September 2007 Archives

“Go, go, go Joseph you know what they say/hang on now Joseph you’ll make it some day”, goes the Tim Rice lyric to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s insistent melody in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; but he’s not the only person aspiring to make it some day. As the set of reality TV series that saw Maria in The Sound of Music, the title role of Joseph and Danny and Sandy in Grease fade in the memory now, the finalists that featured in each series are spreading throughout the industry. [Continue by clicking below]

Last night saw the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue join the roster of Delfont Mackintosh owned theatres that have had a comprehensive refurbishment, when it re-opened in a state of glistening luxury with the transfer of the Chichester Minerva production of Macbeth starring Patrick Stewart. This latest refurbishment, costing some £3million, has entirely overhauled the formerly tired and decrepit auditorium, the public areas (including extra loos, particularly for women – the eternal bugbear of West End theatres!), and the stone-cleaning of the Portland stone exterior, plus new exterior architectural lighting. (The press release, noting “the needs of modern audiences”, ominously doesn’t mention any backstage upgrades for the comparable needs of modern actors, but if Delfont Mackintosh’s previous work on theatres like the Novello is anything to go by, which I visited coincidentally enough when I interviewed Patrick Stewart there, I am sure these have been attended to).

But while these handsome (and pricey) refurbishments are hugely to be welcomed, they surely must embarrass and shame the rest of the West End who are simply not keeping up. [continue by clicking below]

Only yesterday I was bemoaning the lack of developmental opportunities for musicals in this country here. “The only way that musical theatre writers can grow is by practicising their craft, and having shows actually put on — not just written and maybe read in a workshop,” I reflected – the kind, I could have added, that is invariably entire self-promoted. If you write a new musical, you’re basically on your own, in every sense – even though this is, famously, a genre whose successes are the results of collaboration. But musical theatre writers often have to become their own producers, up to and including the West End, as I pointed out was the case for Kath Gotts with Bad Girls – the Musical.

I neglected to mention yesterday the Perfect Pitch festival that is taking place for the second year next month at Highgate’s Upstairs at the Gatehouse (from October 16-28)….[continue by clicking below]

When a Broadway musical used to run into trouble out-of-town, they cry would go up for a “show doctor” – an outside eye to come in and make adjustments, sometimes small, sometimes wholesale, to rescue it. Nowadays, it sometimes seems that the genre itself is in need not so much in need of a doctor as of the Surgeon General (in the US) or the Chief Medical Officer over here.

But it may not be necessary to call for the priest to administer the last rites to the patient just yet. Like other art forms, the musical is a resilient and constantly evolving thing. On the one hand, it is reassuringly as popular as ever – theatres are full of them, even if many of them are jukebox pop shows and/or endlessly created out of hit film titles (next up in London, Desperately Seeking Susan combines both). On the other, it’s hard to make a mark with something genuinely new.

Yet the opening last night of the Donmar’s British premiere for Parade, a short-lived 1998 Broadway musical with a score by Jason Robert Brown and book by Alfred Uhry (which ran for just two months in its original Lincoln Center Theatre season), proves that there are still people trying to do serious and original things with the genre in the US (as does the current Broadway hit Spring Awakening, the 2005 show The Light in the Piazza and Caroline, or Change, of which only the last has been seen here yet). Though these kinds of musical drama have been eclipsed all over again by the resurgence of musical comedy or more particularly, musical comedy parody or tribute (as witness the success of self-referential shows from The Producers and Monty Python’s Spamalot to The Drowsy Chaperone), Parade is a show that dares to be dark yet thrillingly powerful.

The opening of two other new musicals this month — Bad Girls – the Musical at the West End’s Garrick Theatre and When Midnight Strikes at the tiny Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court – may be very different in terms of scale, but they are both part of the same rare, apparently endangered species: they are original new musicals by British composers who aren’t Andrew Lloyd Webber or Elton John.

But Kath Gotts, who wrote the music and lyrics to Bad Girls, has had to turn into her own co-producer (with the show’s director Maggie Norris, plus Eileen Gallagher, the chief executive of Shed Productions who produced the original TV series) to actually get it on in the West End. And When Midnight Strikes is one of ten full-scale musicals that British composer Charles Miller has written with American lyricist and book writer Kevin Hammonds, but none of them have yet reached the West End.

It clearly takes a lot of determination not just to write a show but also to actually get one on. I’ve written before here how it’s a recurring theme when it comes to the future of the indigenous British stage musical to wonder where the talent is. As I pointed out then, “Howard Goodall – who in my opinion wrote one of the most beautiful scores of any British musical of the last twenty five years in The Hired Man – is yet to produce a genuinely popular hit; and while Willy Russell, of course, wrote the ever-running Blood Brothers, he has not written a second hit musical to join it (his other musical hit, John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert, premiered in 1974, ironically pre-empted the current fad for jukebox musicals, folding Beatles songs into a new play). Otherwise, there’s Stiles and Drewe, whose Honk! is a popular success but has never had a proper West End run, and who also contributed additional songs and revisions to Mary Poppins; Steve Brown, who is yet to follow his 1999 Olivier winner Spend, Spend, Spend; and Richard Thomas, ditto on his 2003 Olivier winner Jerry Springer – the Opera (though he’s written Kombat Opera, a series of TV musicals).”

I went on to note that, “By comparison, Broadway keeps giving new musical theatre talent the opportunity to ply their goods; of the 21 musicals currently running on Broadway, eight of them are by writers who each made their Broadway debuts with those shows: Avenue Q’s Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, The Drowsy Chaperone’s Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, Spamalot’s John Du Prez and Eric Idle; Hairspray’s Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Legally Blonde’s Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin, Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening, Brenda Russell, Alice Willis and Stephen Bray’s The Color Purple, and of course the bittersweet triumph of Jonathan Larson’s Rent, since Larson never lived to see his own success.”

So, although Broadway still operates as a creative furnace to offer opportunities for new writers to come through in a way that the West End simply does not, there’s another significant difference thee: there’s a life beyond Broadway for them to learn and hone their craft, too, whether in regional theatre or the off (and off-off) Broadway scene where new musicals are regularly tried out. We, on the other hand, do not have a single theatre anywhere that is committed to doing new musicals as part of its regular programme. While Britain has a thriving culture of new writing in plays – with theatres like the Royal Court, Bush, Soho and Hampstead in London all specifically dedicated to its promotion – new musicals just don’t figure.

