The lights went out but the show still went on. With most of central London, it seems, in a constant state of being dug up, it’s not just difficult to walk along Shaftesbury Avenue (and don’t even think of trying to walk down Old Compton Street uninterrupted), but also local businesses are being affected by the sort of regular power outages that they’ve come to expect in South Africa, for instance, at the moment, where power is being rationed as the state-owned electricity company implements a series of rolling power-cuts (known euphemistically there as “load-shedding”) because supply cannot keep pace with demand. But this is central London, for heaven’s sake – and, as with the ailing infrastructure of the tube and the crumbling state of most of our theatres, no one much wants to take responsibility for such things.
But the Gielgud Theatre is one of the theatres that has had lavish love and attention bestowed on it, courtesy of producer/theatre owner Cameron Mackintosh; and when, mid-way through last night’s press performance of God of Carnage, the lights suddenly blew, I wondered briefly if it was a dramatic effect as the actors continued to play through very much diminished lighting. But no – soon a stage manager interrupted Janet McTeer mid-sentence and said they would have to stop the show. And minutes later, Cameron himself walked to the front of the stalls and told the audience it wasn’t because he hadn’t fed the electricity meter — Les Mis was down next door, too.
Nica Burns, who now owns the Apollo and Lyric in the other direction, was sat behind me, and told me that a performance of The Vortex last week had to be completed by emergency “working” lights, too. (Pity this wasn’t a Katie Mitchell production – you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference).
After a break of about ten minutes, David Pugh — the producer of God of Carnage — returned to say the show would go on because it had to, but with those working lights on and the house lights kept on, too (handy, of course, for us critics, who are used to scribbling in the dark, but this time could see what we were writing). About fifteen minutes into the resumed (and frankly compromised) performance, someone rigged up a follow-spot beam, which threw a bit more light on the proceedings, but poor lighting designer Hugh Vansone’s work was still nowhere to be seen.
You feel, of course, for the actors in such situations: first nights are highly charged events, anyway, and to have their meticulously-maintained energy flow interrupted in this way must have been a bitter blow; and then to know that the audience were only seeing the rest of the show in half-shadow must have been even more galling.
This isn’t the only recent opening to have been thus affected. Famously, of course, the lights were also badly affected for the first night of the original production of The History Boys in 2004 at the National, but before the show actually was due to start when a sprinkler system was activated – drenching the stage and lighting rig. It played havoc with the lighting set, but Nick Hytner made a speech before the performance finally began, about an hour late, and warned us that we wouldn’t be seeing the lighting as it had been designed.
Nor, last year, did things go to plan on the first night of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Adelphi, when – as I blogged here at the time – the Ishmaelites failed to come riding by, so that Joseph’s brothers had no one to sell him into slavery to. The apparent failure of the revolving stage floor caused the performance to be halted, too – with rumours soon following that the performance had been sabotaged over a backstage dispute involving crew wages; but these were unsubstantiated. As Lee Mead, the reality TV winner who played the title role on the opening night, sagely said at the time, “That’s theatre, that happens.”
The sets also failed to move, someone told me last night, when My Fair Lady transferred from the National to Drury Lane in 2001, and the resulting hold-up meant that the show went on for hours and hours. I’m not sure the audience noticed, though – it was a Trevor Nunn production, after all, and they’re expected to be long. (Talking of which, I am dying to know how long will Gone with the Wind be….) But going further back in the history books, the first night of another Nunn musical, Cats, was famously disrupted not during the show but at the curtain calls: as Michael Coveney reports in his biography of Lloyd Webber, “The reception was wild bordering on crazy as the critics dashed from their seats. As they did so, Brian Blessed came to the front of the stage and raised his hand, asking the audience to leave quickly and quietly as there was a bomb scare. A standing ovation was cut off at the knees,” he wittily remarks. The scare turned out to be a hoax call – and, Coveney also reports, it had actually been made just before the climax of the show when ‘Memory’ is sung – “but the stage doorkeeper couldn’t find anyone authorised to stop the show. So ‘Memory’ and the finale went ahead uninterrupted. Lloyd Webber’s fortune, and career, may have hinged on that accident.”
And talking of fortunes, and back finally to Yasmina Reza: in Dominic Dromgoole’s witty, provocative survey of contemporary playwrights The Full Room, his shortest and funniest chapter is reserved for her: it comprises just five words, which are then offered in translation, too. “Yasmina Reza is very rich,” is followed by an offset, italicised second line: “Yasmina Reza est tres riche”.
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