Named and shamed….

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.