When musicals are done by regional producing theatres, they invariably occupy the “panto” slot – there as a crowd pleaser to generate funds for the theatre. They cannot afford to risk something new. It means that the closest British composers come to working on new material is invariably only if they are commissioned to write a panto score. But the only way that musical theatre writers can grow is by practicising their craft, and having shows actually put on — not just written and maybe read in a workshop.

Because the costs of putting on musicals are so high, no one can afford the risk of failure with something that’s not tried and already tested. So the only new shows we in turn get are the ones that have been tried and tested on Broadway — where there’s still a lot of encouragement of new writers. Even subsidised theatres like the National and Donmar only lend their name and resources to work that arrives ready-made from there, as with Caroline, or Change at the former or Parade, now at the latter.

The British theatre scene currently has neither the infrastructure nor, more importantly, the will to support the difficult process of developing new musicals. Because they’re perceived of as commercial animals that can (but usually, in fact, don’t) generate lots of money, they’re left to supposedly stand on their own two feet — but it’s left the British musical hobbled, in fact, by not being able to grow, innovate and evolve. The public, in turn, have been taught to want only what they already know, thus creating a vicious circle in which the only shows being put on are either revivals of old ones (The Sound of Music, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Grease, where the innovation has been confined to the casting of them by reality TV) or jukebox ones where they know the songs already.

My own profession, the critics, have their own part to play in this: of course we can only review what is actually put on in front of us, but when we allow lazy, hazy work like Dirty Dancing or Dancing in the Streets to go unchallenged, we encourage producers to think they can get away with it, and they do. More adventurous writers, meanwhile, will be chased away from writing musicals by the cult of mediocrity that prevails.

The Arts Council’s new initiative to explore ways in which they can support the growth of the sector is a belated but welcome acknowledgement of how far British musical theatre – once a major theatrical export of ours – is being left behind by the lack of development being given to it. ACE wants to become a broker to help support its clients take on some of this responsibility. However, it ominously adds the caveat that “the resources at the Arts Council’s disposal is unlikely to include large-scale funding”. But musical theatre can’t live in the keyboards (of computer or piano) of writers alone, but needs to reach our stages where the work can be seen and heard. And that costs money – which may, in the end, make it, too.

Perhaps I need the help of a hobbit – or the wave of Gandalf’s wand – to help me retrieve my luggage that went missing on my return flight from Las Vegas and Los Angeles yesterday (and I wasn’t even flying BA!). But I do, at least, have one of those free little utility bags that Virgin Atlantic hand out on the plane, and collectors of theatrical merchandise need to arrange a flight pronto: mine came complete with a keyring, socks and eye-shade all embossed with the logo to the stage version of The Lord of the Rings. There’s also a publicity leaflet for the show – one that includes just one press quote for the show and which happens to be mine!

Virgin’s flight entertainment guide also has a full, back page ad for the show. Arriving at Heathrow (and the now to-be-expected delays everywhere, including the fact that even though the airport had nine-and-a-half hours notice of our arrival, we were sent to a remote stand where it then took another 20 minutes to get a staircase stand to), one of the welcomes that otherwise greets visitors are hoardings for Mamma Mia! and racks of leaflets for West End shows.

Theatrical marketing often seems designed to catch people on the move, but catching them while they on the move but trapped in their seats for a number of hours may be a very good way of at least imprinting the idea that something is showing on their brains. Apart from newspaper ads, one of the biggest spends for theatrical advertisers has traditionally been the “bus backs” panels on the rear of double decker buses and tube escalator panels. But both outlets are increasingly under threat thanks to the proliferation of bendy buses that don’t have the same advertising panels, and the new high-tech video panels that are now taking over on the escalators. The latter are being taken over by corporations with deeper wallets than theatre shows, since the video panel campaigns I’ve seen so far have comprised the entire wall of the escalator, not just single panels of it.

So where will theatrical marketing go next? It’s a tough product to sell: the inventory is always limited by the seating capacities of the theatres, so a producer’s spend on it is capped by the possible returns that can be make (while still covering the other fixed running costs). The other industries they are competing for space with – mobile phones, iPods, etc – will simply manufacture more if the marketing works. The theatre can’t manufacture more seats to fill.

But if it loses its traditional advertising outlets to bigger spenders, theatre marketers will have to start thinking more creatively about how to reach potential audiences. I doubt that The Lord of the Rings initiative on Virgin came cheap; but it is certainly memorable.

If you only know Cirque du Soleil from their now extensive repertoire of touring shows that make annual visits to the UK (when they turn the Royal Albert Hall into the world’s most spectacular big top), you only know the half of it. Over the last decade or so they have come to define a new brand of entertainment with shows created specially for Las Vegas where, as the famous saying goes regarding other vices on offer in this desert town, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. These shows can only be seen there, not on tour, so although this is a town already saturated – as a friend of mine dubbed it – with shows and ho’s, at least some of the former are like none you can get anywhere else.

It may be that with five shows now playing here, however, Cirque are beginning to saturate their own market; and there are certainly signs that at least one of the shows, Zumanity (at New York, New York) is weakening, with tickets available for it at the various half price outlets around town. On the other hand, ‘O’ – their amazing water-based spectacle (at the Bellagio) – remains a smash hit, which I saw for the fourth time last night and remains one of the most astonishing theatrical shows of my entire theatregoing lifetime. Even though its conceiver and director Frank Dragone has recently cannibalised his own work here by creating a new piece, La Reve, for the new Wynne Hotel, this is still incomparable stuff – no wonder one local critic dubbed the newcomer, “Uh-oh”. For all the lavish effects of La Reve, which I saw on Thursday, it doesn’t have the art, heart or poetry of ‘O’.

But if ‘O’ saw Cirque reinventing the environment as well as the content of the circus by creating a show that unfolds on, above and below a vast onstage lake, Ka (at the MGM Grand) did something no less bold: it seems to have dispensed with a stage altogether. Instead, there’s a dark, empty void at the front of the auditorium that belches fire; and a series of platforms rise out of it that tilt, rotate and even go vertical as the performers fly off it into the void. I first saw Ka at its world premiere performance two years ago, and returning to it on Wednesday was knocked out once again by the daring and danger of Robert Lepage’s thrilling production.

But even by Cirque’s own outstanding standards of creativity and inventiveness, their latest show Love (at the Mirage) goes somewhere entirely new with something old. While jukebox compilation pop shows have rapidly become the new template for modern musicals, Cirque now create a new one both for themselves and that increasingly stale genre, by creating an impressionistic, psychedelic dance and acrobatic spectacular around the songs of the Beatles.

While Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out created a contemporary narrative ballet out of the songs of Billy Joel, this amazing show takes some thirty Beatles songs – both familiar and lesser-known – and sets them to visuals that complement as well as comment on them. ‘Help!’ becomes a knife-edge rollerblade derby on three 11-foot tall ramps; ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, perhaps inevitably, sees an aerialist reach new heights of exhilarating contortions; while ‘Back in the USSR’ is executed as a trampoline ballet of thrilling agility.

Set beside the empty spectacle of Satisfaction, the disastrous ballet that Peter Schauffus created out of the work of the Rolling Stones that gave no satisfaction when it came to London’s Apollo Theatre last month, this ecstatic and exhilarating show demonstrated that pop, dance, circus and theatre can effortlessly meld to create something that transcends mere nostalgia to instead provide a startlingly fresh experience.

There is a point in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, of course, when the show-within-the-show is suddenly halted by the interventions of the Opera Ghost when the casting approval he has sought hasn’t been met (a classic version, no doubt, of the estates who control rights over productions today), and he sets both the chandelier and the diva’s principal vocals swaying, as well as brutally hanging a stage hand. (Oops, perhaps I should have put in a spoiler alert here, but after 21 years in the West End, I suspect you know the scene by now). The opera managers run about frantically and tell us the show will resume soon with Christine Daae in the lead role, after a ballet interlude to keep us entertained.

But at last night’s performance of Phantom – the Las Vegas Spectacular (as the special version of the show specially made for Vegas has been renamed, expanding the physical production in scale – there are four chandeliers floating over the audience at the beginning, that then assemble to make one! – but reducing it in length to a more easily digestible 95-minute one-act show), this scene was prefigured, about a half an hour in, by an alarm call and flashing lights throughout the theatre, with the public address system announcing: “The alarm you have heard is part of the hotel’s early alert system. The reason for the alarm is being investigated. We will keep you advised.”

There was no sudden rush for the exits, and most of the audience dutifully stayed put until, eventually, the emergency lights were disabled and another announcement was made: “We are announcing an all-clear.”

Lloyd Webber cynics (and I’m not one, I hasten to add) might suggest that an early alert system should always be in place against the sudden arrival of his crashing chords and lush strings. But it was fascinating to watch this musical again in such a cleverly stripped back way – the press material promises that the show “includes every song from the original” – and I honestly can’t say I missed anything.

Even the long interruption had a familiar feeling. The first night of the current revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in the West End was also famously interrupted when the set broke down and there was a 20-minute pause. Perhaps there was another ghost at work there….

Theatre critics are opinionated – that’s our job. And we don’t always agree – in fact, that’s one of the pleasures of a media landscape in which there are still enough outlets for there to be as many opinions as there are places available to express them. But there’s also a unique tension when members of the same paper go head-to-head to confront each other, and there’s a remarkable debate going on at the Guardian blog. It opened on Monday with Michael Billington – the paper’s long-serving chief drama critic – posing the question ‘Who Needs Reviews?’ and adopting a defensive position that suggested that he welcomed blogs, but not as a replacement of professional theatre reviewing, while Billington’s deputy Lyn Gardner replied the next day that “the blogosphere has breathed new life into the dying art of reviewing.”

While Michael was intent to defend a job that looks increasingly under threat, Lyn was therefore welcoming the opportunities that have been lately been opened up as a result of the blogosphere; but their very public divergence of opinion – on a blog, moreover — suggests that Lyn has thrown down the gauntlet as another challenge to his position. Who needs blogs to threaten your job when your deputy threatens it for you?

Though the blogosphere has led to a democratisation of the way theatre opinion can be expressed, there’s no such democracy to the world of the theatre critic, which is still hierarchically structured. The very fact that The Guardian, Telegraph and Times still employ a regular deputy to their chief critic, instead of buying in the occasional freelance (as the Independent now seems to do), is a sign that those papers still treat the theatre seriously; but deputies can suffer from being the constant underdog. The lead critic will usually keep the opening night diary, and deputise only those things they don’t want to cover, sometimes at the last minute; and the deputies of each of those papers otherwise carve out their own niches as purveyors of the regions and the fringe the rest of the time. Deputies also fight the ever-increasing pressure on space – the Evening Standard, who have two deputy theatre critics, sometimes don’t even run the reviews they commission from them.

No wonder a deputy like Lyn welcomes the new opportunities of the blogosphere, where all opinions are equally welcomed – and public dialogues can take place with the readers, too. The landscape of reviewing is definitely changing and evolving, and it may be that yet more radical interventions need to be made. The FT took a major step in breaking down the hierarchical structure of their theatre review desk by appointing Alastair Macaulay’s two deputies, Ian Shuttleworth and Sarah Hemming, to share the number one slot when Alastair departed for the New York Times.

But if nothing else, the blogosphere (as this particular debate has proved) can address the problems and also be part of the solution. Criticism, in whichever form it takes, is never the last word on a piece of art, but only the beginning of a dialogue between practitioners, consumers and commentators; and the blogs that are addressing how we work are now beginning to expand that conversation, too, even further.

Time was you’d be happy, as a West End or Broadway producer, with swapping shows between the two theatrical capitals of London and New York, and licensing productions in other English-speaking territories like Australia or South Africa (though in the apartheid-era in which I grew up in Johannesburg in the 70s, of course, a cultural embargo was in place that prevented many hits from travelling there, so we were dependent on classics outside its reach). The biggest Broadway hits may have had a pre and/or post-Broadway life, as would some shows from the West End with regard to the UK regions. But that was the end of the road, in every sense.

But then came Cats, and a new brand of theatrical globalisation that saw the show “shipped out” to other non-English speaking territories around the world, but in identical recreations of the original physical production. This producing model, pioneered by Cameron Mackintosh and meticulously maintained by him from a quality point of view to ensure that the integrity of the product always remained intact, would be followed by the international successes of Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon, a quartet of shows that put British theatre amongst the biggest exports of the 80s.

But Mackintosh hasn’t had too many big original successes since those heady days (and neither, for that matter, has Andrew Lloyd Webber). So the future of the British musical as a global property was stalled, until the arrival of Mamma Mia! at the end of the 90s (produced not by Mackintosh and/or Lloyd Webber but by Judy Craymer). And in the absence of being able to create original work, Mackintosh has now pioneered a radical plan to find yet more new life for his past hits, in a unique partnership that was formally announced yesterday that sees him joining forces with the leading Chinese performing arts agency China Arts and Entertainment Group to bring Western musicals to China for the first time, kicking off with Les Mis that will open the new National Grand Theater beside Tiananmen Square in Beijing in November 2008, to be followed by Mamma Mia!(both of them previously seen only in English language versions there) in 2009, but now both to be performed in Chinese language versions for the first time.

