The fates were not with Kismet….. and neither was the cast

Tough though English National Opera’s Kismet was to watch – I blogged here at the time about how the head of one senior opera critic sitting across the aisle from me was operatically rolling so far forward in despair it was virtually buried in his briefcase – it must have been even harder to actually turn up and have to appear in every night. This is usually one of the private agonies of the theatre: actors tend to grin, literally, and bear it, since they don’t want to jeopardise future opportunities by speaking out about what they’ve had to experience. But that unwritten rule was irresistibly broken yesterday, when Michael Ball hilariously trashed Kismet in an interview in the Evening Standard, headlined with his own words, “It was shockingly, gloriously awful”. He went on, “It was like being in a cross between Springtime for Hitler and Carry on Camel”.

Was this one of those shows done with the best of intentions where the flour just doesn’t rise once it was in the theatre? No, he could see it coming: “The rehearsals were a shambles. People were standing around on stage saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ Can you believe it? I’ve never had a dance lesson in my life but I suggested a few things, just because you have to come up with something with all those people looking at you. It was as if a member of the Stedham Village Players had won the Lottery and said [puts on camp northern accent]: ‘I’m putting on Kismet and I’ll do it my way.’ It was like Aladdin at the Bradford Alhambra circa 1978.”

Ouch! He itemises the problems: “One of the biggest disasters was the design. To stick it all in a bloody great Day-Glo pink blancmange with no room to move and having the male dancers dressed in the same colour as the set so you couldn’t see them and the women, supposed to be luscious and sexy, wrapped up in M&S blue sheets …” And working practices at ENO get a hammering, too: “At ENO, because it’ s subsidised, there’s a civil-servant mentality. Even if you’re in the middle of a song, if the rehearsal reaches its scheduled end, you all down tools. I found that completely shocking. There was no collective sense of continuing to the end - just a matter of minutes - to make the whole enterprise better. One of two people might have done it but the others had already gone home.”

Ball, whose loyal fan club, of course, bought many of the tickets, was tempted to tell the audience what he thought: “I wanted to come to the front of the stage and say ‘We know. It’s as bad as you think. We’re not crazy’.” But maybe he is to say all this in the same breath as adding, “in spite of all that, I loved every second. The people were great and I’d be happy to work at the Coliseum again.” He’s trying to spoil his cake and eat it.

Nichola McAuliffe famously did so in 2004 when she was starring in Murderous Instincts at the Savoy, and before it even opened wrote, in a double-page spread in the Daily Mail, of a producer who was “as mad as a box of frogs”, and rehearsals as being “like a motorway pile-up”. Now she’s done even better with the experience and written a brilliant backstage fictional account of the putting on of a West End salsa musical, called A Fanny Full of Soap.

Actors are invariably glad of the work, whatever it is, but its good to know that their critical faculties are intact, and that even those in hits aren’t necessarily spared its blushes: I have spoken to a couple of members of the cast of Dirty Dancing, and even they have privately admitted it is rubbish. Yet they also know their responsibilities to an audience who have come along to have their memories of the film honoured, and that it is their job to make that happen.