves.

Of course, “facts” can change – but a date that hasn’t been announced in the first place can’t later be deemed to have been “moved forward”, as the website concerned later wrote when their original “written – official – confirmation”, was proved to be incorrect. And Bell may yet, of course, sign for Equus now that the interest has been so overwhelming – but for now, the sites “confirming” him for the role are premature.

Critical and public opinion has been divided over the last few weeks by shows like Attempts on Her Life and Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia, as I’ve blogged about here. And although I was in the dissenters’ corner for both, I am giving Dissocia another go this weekend – and have put my money where my mouth (and pen) are and have actually bought a ticket to see it again. And it’s partly thanks to a response posted here this weekend from someone who said, “As someone who has been diagnosed with BiPolar and sought out its positives to lead an engaging and fulfilling life, you and your superb actors really caught the nub of the dynamic of what it is to be mentally ill. It seems that a lot of people (notably the Guardian critic) are overly caught up on how they view mental illness - rather than possibly stopping to realise that the important thing is engaging with what it is like to be in that position.”

One of the joys of the theatre is the ability that it has of taking you into other, private worlds – as well as reflecting your own. Clearly, for this correspondent, the success of the play was to do with reflecting his own experience. Now I want to see if I can make the imaginative leap that either I failed to make – or the play failed to make for me – to do the same thing.

But the fact that its producing reactions – albeit (bi)polarised ones – means that it’s at least working on some level, so as another correspondent urged me to do, I am seeing it again. I’m not the only critic to do so — I see that Susannah Clapp also went back for a second look, writing in her Observer review, “this play about having more than one person in your skin put me so much in two minds that I went back for a second shot.” Grappling with the difficulties of writing about it, she said, “The project is important: what, after all, is the point of going to the theatre if what’s on offer can be summarised in print?”

Indeed, the theatre is about much more than what’s on the page; it’s an experiential artform, not a purely literary exercise. And so, of course, is opera, with the ability of music to make the kind of emotional connections that transcend mere language. Seeing Philip Glass’s 1980 opera, Satyagraha, receiving its British premiere at London Coliseum, is all about the experience of living in the hypnotic moments of its performance – there is no narrative or linguistic anchor here at all to hold onto, but instead it offers a series of non-linear statements about Gandhi’s pact of non-violent protest, sung in ancient Sanskrit, accompanied by Glass’s mesmerising, meditative musical repetitions.

It’s fascinating how opera, historically a conservative art form, should produce such a glistening piece of highly inventive and challenging theatre making. I loved it so much that I went back to see it again a second time on the weekend – again, buying a ticket this time for the privilege! It was wonderful to see how a company like English National Opera are embracing new kinds of working. Here, they entrusted the opera’s physical realisation to the wonderful team of director Phelim McDermott and designer/associate director Julian Crouch of the fringe theatre company Improbable, and the results were as theatrically thrilling as they were musically magnificent.

But then ENO, despite the managerial and funding difficulties that have blighted its running over the last few years, does seem to have the exhilarating confidence to experiment with form and make the kind of inspired directorial choices that have led to some of Britain’s most innovative theatre creators working there. In 2005, Richard Jones did a stunning production of an opera that set Fassbinder’s screenplay to The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to music that was one of the best shows I saw all year. David McVicar, who recently staged Handel’s Agrippina there, is another fine director who works too little nowadays in legitimate theatre – but clearly he and Jones are being stretched and challenged enough in the opera house. And so are opera audiences.

Some critics wear a professional mask that makes them impossible to read when they’re watching a show – let alone impossible to read when they then write about them. (I’m not naming any names). But others are far more transparent. There’s often no happier sight in the stalls than the Daily Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer, whose sense of infectious pleasure will actively try to conscript others around him (he should be paid extra by the producers when this happens!). But conversely, when he’s not having a good time, boy, does he let you know it! And let’s ‘em have it!