A new and potentially extremely lucrative new market is thereby being opened up, and though the projected production slate is inevitably top-heavy with Mackintosh’s own shows, it is interesting to see that the offerings for potential future new productions stretch to both Mamma Mia! and The Lion King. The world already can’t seem to get enough of these shows; but it will be interesting to see how this experiment in giving the Chinese a new cross-cultural experience will pay off.

To read the reviews yesterday for Complicite’s A Disappearing Number that opened at the Barbican last week was to discover that several critics, myself included, consider ourselves to be mathematically challenged. In my own review in yesterday’s Sunday Express, I admitted, “Since I barely scraped a C grade pass in my ‘O’ Level maths, the prospect of Complicite’s new show A Disappearing Number about the complexities (and apparent beauty) of exploring the meaning of the world through baffling mathematical equations was daunting to say the least. It doesn’t get off to a promising start as Saskia Reeves’ contemporary mathematician gives us a breathless lecture on prime numbers and different kinds of infinities. But in its parallel narratives of her journey to India, and that of the real-life story of a young Indian maths genius who came to study in Cambridge in 1914, Simon McBurney’s production provides its own proof of the infinity of theatrical resourcefulness.”

It turns out I was far from alone in my mathematical shortcomings. Susannah Clapp’s review in yesterday’s Observer came with an explanatory subheading: “Even for a maths dunce, Complicite’s latest is exhilarating” (which were presumably the sub-editor’s words, not hers); but in her actual copy, she says that Complicite’s Simon McBurney “has talked of the medieval notion of music as ‘arithmetic you can hear’, Complicite makes ideas you can see. This is so more than ever in A Disappearing Number which - amazingly, particularly to this innumerate reviewer - projects the allure of numbers.”

In the Sunday Times, the subs once again had a field day: Christopher Hart’s review came with a subheading, “Whoever thought equations could be so much fun on stage? It all adds up”, which Hart himself admits he has trouble doing. “Praise is due for the company’s efforts to make us do the math,” he says, and goes on, “You are reading the words of someone who failed maths O level. At the time, I believed it was because I had an artistic temperament. Actually, it was because I was lazy and stupid. But I was quite excited to learn from Ruth what partitions are, and that the number 200 has three million million million of them. The pleasure of sitting in a theatre and amassing pure and useless facts is not to be underestimated. Indeed, I was struck again by what a good medium theatre can be for expounding hard maths and science. Think of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen or Terry Johnson’s Insignificance.”

And reading these reviews, our readers are amassing pure and useless facts about how hopeless at maths some of us confess to being, too!

It’s been a standing joke for the 25 years since the Barbican Centre first opened its doors that it’s difficult for audiences to find; and that’s still the case, despite a £14million refurbishment to its foyers which included the creation, finally, of a formal “entrance” in Silk Street (that simply covered in the existing draughty driveway but has bizarrely left a little bit of the new grandly empty space still uncovered, so its still going to be draughty in the winter). I know this because I arranged to meet someone at the Silk Street entrance last night who’d only been there once before, and he arrived late and ruffled: the signposting from Barbican tube is still misleading and confusing, he reported, and anyway, how do you get to the Silk Street entrance if you follow the prescribed route? (Answer: by walking down the long road tunnel rather than into the Barbican itself, an unappealing prospect at the best of times).

Walking from Barbican tube, the more scenic route is up and over the street on the connecting bridge that takes you onto the elevated housing estate part of the Barbican, from which you descend to the Centre beside the artificial lake. On this side of the building, there is no formal entrance – just the competing claims of the Waterside Café ahead and the lifts and scenic spiral staircase to different levels as you enter. The main “entrance” is still entirely on the wrong side of the building, across the newly-installed bridge that travels over the lower level main theatre and concert hall concourse.

I doubt I’m ever going to be able to love this building; unlike the South Bank, where a ragbag of fine modern buildings effortlessly dovetail to provide an unparalleled artistic smorgasbord, the Barbican compresses theatres, concert hall, cinemas and art galleries all under one roof. But the public spaces still feel woefully unpopulated; and although they have been so expensively refurbished, I also noticed last night how tatty the theatre itself is now starting to look, so its time to spruce that up now.

Two press announcements this week have brought the imminent and future ambitions of the Donmar and RSC into focus, with both seeking to simultaneously consolidate and expand their positions in the theatrical firmament. The Donmar is finally investing in property; not having hitherto owned their theatre, offices or rehearsal spaces, they’ve now bought a 125-year lease on their home base, taking it over in nine years’ time when the lease of their current landlord – and sometimes benefactor – Ambassador Theatre Group runs out.

Michael Grandage would not yet disclose the price they’ve paid for it, as negotiations have only just been concluded, but whatever it is can never be recovered from the box office alone, as with just 250 seats to fill a night and an annual operating budget of some £3million for the six shows they produce annually, it’s a tight fit to meet those costs already, with top-ups to the potential box office required from the raising of corporate sponsorship and their Arts Council grant. But in for a penny, in for a few more million: Grandage also announced a one-year West End residency at Wyndham’s for a production slate of four new shows there that will continue the Donmar ethos in town, including a Donmar ticket price structure with a top price of £32.50 and 130 seats available every night at the bottom price, too, of £10.

Deals are being sought everywhere – “concessions are being made by everyone”, said Grandage – from the theatre’s landlords Delfont Mackintosh to the actors, who will be employed on the Donmar’s “favoured nations” contracts with no one receiving points or hierarchical billing, but at what Grandage promised would be higher rates than Donmar salaries.

But even with reduced operating costs than a commercial producer would face in a similar situation – and the prospect of a Jude Law Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is the kind of project a commercial producer would happily pay top dollar for (and charge even higher dollar for, in turn) – this is a high-risk strategy. It may significantly increase the presence of the Donmar in the West End from being a niche theatre for a cognoscenti who manage to get their act together to actually buy tickets in advance there to one that is more publicly available simply thanks to the greater availability of seats, but it also exposes the Donmar to unprecedented risk, too. As it is, Grandage spoke of how it only required one element to go wrong amongst their income streams for them to be seriously affected, whether it’s a production that under-performs at the box office or sponsorship that isn’t available; so I hope that the season pays off, in every sense.

