Being a theatre critic makes you sometimes feel that every night is Groundhog Day: there we are all assembled yet again, gathered perhaps in slightly different configurations and maybe with the odd diary difference, but mostly in the same places on the same nights, chasing the same basic round of shows to cover however we do it.
So, for instance, following the interesting clash that occurred on Tuesday evening when the launch of the transfer of the RSC history cycle with Richard II went head-to-head with the Donmar’s opening of its new production of Peter Gill’s Small Change, this meant that most of the first-string lot were at the Roundhouse, but Michael Billington and Nicholas de Jongh managed to be at both - Michael by going to Richard II a night early on the Monday (which meant that his “overnight” review for that play alone appeared on Wednesday), while de Jongh went to Small Change a night early (and evidently offered his nuts to the West End Whingers to nibble, but that’s another story; though quite how they also managed to also spy Charlie Spencer there is even more puzzling, since he was in Birmingham at Hapgood and didn’t see it at all.).
The “overnight” critics, too, I hear will be absent from Gone with the Wind on Tuesday evening - with a running time now set at three-and-a-half hours (as of Wednesday’s two performances after the “fixes” that followed Tuesday’s cancelled performance), there is still no way they would be able to sensibly file their reviews immediately after the opening night performance next Tuesday, so are being allowed in on Monday to get ahead of the game.
A couple of Sunday papers now also have ludicrously early deadlines for their critics: the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph both require copy for Wednesday mornings, while the Independent on Sunday requires it for Thursday morning, so those critics sometimes sneak in early, with permission, so that they can at least publish simultaneously with the rest of the Sundays.
But clashing dates aside as we each individually negotiate our diaries and respective deadlines, we’re essentially in the same boat, mostly at the same time - literally so, when it came to the opening of Fram at the National last night, which was the name of the ship that Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had specially built to take him to the Arctic in the 1890s. In real life the boat sturdily transported him and his fellow explorer Johansen to their destination, but even if the play felt like it was taking on water and sinking under the weight last night, there was still plenty to keep theatre critics, at least, amused.
First of all, of course, it was intriguing to find actor Jasper Britton - who was playing Nansen, but less than two months ago was playing John Gielgud in Nicholas de Jongh’s play Plague over England - once again finding his character playing opposite another who is Sybil Thorndike! And then, in an even more striking resonance, to find that de Jongh is himself personally named in the new play, when scholar and translator of Greek plays Gilbert Murray bemoans the possibility that de Jongh, too, might become memorialised in Westminster Abbey.
Those are the kind of “in” theatrical jokes that make one wonder exactly who this play is aimed at - if it’s purely the theatrical cognoscenti, what is it doing in the Travelex £10 season? If, as I understood it, the season is partly an exercise in audience building to draw in spectators who might not otherwise go to the theatre because they are put off by its price, then they’ll be baffled (and not necessarily be tempted to visit again). If, on the other hand, the Travelex season is now an exercise in experimental theatre-making that is more risky than most of the fare at the National and a majority of tickets at £10 is therefore considered a fairer price to expect audiences to pay to take that risk, wouldn’t it have been better taken in the smaller confines of the Cottesloe where it wouldn’t have felt quite so exposed?
Then again, though I’d never heard of Nansen before seeing this play, I was intrigued to discover another weird critical connection when Georgina Brown told Michael Billington and me that her kids went to a prep school in Dorset where each house that the students were streamed into was named after an explorer, and hers had been in Nansen House!
Sybil Thorndike, meanwhile, ends the first act by throwing up onstage - something I’ve now seen in a play two nights running, since there was a scene in Henry IV at the Roundhouse yesterday when someone in an Eastcheap Inn also does so. It’s actually becoming a trend this year: there was also Tamsin Greig’s famous vomiting scene in God of Carnage and another in Roy Williams’s RSC transfer of Days of Significance.
But they’re evidently not the only ones being made ill in the theatre at the moment. In a surprisingly candid interview in this week’s Time Out, Jasper Britton comes clean about why he withdrew from the Royal Court’s production of The Arsonists last year, saying that he left it “because I made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t work with wankers anymore. Because I’ve done too much of it and it makes me unwell. I’ve pissed off so many people anyway.” We can only speculate who those wanker(s) might have been: since he continued to work with his fellow cast members in the other play, Rhinoceros, that was running in rep with it, could it have been the director Ramin Gray (the other play had been directed by Dominic Cooke)?
Not Charles Spencer??? Does he perhaps have an evil twin?
Thank you for alerting our attention to this. The source of this supposed sighting of CS has been given a severe drubbing down.
Thank goodness facts are not our forte.
Andrew