Not enough hours in the day….

It will, no doubt, be heralded in some quarters as a great piece of abstract European experimental theatre, but really: bring back Rattigan, say I. I fell in love with the theatre thanks to seeing a production of The Deep Blue Sea as a teenager (a play which is, indeed, back on the road right now, with an official press invite being extended to when it reaches Guildford – and yes, I will be there, or at Richmond the week after), but I couldn’t imagine anyone falling in love with the theatre after seeing this. In fact, I fear it would be enough to put them off for life.

Mind you, anything that can give rise to a review like the one posted by the West End Whingers here has got to be worth it. And perhaps, I’m just showing my age. How old-fashioned of me to want a play to have a plot, characters and meaning! Or to expect actors to have to act, not merely be moving puppets populating a so-called writer and director’s expressionistic landscape.

Frankly, if you want to watch life go by, just buy a coffee at a café on Old Compton Street and sit outside, as I frequently do – my favourite one on the corner of Frith Street, across from Café Nero and next door to Balan’s Café, even has outdoor heaters, so you can do so year-round. It’s a lot cheaper than buying a theatre ticket – and you can leave whenever you want to. Mind you, I suspect that audiences will be making their own minds up as to how long they want to put up with this play, too: the first leaver last night was just fifteen minutes in. And that, of course, was on a press night, when most of the audience have some kind of interest in being there, whether they’re disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer – who has long, as we know, championed experimental theatre, such as his own courtroom drama The Accused in which he put himself into the dock, not long before he was subsequently put there for real – or Peter Hall or David Hare.

Even if Archer’s career as a playwright won’t exactly earn him a permanent place in theatre history, I discovered in one of my interviews on Tuesday that his legacy to at least one West End theatre is going to be more enduring: he owned the Playhouse Theatre on Northumberland Avenue for a time, and – according to JJ Feild, currently starring there in Ring Round the Moon — he actually sold off the theatre’s dressing rooms to be converted into apartments. “When you look at the theatre on the left,” JJ told me, “those were the dressing rooms – so now we’re all forced to share the few rooms in the basement. We’ve become this big family underneath the stalls!”