I’ve previously reported here that actor David Haig recently told me how matinees nowadays are busier than ever: ““When I was first in the West End you could not rely on the matinees to be full,” he told me, “but nowadays you can rely on the matinees to be full and not the evenings. I think it is to do with a generation of the public who used to go in the evenings, but who are now older and more comfortable going to a matinee.”
This was born out yesterday when I went to see the quintessential matinee play featuring a quintessential matinee star: the revival of The Importance of Being Earnest with Penelope Keith. The Vaudeville Theatre was so packed that it felt like being at a Wednesday matinee at Richmond. And – proving that I, too, am well on my way to becoming a matinee lady – I am also fond of repeating myself, so let me do that and say what I said the last time I wrote about matinees: “There is something uniquely reassuring to feel the warm glow of appreciation that comes from an audience who have invested in going to the theatre all of their lives.”
This was both a star and a play that they know and love, too: it was like visiting an old friend for all of us. So what that some of the supporting performances are a bit broad, and the sets a bit wobbly; so are we all nowadays. And this is a play that helpfully even inserts not only two toilet breaks, but also a nap break, too: the middle act (in which Lady Bracknell doesn’t even appear) had at least five people in the row in front of me nodding off. And the great thing is that they didn’t miss a thing….
Then it was on to the Almeida, for a change of pace and place (and a few more nappers, including a leading critic seated in his usual seat on the third row of the right hand aisle): we’re having another of those mini-Pinter fests in town, and last night was the turn for yet another production of The Homecoming. I’ve not done a statistical analysis of all of Pinter’s plays, but this one seems to come around more than most: there’s simultaneously another production on Broadway, starring Ian McShane and Eve Best, at the Cort Theatre, but in the last decade we’ve also had revivals at the National (1997, with David Bradley and Lindsay Duncan), and Comedy Theatre (2001, with Ian Holm and Lia Williams). So, like Earnest, this is starting to feel like an old friend, too, though a still disconcertingly disturbing one.
How many stars will I give it? A critical colleague, paying unusually close attention to such things only because he was teaching a class on criticism and the group had studied last Sunday’s reviews, came with a message from one of his students: why, having written what looked like a rave review for the other Pinter (the double-bill of The Lover and The Collection at the Comedy), had I only given it three stars? I was surprised, because I was sure I had in fact given it four. I later checked it out, and I was right; somehow, a star was lost when the review was put onto the page. So don’t believe everything you read. But the lesson, as these students demonstrated, is to read the review, too: it may tell a very different story to the boiled down version that appears in the star rating.
Last night’s Almeida opening, of course, meant that I wasn’t at another in nearby Hoxton: The Death of Margaret Thatcher at the Courtyard also opened officially last night. But if you were a Daily Telegraph reader, you might have been disconcerted to find a review the day before, and not from either of its excellent critics, Charles Spencer and Dominic Cavendish: on Wednesday, the paper published a “review” on page ten of its news pages written by one Andrew Gimson – the paper’s parliamentary sketch writer. Is he seeking to follow in the footsteps of Quentin Letts, who does double duty as both sketch writer and tetchy theatre critic for the Daily Mail? But at least Quentin follows the rules of engagement. He went to the first performance on Tuesday evening, too – but his review hasn’t appeared until today’s paper.
Well if you WANT a statistical analysis... Going from the plays reviewed by The Stage since we launched the new website in 2004 the most popular play of Pinter's has actually been The Dumb Waiter (6 times), followed by The Caretaker (5 times), The Birthday Party (4 times), Old Times and Betrayal (3), A Slight Ache/The Lover/The Collection (2), Ashes To Ashes/A Kind of Alaska/The Hothouse (1) and so far we haven't reviewed a version of The Homecoming! But of course we don't review every production and maybe it's more popular overseas or amongst amateur groups.
Nothing to say about Mahler, then? :/