May 2008 Archives

Only last month I was writing here of how film critics were becoming increasingly endangered species, with some 28 losing their jobs in America in the last two years alone and not being replaced. Now a worrying trend is starting to emerge over here for TV critics, too. The Evening Standard, which once prided itself on fielding one of the most acerbic in the business, Victor Lewis-Smith, no longer runs a review column of the previous night’s viewing highlights (or lowlights); and now the Daily Telegraph won’t anymore, either, from next week.

James Walton signed off his final column yesterday by saying, “The time has come to bid you a sort of farewell - because this is my last daily TV review. From Monday the Telegraph is redesigning its TV pages in a way that means this space will be occupied by more features and interviews.”

Some of his loyal readers have already posted comments to the online version of his last column, that show that not everyone thinks this is the way to go - but could be proof of the way things are going.

I was writing only yesterday about my very personal connection to Fat Pig, and proof positive about how live some of the issues that the play raises are is the response of some of my colleagues. In a world where racism and homophobia are now rightly legislated against, one of the last bastions of legitimate prejudice seems to be fat-ism - even the state legislates against it as various local authorities are now actively withholding medical treatment to the overweight for procedures like hip and knee replacements.

But the worst part of the new fat-ism is the supposed concern that masquerades behind the assumption of guilt: “Huge is a growing issue nowadays; over a third of most people are too fat, and it’s bad for them and bad news for their loved ones,” writes Michael Coveney of Fat Pig in his review, while Charles Spencer suggests that Neil LaBute “is uncharacteristically soft on his fat heroine. To be as overweight as Helen is not normal, but LaBute doesn’t inquire why she has put on so many surplus pounds, jeopardising both her health and her romantic life.”

What legitimises such concerns is the assumption that “fatties” have brought it upon themselves - and can always do something about it.

Theatre, if it’s to mean anything, takes its cues from real life; and one of the joys of it is having a window opened into other people’s lives. But sometimes it is your own that you see being reflected back at you, and by coincidence, two plays that both opened last night did just that for me. (But no, I wasn’t a miracle worker who was able to be in two places at once as they did so - I was at one of them on Sunday afternoon, the other last night).

I’ve already written here yesterday about one of the undergraduate characters in Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit wanting to grow up to be theatre critic of the Sunday Times; and of course I was myself a Cambridge undergraduate in my time, some 14 years later than when this play begins, who also wanted to grow up to be a theatre critic - and even in those student days, was indeed a terror of the Cambridge stalls (and not just ones in theatres - the character played by James Dreyfus and I had something else in common then!)

Who says public, paid-for entertainment is dying? Everywhere I went over the long weekend I saw full houses: from Richmond and Chichester (in both the studio - easy to fill - and main house, far more difficult!), to the Menier and Minnelli, plus the Trafalgar Studios and Indiana Jones, it was a packed weekend in every sense. And if, as usual, I overloaded my diary (and managed to double-book myself on Sunday afternoon and entirely forget about the first show I had booked for some weeks ago until the venue concerned e-mailed to ask where I’d been!), at least I dodged one bullet: a colleague told me he’d been to see Haunted at the Arts on Friday evening, and declared it the worst thing he’d ever seen - since the last worst thing he’d ever seen!

The Arts is one of those venues that is starting to feel haunted indeed; once show after show fails to deliver, a bad smell starts to attach to it - and soon it becomes associated only with failure and lousy evenings at the theatre. It’ll be difficult to turn around - perhaps they need Jonathan Church, the wonder director who has previously turned around the fortunes of the Salisbury Playhouse and Birmingham Rep and has now done the same thing at Chichester, where the previous triumvirate of directors - the late Steven Pimlott, Ruth Mackenzie and Martin Duncan - had perhaps programmed more adventurously, but it turned out far too adventurously for Chichester audiences who stayed away in droves. Church, however, seems to know exactly what Chich needs; it’s a pity he can’t be cloned and parachuted into other troubled theatres around the country.

I typically “theme” my entries here (and sometimes ramble!) to make specific points. But today I’m going to round up some things I’ve spotted lately - one as recently as last night - that have intrigued me.

• Billy Elliot is currently trumpeting, in an ad and poster campaign, that “Billy’s Gone Global”, and cites four cities in evidence: “London-Sydney-New York-Newcastle”. Only it has never played in Newcastle - though a plan had been once mooted to do it there first, before it came to London, but it was abandoned — and that isn’t even where the show is set, either! As a friend from those parts informs me, “For heaven’s sake, Easington isn’t even in the same county!”