His review yesterday for the new, admittedly fringe-y production of The Elephant Man at Trafalgar Studios was one such an occasion. Myself, I found things to admire – as you can find in my review on this site, and I wasn’t entirely alone – Sam Marlowe did in The Times, too.

But for Charlie, “Almost everything about the evening seemed determined to create a bad impression, from the undrinkably vile coffee served in the bar before the show, the tiny size of the audience (a couple of dozen at best), to the sheer, mind-boggling inadequacy of the production by the Creative First company.” Creative First can’t exactly be blamed for the quality of the coffee – Ambassador Theatre Group, who own the Trafalgar Studios, need to be challenged on that; nor on the size of their audience (now likely to diminish further after reviews like this!).

Charlie even holds it up as the kind of production that could put you off the theatre for life: “The problem with theatre, of course, is that when it’s good, it’s wonderful, and when it’s bad it is absolutely unendurable. And if you hit a naff production at an impressionable age, you could well be put off for life. One can only assume that Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Tessa Jowell and the rest of the lamentable crew were unlucky enough to stumble across a show as dire as this revival of The Elephant Man in their youth, and as a result have secretly despised the theatre ever since.”

All of which is an awful lot of weight and responsibility for a small London show to be freighted with. I pity the company that Charlie stumbled upon them. But I also know just how Charlie feels, too. Two other recent productions sent me to a theatrical purgatory: Attempts on her Life at the National and The Wonderful World of Dissocia at the Royal Court, both of which worked hard to put me off theatre for life (or at least the rest of the evening). I’ve already blogged here, however, about the very different critical reactions that Attempts on her Life and The Wonderful World of Dissocia have respectively received.

On both occasions, however, it was the mind-bending tedium of what was on the stage that upset me most, and that is, after all, what we’re there to pass comment on. I had to speak as I found; but I realise that others didn’t necessarily find the same thing that I did — hence my balancing of the critical opinions in those blog entries.

And just as I love Charlie for speaking his mind, too, I feel I need to offer a word of support to Creative First. Lots of factors about going to the theatre influence how we react to something. Critics are only human; and vile coffee can put you in a bad mood. No wonder some producers lay on drinks and even sandwiches before a first night; it’s not exactly a bribe, but a bit of hospitality puts us in a more hospitable mood!

Of course the West End is still flush with the imports of Broadway musicals – Avenue Q, Spamalot and Wicked all arrived last summer and autumn, joined by new London-originated revivals of such Broadway classics as Cabaret, The Sound of Music and Porgy and Bess – and yet more are on the way, with The Drowsy Chaperone due at the Novello next month and Jersey Boys at the Prince Edward, just as soon as Mary Poppins flies into the sunset one last time. Meanwhile, the London fringe has also mounted a rear-guard attack for shows originally seen off-Broadway like Little Shop of Horrors (now moved from the Menier to the West End) and the King’s Head production of The Thing About Men opening later this month.

But anyone visiting New York right now will experience a West End déjà vu, too, for productions and/or plays we’re exporting there. Just this week Kevin Spacey, Eve Best and the rest of the Old Vic cast have reassembled to open on Broadway in A Moon for the Misbegotten (where Spacey has found the virtually unanimous praise he received in London lost somewhere in transit, but Best has, once again, been declared to live up to her name by the New York critics as she is regularly acclaimed over here), and David Harrower’s Blackbird has opened at off-Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club, which the New York Times’ Ben Brantley has called “a drama that promises to be the most powerful of the season, but in a different production to the one that Peter Stein directed here first at the Edinburgh International Festival and subsequently in the West End.

Michael Grandage’s Donmar production of Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, with Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprising their London performances in the title roles respectively, is now in previews at Broadway’s Jacobs Theatre, prior to opening officially on April 22; and Melly Still’s National Theatre production of Coram Boy is about to begin previews at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre on April 16, prior to an opening on May 2.

