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….