Only yesterday I was mentioning here that I’d seen sixteen shows in the previous twelve days; but I was clearly slacking. Someone I know who lives in LA - where he works for a film studio, but is a keen theatregoer - was in London for six nights last week, and managed to fit in 11 shows between Monday and Saturday! He flew from LA the Saturday before, stopping over in New York (where he saw one show on Saturday evening and another at the Sunday matinee), then flew on overnight on Sunday night; on his way back last Sunday, he again stopped over in New York, going into town to see one more show before going back to the airport to fly on home! So in the course of nine days, he saw fourteen shows.

No, it isn’t a competition - but here’s an interesting difference: he actually pays for all of his tickets. So he makes a commitment of time as well as money for something he is passionate about. But he rarely, if ever, pays full price - quizzing him on his week here, he’d managed to get deals like a £10 ticket to Gone with the Wind from lastminute.com and a £20 day seat for Marguerite. Sometimes, the availability of an offer dictates his choices: finding none for The Deep Blue Sea, for instance, he chose not to see it. (Yet when I went myself to last Saturday evening’s performance, the stalls was probably a third full. Surely the producers should start getting offers out and audiences in?)

But part of the reason he was able to load his schedule with quite so many shows is the availability of more variable matinee days and times.

In the last twelve days, going back to the Saturday before last, I have seen sixteen shows - of them, five I had of course seen in other previous stagings, each several times over — King Lear, The Birthday Party, Pygmalion, The Good Soul of Szechuan and Chess; and four I had seen in earlier incarnations of the same productions — That Face (first at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, now newly transferred to the Duke of York’s), Never Forget (first at its Manchester opening last summer, now at the Savoy), Fucking Men (first at its Finborough “reading” earlier this year, now in a full production there) and The Deep Blue Sea (first on its regional tour, now at the Vaudeville).

But its striking — and welcome — that three of those four “repeats” are of new work (albeit recycling old pop tunes in the case of Never Forget); and that the rest of this time period also contains four more entirely new plays and two new musicals (and one cabaret burlesque evening, just for variety!). Nine out of 16 shows being new work is not a bad strike rate, and proves that even the West End hasn’t given up entirely on it.

Last night saw an increasingly rare example of one of them being an entirely new musical - and with a new score, too - receiving its world premiere in the West End.

Yesterday was a bit of a mad day: not one, not two but three separate London producing theatres chose to issue their new season releases simultaneously. You’d have thought some sort of co-ordination would have been possible between them to spread it out a bit - especially since two of the three theatres use the same PR agency.

This way they’re all fighting for the same editorial space, though I don’t suppose that the papers are exactly holding the presses for announcements of London premieres for new work by August Wilson (at the Tricycle), Sam Shepard and Neil LaBute (Almeida), however revered they may be. (Is LaBute, by the way, on his way to becoming Britain’s most produced contemporary American playwright? There isn’t, I suppose, too much competition, alas, but just next week the West End gets Fat Pig, while the Almeida have In A Dark Dark House opening in November. Both of them were first produced by off-Broadway’s MCC Theater, who are even now previewing LaBute’s latest, Reasons to be Pretty, so I guess it can only be a matter of time before we get that one, too).

Michael Attenborough was originally planning to host a Critics’ lunch last Friday, presumably to reveal his new season to us, but it was cancelled when the date proved “inconvenient for most”. But there was no headline grabbing stuff there anyway; instead, of the theatres making announcements yesterday, it was the Lyric Hammersmith who had two banner stories.

I blogged only the other day about the collapse of Telegraph critic Charles Spencer’s seat at the opening night of The Deep Blue Sea last week, and indeed he wrote about himself in his review of the production: “I was completely caught up in this deeply moving revival of Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece when the emotional tragedy on stage was counterpointed by sheer farce in the stalls. My seat suddenly collapsed. I know I’m overweight but surely not that overweight. Rarely has the dilapidated state of our crumbling West End theatres been more forcefully brought home to me. Mercifully, the man from the Sunday Times offered me his spare seat.”

Intriguingly, the front-of-house billboard of Charlie’s review - which reprints most of his otherwise rave review in full - omits this opening paragraph. But these are far from the only occupational hazards that those of us who go to the theatre, and write about it, frequently suffer or at least witness: at Saturday’s matinee of The English Game, Richard Bean’s brilliant new state-of-the-nation play told through the players of a local cricket team, a disgruntled player lobbed his bat on the ground, and it hurtled across the stage and into the front row of Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre!

It reminded me of a first night at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs a few years ago of a play called Flesh Wound by Che Walker, that nearly inflicted one on a critic seated in the front row.

Brits have made a good showing in the nominations for the Tony Awards, announced earlier this week with six shows that originated in London (or Chichester) picking up nearly a third of the total number of nominations to take 35 nods (out of the 112 in all). But with thirty more shows produced overall on Broadway in the season that the announcement of the nominations now brings to an end, that actually proves the disproportionate influence and quality of Brit-originated shows and/or personnel, that I previously noted on a Guardian blog here.