Still, it’s an important step towards helping West End drama recover that this summer had started looking like a seriously endangered species, as I wrote here in July. Coupled with Haymarket launching its own season as a producing theatre under the auspices of Jonathan Kent next month, there are serious changes afoot in the dramatic ecology of the West End.

But while the Donmar builds a new relationship with Delfont Mackintosh, what has happened to the five-year plan that was announced just two years ago for the RSC to house their London seasons at their theatres? In the RSC’s announcement this week of their 2008 artistic programme, the plans for London include an emphasis on new writing, with five new plays scheduled, including two new pieces that will premiere here, alongside work that has already been announced to open at the Tricycle and Soho Theatre. Trevor Nunn’s double bill of The Seagull and King Lear has also long been announced as heading to the New London after its current world tour, while Michael Boyd’s eight-play History cycle is heading to the Roundhouse in April 2008. But the Delfont Mackintosh annual hire seems to have, perhaps temporarily, fallen by the wayside. Perhaps it was just a practical matter of theatrical availability as well as the right sort of shows for the company to want to bring to London: with the Novello about to open Desperately Seeking Susan, the Gielgud booked back-to-back with Chichester transfers for Macbeth and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, and Wyndham’s taking the National’s The History Boys back after Shadowlands, there’s no room at the inn(s).

Time Out ran a cover feature a couple of weeks ago on the things that let London down, from most disgusting loos and most awful sound systems to most unhelpful shop staff. Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios is criticised for not being able to provide ready-made food: “The people who run the bar and restaurant seem more interested in those few who come just to eat; everything is prepared to order, which means there’s no fast food beyond nuts. We’ve arrived 45 minutes before a show and still not managed to get so much as a sandwich.”

Actually, Riverside isn’t alone in these gastro-theatrical (lack of) delight: the Royal Court’s forever teeming downstairs restaurant and the Young Vic’s inviting restaurant both also seem to need pre-planning to enjoy, as food at both takes time to arrive. The Young Vic bar does have a few (very) modest bar snacks available, but nothing like the excellent cake selections that used to be on offer when Konditor and Cook used to run the theatre’s catering concession, and there is now a sense that the Young Vic’s bar and restaurant both function entirely independently of the theatre, attracting an audience entirely of its own who hang out there all evening, while the theatregoers themselves are regarded as an inconvenient intrusion.

Time Out also named and shamed the “pushy ushers” at Shakespeare’s Globe in their litany of woes. “We know they have their orders, but do the elderly ushers at Shakespeare’s Globe have to be quite so officious?…. Woe betide any groundling who tries to squat on the floor, sit on the steps, or seek shelter in the rain beneath the roof where those who paid for seats are sitting snugly. Nobody escapes when these grey-haired enforcers are on the prowl.”

Time Out has a point – whenever I’m watching a play there, my eye is constantly distracted by the Globe stewards doing their stewarding throughout the action – as well as during the breaks. At the interval the last time I went there, I exited the gates to sit beside the river, and showed both my programme and the ticket stubs within it to the steward on my way back in – proof enough, surely, that I was meant to be there — but he needed a close-up inspection, turning the stubs over to make sure they were for the right play! I told him myself that the Globe took the biscuit for officious jobs-worth(iness) – even though, as Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole pointed out in a letter published in last week’s issue, they’re not in fact in paid jobs to do so. “The stewards at the Globe are volunteers; they give up long hours throughout the summer with good grace, great humour and great generosity,” he wrote. “Everybody who works here, and the overwhelming majority of our audience, know that a visit to the Globe is only as special as it is because of the work the stewards do. So, fuck you.”

That’s telling us! Dominic has certainly never been afraid to speak his mind – it’s a combativeness that makes him one of the most entertaining and refreshing of artistic directors. But no wonder the stewards behave as they do in that case. They’ve been officially licensed to do so.

But talking of the Globe, I think I’ve just dodged a different kind of theatrical bullet there beyond Dominic’s ire: I missed last Thursday’s opening of We, the People, thanks to a clash at the Almeida with their opening of Awake and Sing!. It’s had a triple round of one-star reviews from the first reviews I read: according to Sam Marlowe in The Times, “The first-night audience for Eric Schlosser’s new play about the drafting of the US Constitution was the smallest I’ve seen at the Globe; postinterval it was smaller still. Hardly surprising, given that We The People is so thoroughly inert…. Charlotte Westenra’s tedious production rivals the oak structure of the Globe itself for woodenness. “

In another one-star review in the Evening Standard, Fiona Mountford points out that playwright Eric Schlosser “has, heroically if foolishly, decided to dramatise one of the least thrilling processes known to mankind, namely a 16-week long committee meeting”, before concluding, “Let’s hope someone inflicts a similarly lethal play about the English Civil War on the American theatregoing public soon. It’s only fair.”

In The Guardian, Lyn Gardner’s one-star review called it “the dullest play of the year”, a sentiment completely echoed by the headline to Charles Spencer’s review in the Telegraph: “Yawn of the year”.

Charlie points out that on this occasion Dromgoole got in there first before he’d even seen the play: “The Globe’s artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, greeted me as I arrived to review We the People with a malevolent grin and the prediction that it wouldn’t be my kind of play at all. Boy, was he right. I spent interminable hours as a cub reporter covering the committee meetings of the parish and district councils of West Surrey. They were as rib-ticklingly enjoyable as a Ray Cooney farce in comparison with this heroically turgid epic on the framing of the American constitution.”

I look forward to Dominic’s responses, which may be even more rib-tickingly enjoyable than Ray Cooney’s farces.

Visiting the Theatre Royal in Newcastle-upon-Tyne last night to see the new tour of Aspects of Love was a series of aspects of irritation – none of them, fortunately, related to the production itself. The aggravations began at the box office, who didn’t seem to have my ticket – though it turned out it was there all along, for some reason (and this box office is not alone in this), the moment they are faced with a booking that isn’t being collected with a credit card, they simply fail to look for it, make a call somewhere else in the building, then finally print out another ticket (that wasn’t booked for me) instead. They also express surprise when I ask for a programme – it’s as if they’ve never seen a critic – and sent me on my frustrated way. When I told the company manager of the problems I’d had, he tried to intervene, and the box office offered him an even worse seat for me in the back row of the dress circle. Finally, moments before the show started, someone else in the box office found the ticket I’d been booked into all along, the company manager found me, and I was seated – in the middle of a row in the middle of the dress circle.

