August 2008 Archives

We are undoubtedly blessed in London to have some of the greatest theatre buildings in the world. It is an amazing heritage it is sometimes easy to take for granted, and a heritage that sadly isn’t always being honoured by their gatekeepers — the people who actually own the buildings and are happy to cash in the profit they generate, but not re-invest it in maintaining them, which has sadly become a regular hobbyhorse of mine.

Of course there’s a big difference between the buildings held publicly and those owned privately - the public ones have been able to draw on lottery funds to assist their refurbishment and redevelopment plans. But that is as it should be; they are using public money to properly resource buildings that have variously become vibrant public spaces. Head to the National, day or night, for instance, and it has long been open to all comers, with coffee bars, bookshops and exhibitions to visit even if you haven’t got a ticket for a show.

And there are plenty of shows that don’t even need tickets.

Musical theatre is a powerful muse. As Franklin Shepherd, a composer tells his lyricist collaborator Charley Kringas as they start out on their career writing musicals together in Merrily We Roll Along (which in fact happens at the end of the show, since the action travels backwards in time), “Musicals are popular. They’re a great way to state important ideas. Ideas that could make a difference. Charley, we can change the world.”

Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the score to Merrily, may not have changed the world - but his shows have certainly changed musical theatre. And though Merrily was one of his most notorious Broadway flops when it first premiered there in 1981 (and ran for just 16 performances, some seven more than the even bigger flop of Sondheim’s 1964 show Anyone Can Whistle), it has found an extended life far beyond it, not least when Michael Grandage staged it at the Donmar Warehouse in 2000. Merrily comes from the inside track of the pain and pleasure of creating musicals - both in its story of the fractured relationships that lie behind them and the show’s own fractured journey towards claiming its place as an essential part of Sondheim’s repertoire. It is therefore a testament to the fact that flop shows can be reclaimed - and proves that different ideas about producing them can make a difference, too.

I thought of some of this as I watched last night’s premiere of a major new touring production of The Witches of Eastwick, another musical that had a difficult birth.

No, I’ve not been on a plane for a while. And I’m not in a hurry to do so again, either, after seeing Charlie Victor Romeo on the Edinburgh Fringe this year, an utterly terrifying recreation of the ‘black box’ conversations from the cockpit of planes that have crashed, most of them with fatal results. As Chris Wilkinson wrote in a Guardian blog, it was quite possibly the greenest show in Edinburgh, at least in terms of its impact: “Ironically, the show that might actually have the most positive impact on reducing our carbon footprints, is Charlie Victor Romeo a piece that doesn’t mention the environment once… It’s a bleak, depressing bit of work - and once you have seen it, you are not going to want to set foot in a plane anytime soon.”

But if a theatre show is striving to keep me out of aeroplanes, aeroplanes are about to become the latest frontier for getting punters into the theatre. According to a story in Variety, flight attendants may soon be prowling the aisles in the sky asking, “Coffee? Tea? Tickets to Broadway?”

So the Olympics finally ended on Sunday, and now the baton has to be picked up by London. Since the television is hardly ever switched on in my house - except to watch DVDs of my current obsession, Curb Your Enthusiasm — my own enthusiasm for the entire Olympics story was distinctly curbed and I didn’t see any of it till it was very nearly over. But I finally tuned in on Sunday afternoon for the closing ceremony, since I was curious to see the much-heralded British contribution to them that I had even previewed here last week. But if I expressed the thought that “If the current Olympic victories are putting a smile on everyone’s faces, then Sunday’s closing ceremony is sure to keep it there”, I was definitely premature in those hopes.

The discrepancy between China’s seemingly limitless budget to stage the rest of its spectacular closing ceremony and how far we’ve got to go was cruelly demonstrated by this utterly feeble, eight-minute “handover” sequence and only proves that they’ve given us an immensely tough act to follow.

“There is something wrong when some of the best new British plays become no more than boutique studio events, only available to early bookers and insiders,” wrote playwright David Eldridge in The Guardian this week. It is exactly the same problem when some of the most anticipated classical productions, too, like the Donmar Warehouse’s Othello last year, inevitably sell out instantly, which its director Michael Grandage acknowledged in an Evening Standard interview “did turn into a bit of a bad news story because people couldn’t get in.”

But Grandage has rejected the claim that I made in a Guardian blog that the Donmar is “virtually a private members’ club, with membership and private donor schemes making tickets even harder to come by for the general public”.