In fact, with ten other locally-produced new shows this season entirely snubbed in the nominations, the remaining 77 nominees are spread amongst the remaining 20 non-British born productions, though several of them again go to Brits in them, like Eve Best for The Homecoming and Ben Daniels for Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

But the frontrunners are Broadway’s own.

In the fourth act of Pygmalion, Colonel Pickering complains, “Well, I feel a bit tired. It’s been a long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and the opera! Rather too much of a good thing.” And I realised, hearing this line at yesterday’s matinee, that he might have been talking about my sort of day, one had actually led me - for the first time in memory - to actually be late for that performance.

I’m usually obsessive about time-keeping — and particularly about curtain up times — so I invariably aim to arrive at the theatre at least half an hour before a performance is due to start; turning up late for a performance as a critic is like getting late to the office for others. But of course everyone does it, from time to time; there was one occasion when the Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer was browsing in a record shop before a Donmar Warehouse press night, only to realise his watch had stopped - and he’d missed the first half hour!

It’s one thing, though, for the audience to be late, but quite another for the actors.

Is there an original pop musical in the world stuffed with better melodies than Chess? I can’t think of one - yet it has never become the megahit onstage that the score, at least, promises. It’s ironic that, a decade to virtually the day that the original production of Chess closed at the Prince Edward Theatre (on April 8, 1989, after a run of a month short of three years), another musical that also featured songs by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus should open at the same theatre, on April 6, 1999, and still be going strong in London and around the world nearly yet another decade later: that show, of course, is Mamma Mia!, and indeed partly owes its very existence to Chess, since its producer Judy Craymer first met Benny and Bjorn when she worked on the development of Chess with that show’s original producer Robert Fox.

But whereas Mamma Mia! already had a truckload of established pop hits to accompany its passage to the stage, Chess had to establish its own, and lyricist Tim Rice - at whose instigation the show had been written, and whose inspired idea it had been to invite Andersson and Ulvaeus to collaborate with him on it - followed a route that had served him well with his earlier collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita: a concept recording was made first to introduce the score to the world, and created two fast hits, ‘I Know Him So Well’ and ‘One Night in Bangkok’. And then, in 1984, two years ahead of its stage premiere, a concert version was taken on the road.

For the last two nights at the Royal Albert Hall, the show has now come full circle and was once again a celebrity powerhouse concert - a format in which it has never been bettered.

It was the critics who are universally blamed for the original fate of The Birthday Party, when - after a couple of encouraging regional dates in Cambridge, then Oxford - it came to what was then the Lyric Opera House in Hammersmith on May 19, 1958, and abruptly closed just eight performances later after a run of only a week. Pinter himself wrote later that year to the editor of a university paper, “The response given to The Birthday Party in Oxford and Cambridge was most stimulating, involving a high degree of participation on the part of both audiences…. The remarkable difference in reaction to The Birthday Party on the part of the London daily critics and the audience in Oxford and Cambridge constitutes for me one of the most interesting features of the progress of the play. (There was, of course, no audience in London; the abstention counselled by nine or eleven critics was heeded sufficiently to bring about the abrupt closure).”

But it was also, of course, a critic who famously made people think differently about it, too.

London was in glorious weather this weekend; and I was in (mostly) glorious theatre for much of it. Even the Barbican Centre becomes nearly palatable in the good weather: though the lakeside terrace may be an entirely man-made oasis in the midst of the bleakly (dys)functional urban cityscape it is part of, but at least you get the illusion of nature. And on Friday night, going there to hear the premiere of a new Dominic Muldowney piece being presented as part of a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert, I met the reason for me going to it at all out on the terrace: Philip Quast was mingling informally with his family, before it began.

That’s the great thing about open spaces like this on warm sunny evenings: it democratises the concert going experience. (And the BBC Symphony chorus were also out of the terrace earlier, doing a group photoshot). But if it was a nice discovery to find Philip out on the terrace, it was, of course, even more special to hear him inside, taking on such a demanding new classical piece so commandingly.

The West End is forever in danger of being turned into a giant TV variety studio: three West End musicals, of course, have already had their original leads cast by public vote on reality television, with a fourth on the way; while The Sound of Music replaced its TV found star, Connie Fisher, with Summer Strallen, who was first introduced into the show not on the stage of the London Palladium but via a set up on TV’s Hollyoaks. Plays, too, are regularly cast nowadays from the ranks of inexperienced TV and film actors.

Last week’s opening episode of the new series of Channel 4’s Peepshow made surprisingly prescient fun of this. Mark and Jeremy arrange to go on a double-date to the theatre - and Jeremy assures his sceptical friend that the prospect of going to see a play wasn’t something to be afraid of: “It’s all different now,” he says. “They’ve moved on. They use proper actors, you know, Americans, and people off the telly, and they’re all based on films, so its fine.”

