September 2008 Archives

Boundaries between art forms - and the people that make work in them or from them - are tumbling everywhere at the moment. Sometimes, of course, these are purely opportunistic — Rain Man, best known as a hit 80s movie, becomes a stage property, only because it is hoped that the title recognition factor will draw audiences in. Ditto last night’s opening of a stage version of the historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, also known as a 2003 feature film, which drains most of the art - and all of the artfulness - from this story of an artist’s muse and inspiration.

But elsewhere the theatre is responding to a changing world, and embracing different artists and different ways of working as never before.

I was at the National for the second Sunday running yesterday, this time to see War Horse again on its welcome return season, and the place was once again packed. Yet again, too, the final day for this year’s Watch this Space season in Theatre Square outside the theatre attracted massive crowds for a free outdoor aerial spectacle from the Netherlands - someone from the National told me that they reckoned around 2,000 people gathered to watch it (Unfortunately I missed it, as I was sitting on a bench with a friend in the sun further down the river, drinking a latte from a little mobile kiosk since my friend had tried the National before I got there but discovered that the coffee machine was broken. So I guess that one of the weaknesses of a seven-day operation has already been exposed!)

But though I have to say that I certainly welcome the introduction of the new schedule here, so that the National participates fully in the life of the river alongside the rest of its neighbours, like BFI Southbank next door and the Royal Festival Hall that have long operated on a seven-day schedule, I realised when I collected my tickets at the box office that it’s not quite so simple for the staff: manning one of the Olivier box office desks was the National’s indefatigable (and usually tireless) box office manager Michael Straughan.

Journalists live by our by-lines; it’s what differentiates us from each other (apart from the quality of our prose and reliability of our opinions). So how confusing is it going to be now that there’s not one but two Tim Walker’s writing theatre reviews?

The first Walker - who is also the Telegraph’s Mandrake columnist - has been writing theatre reviews for the Sunday Telegraph for a couple of years now, with lots of (sometimes misplaced) enthusiasm and even more regular factual blunders. And on Wednesday, the Independent published an overnight review for the new Ray Davis musical Come Dancing at Stratford East that was also by Tim Walker - a feature writer on the paper who shares the same name as the man from the Telegraph.

It may, of course, be a one-off - the Independent haven’t sent their columnist Deborah Orr to review another play since she reviewed Under the Blue Sky for them back in July. But is the serious business of theatre reviewing really to be farmed out to the nearest available features writer or columnist in this way?

Of course, one of them may yet become a regular, in which case they would build up a track record in going to the theatre for (part of) a living; but if the second Tim is to continue doing so, we really do need to find a way to differentiate between them. (Apart, that is, from the reliability of their facts).

I should have been heading to Chichester today for the opening of Martin Sherman’s Aristo starring Robert Lindsay (or, as a marketing e-mail I received from the theatre called him yesterday, Robert Linday) as Aristotle Onassis. The entire run to October 11 is already sold out, in advance of the opening; but on Tuesday I got a call from the press office there that the opening has had to be postponed to next week now, owing to the fact that Robin Soans has had to withdraw from the cast because of illness.

One immediate result, and that’s what yesterday’s marketing e-mail was about, is that tickets had suddenly opened up for tonight; but I wonder just how they’re going to find them for the press next Wednesday instead on a sold out house. But also, given that there’ll be just another 12 sold out performances to go after that one, the reviews are not going to have any impact on the current life of the show - only for any possible future one.

Last night Elaine Paige made her long overdue National Theatre debut - and as she prepared to take a bow on the Olivier stage, I was beside her and she asked me to take her hand and join her in it. So it was a first for both of us to bow on that stage, though I’ve actually been on that particular stage a few times before now, previously hosting platforms with the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Peter Shaffer and Trevor Nunn, Emma Rice and Tom Morris.

But each of those talents had a direct connection to a show being staged there at the time; whereas last night I was hosting a platform interview with Elaine to mark the publication of Memories, a handsome picture book survey that looks back over her last 40 years on the West End and Broadway stages, and even to four years earlier than that with The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd that closed out-of-town in Manchester in 1964 - giving us, as I said near the start of the Q&A, some 44 years to cover in 44 minutes!

If it was better late than never for her to make an appearance here, surely a proper run in something is now long overdue?

There are different types of audiences for different sorts of shows, but can you achieve a cross-over - and should you try to? In a feature in last weekend’s Sunday Times, Nick Hytner celebrated the strength and variety of British artistic endeavour - and suggested that we should embrace the different audiences each attracts, rather than trying to make a homogenised kind of art that appeals to everyone.

