Getting under the theatrical bonnet….

But it also helps to build trust and mutual respect on both sides of the critical fence. Instead of a wary, sometimes open, hostility, I hope that theatrical practitioners can see me as an honest enthusiast and champion for what they do - but it doesn’t mean I’m going to like everything that I see, either.

The two jobs are separate but related. Wearing a preview hat, I am writing to offer the voice of the person being interviewed, and the job, as I see it, is to contextualise those words (both in relation to what they are talking about and their career more generally) and ensure that they are reported accurately (I always tape and accurately transcribe the interviews I do, unlike AA Gill, for instance). As a critic, on the other hand, the words are entirely my own - and my responsibility is to ensure that they contextualise the work and my responses to it, so that the reader has a clear sense of where I am coming from.

The last few days have been fascinatingly full of backstage glimpses into some of the processes that happen before the curtain goes up. Even though I often sit in interview rooms talking to actors about the work they’re in the midst of preparing, I don’t usually see the actual work process unfolding. Rehearsals are usually, and for good reason, a private business: actors work with their director, in conditions where they can trust each other enough to be allowed to both make mistakes, experiment and maybe fail, before putting things right.

But by coincidence I have, in the last five days, visited two productions to see rehearsals, too; and maybe critics should do this more often. We, of course, typically only see the finished product; our commitment to a show is usually only the two hours’ traffic of the stage (which is sometimes three, or - if it’s a Trevor Nunn production, four). But being afforded a glimpse into just how a production is rehearsed and comes together - the sort of notes that a director gives and the nuts-and-bolts of staging and technical matters - gives one a different sort of appreciation into just how much work has to take place before we get there. Yes, it’s a given that such detailed preparation must occur; but just how does it happen?

And experiencing each required a different sort of commitment from me, too. First there was one of time and distance. On Friday, I flew to Frankfurt, Germany to watch rehearsals of a London-bound revival of West Side Story for a backstage piece I am writing on it, and it’s amazing how much musicals are Big Business here. The van that collected me from the airport was entirely emblazoned with logos for We Will Rock You that the same producers are currently mounting in Cologne.

During the explosion of interest in musicals that the British megashows of the 80s produced, theatres were specially built to house them, and not just in the big cities, but - thanks to the brilliantly efficient motorway system - in more “middle of nowhere” locations that would still make them accessible to a wide population. One was Bochum, an industrial, former mining city in the Ruhr area, where they built a theatre specially to house Starlight Express and where it ran for years. But repeating the model for Sunset Boulevard, in a theatre specially built for it in Niedernhausen, near Frankfurt, only saw the show run for two-and-a-half years, after it opened in 1995; and now a large, purpose-built venue, the Rheine Main Theatre (with smart Ramada Hotel attached) is literally an white elephant, standing empty - except for occasional one-nighters - for large chunks of the year.

The producers of West Side Story were therefore able to hire the theatre instead to use as a giant rehearsal room and production foundry; a luxury indeed, compared to London, where - the glorious Jerwood Space (splendidly converted from a former school in Southwark) aside - many shows rehearse in a world of ad hoc church and community halls. It was to one such place, Duthy Hall (also in Southwark, and instead of flying to Frankfurt, took me about three minutes to walk to from flat in Borough!), that I went yesterday, too, to watch director Jude Kelly rehearsing a couple of scenes from her forthcoming Royal Festival Hall production of The Wizard of Oz.

I caught both shows at very different stages in their lives: in Germany, West Side Story was on the homestretch towards being complete, with the actors working by then on a full rigging of the set and in the full stage lighting for the production. Much of what I saw was therefore about “cleaning up” the technical staging and minutiae of entrances and exits. But director/choreographer Joey McKneely was also working intensely on dance and performance, too - demands made greater by the doubling up of the casting of the three leads, so he had to work with each set separately (but at least the rest of the company kept getting two passes at what was being staged).

Nineteen years ago, McKneely - then a young Broadway hoofer himself - was part of the original Broadway cast of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway that Robbins himself put together; so - just as Ann Reinking has done for the work of Bob Fosse that she, too, once worked with him on - McKneely provides a direct link to Robbins’ work he is recreating now; and its inspiring to see the torch being passed in this way.

Meanwhile, far closer to home, The Wizard of Oz is being imagined anew; and if Wicked is currently offering London and Broadway audiences a different sort of radical spin on this story, it was interesting to see a more familiar approach being explored yesterday, with the actors - only in their second week of rehearsal - at a much earlier stage in their progress towards bringing it to life. Most were, in fact, already “off book”; only Roy Hudd, who had just joined the company the day before, was still working from his script - one he ruefully noted was printed on both sides. “I thought there wasn’t much to learn - then I noticed it’s on the other side as well!”, he joked.

But my day didn’t end there. I then went to meet an escorted group of American theatregoers who had been in town for a week to see a set of plays, and now it was their turn to get under the bonnet of a theatre critic! It is fun when the tables are turned and my usual role of interviewer turned into being the interviewed; and while I usually do my critical job in private, it was interesting to engage in a lively discussion with them on what they had seen.

I ended the day by hosting another talk, this time with me as interviewer rather than observer or observed: I hosted a post-performance chat with Jeremy Irons, Anthony Calf and Robert Glenister from the National Theatre’s production of Never So Good for some of the theatre’s corporate donors, and it was again interesting to hear the actors, who have lived with each of their characters far longer than I did watching it, talk with such engagement and obvious enthusiasm about their work.