Some answers… and more questions…. UPDATED

Kelly, of course, was dying to know the sleeping scribe was that I mentioned had been asleep at the Coventry press night of Scenes from a Marriage, and wondered aloud if I hadn’t protested too much: “Stage blogger Mark Shenton insists it wasn’t him. Normally a forceful denial like that would only make Noises Off suspect that it was Shenton, but he has a good alibi in so far as he wasn’t actually at Scenes from a Marriage that night. And, alas, we can’t blame it on admitted snoozer Toby Young either, because he is no longer reviewing.” But the great thing about the interactivity of blogs is that readers may not be as inhibited as we are to name other candidates. Below my original posting there are a couple of replies identifying another critical sleeping incident at the Trafalgar Studios – a venue that I have coincidentally previously seen other sleepers at. And below Kelly’s blog last week, the Coventry sleeper, too, is identified, and his name shares the same first five letters of the city it took place in.

I also reported last week on the feud, originally mentioned on Michael Coveney’s blog but subsequently removed from there, between Three Sisters on Hope Street co-writers Diane Samuels and Tracy-Ann Oberman. In an interview with both of them in The Times on Saturday, some of the background to it are more publicly explained. Oberman apparently wanted the role of middle sister May Lasky, but was offered another role instead that she turned down. “This production may not be my ultimate vision of the play”, she is reported saying, “and in the future I fully intend to play May. I have to. I actually think she is me.” Diane Samuels tactfully says, “Without some argy bargy, no creative process could happen.” Are they still friends? “Well, we’re still neighbours” is her reply.

So there are some possible answers. Now for some more questions:

• Why were the great and good (and Abi Titmuss) in Drury Lane last Friday?

That’s an easy one! It was the annual New Year’s party for The Stage, one of the industry’s most celebrated networking occasions that allows PRs, producers, actors and other theatre professionals the chance to hook up for a drink… or two. This year there was also the chance to hear the winning entry of The Stage-sponsored Notes for The Stage competition; and also to hear Brian Attwood’s announcement that the entire 127-year back catalogue of some 170,000 pages of The Stage are being digitised for instant retrieval on the Stage website. Hooray!

• What is the Arts Council playing at?

I was also pleased to meet the Arts Council’s Director of Media Relations, Louise Wylie, who has certainly had her work cut out for her these last few weeks, but far from feeling in the eye of the storm, she told me she was actually excited at the challenges it was presenting. I wonder, however, how she felt yesterday at the Sunday Times news feature headlined “Stars force cuts U-turn on Arts Council”, suggesting that chairman Sir Christopher Frayling has confirmed that decisions to withdrew funding from about a fifth of the total had been re-considered. The Arts Council has insisted on maintaining its client confidentiality throughout this process, not going public on who the potential winners or losers actually were, which has resulted in (dis)affected groups seizing the PR initiative and managing the news – and protests – themselves. This has left the Arts Council floundering in their wake, unable to justify or explain themselves since no announcement had been made at their end at all.

All of that, of course, is due to end this Friday with the official announcement; but once again the Arts Council has wrong-footed itself with this pre-emptory statement from Frayling. The Sunday Times speculates that “among those likely to be spared” are the Bush Theatre, the Nortchott Theatre in Exeter and the National Student Drama Festival – the three, coincidentally, that Nick Hytner mentioned he’d put in special pleadings for himself at a recent press conference, as I reported here. But in the Sunday Times, Frayling now publicly rebukes Hytner: “This is a bit rich of Nick when his National Theatre has been a double winner. Also, I don’t think calling us ‘bollocks’ is what would pass as a critical judgement”. Ah, so far from not commenting on who the gainers and losers are, we now have confirmation from Sir Christopher himself that the National is a “double winner”….

3.45PM UPDATE ON MONDAY: The Arts Council have now issued a press statement:

“The names and number of organisations mentioned in the Sunday Times article are purely speculation on the part of the journalist. While it is true that Regional Councils have now all met to make their final funding decisions, the process is not complete until National Council meets on Tuesday 29th January to formally approve the overall Arts Council budget. All funded organisations will be advised of their funding for 2008-11 by Special Delivery letters on Friday 1st February, and this information will also be published on the Arts Council website later that day.”