“It would be a poor theatre that pleased everyone all of the time,” he wrote, “and it’s time to free ourselves from the obsession with the perfectly formed, beautifully diverse audience. There is no such thing. The wide-ranging carnival of British performing arts pulls in any number of different kinds of crowds. It would be terrific if every child emerged from school fully equipped to enjoy a Prom, and no effort should be spared to open up the glories of classical music to those who haven’t encountered it at school. But meanwhile the 5,000 who typically pack the Albert Hall on an August evening have only their musical enthusiasm in common. They don’t look like each other and they don’t look like the crowds who recently packed the Arcola Theatre and the Royal Court for two tremendous plays, by Femi Oguns and Bola Agbaje, about the tensions between British West Indians and British Nigerians. But so what? Audiences are heat-seeking missiles. They go to what grabs them. It’s the variety of what’s out there that counts.”

But venues play their own part in keeping audiences in their comfort zone: the missiles know where to aim towards.

One more revolution took place yesterday in London theatre, and it could be a watershed moment: while the newly-opened Donmar Warehouse production of Ivanov was giving a 3pm matinee at Wyndham’s in the West End yesterday, the National, too, for the first time in its history threw open its doors for regular Sunday performances, with performances of War Horse in the Olivier and in-i in the Lytelton. Between now and January 18, there will be 23 more Sunday matinee performances in one or other (or both) of those houses. The scheme will then be put on hiatus while the National takes stock of the impact it has had on the building, before resuming full-time next summer.

While the Sunday matinee is a long-standing Broadway tradition - and one of the most popular shows of the week - and Sunday performances are regularly offered by theatres on the continent, too, we’ve been slow to catch on here.

Only the other day I was welcoming the positioning of Trafalgar Studios here as one of the “most interestingly programmed theatres in the West End” and said that the initiative formally announced on Monday for it to become a base for international collaboration “is certainly an interesting one”.

The first two companies signed up as Associates there are Sydney Theatre Company, whose co-artistic directors are Cate Blanchett and her playwright husband Andrew Upton, and New York’s LABryinth Theatre Company, one of whose artistic directors is actor/director Philip Seymour Hoffman; but the opening last night of the first manifestation of this partnership - with Hoffman directing the London premiere of Upton’s Riflemind — suggests that maybe I spoke too soon.

No West End theatre owner in modern times has expended quite so much love, care or attention - and most importantly, hard cash - on his venues as Cameron Mackintosh. Last night the latest - and now brightest - jewel in his theatre-owning crown was officially unveiled with the opening night of Ivanov at Wyndham’s, that launches a year-long residency for the Donmar Warehouse there; and before the show, Cameron (accompanied for part of it by the Donmar’s Michael Grandage) proudly took a press party around the venue, from stalls to balcony and every bar (and particularly toilet) in between.

One of Cameron’s most enduring legacies will surely be the provision of extra loos - especially for the ladies - throughout the venues he runs; as someone (it may have been Charlie Spencer) dubbed him, he’s become the patron saint of ladies’ loos, and they seem to be up every staircase you look here!

The world may be in financial meltdown at the moment - and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, except sit back and wonder at how the startling years of greed in the financial sector are finally unravelling, leaving governments - and that means us - to pick up the pieces.

Perhaps it’s time for another Caryl Churchill play to explain it all to us, as she did in 1987 with Serious Money that satirised the era that began the current freefall, after the London stock market “cast off tradition and plugged into the deregulated frenzy of modern Wall Street in 1986”, as Frank Rich put it in his New York Times review of the play when the original Royal Court production transferred to New York’s Public Theatre.

The West End has been slow to come to terms with the fact that it must adapt or die. And it is finally accepting that the former may be the preferable route to go. While musicals have become its dominant product - for which there are no guarantees, either, as witness the recent fates of Gone with the Wind and Marguerite, to name just two - the old West End model for the few remaining plays that make it town, with star actors in star vehicles, are hardly ever a cast iron guarantee, either.

Even Maggie Smith, about whom it used to be said could sell out reading the phone book, failed to take the town when she starred last year in Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque; but then, as a friend ruefully remarked, at least if she’d been reading the phone book you might have had the excitement of hearing your own name spoken, rather than the play concerned.

Instead, the West End looks longingly at the success of the subsidised theatre in attracting plays, players and audiences.

One of the joys of the theatre is that it never stands still. It’s a constantly evolving medium, with a turnover of venues, shows and personnel that can keep it fresh and surprising. And while some venues and artists will inevitably atrophy, others come along that move fast - and can quickly usurp the ‘establishment’ in the process.

This month is the eighth anniversary of the founding of Dalston’s Arcola Theatre, and yet it feels both like it has been here forever —- it is now an indispensable part of the fabric of London theatre — and has only just arrived.