I have just been sent a series of cuttings on theatre criticism by a friend, and in one of them the writer declares, “The biggest single obstacle to adequate dramatic criticism today is lack of space. Clement Scott had a column and a half at his disposal after an important first night. Now the allocation is one of two paragraphs or a weekly column to be shared among three or four plays. Under such conditions the dignity of dramatic criticism is difficult to sustain.”

No, this wasn’t written recently, but over 60 years ago, by someone called John W. Collier. So nothing has changed - and yet everything has changed. On the one hand, I am constantly fighting for space in my print outlets - sometimes I have as few as 110-120 words for a careful dissection of a major opening in, say, the London Paper or the American magazine Entertainment Weekly, but then the job becomes about making every one of them count; and even the weekly round-up I do for the Sunday Express often means cramming four or five shows into just 500 words.

On the other hand, I am always grateful that the theatre is covered at all in each of these places.

The front pages of every paper today are trumpeting the success of Team GB in China, and in particular that of triple gold medal winner, Edinburgh bike racer Chris Hoy. But there’s another British Olympic victory in the making, and it’s the off-track one of groups of young British actors, singer and dancers variously making their mark in Beijing’s cultural Olympiad celebrations.

The National Youth Theatre, who are now in the midst of their annual summer residency at Soho Theatre, have also been represented in Beijing as the only British company to have been invited by the Chinese Ministry of Culture to take part in the Chinese International Youth Arts Festival, where they presented a production of The Merchant of Venice for which 25 young actors from the UK were joined by 12 cast members from Beijing as part of a remarkable cultural exchange. And they’ll be represented again at Sunday’s closing ceremony, when the Olympic Flag is handed over from Beijing to London, to perform the National Anthem.

Of course anything and everything is a respite after Edinburgh; but after that massive, indigestible feast, we’re in the midst of a theatrical famine of theatrical openings in London. As always, it’s the lull before the September storm blows in again, so we should enjoy it while we can, I suppose; but it’s a perennial complaint on this blog that clashes in the first night schedules mean that we’re sent chasing our tails so often, yet right now the diary is more or less a blank, apart from the opening of three plays in the National Youth Theatre’s annual summer season at Soho Theatre this week.

It means, however, that there is time for a bit of catch-up - and a bit of relaxation, too. Last Friday, for instance, I finally got to the Scoop for this year’s free outdoor theatre season, now in its 6th year there, after I had to abort a previous attempt a couple of Sundays before owing to bad weather. And its amazing to see what a “commercial” success it is, at least in terms of bums on seats (or at any rate bums on hard stone, not much alleviated by the thin foam cushions they rent out for a pound each) - the place was packed, and though the play was Lorca’s difficult, overwrought Blood Wedding, most stayed with it, too, for the 90 minute duration.

But the most surprising thing of all is just how attentive, inclusive and eclectic this audience is, too.

Thank God for Radio 2. While musical theatre is, without doubt, one of the most popular forms of theatre there is and an entire export industry has been based around Britain’s expertise in creating it, it is strangely little sung about on our radio airwaves. Commercial radio all but ignores it, and though BBC Radio 4 used to have an excellent weekly programme, Stage and Screen, hosted by Edward Seckerson, it was strangely decommissioned a couple of years ago (though Ed has maintained the show’s presence electronically by migrating it to an online platform).

It has instead been left to Radio 2 to fly the flag for musical theatre, where Michel Ball and Elaine Paige fill the Sunday mornings and early afternoon slots; but the station - which has the greatest reach of any BBC Radio station, attracting some 13m listeners a week, according to the most recent Rajar figures - is also strong on generating fresh, unique content, particularly through the institution that is Friday Night is Music Night — the world’s longest-running “live music” radio programme that has been running since 1952.

Last night it held a live recording at the London Palladium for Lyrics by Don Black, a slightly belated 70th birthday tribute concert (nearly two months after Don’s actual birthday on June 21) to one of our most prolific, yet paradoxically personally unsung, musical theatre heroes of the last half century.

This time last week I was trudging through the wet streets of Edinburgh; I was there for five days and it rained on each of them. And I got home to London to yet more rain. Of course, I’m a critic, not a weather forecaster, and it usually doesn’t really matter what the weather gets up to - I spent most of my time indoors in darkened theatres anyway, or in my office writing about what I’ve seen.

In Edinburgh it only becomes an issue when you’re racing across town between venues and have to dry off each time you arrive anywhere. And in London, it only really becomes an issue when you’ve got a visit planned to somewhere like the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park - as I did last night, for the opening of their “summer” musical Gigi.

I duly spent yesterday obsessing about the weather, and when a thunderstorm and rain kicked in briefly in mid-afternoon, I thought we might be done for.