Meanwhile, also running on Broadway is David Grindlay’s revival of Journey’s End (that was a long-running West End hit), and in different productions to the ones they received in London, Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia trilogy (directed by Jack O’Brien there as opposed to Trevor Nunn here) is a sell-out Lincoln Center hit at the Broadway-scaled Beaumont Theatre; while Christopher Shinn, a young American playwright, has Dying City (first seen at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs) in the downstairs off-Broadway Mitzi Newhouse (directed there, as it was at the Royal Court, by James Macdonald). Patrick Marber’s Howard Katz is at Roundabout’s off-Broadway Laura Pels Theatre, with Alfred Molina in the title role originally taken at the National Theatre by Ron Cook; and Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands has just ended a run at BAM.

I am heading to New York myself, two weeks today, and can’t wait to catch up with some of these again… not to mention The Pirate Queen that I’ve already blogged about here! But also top of my list is the return to the stage of Angela Lansbury in a new Terrence McNally play called Deuce in which she co-stars with one of my favourite New York actresses Marian Seldes; the incandescent Audra McDonald in a revival of the musical 110 in the Shade ; and Legally Blonde – the latest film-to-stage musical transition…. Oh yes, and there’s one more theatrical export from London I plan to catch up with: Alastair Macaulay, formerly of the London theatrical beat on the Financial Times, has now flown the net to New York to take up a new post as chief dance critic on the New York Times…

A few weeks ago at the National Theatre’s annual fundraising event, a dinner with Nick Hytner and Helen Mirren was auctioned off for £40,000, as I blogged here (by comparison, a first night and dinner with me fetched £2,700…. And I thought I did well!) But yesterday, lunch with Mirren (and also attended by Hytner) cost me just £35 – a bargain indeed! It was the Critics’ Circle Annual Award lunch, being given for the 19th time, in which distinguished practitioners from each of the five divisions of the circle’s members’ sections – drama, dance, film, music and visual arts – are proposed and voted for by the entire membership (or at least the membership that bothers to return their voting forms) for the honour of the Critics’ Circle Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts.

Previous winners have included Sirs Peter Hall, Michael Tippett, David Lean, John Mills, Pete Ustinov, John Dummond, Peter Wright, Richard Eyre, Edwad Downes, and Ian McKellen; Dames Ninette de Valois, Judi Dench and Alicia Markova; and mere mortals Harold Pinter, Paul Scofield, Alfred Brendel, Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett.

Mirren, as eternally gracious as she is ever glamorous, has of course had an amazing year, already topped by her Oscar win as Best Actress; but was able to look on the bright side of accepting one more prize, because at least with this one – a beautiful glass goblet – it was something she said she could actually use! But then in a witty and charming acceptance speech, she analysed each part of her citation and wondered if it applied to her. “Distinguished” she found difficult to understand, since she didn’t see herself as such; “service” was even more difficult, since she was just doing a job, and that was as much about being able to pay the mortgage as anything else; as for “arts”, she said she was just an actress, and every word that came out of her mouth was thanks to the greatest of the artists, the writers.

Of course, the assembled throng were writers, too, but ones who write about the art that the artists create; but some of us are fans, too. One critic at my table remembered ushering for Mirren’s Cleopatra for the National Youth Theatre in 1966 and seeing it several times; another established a tenuous connection by also hailing from Ilford, Essex and therefore using that fact as an entrée to introduce himself proudly to the Dame.

In other news yesterday, I’ve already blogged about the postponment of the King Lear press opening that was originally scheduled for April 3 but moved the day before when Frances Barber sustained a bicycling accident and wasn’t able to perform. I’ve also previously blogged about the long wait the press were going to have in any case before being allowed to review its companion production of The Seagull – a total of 27 previews are being given before it opens to us on May 31, after which there are just 13 performances left to play before the run ends.

Now, Nunn has decided to give us a marathon run on May 31 and open both plays on the same day – which means a nearly two-month delay on the originally scheduled King Lear date. According to the press statement, “The decision to delay the Lear press performance is to allow the ensemble company time both to rehearse and perform The Seagull in repertoire with King Lear after Frances has made a complete recovery.” In fact, Barber’s Lear understudy, Melanie Jessop, will have to do double duty and do the opening performances of The Seagull, too, in Barber’s role of Arkadina in that production, too, until Barber is fit enough to take over.