That wasn’t, in itself, a problem – the view was fine – but the cramped conditions (and not having a guest with me) meant that I was squeezed in the midst of paying customers. At the interval, one of them – who wasn’t, in fact, one of the people seated on either side of me – came up to me to complain: she’d paid £30 for her ticket, and the fact that I was writing notes was very distracting! When I spoke to the company manager once again trying to get re-seated, he told me that the show’s assistant director – seated in between other production personnel – had had a similar complaint levied against him when he was taking notes last week. Obviously these Newcastle audiences were more curious about their fellow audience members’ activities than what is going on the stage. Yet no complaint was made last night against another audience member who had a giant bag of sweets on her lap nearby, and seemed to dip into it throughout the first act constantly, oblivious of the disruption she was causing.

I am often acutely frustrated by behaviour like this, so am wary of being the source of distraction myself. I make sure that I write notes as discreetly as possible, and I certainly don’t use a pen that lights up or the glow of my mobile phone, as I’ve seen people reading their programmes by, to do so. Nor, as one or two of my colleagues sometimes do, do I use a pencil – I have often sat in front of critics listening to the gentle scratchings of their pencils against paper.

But all of this palls in comparison to the absurd situation at the opening night of the Take That musical, Never Forget, in Manchester a few weeks ago, when the producers – for reasons best known only to themselves – chose that night to actually film the entire show. With camera cranes swooping dangerously over the stalls, they also bathed the auditorium in the purple glow of additional lighting to make sure that the audience too was lit and visible to the cameras. I actually had to watch parts of the show with my programme held up to the right side of my face to stop the irritating glow; and far from being able to judge the show in the best light, in every sense, the entire experience was compromised. Producers, you would think, would like to have their show given its best shot of success with critics, but here – in trying to get the best shot for the cameras – those priorities were ignored. If I’d been a paying customer, I’d have been even more furious. As it is, I simply couldn’t believe that they were prepared to compromise their own show in this way.

When The Producers opened on Broadway in 2001, its immediate success led to the introduction of so-called “premium” seats – where the producers, in effect, turned into their own touts, selling off the best seats in the house at inflated prices (on that occasion, $480 a seat), which has now become adopted as an industry standard practice in New York, though never with prices at that fleecing level. For Mel Brooks’ new Broadway-bound show, Young Frankenstein, the premium seats have already been pegged at $450, before the reviews are even out and therefore the likely demand for them is not yet known yet.

Now Young Frankenstein’s co-producer, Robert Sillerman, has told the New York Times that they are going to break ranks, too, with the Broadway custom of reporting their weekly grosses – a practice, dating back to the 1930s apparently, in which the weekly figures are published in the pages of Variety (and now online, too, in places like Playbill.com). According to Sillerman, “This is a private transaction. Consequently, I don’t know if there’s any – I’m quite sure there’s not any – bona fide business reason to do it other than bragging rights.”

No other private industry feels compelled to disclose its weekly balance sheets to its rivals, so why have Broadway producers traditionally honoured this practice? To borrow a song title from that great Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, the answer may simply be “tradition”. And there’s also a suspicion that a producer who doesn’t want to give the game away may have something to hide: that his show isn’t doing as well on the advance front than was expected.

But where one leads, others may follow; and the days of full disclosure that Broadway currently operates under may well be numbered. As Mr Sillerman told the New York Times, “Every producer I’ve queries about this had said, ‘Hosannas to you’. Every one of them has unilaterally applauded the idea.”

Theatrical chemistry is one of those seemingly indefinable things, and part of its magic: it simply can’t be predicted what will work and what won’t. No one reckoned that a musical based on a set of old poems about cats by TS Eliot could work, yet Cats became the longest running West End musical of all time – until eclipsed by a three-hour plus stage version of a Victor Hugo potboiler, Les Miserables, that many critics wrote off, too, when it first opened at the Barbican. Then again, a stage version of such a beloved film like Mary Poppins sounded like a licence to print money – yet is closing next January after a respectable, but not record-shattering, run of just three years.

But if what works onstage can’t be predicted, is there a more exact science available to some of the stages that shows appear on? Why is it, for instance, that the classic theatres of Victorian-era architect Frank Matcham, like the London Palladium and London Coliseum, remain epic places that not only give audiences a sense of occasion, but also make them feel part of the occasion – yet modern theatres, like the Milton Keynes Theatre that I recently visited for the first time, or High Wycombe’s Swan, feel both distancing and alienating?

Once again, why is it that the National is such an inviting place to visit, while the Barbican feels so hostile, even after its recent expensive and extensive refurbishment? And why the Royal Court is such a perfect auditorium, but Soho – despite the padded comfort of its benches – is such a blandly inexpressive place? Or why, after an intervention to carve up the Whitehall into two studio spaces, the resulting Trafalgar Studios now contains a near-perfect little studio, but a steeply-raked main house that is positively vertigo-inducing (and horribly cramped to boot, seating-wise)?

Part of these are practical matters – and some, of course, are questions of taste. (Someone probably loves the Barbican). But in a feature in The Guardian this week that followed a preview visit to the refurbished Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds that opens next week, Michael Billington explored some other more fundamental ideas.

He discovers that smaller theatres are ones he responds to: “You can’t, of course, dissociate a theatre from what happens on stage. But my subjective list of totally successful modern theatres is relatively short: Stratford-upon-Avon’s Swan, Chichester’s Minerva Studio, Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre-in-the Round, London’s Young Vic, Cottesloe and Tricycle, Richmond’s Orange Tree. What do they have in common? All are modest in scale. All allow the actor to converse with the audience. None, except the Tricycle and the Cottesloe on rare occasions, deploys a conventional straight-edged stage. Above all, these theatres acknowledge that, in the television age, we want to be able to see the actor in close-up, rather than peer at some distantly posturing mannequin.”

But that question of scale is also one of getting the proportions right. Trafalgar Studios and Soho may be supposedly intimate spaces from the point of view of the number of people they can actually accommodate, but something has gone wrong in their configuration. At Bury St Edmunds, artistic director Colin Blumenau tells Billington that the relationship between stage and audience has been perfectly defined: “In geometric terms, it is exactly the same distance from the back wall to the proscenium arch as it is from the forestage to the rear of the auditorium.”

And Billington speaks to theatre architectural consultant Iain Mackintosh to come up with a formula for the creation of a good theatre space. There are three requirements: “One: a quality of verticality that gives the human figure the right proportion (he cites the proscenium-arch Royal Court as a fine example). Two: auditorium side walls that have a reflective surface. Three: the perfect volume.”

