A skewed perspective…..

With theatre-in-the-round (or semi-round), you have to accept that your view will not always be the best available but perspectives will keep shifting as the action does. So seeing The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder at the National’s Cottesloe on Wednesday evening, I accepted there were moments when I lost sight of an actor’s face or reaction as a result, but the benefits of seating the stage-level audience in three rows on three sides (just as the two circles at the Cottesloe also do) afforded a greater immediacy and democracy of views, too, since the setting – in the house, garden and outside caravan of the Lewisham home of the title character – was also in and amongst us.

That’s wholly different from the situation at the Donmar, where the stage faces out front and so do the actors most of the time, towards the central banks of seating in the stalls and circle. Finally catching up with their highly acclaimed current production of Betrayal yesterday afternoon, having been away in Australia when it opened, I was seated in B31 – the seat closest to the centre of the stage right side block. And it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my theatregoing year.

I could sense there was great acting going on from the wonderful trio of Toby Stephens, Sam West and Dervla Kirwan; but I frequently couldn’t see it. The three-hander functions mostly as a series of two-person encounters, and one or other of the actors in each of the scenes regularly had their backs turned to me, or worse, actually sat in a place so that not only could I only see their back, but the view of the other actor was also entirely obscured from my view. I might as well have been listening to the play on the radio.

And frankly, in a theatre that only seats 250 to begin with, it seems perverse to have a situation in which a proportion of them don’t have access to the full experience of what is being put on. I lunched with a leading West End producer before the show yesterday, and funnily enough he mentioned that he had been interested in transferring it – but needed to see it again from the centre, as he’d seen it from the side, before he contemplated it. Watching it from the side, I knew exactly what he meant.

The performance also happened to be a schools’ matinee. My heart sometimes sinks when I happen to go to one, since I fear disruption from inattentive kids; but on the other hand, I have to remind myself that it was precisely a theatre trip, to see a production of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea when I was just 14, that changed my life and set me on the professional course I have ultimately ended up on. I have to say that both Betrayal and The Deep Blue Sea, with their darkly tangled stories of the pain and hurt of infidelity, strike me as odd choices for school audiences who necessarily won’t yet have experienced those kind of challenges in their young lives; but then The Deep Blue Sea obviously resonated with me at some primal level, and has continued to deepen as I’ve got older and experienced both the pain of desperate longing and unequal relationships for myself.

Yesterday’s kids were, for the most part, with the play; but it only requires a few chatterers to disrupt the flow for everyone else in a place as small as the Donmar. And behind me, but too far away to shush myself, three girls kept up a constant hiss of whispered commentary for the last 45 minutes or so. The frustrations of my compromised view was finally exceeded by the frustrations of the chattering, neither of which I was in a position to alter.