The National Theatre of Scotland is even younger - its first artistic director was only appointed in 2004, and its inaugural production presented in February 2006 - yet it, too, has already embedded itself firmly in the theatrical ecology; and has done so, moreover, without a permanent building base but merely the idea of operating as an umbrella for productions that tour under its auspices.

Theatre people are fond of celebrating - any anniversary is ripe for celebration. Only yesterday a press release arrived about The 39 Steps that announced the extension of the booking period for another year, as the show marks its second anniversary at the West End’s Criterion this month since transferring from the Tricycle.

Funnily enough I ran into Edward Snape, it’s producer, at the Almeida Theatre’s Kicking a Dead Horse the other night, and I had already congratulated him on finding his own personal Woman in Black — the kind of welcome bread-and-butter show that keeps a producer in work and money. But I said that I hoped that it doesn’t stop him from ploughing the resources back into making more theatre, and he assured me it wouldn’t.

Last year’s London revival of Peter Shaffer’s Equus has just begun previews at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre before it opens on September 25; and the magnificent War Horse returns from tonight to the Olivier. Last night also saw Dublin’s Abbey Theatre bring their world premiere production of Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse to the Almeida - the first time, says artistic Michael Attenborough in a programme note, that he has invited an outside company to appear there during his six-year tenure so far as artistic director of the theatre.

He adds, “But such is my huge admiration for Sam Shepard’s work (I had a fantastic time directing our sell-out production of his The Late Henry Moss here in 2006) - and for my old friend Stephen Rea - that I could not resist bringing his latest work - if only briefly - to the Almeida Theatre”.

Apart from too many hypens and sub-clauses in that last sentence, I’m also wondering if there’s now too much horseplay(s) about and whether such loyalties were misplaced.

Another day, another notification from the Rain Man PRs of more legal action. On Monday I reported here that I had been formally put on notice not to repeat a story that appeared in the previous Friday’s Daily Mail concerning the production, and of course I duly honoured. (The threat of being liable for what they called “aggravated damages” was sufficient to warn me off. But not, of course, from pointing out how aggressively this has been pursued, hounding journalists that were in no way connected to the original story).

But I also noticed on Monday that there was another story online on the website of the Daily Mirror that drew attention to the off-duty activities of Rain Man’s star - though it didn’t actually name the play he is in, so the publicity job on behalf of the production was only half done.

That story, too, has now been formally denied,

The last daily paper to hold out against introducing star ratings with their theatre reviews has finally succumbed to the inevitable: the Daily Telegraph has, since last week, joined its Sunday stablemate in offering them.

Now it is only The Observer and the Independent on Sunday - the latter of whom instead offer a pictorial representation of a figure in various states of animation, from slumped to standing ovation (and last Sunday, for Rhoda Koenig’s review of the Tricycle’s Twelfth Night, had an additional category of an empty seat, having presumably vacated it entirely to flee the theatre) - that don’t do stars amongst all the national papers; though there’s also a curious anomaly in the Daily Mail, who do stars for Friday’s theatre page round-up, but not on the overnight reviews published during the week.

We are, of course, living in an ever-faster world.

On Friday I was served with a legal warning on behalf of Nimax Theatres and the producers of Rain Man. Good heavens - what had I done wrong? (Yes, I know I recently drew attention to the state of the toilets at the Garrick on the opening night of Zorro, but that was an indisputable fact that Nica Burns told me personally this blog had drawn her attention to).

The curious thing, however, is that it was for something I had not written yet, nor indeed intended to write. Instead, it was for something that another journalist had written, namely Baz Bamigboye of the Daily Mail, and I was being warned not to repeat the story that had appeared that day in the Mail regarding the production (which was originally due to open tomorrow, but has been postponed to Friday week, following the departure early in rehearsals of original director David Grindley).

I have to confess that I do indeed read Baz’s column every Friday.

There is no shortage of theatre spaces in London, of course, of all shapes, sizes and all-too-often, states of disrepair. Some of this is being addressed - subsidised houses from the Royal Court to the Royal Opera House and London Coliseum, have been able to draw on a combination of lottery funds and private fundraising to invest handsomely in their futures, while next week sees the unveiling of Cameron Mackintosh’s latest privately-funded refurbishment to one of his theatres, Wyndham’s.

But while another of Mackintosh’s schemes to create a new studio space above the Queens’ Theatre that he was going to call the Sondheim Theatre seem to have been put on hold, we have a major vacuum in the West End for mid-scale commercial houses that could be the equivalent of off-Broadway in offering the sorts of seating capacities that could allow shows to run profitably for limited runs, but not require the full financial commitments of the West End proper. (The smallest West End theatres, from the New Ambassadors and Duchess to Fortune and St Martin’s, have each become gridlocked by long-running hits that show no signs of shifting now, thus taking them out of the availability pool).