According to Mackintosh, the latter is the key, and is “the height, width and depth of the auditorium divided by the number of people in the hall.” According to Mackintosh, “If you have too much volume, the actor, director and designer all have to paint with a broader brush.” And Billington reports that applying this formula, the National’s Olivier Theatre has more volume for 1,000 spectators than Drury Lane has for 2,000, “which is perhaps why it is a notoriously tricky space”, he writes.

Of course it ultimately also depends on where you sit: a friend of mine once sagely remarked that there are no bad seats, only bad shows, but critics are in the lucky position of invariably seeing shows from the best seats (though its an interesting fact just how often Nicholas de Jongh ends up in one with a compromised view of the stage). Curiously, too, the RSC seated most of the critics on the two side wings that flank the thrust stage for their opening of Twelfth Night this week, which brought us closer to the action than the front-on seating. But I also thought about the volume formula, and noticed just how cavernous the height of the space over the stage is in the temporary Courtyard Theatre (that is the model for the refurbishment of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre main house). And it comes thrusting so far forward that distances across the stage are considerable, too. It pushes the actors far away many of the audience, instead of bringing them close up to them.

I’ve previously blogged about problems at the Donmar when seated on the side, and its probably impossible in a three-sided auditorium to give everyone a perfect view at all times, even in a theatre of just 250 seats. On the other hand, climb (as I have often done) to the top gallery of the London Coliseum, and the theatre looks at its most beautiful from there. The views are good, too – and the sound, some say, is the best in the house.

On the American theatre bulletin board talkinbroadway.com, it’s a common courtesy of people who post comments on shows they are discussing there to preface their contributions with the phrase “spoiler alert” or some such notification if they are going to detail key plot points – knowledge of which could spoil the surprise and therefore enjoyment of other theatregoers if they didn’t know them already.

Yet no such inhibition seems to apply to theatre critics, who will sometimes happily fill columns and columns of their copy with detailed plot exposition. Of course its part of the job of a review to convey some of the information about content as well as context: the question most people want answered about a show they know nothing about is, “What’s it about?”, followed by “What’s it like?” But if you are told absolutely everything that it is about, there’s no point finding out what it’s like – because part of the joy (or not) of what it’s like is finding out how the characters arrive where they do.

The intricate, layered storytelling of Pedro Almodovar’s films is driven by a series of coincidences, surprises and revelations; and they’re at the heart, too, of the stage version of his 1999 film All About My Mother that opened at the Old Vic on Tuesday night. I was astonished, however, to read a review by one of my colleagues that began his review by rewinding the plot from the end.

SPOILER ALERT! Do not read the next two paragraphs if you want to see the show for yourself – but too late if you’ve already read the paper that didn’t issue an alert. In this review, we discover right at the beginning of the review that Lola – a character we don’t actually meet till near the end – has to face up to some “home truths” that have “arrived in the questing form of Lesley Manville’s Manuela, who cares for his latest offspring, born to the distinctly fallen and now dead nun, Sister Rosa.” Whoooa!!!! Here we are told not only who impregnated the nun – but also that she in fact dies in the course of the action. I think audiences would like to discover that for themselves.

Manuela, of course, is on a search for her son’s father, following her son’s death in a road accident – I’ll concede that it’s difficult to describe the journey without alluding to this fact (which I did myself in an online review elsewhere), even if that’s another event the audience might prefer to discover for itself if they are new to the story; but to be told the outcome is a step too far: “Esteban’s father turns out to be dying of Aids and someone who has remained true to nothing and no one.”

RESUME READING HERE IF YOU SKIPPED THE LAST TWO PARAGRAPHS: Another danger is critics revealing key lines and jokes. Luckily, one of Diana Rigg’s choice ones – what Paul Callan in his Daily Express notice calls “probably the most risqué line of her career” – is, Callan adds in parenthesis, “too unprintable”. (But not for Variety’s David Benedict, who in his review reveals the joke in full).

But the pity is that far too much is printable and has now been printed – and imprinted on audience’s minds. The show has been spoilt for them. Perhaps they should apply to the paper concerned for refunds – that might stop reviews that do that.

Actors, just like the rest of us, are often burdened by their pasts. It’s just that the past for actors remains very alive, forever preserved on celluloid, videotape or even just in people’s memories.

Stockard Channing opens in Awake and Sing! tomorrow at the Almeida, staking another claim that she earned long ago to be taken seriously as an actress. Yet still questions inevitably come up about her appearance as Rizzo in the 1978 film version of Grease every time she is interviewed. In a profile in the Daily Telegraph this week, “I wasn’t crazy about what it did to me at the time. People were very snotty about it. Then with the attendant hoopla it’s gone on forever, which is fine and curious but really has nothing to do with me.”

She’s in good company in being amazed at how the past lingers – sometimes in unexpected places. In an interview in The Times, Diana Rigg – who opened last night in the stage version of Almodovar’s All About My Mother at the Old Vic – referred to the fact that people still remember her forever as Emma Peel in The Avengers (which she played for 51 episodes between 1965 and 1968), “That stuff is still around. It’s all over the place on the internet. Apparently I’m used as a screensaver. I’m also a mouse pad. How low can one get? You are looking at a mouse pad.”

But longevity is sometimes just that – a function of having been around for a long time. It was rather wonderful, the night before, to see Rigg’s Avengers predecessor, Honor Blackman, who played Catherine Gale in 43 episodes of the serial between 1962 and 1964, back onstage playing Fraulein Schneider in the current production of Cabaret. And of course, every time she is interviewed, too, everyone inevitably mentions the role of Pussy Galore, the Bond girl she played in the 1964 film Goldfinger. But she’s gracious about it, too, telling the Halifax Evening Courier earlier this year, “I never get tired about talking about the role because I will always be grateful for it. Why not? I’m flattered that people still talk about it and that they say I was one of the best Bond Girls, although to be honest I’m not really sure I want to be described as a Bond Girl because I’m no bimbo. Never have been. There was a lot more to the role of Pussy Galore than that.”

And, as we can see from their respective work on stage, there’s a lot more to each of these actresses, too, that what they have become (in)famous for.

“There is nothing new about celebrity casting,” wrote the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer in a review yesterday, “but attempting to sell a show by casting the offspring of the famous appears to be the latest trick in an age unhealthily obsessed with all things ‘sleb’.”

There’s another manifestation of this next week, of course, when Chicago sees the London stage debut of Kelly Osbourne as Mama Morton – as I recently wrote in the Sunday Express, it is “a living embodiment of the show’s astringent critique of phoney celebrity. Who next - Paris Hilton?”