In the new issue of The Stage out today, I have written a feature on the current state of play (and the absence of plays) in the West End, amplifying on a theme I first wrote about here a couple of weeks ago. Of course the summer is always a difficult time for West End producers, and the weak dollar against the pound has only amplified that to keep American tourists away, while local audiences - distracted first by Wimbledon, and now the Olympics - are also watching their wallets at a time when the papers are endlessly predicting economic woes ahead (Just yesterday, Metro led with a front page banner headline: “It’s official: we are worse off”, and showing how the cost of living is outstripping pay rises for the first time since the 1990s.)

But London still has something utterly unique to offer, and the biggest worry is that even this is not enough of a draw nowadays for the kind of culturally-minded tourists that theatres have traditionally depended on to get through the summer.

Theatre people like to see what they do as creating art, but what about the artwork? The worlds of the art and commerce of theatre - the making of theatre and the selling of it - neatly collide in the offices of the agencies that create the advertising and marketing campaigns that promote shows.

I must declare an interest here: I’ve had an insiders’ view of this world, since my first professional job after graduating from University was to work for Dewynters, then an independently-owned ad agency who had re-defined theatrical advertising in the 1980s by concentrating on the creation of instantly recognisable logos that branded shows like Cats, Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera with images that are still used worldwide over twenty years later.

Returning home from Edinburgh late last night, I left the party behind in full swing - but awoke this morning, at least, to the now-familiar sound that had greeted me when I arrived in Scotland, too, namely driving rain. But the sun is trying to shine intermittently through it, and so am I. They’ve just played Handel’s Water Music on Classic FM as I write, and presenter Simon Bates has declared that some parts of the country have just had more rain in an hour than they usually get in a month.

But life has to go on, despite it - even if I’m now worried about the opening on Thursday of the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park musical Gigi. And though it’s difficult to believe when you’re in the thick of things in Edinburgh, there is an ongoing theatrical life, of course, beyond it, as that planned opening proves. And that’s not the only London opening this week, either: there’s also Piaf at the Donmar Warehouse tomorrow. Even if there has been saturation coverage of all things Edinburgh on the arts pages in the last week, I suspect that these London openings won’t be ignored - far from it, I suspect, since most of my first-string colleagues, it seems, are largely ignoring Edinburgh, so will be looking for something to see here.

Since last filing a blog entry here on Friday, I have seen 20 more shows in Edinburgh; eight on Friday (one up from what I had originally planned, since I found a gap in my schedule and discovered a show to fill it with), and six each on Saturday and Sunday (with a seventh planned for Sunday cancelled, not due to my own lack of stamina, but my failure to read the programme correctly that last night was that show’s night off). What would take you three weeks to see going to the theatre every night in London takes just three days here - but it’s also alarming how compressed one’s life becomes, as the days slip by in a theatrical blur.

Edinburgh is clearly a dangerous place for obsessive-compulsive theatregoers like me - but at least I know I’m far from alone. A couple of theatrically-minded friends flew in - one from France, the other from New York - on Friday for a similarly-obsessive round of fringe going, though as one of them said after we’d seen New Electric Ballroom at the Traverse on Friday morning, “I wish the plane had been late!”

Even for a theatrical obsessive like me - and any regular readers of this blog will know that at least that judgement of myself is accurate! - Edinburgh is too much of a good thing (as well as too much of very bad things). Maybe I’m just overdoing it - and it’s hard to resist doing so with so much being promised everywhere, and so little time to see them all - but after seeing five shows yesterday (and seven ahead of me today), it’s hard to maintain emotional connections with everything I’m seeing. (Trying to stay awake for them all — or fed between them - is also a challenge that I must frankly admit I sometimes lose; thank God for lots of caffeine, plus the creperie outside the Gilded Balloon, whose banana and cinnamon crepe is always a daily treat for me up here! I’ve not tried “Well Hung and Tender” yet, though give me time. And no, I don’t mean a visit to the New Town bar - it’s the name of the outside Aberdeen burger bar outside the Gilded Balloon, too!)

As one London critical colleague I ran into late last night admitted to me, it’s not easy to write about anything from the heart anymore after such an overload; though funnily enough, the show we were both seeing had actually come from just such a place, and was one of those developmental discoveries that the fringe is all about.

I very nearly didn’t come to Edinburgh at all this year. Brian Logan, writing a theatre preview in last week’s Time Out, drew up a list of his personal “must-see” shows before he even got there and found that it was already 75-strong. He admitted, “I’ll never see them all, and I doubt you will either, unless you’re up north for the whole of August with a bulging wallet and the constitution of a buffalo. But we can dream - because the shows we have to choose from are, on paper, the stuff of any theatregoer’s fantasy.”