• Who is the PR for Afrika! Afrika!

I’ve been wondering this for a while, since I never got a press release for this circus show taking place in a tent beside the O2 – and neither, when I asked them, did the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer or The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, who have, however, managed to review it. But at The Stage party on Friday, I was at last introduced to someone from the Outside Organisation, the PR company apparently looking after it. Perhaps I’ll get a press release now….

• How do you find the Rose at Kingston? (And how do you see from the front stalls?)

There are lots of challenges to opening a brand-new theatre, but it starts with helping your audience – and critics — to actually find it. The Rose of Kingston finally officially opened on Friday with Peter Hall’s new production of Uncle Vanya, but some of us had been there three years ago when Hall did a preview of the building, then still largely a building site, when he revived his Bath production of As You Like It in the shell of the incomplete auditorium for a short showing ahead of an international tour. On that occasion, critics were met at the station by serried ranks of theatre supporters and led through the crooked streets of Kingston (even the phone boxes here have an amazing way of falling over) to find it. On Friday, however, we were left to our own devices. It was fine for Lyn Gardner, who actually walked from her home nearby to get there; but for the rest of us Kingston is uncharted waters. This was, after all, only my second-ever visit there – I didn’t even realise the river ran just behind the theatre until, arriving early on Friday, my guest who knew Kingston better than me took me down there!

Of course, the last time we made allowances for the lack of facilities there – but this time I was sorry to hear from Stage reviewer John Thaxter that views from the unraked front stalls are far from ideal. As he wrote to me afterwards, “with the stage floor a bare 18 inches above the auditorium floor, I could see less than half the action. My side views, left and right were totally obscured by a forest of heads, tricky when, for Chekhov’s play, one needs to know whether other characters are eavesdropping on the intimate central exchanges.”

Perhaps the stage level needs to be raised a bit. According to John Sheppard, a Globe lecturer in Elizabethan theatre studies that John Thaxter has been in touch with, the Globe and Rose stages were five feet above the pit floor – designed to deter drunken audience members from clambering on the stage and joining in the action!

• How do you see through a pillar?

Talking of sightlines, and perhaps I was just unlucky, but I went to see the wondrous Barb Jungr at Ronnie Scott’s on Saturday night – and couldn’t see her at all! Although my tickets had been arranged through the management, I was seated on one of the side banquettes on the left hand side of the room as you enter – directly in line with a pillar that entirely obscured Barb! I moved to the vacant table in front of me, but two songs in was moved from that, too, when some late comers arrived – the waitress claiming, when I protested about not being able to see, that I had a restricted view ticket so shouldn’t complain! So I moved to a stool at the bar instead, where the view was fine – when not interrupted, that is, by the nearly constant stream of waiters passing backwards and forwards in front of me. And there was also the continuous clutter of drinks being prepared behind me, not to mention the even louder din of staff talking in the kitchen behind whenever the door to that was opened. The man propping up the bar on the corner, too, insisted on singing along whenever he knew a song – until I told him I’d rather hear Barb sing than him!

It was recently reported in the Evening Standard that Ronnie Scott’s was “in crisis” following the sudden departure of its artistic director Leo Green. Perhaps whoever takes over can sort out some of these problems….

• Why is ignorance a badge of honour?

Finally, how is it that cultural philistinism is not merely alive but actually applauded on The Guardian blog? In an entry on the film version of Sweeney Todd, film and music writer Andrew Pulver declares that what he really hated about it were the songs. Fair enough – not everyone loves Sondheim. But this isn’t informed commentary: “I’m no Sondheim maven, nor am I much of a fan of musicals in general. In fact, the only Sondheim tune I know I’ve heard is ‘Send in the Clowns’.” But The Guardian seems to have asked one to write about it. He’s not seen or heard other Sondheim – and not seen or heard many other musicals, though he’s quick to dismiss them by parading the feeble extent of his knowledge: “I still find the genre difficult to like, especially in its modern incarnation: for every toe-tapper like Cabaret or Bugsy Malone there’s a stinker like Rent or Evita.” Cabaret – a musical about the rise of Nazism in 30s Berlin – a toe-tapper? This is true ignorance paraded as a virtue.