One of the inevitable side-effects to writing a blog regularly is to put one’s own life and habits in the public domain – and sometimes, of course, the lives and habits of others, too! – in a way that once would have been confined to one’s friends and family. You will know, for instance, if you read yesterday’s entry what a lark I often am (I wrote it at 5.15am) – and last night I was an owl, writing again at 11pm – so, to the question that is sometimes asked of me, “Do you ever sleep?”, the answer is that yes, I do, but not much. I’m not an insomniac – I just don’t have much time to do it. One or two of my colleagues, of course, frequently catch up in the stalls; just yesterday Quentin Letts was admitting as much in his review for The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other in the Daily Mail: after describing how, for 75 minutes, 27 actors walk on and off in various guises, he listed some of these and included a circus band who, he added in parentheses, “woke me up at 7.51pm – thank you”.
I’ve started to actually suspect another of suffering from narcolepsy – according to dictionary.com, “a condition characterized by frequent and uncontrollable periods of deep sleep” – but in a review for the same play yesterday in the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh admits to another condition that the play awoke, so to speak, in him: it left him asosiopetic, he says, and defines it as “a condition in which the sufferer is unable or unwilling to say anything.”
But it obviously doesn’t seem to last long – or does it? Just as some critics seemingly awaken from brief but deep sleep to hastily scribble notes to themselves, he is able, after that opening paragraph, to pen three more long paragraphs, too. I suppose it is for the reader to judge whether he actually says anything in them, or whether he has been true to his definition of the affliction the play apparently induced.
Will critics, of course, be left speechless or merely dumbstruck by Nicholas’s own musings when his new play, Plague over England, which revolves around John Gielgud’s arrest and conviction for public indecency, opens at the Finborough at the end of this month? That’s assuming we can find it: according to his self-penned double page feature in Wednesday’s Standard, it is “a little fringe theatre in Chelsea with a big reputation among theatre critics”. The last time I went there, just last Sunday in fact for a new play called Fucking Men that is being give a few try-out performances on Sunday and Monday evenings, it was actually in Earl’s Court.
But be that as it may, he had trouble getting others to see it when it was given a prior rehearsed reading at the Royal Court last year, which really is in Chelsea. He quotes the Court’s director Dominic Cooke as saying, “We’ll invite a whole lot of artistic directors and producers and get one of them interested.” De Jongh goes on, “Most accepted the invitation, but virtually none came. Nor did any of them ever refer to it when I subsequently saw them. It was as if by daring to write a play I had committed an act of gross indecency, some dirty act done publicly, worse than Gielgud’s own offence. My play was obviously something which could not be mentioned, let alone discussed in polite company.”
Only earlier this week de Jongh queried Cooke’s ongoing judgement as an artistic director: in a review of a play that opened there on Monday, he wrote the next day, “Last November Cooke said you could ‘sniff the best plays after half a page’. Judging by Fiona Evans’s Scarborough, whose chief characteristic is its clammy air of contrivance, Cooke’s nose has become blocked or else ‘best’ has become a thing of the past at the Court. It took me mere moments to turn up my own nose at Miss Evans’s doomy romance drama….”
But Nick is bracing himself for criticism himself. “It is good for a theatre critic, particularly an outspoken one, to suffer the lash of criticism – at least in private,” he says of the process of showing the play to a friend. But now he is about to unveil it to a larger public – and one that crucially includes his colleagues on the centre aisle (assuming it hasn’t, of course, been removed, which is a particular obsession of his, as Arthur Smith recently noted at this years Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards). “Now, after no end of agitations and anticlimaxes, I nervously await judgment day on 29 February, press night. Am I afraid of the critics? Well, yes, of course.”
Perhaps he is remembering the reception he gave to fellow critics Toby Young and Lloyd Evans on their last effort, A Right Royal Farce at the King’s Head, in 2006: “Only people with an appetite for rank theatrical rubbish will want to gorge themselves on this relentlessly boring little farce by Toby Young and Lloyd Evans”, he wrote, and went on to declare that it “has all the shock-value of a pair of pubertal schoolboys caught fiddling with each other in the bike shed.” So what about the shock-value of Gielgud caught fiddling with himself in a Chelsea public toilet? Unfortunately I won’t be able to find out on February 29 myself – I’ll be in Las Vegas then – but even though I’ll be in the world’s gambling capital, I wouldn’t want to bet anything on the outcome…
I'm sure Mr de Jongh will be treated fairly and respectfully by his critic colleagues when his play debuts. I look forward to reading the reviews with relish.