Christmas seems to get earlier every year — and so now does the end of the year, too. In yesterday’s Guardian, Michael Billington was already offering his best and worst of the year, which kicked off with a warning shot about the state of regional theatre following the closures, mid-season, of Bristol Old Vic and Derby Playhouse. “Regional playhouses are vital to the structure of the nation’s theatre: close one or two and the dominoes start to tumble”, Michael writes; but Derby has, in fact, already re-opened just as suddenly as it closed, with its Christmas run of Treasure Island suddenly salvaged and resuming performances last Saturday. (The theatre’s ongoing future is, however, still far from secure, and on its website, it is both soliciting ongoing support, and points out that the theatre is still in administration and is only able to sell tickets for Treasure Island). But Michael is undoubtedly prescient about the dominoes effect: after first writing this entry earlier this morning, I received an e-mail a few hours later that told me that Exeter’s Northcott Theatre, which has re-opened just today after a £2.1m redevelopment programme, is facing a bleak future following the loss of its £547,000 Arts Council grant from April 2009. The theatre had been closed for nearly a year, with the Arts Council supporting the redevelopment both with a £100,000 grant towards it and a further £540,000 in revenue grants to support it while it was closed.
But if the Arts Council’s announcement, just as the theatre re-opens for business, is a case of bad timing, it may also have been a little premature for Michael Billington to take an overview of a theatre year that still had last night’s opening of an exemplary West End revival of Absurd Person Singular and next week’s opening of Much Ado About Nothing at the National to come.
In New York, too, New York magazine’s Jeremy McCarter has also already weighed in with his annual review, too. There will, no doubt, be many more such pieces in the weeks to come on both sides of the Atlantic; right now in London, most of us are still dealing with this week to think about the entire year yet! In fact, I’ve just got to get through today first, with a three-show day ahead – I’m seeing a morning Christmas show at Hampstead, then a matinee at the National (catching Women of Troy that opened when I was in the US to wildly differing reviews, from a one-star pan in the Sunday Times to a five-star rave in Metro, so I’m looking forward to making up my own mind, but for which a friend has already offered a wonderfully succinct preview when I invited him: “I’d love to spend an afternoon turning out the lights and mumbling, but I’ve got something else to do!”), then the return of Tintin tonight.
The main Stage site also carries news of the potentially devastating out-of-the-blue cut to the National Student Drama Festival, based on no identified shortcomings whatever.