Brantley blogs for Britain….

Next week will mark the second anniversary of me blogging here: I started on August 3, 2005, and the entry you are now reading is number 540! (And for a year before that I was doing a blog elsewhere). As a relatively early conscript to the blogosphere – though not as early as director Paul Miller – I have watched its growth with interest, welcoming the refreshing new voices it has allowed (everyone and anyone can now have a platform for critical views, not just critics!), but also the fact that it is levelling the playing field. Critics can sit in the reserve benches (with their reservations), if they like, but we may miss the game entirely if we do. And to continue mixing sporting analogies, we’re being urged to leave the security of the commentator’s box and come out onto the terraces, too, to join in with the public cheers (and sometimes jeers) – some of which may, in fact, be directed at us. If, in the clamour of this new mob rule, we may be shouted down, we just need to shout louder. But at least everyone is shouting, and it’s about something we all love: the theatre.

The Guardian, first as ever with so many things, was (I think) the first major national paper to embrace the possibilities of the blogosphere, and got their major critics in on the act. But while Michael Billington and Lyn Gardner post regular entries on The Guardian’s theatre and performing arts blog, there’s a much wider plurarity of voices also posting columns there, from theatre practitioners to other (non-Guardian) journalists, not to mention the immediate public responses (once you’ve registered) that it automatically allows. The great thing about the blogosphere is that it is both readily interactive with its readers, and has introduced a wider accountability to them (even if its only a one-way street, since the readers themselves don’t have to be accountable to those who write blogs but can easily hide behind anonymous pseudonyms that they have registered).

It’s the height of the summer (even if, when you look out of the window, you can’t quite believe it), so the tourists are out in force – including theatrical ones. And arguably the most important theatrical tourist of the year is the annual summer appearance here of the New York Times chief theatre critic Ben Brantley, who I saw both at The Hothouse at the National last Thursday and again at the Menier Chocolate Factory’s opening of Take Flight last night. In previous years, of course, we’ve had to await his weekly reports in the paper itself, such as the one that appeared on Monday that covered his double-dose of Pinter (with Betrayal side-by-side with The Hothouse, as well as In Celebration and Baghdad Wedding. But this year we are also getting a daily blog, the London Theater Journal, in which we’re able to keep track of his various movements – from sightings of Pinter at the Wolseley Restaurant, to those of his bowels (with a case of food poisoning keeping him for attending Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on Tuesday night).

He is, as he proudly boasted at the beginning, seeing 28 shows in 21 days – now, after his food poisoning incident, possibly being reduced to 27 shows, though he may yet sneak in an extra matinee to bring the total back up again. But while his personal theatrical marathon means that he is usefully acting as an informal scout to American producers, waiting on the sidelines for his approval or not on possible transfer prospects, his presence on the blogosphere is exposing him to more immediate reactions, too. And it means that bigger questions can be asked. As one correspondent asks, “I wonder why Ben Brantley and the Times repeatedly covers theater in London, but rarely covers the Unites States regional theater scene. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie, the Goodman, ART, the Huntington, et al… numerous theater across the Unites States, big and small, often produce significantly superior work to that being performed in Manhattan. Doesn’t the New York Times, as the most respected American journal both domestically and abroad, have a greater responsibility to review and discuss the theater art being created in its own nation? It seems I read a London review every month or so, as well as a huge London theater feature twice a year, but only find an American regional theater review 4 or 5 times a year. Why?”

The answer, of course, is partly today with a critic’s own passions – I go to New York more often myself, for instance, than Manchester – but also to do with the readers. If you’re interested in theatre, the two big theatrical destinations are New York and London. And just as I regularly cross the pond to Broadway, there are large groups, both formal and informal, of theatregoers who come here from America regularly.

Last week, for instance, I was hosting a week of seminars for a group of mostly Californian theatregoers who come to London annually for three weeks, under the umbrella of an extension program organised by the University of Berkeley in San Francisco, and see a play every night. The next morning, they all convene in a conference room at a University of London hall of residence, where a critic — either Matt Wolf (for their first week and this week as well) or myself (last week) — lead a discussion on the play they’ve seen the night before, and then we are joined by someone connected to the production, whether the director, writer, or a cast member. Amongst my guests last week, I had actors Sam West (for Betrayal), Dale Rapley (for the Globe’s Merchant of Venice) and Susannah Fielding (for The Rose Tattoo), and directors Anna Mackmin and Lucy Bailey (for In Celebration and Glass Eeels respectively).

I found hosting these informal sessions frequently as fascinating as I hope the group did; they provide a unique window into the creative process. Though I often speak to actors, directors and writers about their work for interview profiles, on those occasions we’re both doing a job and a tape recorder is running; at the Berkeley sessions, everyone is far more relaxed. Since its clear that the place the group is coming from is their love and enthusiasm for the theatre, the guests typically respond with a kind of openness I have seldom encountered in other public forums, where they don’t allow their guard to drop quite as much. So last week, for instance, we learnt just how much a freelance director typically earns! (The answer: not much!)

But coming full circle back to Brantley and his blog, I found that one of my group responded to his entry about the authenticity of the American accents in London plays, and in particular The Rose Tattoo. Brantley praised Zoe Wanamaker – “her accent is stitched tightly and consistently into the character” – and then wrote, “But as for her fellow performers: Mamma mia, honeychile! I grew up in North Carolina, so Serafina’s Southern neighbors in particular had me digging my nails into my palms. (Whether evil-minded sluts or a virtuous sailor, they all sounded like they had just arrived from Tobacco Road.) Susannah Fielding, the lovely young actress who plays Serafina’s 15-year-old daughter, switched between regulation music-hall Italian and regulation musical-hall Southern, which might have been meant to indicate she was of a transitional generation. But that doesn’t account for the pure English received-pronunciation vowels that floated in from time to time.”

Fielding may not be able to defend herself, but her appearance as a guest of the Berkeley group last week led to this reply from Daniel Curzon, who was part of it: “The actress playing the daughter came to the class I am attending. She explained her accent as being a result of an idea by the director who died (half Sicilian, half Southern), but felt uncomfortable doing it that way. I told her it was MOMa, not MaMA in the South. She said it was supposed to be Italian. Another linguist in our class said second generation children don’t have mixed accents, perhaps some of the parents’ language but learning native English from their peers.”