Of course, the RSC – and Nunn, who used to run the RSC – loves a marathon, as with his famous two-part adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby; and the RSC is already inviting critics this August to a triple bill opening of Richard II (at 10.30am), Henry IV Part I (at 3pm) and Henry IV Part II (at 7.30pm) on August 16. But Nunn’s double bill of King Lear and The Seagull promises to be a long day for actors and critics alike, since he never does things by halves. And a long day, for me, in particular, since I’m flying to Sydney the very next day. But as a friend of mine has already ruefully remarked, it may be useful to get me into training for the flight.

One of the dangers of missing a press night and catching a play a few days later isn’t so much not being able to go with an open mind after reading the other reviews as having the surprises blown. Of course, you never go to anything with a completely blank slate – advance word seeps out, either via friends who have seen something already or in Baz Bamigboye’s Daily Mail column (who can’t resist writing about things before they open) or via interview profiles. (I try to avoid internet chatroom boards nowadays – though some contributors make worthwhile comments, they foster an unhealthy environment that isn’t always very constructive).

But it’s disappointing that critics so often give the game away. Last night, I went to Joe Penhall’s new play Landscape with Weapon at the National (having missed last Thursday’s official opening since I went to the premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha at ENO instead, and loved it so much I have already paid to go again this weekend). Since Friday was Good Friday, the only overnight review I saw run was in The Guardian, and the Sundays missed it, too. So I was fairly safe. Until I read yesterday’s Independent, that is, on the way into the show. I had only picked it up, in any case, from that handy new newsagent stall positioned near the National’s stage door, to kill time and read my friend Rebecca Tyrrel’s weekly column (I had just spent the Easter weekend with her at the country cottage she rents in Devon).

But I wish I hadn’t. Not for Rebecca’s very funny column, I hasten to add, but for Paul Taylor’s review of Landscape with Weapon (spoiler alert – as they sometimes helpfully say on the aforementioned bulletin boards: don’t click on this link to the review if you intend to see the play). It may be headlined “An ethical battlefield”, but it commits the unethical sin of revealing the ending. “The ending is bleakly beautiful”, Paul writes in the final paragraph. And proceeds to tell us what it is. Actually, I can spot a spoiler alert when I see one, and reading that line that precedes the revelation, I stopped reading. And only returned to it after I left the theatre.

But it seems a pity to me that a critic will spoil something that they themselves refer to as ‘bleakly beautiful’ to future audiences. But I realise that as I say this that I am only too happy to have the game given away on something that is truly terrible. Last Friday, I lapped up the reviews of the new Boublil/Schonberg musical, The Pirate Queen, that opened in New York the night before. Boublil/Schonberg, of course, created one of the most successful musicals of all time, Les Miserables, redubbed The Glums in some quarters, but they’re be pretty glum this time around. The reviews, as so often happens with a bona fide turkey, are likely to be the most entertaining factor about the show. (But having read them, I can’t wait to actually see it for myself, which I plan to do in just over two weeks time….)

New York magazine’s Jeremy McCarter declared, “You can stop wondering—if you’ve been wondering—how a Céline Dion jukebox musical might sound. Without using her actual songs, The Pirate Queen distills enough of her essence to suggest how dismaying the genuine article might be. The bombast, the flutes, the refusal to acknowledge, however fleetingly, the corn spilling off the stage: What you’re hearing is a two-and-a-half-hour meditation on the love theme from Titanic”. He offers a word of respite to one actor: “The able Jeff McCarthy has my condolences. No actor should be asked to play a fearsome pirate chieftain while dressed like a cartoon wizard. His wig of cascading gray curls—which could, in theory, be kind of hard-core for a medieval outlaw—keeps falling in his face, forcing him to flip his hair extremely un-bad-ass-edly. Not for the first time, I thought I might be watching a Christopher Guest parody.” (Guest, of course, has already made the ultimate theatre spoof comedy, Waiting for Guffman, that unaccountably never received cinematic release here, but is one of my favourite films of all time).

