I just counted up the shows I saw between last Monday and last night, and in that seven day period, I saw nine! And that’s even with taking one night off – for bad behaviour, namely to go to the Bush Theatre’s annual fundraising pub quiz, held in a Hammersmith working men’s club (apparently much favoured by Peter Gill as a rehearsal studio, since he once lived nearby) on Friday night, where a star-studded audience of Bush alumni (well, Richard Wilson, Neil LaBute and, er, Tim Fountain) celebrated the restoration of the Bush’s grant – while contributing funds beyond it. The table I was on, called Critical Mass though critics didn’t exactly provide the majority on it, got regular mentions from quiz master Ralf Little because of our presence there.
We didn’t do too badly, either, coming in fourth.
That was thanks, primarily, the collective efforts of David Benedict, who not only knew the exact rhyme scheme to Shakespeare’s sonnets but even complicated mathematical equations, the Royal Court’s Diane Borger and the sole civilian at our table, the boyfriend of AT’s Tali Pelman. But I have to admit that when it comes to general knowledge, I generally know next to nothing – until the sporting round, that is, when I was able to identify the name of the sporting play done at the Menier a couple of years ago, namely Breakfast with Johnny Wilkinson (don’t, however, ask me who he is, or what sport he plays).
But if I took one night off, I more than made up for it elsewhere in a hectic week – though some of the nine performances were mainly pleasure, not work (though work for me is often, of course, pleasure!). For one thing, I love cabaret, as regular readers of this blog will know from my annual sojourns to the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in Australia over the last four consecutive years, and you need to grab it while you can: cabaret doesn’t tend to stick around long. So last week I went to three separate performances – one at the Shaw, and two at Jermyn Street Theatre (with one more in my diary for tomorrow, too).
While the Shaw’s season has been an ad hoc one, presented under the umbrella title Feinstein’s at the Shaw on intermittent evenings over a period of a few months, Jermyn Street is currently offering a concentrated blast of cabaret splendours with its American Songbook in London season that both embrace the venerable past (on Saturday I saw Julie Wilson, who at 83 is still alive-and-kicking) and the future of it, with Maude Maggart taking over tomorrow. Last night I was there, too, for the cabaret return of one of my favourite performers, Alison Jiear, who first came to Britain as part of The Fabulous Singlettes, an Aussie 60s girl-group tribute troupe, and stayed. Wilson and Jiear were magnificent, presenting punchy and pertinent programmes that were glinting with mischief and charm.
By awful contrast, German cabaret chanteuse Ute Lemper presented an evening of indulgent self-regard at the Shaw on Thursday. She’s a slinky and provocative presence, to be sure, as we know from when she played Velma Kelly in the original company of the current revival of Chicago; but in this weirdly put-together cabaret catastrophe, she put the seal on a frequently impenetrable evening when she mashed up ‘Mack the Knife’ with ‘All that Jazz’. She needs to see Julie Wilson for a lesson in how ‘Mack the Knife’ should be delivered, with a still-devastating and lethal authority.
Wilson, of course, starred over fifty years ago in the West End in a series of musicals at the London Coliseum – and it was fun on Saturday to go from the close-up intimacy of the 70-seater Jermyn Street Theatre back to the vast Coli later the same evening, to attend the first night of ENO’s dazzling new production of Lucia di Lammermoor. This wasn’t work, either – ENO have the enlightened policy of welcoming theatre critics to its productions (though as a friend of mine ruefully asked, “Is that because the opera critics won’t go anymore?”) But after the perversities of some of its recent productions – and programming decisions, like the one to revive Kismet — ENO’s first-ever staging of Donizetti’s opera found them back on form, with a blazingly theatrical staging by David Alden that also had former ENO Music Director Paul Daniel back in the pit.
But even if I haven’t had to work all the time, theatre critics did have to yesterday, when Brief Encounter took the rare step of holding a double opening on a Sunday. This production isn’t going by the book in any sense, since it is being done not in a theatre but in a still-functioning cinema, but it also broke the rules by offering critics not a single performance to see it at, but a choice between the matinee and evening.
Since it is, of course, a film for a lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon in front of the television, I figured I’d choose the matinee (and it also let me get to Jermyn Street afterwards); and although I was in the company of colleagues (including The Observer’s Susannah Clapp, The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner, The Independent’s Paul Taylor, the FT’s Ian Shuttleworth, the Daily Express’s Julie Carpenter and the Jewish Chronicle’s John Nahan), it was interesting not to find the place saturated with us. It reminded me of the New York Critics’ previews system, which I have also regularly attended: critics there are given a choice of performances to attend, so do not do so en masse.
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