But this year I found I couldn’t share that optimism, and the prospect of all of those dreams sounded more like a nightmare. It’s not just the daunting sense of choice, which makes it so hard to make them in the first place, but also the scheduling difficulties when you finally settle on what you are going to see — and then the sheer sense of rising panic as you start hearing the word on the grapevine about what else there is that’s hot and find that you can’t possibly do it all.

It’s a festival, in other words, where you have to admit defeat before you even begin; to accept that you’re only ever going to see a tiny slice of the action, and simply enjoy what you can.

The entire run of the RSC’s new production of Hamlet sold out way ahead of last night’s official opening at Stratford-upon-Avon, and even though tickets are only on sale to RSC members at the moment for the all-too-brief West End run to follow at the Novello Theatre in December, tickets are already reportedly being advertised on e-Bay at £500 a pair. According to a story in today’s Independent, the RSC are “trying to fight the trade in black market tickets by emailing the guilty sellers and demanding they stop the auctions. In some cases, where the row and seat number were listed, they were able to pinpoint the exact member and threaten to cancel their tickets. ‘We’re doing everything in our power to try and curb this kind of activity, but it’s not something we can prevent,’ said a spokeswoman for the RSC.”

According to The Independent, the RSC also received a flood of membership applications following the announcement of David Tennant’s casting in the title role; and even if lots of stuff and nonsense was put about by the likes of Jonathan Miller and even one of my critical colleagues moaning about the supposed obsession of theatre producers with celebrity casting (but both proving themselves ignorant of Tennant’s own prior RSC pedigree), as I blogged about here at the time of that announcement, it does once again demonstrate the general public’s obsession with it that even leads them to join a membership scheme, and not always for healthy reasons like wanting to actually see the show but clearly rather to try to make a fast buck on e-Bay.

The same thing happened when the Donmar did Othello last year with Ewan McGregor.

It’s taken until August for people to notice, but the sudden coincidence of three prime theatres being simultaneously dark side-by-side on Shaftesbury Avenue, plus the nearby Comedy - has given rise to reports that the West End could be heading towards serious difficulty, and particularly when it comes to serious fare. The West End may have had an all-time record breaking year last year, as I previously reported here, but most of those figures, in terms of attendance and revenue, were driven by musicals.

So no wonder, too, that some commentators are also noting the threat to the straight play in this newly-beleaguered West End: Nicholas de Jongh wrote a feature in the Standard last Friday pointing out that, “Apart from the brilliant hybrid version of Brief Encounter playing in a Haymarket cinema there are just six plays in the West End this week - of which two are those clapped-out long-runners, The Mousetrap and The Woman in Black — compared with 24 musicals.”

This blog turned two yesterday - astonishingly, I seem to have been doing this for two years now, day in and day out (but not most weekends, since I have to give myself a little bit of a respite, and I’ve taken a couple of weeks off for good behaviour — or rather in my case, a chance for some bad behaviour!).

And of all the jobs I do, it’s one that gives me both the greatest free reign and the most direct, immediate feedback. Blogs - as I’ve often noted here before — may be changing journalism, and this one has certainly changed me. Not a day goes by without someone commenting, either publicly on the blog itself or more typically to me personally, about something I’ve written here. And readers don’t even have to buy a copy of The Stage to get it; it’s here entirely for free. Long may we continue this dialogue together here.

And even if the art that I’m writing about mostly has to be paid for somehow, I’ve just had a weekend where some of the best events were free, too - or could have been, even if I’d not been on press tickets.

Time was that theatre would be all about text and the acting of that text; but I realise that those days are long, long gone, and its irredeemably old-fashioned to even point it out. Theatre is now a multi-media melting pot of ideas, techniques and stylistic choices being pressed into the service of telling its stories.

This week I have spent four successive nights in the theatre where film and video technology have played a greater or lesser role in realising those stories - or virtually becoming the story itself. At the National Theatre, Katie Mitchell - who made her name as a director who minutely mined the texts of plays by Ibsen and Chekhov, in particular, to release their naturalistic rhythms - has been obsessively pursuing a new strand of working, first with a deconstruction of Virginia Woolf’s Waves, then with Martin Crimp’s experimental Attempts on Her Life and now and with …Some Trace of Her, where live action is created onstage only in order to be simultaneously filmed and projected on a large screen above the stage.