Since Jeremy is played by Robert Webb - who next week makes his West End debut in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, alongside My Family’s Kris Marshall and Gavin and Stacey’s Joanna Page - he is literally proving the point.

The last musical of the current Broadway season that opened officially on Tuesday night has also become the first to close: the opening night for Glory Days, that arrived on Broadway after premiering at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, was also its last night. Its producers said in a statement yesterday, “We adore Glory Days and everyone connected with this production. Sadly, given the over-night reviews and our low advance sales, we believe it is prudent to close the show on Broadway immediately.”

It was clearly less prudent to open the show there at all, and will mark the total write-off of the reported $2.5m capitalization that it cost to bring it there.

Even though the arrival of the summer, at last, means that we have to start suffering the curse of unventilated, non air-conditioned theatres again, we were at least spared one result of that yesterday: the shirt of the Evening Standard critic actually stayed on all day for the Henry VI trilogy at the Roundhouse. But that’s because it was Fiona Mountford, not Nicholas de Jongh, who was in the hot seat (in every sense).

Though Nick had reviewed the first half of the trilogy, it was Fiona who took over for the second half. (In another job share, Ian Shuttleworth was reviewing for the FT, whereas his colleague Sarah Hemming had reviewed the first half, though you’d have thought it would make sense for the same critic to review the whole experience since there are so many overlaps and parallels between them). Last summer, as in previous years, the moment the temperature went up, Nick’s shirt lost most of its buttons, as I noted here at the time; most of us stay resolutely buttoned-up yesterday, though I noticed Time Out’s Caroline McGinn sporting a shoulderless number, while Maxwell Cooter from Whatsonstage.com was wearing shorts.

In fact everyone in the audience noticed Max’s shorts, since in the middle play he was hauled onstage to act as executioner - a nice irony, of course, given that he was reviewing!

That headline, of course, is Mrs Lovett’s declaration to the customer that finally wanders into her shop after she hasn’t seen one for weeks - and discovers that even she thinks that she’s peddling “probably the worst pies in London.” Last week, I became that customer - no, I’m not referring to my experience at the Vodafone shop in Manchester, where you can’t afford to be in a rush or hurry, either, since even with just two other customers in the vast store (and counting a staff of at least seven) I still had to wait nearly 20 minutes to be served last Thursday. Rather, I became the onstage stooge to Maria Friedman as she sang “The Worst Pies in London” at the Menier Chocolate Factory on Saturday evening.

Of course, having seen the show before, I knew that someone gets chosen - and indeed, a friend who had also been before muttered as we returned to the theatre that some poor sod was about to be surprised. I naively thought I was safe because I was sat towards the back - directly, it turns out, in front of Trevor Nunn (who had directed Maria in her last West End and Broadway outing in The Woman in White). But Maria had spotted me in her second number, when she enters from the rear of the auditorium and had sung directly to me; so she honed in on me. After the show, I discovered from Trevor’s daughter, whom he had come with, that “dad thought she was coming for him!”

But Maria had nunn of that.

Confession time: I have nothing to say today! And, just as shocking, I didn’t go to the theatre last night. So, in fact, the two might be related.

I’m not usually, as regular readers will know, lost for words, and there’s invariably something happening, somewhere, that I can turn into a column. But life - or what passes for my life, in the form of the theatre - hasn’t delivered today. Hopefully normal service will be resumed after the bank holiday. But I’m probably also grinding to a halt in anticipation of that weekend, which I’ve actually started already by coming up to Manchester for a couple of nights.

David Hare makes a particularly revealing comment in his programme note for the adaptation of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking that he first directed on Broadway last year and has now brought to the National Theatre (where it opened last night) about what he thought when he was first approached to do the job: “It was easy enough to spend a few hours reading a book about death which you could let flop in one hand while nursing a scotch in the other. But how would it be to spend months in the gruelling Broadway system - endless previews, needless hysteria, erratic critics - in the company of a 72-year-old first-time playwright whose agony of grief was plainly so raw? Wasn’t the prospect… well, rather austere? So it’s hard to explain my own reaction - the one you have before you can think - was that the whole thing sounded, in prospect, highly enjoyable.”

That apparent perversity - of seeing pleasure in dealing with pain - is also one that underpins the whole love-hate relationship that artists like Hare have with Broadway itself, and which he alludes to himself in calling it a gruelling system. But apart from the narcissism of seeing it as all about him - and why shouldn’t it be, I suppose, given that is writing about his choice of whether to take it on or not - there’s also his complaints about that system, which he promptly itemises.