But Charlie’s review, of course, was of the double bill of American plays, Lone Star and Pvt Wars, that opened at the King’s Head last Thursday, of which he wrote that the unique selling point was that it marks the professional stage debut of James Jagger, son of Sir Mick and Jerry Hall.

But he was as surprised as I was that the casting of young James wasn’t actually taking the mick, so to speak. In fact, I spoke to one of the show’s two young co-producers, Sally Humphreys, in the interval, and she assured me that he arrived in the play by a conventional casting call – his agents at ICM responded to an ad in PCR and put him up for it. And he had to audition twice before he won the role. While all the attendant publicity is a fringe dream, he had to actually prove he could do it. And though his previous stage experience, as Charles Spencer’s review pointed out, “has been limited to an amateur theatre society in Barnes”, he made a seriously accomplished and witty stage debut. As Charlie concluded, “I have a hunch that, in a few years’ time, Jagger will be known as a gifted actor in his own right.”

And that, ultimately, is what everyone has to do – a famous parent may get you started, but you have to prove yourself. Peter Hall cast his daughter, Rebecca, in a West End production of Mrs Warren’s Profession when she was fresh out of dropping out of Cambridge University after her second year there, and was hugely vindicated. But, as Sir Peter admitted to me when he cast her again as Rosalind in his production of As You Like It a couple of years later, it had been a “terrible risk, but the honest truth is that I was so confident about her abilities that I really didn’t think about them, which was mainly to her, let’s face it. I didn’t realise that until after the first night. If she had failed, or been not just good, but very, very, very good, she would never have worked again. The profession is not forgiving. So if it had gone wrong, it would have been dreadful.”

In fact Sir Peter had already used Rebecca’s acting services many years before that – when she was not quite nine years old, she had appeared in his TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn. Rebecca’s half-brother Edward followed even more closely in his father’s footsteps, to become an accomplished director in his own right – as Sir Peter also told me, “I’m as proud as hell of Edward, who I think is one of the best directors in the country now”. And yet another of Hall’s progeny, his daughter Lucy, has designed his productions of Happy Days and Whose Life is it Anyway? Each is carving out their own niche in the business.

But for every Hall or Redgrave – or the Strallen sisters Scarlett and Summer, whose aunt is Bonnie Langford – there’s the danger of falling far short of your parents’ accomplishments when you put yourself on the stage, as happened to Finty Williams, daughter of Judi Dench and Michael Williams, or the Olivier/Plowright daughters, Julie Kate (who acted early on but whose most recent IMDB credit has her down as Production Supervisor on a 2004 film Peace One Day) and Tamsin, who have fallen by the acting wayside. Or there’s the huge burden of Steven Ayckbourn as he makes his playwrighting debut to follows in the footsteps of his father Sir Alan, one of the most popular and prolific of all British playwrights, that he’s chronicled in an interview in the current issue of The Stage.

Then there are the children who far eclipse their parents. Kiera Knightley is now one of the biggest of all British movie stars – while dad Will is about to appear at the Bush in David Watson’s Flight Path (from September 12).

As of today, there may be precisely no plays at all running on Broadway; but by the year’s end, a dozen of them will open. As Variety succinctly puts it, “reports of the death of the Broadway play may have been exaggerated.” And just as significantly: “In both number and diversity, the lineup clearly overshadows the tuner slate: just three new musicals before the holidays.”

But the difference is that whereas musicals consider their future – at least in theory – as open-ended (and two of those three musicals are Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and Disney’s The Little Mermaid, so that is precisely what they are hoping for), every play arrives there as a limited season. So although more plays are opening than musicals, it is still the musicals that will dominate in the long run. The same thing happens here in London: as Richard Pulford showed me and I previously blogged about here, taken across the entirety of 2006, and excluding the National, Donmar and Royal Court, if you wanted to see a musical last year you had 34 titles to choose from, whereas if you wanted to see a play you had 63. Yet despite this, the number of musicals playing against plays is skewed in favours of musicals nowadays. But at least plays are indeed being done.

Of the 12 ahead on Broadway, several of them, inevitably, are either in the not-for-profit sector (Roundabout, Lincoln Center Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club, all of whom have a significant Broadway presence nowadays) or commercial transfers from London (the Royal Court’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and the National’s The Seafarer). Then there are the star revivals, including a Kevin Kline Cyrano de Bergerac and a new production of Pinter’s The Homecoming (with Britain’s own Ian McShane and Eve Best). But there are also a number of new plays, too, with commercial transfers from Chicago for Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, the arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention (workshopped earlier this year at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse), and a previously-unproduced Mark Twain play, Is He Dead?, from 1898. Add in Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, and that’s four new plays this side of Christmas.

By contrast, as Matt Wolf pointed out in a column in The Observer yesterday, we may have lots of plays ahead in London, too, “but where, oh where, is the new play? Whereas last autumn at least had the commercial transfers of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Frost/Nixon to set pulses racing, this season is offering retreads, however fresh, of familiar territory: even All About My Mother, like Elling before it, comes to us already a cinema brand name.” (I wonder just how much of a brand name Elling – an obscure Norwegian 2001 Best Foreign film Oscar nominee – actually is, but we’ll let that pass).

As Matt continues, “Not for the first time, one is reminded of the large-scale, commercially viable new play as an endangered species, which is another way of saying that you can’t rely on Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard to keep theatre afloat every year.” And he concludes, “Amid a glittering classical parade and the usual pile-up of musicals (one of which is in fact called Parade) exists a black hole into which new work seems to have plummeted: a theatre scene not so much All About My Mother as it is about a climate of new writing in terminal decline.”

I’m not sure we should be quite so gloomy just yet: though its true that even the Royal Court – with classics by Ionesco and Max Frisch ahead — and the National with Coward and Shakespeare on its agenda, plus the Almeida reviving first Clifford Odets, then Caryl Churchill – new plays are thin on the ground, there are other ways of working, too. The National are also bringing Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse to the stage, while Punchdrunk are colonising BAC next to adapt Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death for its latest indoor promenade performance.

Theatrical storytelling comes in lots of different shapes and forms, and perhaps we shouldn’t get too hung up about insisting that it comes only from playwrights for now. Playwrights work at their own pace; there’s no need to demand that they work to order. And the West End, National and Royal Court are not the only place to find them, in any case; let’s not forget that this week Shakespeare’s Globe has a new play, Eric Schlosser’s We the People, opening; while the Bush Theatre, as usual, has a full slate of new plays ahead, including David Watson’s Flight Path beginning next week, and a new Neil LaBute double-bill in January, amongst much else.