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.
Mind you, I wasn’t sure that the production of The Cherry Orchard in the main house was what I needed; though it dragged out the kind of stellar line-up that used to be a Chich staple, they ended up on the same stage but not the same page. Intriguingly, Diana Rigg shares above-the-title billing on the theatre posters with Maureen Lipman, the latter of whom is in fact in the supporting role of Charlotta but appears to be on a full-time mission to pull focus. She first makes an entrance with a dog (her own, I’m told), who reappears with her in the final scene, too - and in the midst of what should be an ineffably sad moment as Rigg’s Ranyevskaya’s bids a final farewell to the house she has now lost, all we are watching is Lipman trying to keep the dog under control. But though she points a stern finger at the dog who obediently follows, no one has pointed a stern finger at Lipman: between the comedy accent and the constant parade of circus tricks (at one point she actually hula-hoops across the back of the stage, for no apparent reason), is at once both unwatchable but whom you can’t take your eyes off. (In the Minerva studio, meanwhile, Samantha Spiro’s Fanny Brice in Funny Girl is watchable for all the right reasons).
Like Lipman, Liza Minnelli is also an attention junkie; but there is something utterly remarkable about her resilience and survivor’s instinct, too. And like Chichester, she has bounced back from the brink of disaster to make an astonishing recovery: I’ve not seen her in such apparent health and fitness for years now as she was for her London opening at the Coliseum on Sunday evening. She’s trim - “I lost 173 pounds”, she jokes (or maybe it’s true!) - and is able to strike the old poses to perfection; she wears the old ‘New York, New York’ glittering red suit as if the thirty years since that movie was first made hadn’t happened. No such luck for the audience, of course - those of us who have been following her across all these years are showing our age in a way that she isn’t! (I’m not sure I’ve ever been amongst a more ghoulish looking crowd). Or, at times, a more irritating one: the man behind me thought he was at karaoke, and couldn’t help himself singing along; and the critic next to me was actually texting during the show.
On the way to the Coliseum, I passed the New Ambassadors where Stomp plays Sunday performances and what looked like another full house was leaving; in the afternoon, I’d been to the Menier Chocolate Factory for a matinee of their new production of Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit, and it was packed again. Clearly there’s a hunger for Sunday performances; the National, as I mentioned here on Friday, are finally fulfilling their promise to begin them in September, and maybe where the National leads, the rest of the West End will finally follow.
The Common Pursuit makes some surprisingly prescient jokes about the post of theatre critic of the Sunday Times (whom one character, played by Reece Shearsmith, says he wants to become when he grows up); unfortunately, what might have been a joke when Gray’s play was first produced in 1984 has now turned into a reality. Of course, there’s no training, then as now, for us to become critics by, but typically some passion and knowledge has traditionally gone with the territory. Now, however, an absence of knowledge seems to paraded as a virtue; I’ve written before here about a current critic who doesn’t seem to know his Iago from his Othello, and on Sunday, the same critic - who only a few weeks ago was declaring that he never understood why critics were ever supposed to go to musicals (“I don’t see what on earth they have got to do with theatre”, he suggested), now wrote of Marguerite that it is “a great night at the theatre”, in evidence of which he concluded, “Sex, songs and swastikas — who could ask for anything more?”
It may be too much to expect critics to be consistent (or even to make much sense —since when are swastikas a recipe for success, except for convenient alliteration?) But we might at least hope that they know the difference between a set’s designer and its builder — the same critic’s review of Pygmalion at the Old Vic notes that “The production succeeds on almost every level, and, with its exquisitely beautiful sets — built by Robert Knight — it also happens to be the best-looking production now playing in London.” My guess is that designer Simon Higlett has something to do with that….
But if some critics appear to be suffering from senile dementia, others may have what another colleague has wittily dubbed penile dementia, after one famously referred to Daniel Radcliffe’s nude appearance in Equus that “never in modern times has such excitement been stirred by the prospect of viewing a very few inches of adolescent male flesh” - then perhaps they should have turned out for the last stop of the tour of this production at Richmond, as I did on Friday evening, where Alfie Allen is showing quite a few inches more.
By contrast, Simon Callow is a lot smaller than Richard Griffiths who he has followed into the role of the pyschiatrist (and like Liza, Callow has lately slimmed down himself quite a bit, too). It was, of course, in the original production of another Shaffer play, Amadeus, that Callow first came to attention at the National in 1979; and it is inspiring to see him nearly thirty years later giving such an authoritative and commanding performance as Dysart.
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