In Newsday, Zachary Pincus-Roth observes sadly, “The Pirate Queen isn’t an embarrassment like Dance of the Vampires or a vanity project like In My Life. It just feels a little sad, as if a lot of people put a lot of time into something that’s simply lifeless.”

But paradoxically, it seems, full of action: in the New York Times, Ben Brantley points out there’s a lot of physical activity about. “Sword fights, frolicsome jigs, flag hoisting, rope pulling, stately processions, mincing minuets and hearty river dancing (with ship paddles, no less): such circulation-stimulating exercises occur regularly in this singing costume drama of love and patriotism on the high seas — sometimes, it seems, all at the same time… The operating theory behind The Pirate Queen would appear to be taken from an appropriately ocean-themed bit of zoology: if, like a shark, it never stops moving, then it will stay alive. The optimism is misplaced.”

The show, it seems, is a throwback, and an unwelcome one: according to Brantley, “The Pirate Queen registers as a relic of a long-gone era, and I don’t mean the 1500s. The big-sound, big-cast show pioneered by Messrs. Boublil and Schönberg is now as much a throwback to the 1980s as big hair and big shoulders. The crushing tidal waves of music that emanate from the stage, eardrum-tingling as they are, seem to come from distant shores indeed.”

In USA Today, Elysa Gardner makes a similar point: “Before such hits as Grey Gardens and Spring Awakening, it seemed the story-and-song-driven musical was in danger of being replaced by camp-fests that mocked commercial musical theatre. Now The Pirate Queen has sailed along to remind us why: because by the 1990s, the commercial musical had pretty much devolved into a tuneless, witless spectacle.” Labelling the new show “the latest bloated opus from Alan Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, the duo behind Les Misérables and Miss Saigon”, she adds that “the best thing that can be said about the new show is that it makes their previous ones seem like models of grace.”

Mind you, it wasn’t all bad on the night: the Toronto Star’s Richard Ouzounian was moved to declare that it “may very well be the most beautiful musical I have ever seen”. He praises the set, lighting and costumes, but then complains that “you wait in vain for an actual melody to emerge”.

Also damning with similar faint praise, Michael Sommers of the Star-Ledger writes, “Because the words and music are so relentlessly third-rate — come back, Frank Wildhorn, all is forgiven — what’s best about the musical is clattering stretches of Riverdance-style choreography performed with oars, brooms and swords on every piece of scenery available. The 42-member company cavorts through these Hibernian rhapsodies with considerable expertise.”

But there’s one rave: according to Talkin’ Broadway – Broadway’s most notorious chatroom board, but who also have a young critic on board called Matthew Murray who “officially” reviews for them — “This is the first new tuner of the season that looks, feels, and behaves like a bona-fide hit. … Even when The Pirate Queen feels hokey (which it does sometimes), superannuated (which it does frequently), and overblown (which it does constantly), its stalwart confidence captures the electric and cinematic spirit of musical theatre at its freshest.”

When a critic marches so out-of-step with everything else that has been written about this show, you have to wonder if he’s as reliable as Talkin’ Broadway’s gossip mongers….

First it was Martin Crimp that has divided audiences and critics alike with Attempts on Her Life, as I have previously blogged about here. Now I find myself at serious odds with others on The Wonderful World of Dissocia, the Anthony Neilson play originally seen at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 and now revived in a National Theatre of Scotland production that has come to the Royal Court. As Michael Billington noted in his Guardian review, “No one, I suspect, will be indifferent to Anthony Neilson’s play about dissociative identity disorder. Some were audibly exasperated; others stayed to cheer.”

