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.
The first was confirmation of the long-rumoured plan that the Lyric would become the try-out house for the London premiere of Spring Awakening, establishing this Tony winning Broadway show’s “hip” credentials instead of heading straight for the West End. There had been a similar idea to try-out Avenue Q at Stratford East first, but instead it opened “cold” in the West End and had an uphill battle to establish itself (which it finally did by taking the radical step of reducing its weekday prices - a strategy that seems to have paid off, in every sense), so it makes sense that Spring Awakening isn’t assuming it has UK interest in the bag. The Lyric will give the show breathing space for audiences to “discover” it (and at far cheaper prices than they would in the West End); and no doubt it is also buying the Lyric some considerable outside investment, since the costs of staging it there are surely being met by the American consortium who own its ongoing rights.
It sounds like a win-win - and as a big fan of the show, I’m delighted it is being seen here. But where exactly is the Lyric’s own creative input going to be? The press release has David Farr, the Lyric’s artistic director, trumpeting the theatre’s “collaborative approach to making theatre”, and says that the Lyric is “celebrated for the modern and diverse audiences that we reach with our work.” (A modern audience? What does that mean? Is there any other kind? Or is it another way of saying “youthful”, and disguising the implicit ageism in celebrating that fact?) But let’s not pretend that the Lyric are coming on board for too many creative reasons of its own: an opportunity was presented to them and they took it.
And that seems to be the case for Mr Farr, too, who was himself the second banner story from the Lyric yesterday: it’s just a month short of three years since he took up his appointment there as artistic director, but already it has now been announced that he is moving on, to become an Associate Director at the RSC. Michael Boyd is on a bit of a buying spree there, it seems, also signing up Headlong (and soon-to-be Oliver!) director Rupert Goold and Paines Plough’s Roxanne Silbert to join his associate directors’ team that already comprises directors Gregory Doran (currently designated Chief Associate Director) and Deborah Shaw, and designer Tom Piper. Having recently sat through Boyd’s brilliant productions of the Histories, I only hope that he has learnt their lessons and can avoid civil war amongst the ranks as they all jockey for position.
Farr, for one, seems genuinely impatient; he took on Bristol Old Vic, fresh from the Gate, in partnership with Simon Reade in January 2003, and after less than two and a half years jumped ship to the Lyric before Bristol was left to flounder (and eventually summarily shut); now he’s moving on from Hammersmith after just three years. Neil Bartlett, his predecessor, was there for a full decade, from 1994 to 2004; I saw him last week, in fact, at the Lyric’s opening of The Birthday Party, and asked him how he felt when he went back there. “Pride, mostly”, he replied - and, looking around Theatre Square in front of the new entrance said, “I helped made this happen. But I told them that fountain would leak!”, he added, pointing out the incorrect draining of the fountain.
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