I missed last Friday’s press performance, but caught up with it on Tuesday evening instead, where I ran into Laura Wade, the young playwright who, in 2005, had two excellent plays on simultaneously, Colder than Here (at Soho) and Breathing Corpses (at the Royal Court), and she told me she was seeing it for the second time already. (Mind you, I also ran into the National’s platforms manager, Angus MacKechnie, last night, and he’d seen Attempts on Her Life twice already as well.)

These kind of enthusiasms – from intelligent people of the theatre – cannot be easily dismissed. And both Crimp and Neilson are both stretching the envelope for a new kind of working. But while the Crimp (and certainly as produced in Katie Mitchell’s video-led production) might be considered to be a rarefied kind of experimentalism, Neilson insists that he’s trying to reach a wider public: In an interview in The London Paper on Tuesday, he complained that theatre has “become a very insular medium. When people talk about experimental theatre, they think about some weird sort of performance arts. But in fact a lot of theatre now is experimental in the sense that it’s really conceived for other theatre professionals to come and see.” Whereas, he insists, “People will come to Dissocia and they will completely get it. What I can guarantee them is that they won’t be bored and they won’t walk out feeling stupid. They’ll be entertained, there’s a lot of humour in it, there’s songs, it’s very colourful. But there is a very serious point to it, but one that’s delivered in an interesting way. It’s a show that I think anyone can go and see, but that has a lot of stuff that people can think about”.

Of course in the theatre there are no guarantees, and it’s dangerous to make those kind of boasts. Neither I nor the friend I took “got it”. In fact, my friend went so far as to state afterwards that it was positively the worst show he’d ever seen: he felt utterly insulted by the first act and the poor writing of it; and utterly bored by the second.

O brave new theatrical world, if such be the wonders within it! Yet according to an interview with Neilson in The Times last week, he is “on the verge, he thinks, of defining nothing less than ‘the next movement in British theatre’. He’s calling it ‘psychoabsurdism’ -a wild, non-naturalistic theatre (akin, he admits, to the films of David Lynch) in which anything can happen. ‘I’m giving as much time to the inner life as the outer life,’ he says. ‘When you dramatise mental states, your limits are only what the mind can think of. You can have humour, and surprising shifts in tone. You can have songs. You can have dance.” He thinks that it is the responsibility of artists to reach out to the “95 per cent of the population who think theatre is an irrelevance. My shows are very accessible. I’ve never believed that experimentation means unpopularity.’

But his last Royal Court outing, The Lying Kind in 2002, was unpopular – so unpopular, according to an interview that Neilson gave to Time Out’s Jane Edwardes, that Ian Rickson’s Royal Court apparently cancelled another commission it had with him after its failure. A shocked Neilson retreated home to Scotland to lick his wounds, and as he complained to Jane, “the measure of a theatre like that is not how ecstatic it becomes when you succeed, but how it rallies around you after failure.”

But now he’s back at the Royal Court as the opening shot of Dominic Cooke’s new regime there, albeit in a production from the National Theatre of Scotland that is merely using the Court as a transfer house, so he is back in the fold.

But though he works in an experimental manner – the script isn’t prescriptive but is developed during rehearsal – he insists the goal is more experiential than experimental. According to the Time Out interview, “I like to put people into a state where they no longer have any intellectual defences.” As Jane’s piece concludes, “These days, Neilson wants to draw on elements of popular theatre: the spectacle, the songs, the dances and gags. Improbably, he says with pride that he sees himself as being in the same business as Bruce Forsyth. While always pessimistic about whether he’ll ever get another play staged, he’s also unusually excited: ‘I truly do feel that my best work is still ahead of me. I’m getting somewhere with finding a form for myself. I think perhaps I was overly serious and intense when I was younger and now I am completely converted to the feeling of people laughing and enjoying themselves and to using that as a tool.’

But what if you don’t laugh and enjoy yourself? Then there’s no lonelier place to be. And while this is a play in which a woman searches for a lost hour in her life, it left me searching for the two and a half I’d lost watching it….