ATG’s Trafalgar Studios was the first major intervention of a West End theatre chain to create this kind of interim space.

It’s an occupational hazard of going to the theatre professionally that you’re going to have bad nights from time to time; but at least I can remind myself that I’ve not paid for my tickets to add a waste of money to a waste of time and compound the disappointment. And I might be able to do some good, too, and try to spare others the pain by reporting on it.

But it’s also always a matter of degree. As I came out of the Shakespeare’s Globe opening last night of Glyn Maxwell’s Liberty, I ran into the FT’s Sarah Hemming and said to her, “That’s the worst night I’ve ever spent here.” She replied, “Did you not see We the People? That was far worse!” I did indeed miss it — luckily for me (and lots of other critics), there was a first night clash with a production of Odets’ Awake and Sing! at the Almeida that night, so as I reported here, I dodged a theatrical bullet.

There was no such luck last night for a strong showing of first night critics, including Michael Billington, Charles Spencer, Paul Taylor, Quentin Letts and Susannah Clapp,

I like to think of this blog as my daily fibre: something that anchors my journalistic day by its regularity. But as well as writing here, and for other websites, too, from playbill.com to occasional Guardian blogs, I am a voracious consumer of online content, in a way that I once used to of newspapers (and still am, to a degree, especially on weekends, when I routinely buy four or five Sunday papers). At least online you are, electricity usage apart, being green - as long as you don’t print any of it out.

But while most of the national press are excellent at posting their content online - with occasional anomalies, like the fact that the Telegraph fail to post their Sunday arts content there - and keeping it current, it’s an inevitable fact of life that elsewhere, blogs and sites born in the initial enthusiasm of their creators, gradually fall into disuse and disarray. Of course, for many if not most of them, they are an unpaid hobby - or a shop window of links for paid work they do elsewhere (like the one that the excellent Scottish theatre critic Mark Fisher keeps here).

So I’m not about to hound them.

You may be forgiven for thinking that the summer never arrived at all, but now that August 31 - the last official day of summer, according to meteorologists — has come and gone, at least we can stop hoping for a better one to finally materialise now. In 2007 the papers shouted headlines that trumpeted the “worst summer in living memory”, and this year things have been little better: as The Times reported on Saturday, “Official figures show British summer was dull and wet (as if we didn’t know)”. Though the full month’s statistics were yet to be analysed, the story pointed out that “Met Office statistics show rainfall this summer is already up to 50 per cent higher than normal and August is on course to have the fewest hours of sunshine since records began.”

But this isn’t, of course, a weather blog but a theatre one - except when you’re in Edinburgh and can’t avoid getting regular soakings, as I discovered the moment I arrived there in August and five of the wettest days I’ve ever spent there followed, or are heading to the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, as I blogged here when I was heading to the opening night of GIgi. At least I had to only worry for a single night, and it all turned out all right on that night; I can only imagine how Timothy Sheader must be feeling to wake up to days like this morning’s downpours, when Gigi still has a fortnight to run.

But if it’s time to officially write off the summer, in every sense, September always sees the official start of the new theatre season, on both sides of the Atlantic.

I don’t usually post a second daily entry here, but the news of the premature death yesterday of theatrical visionary Ken Campbell, at the age of 66, means that my own rule needs to be broken. But then Campbell broke the rules all the time; the Guardian’s Michael Billington once called him “British theatre’s antic visionary”, while the headline to the same paper’s obituary labels him “one of the strangest people in Britain.”

That obituary, by Michael Coveney, calls him “was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in the British theatre of the past half-century. He was a writer, director and monologist, a genius at producing shows on a shoestring and honing the improvisational capabilities of the actors who were brave enough to work with him”.

Disney’s High School Musical may have finally evacuated the Hammersmith Apollo yesterday after its London summer run there, though we probably shouldn’t be too relieved: it’s bound to be back, and even if it isn’t, a separate touring production is still on the road, with dates currently booked to May 2009. And if we’re yet to see High School Musical 2 transferred to the stage, next month sees the cinematic release of High School Musical 3, so the franchise is far from running out of steam. It’s what Disney, of course, do best: they create a money-making property, and drain it for every financial opportunity going. (High School Musical is even a Playstation karaoke game - though as Metro recently blissfully reported, the lyric booklet that accompanies it apparently printed “counterpart” as “cunterpart” to the song “Fabulous”, which is simply fabulous).

I previously blogged here about how seeing the opening of High School Musical at Hammersmith made me feel as if I was having an out-of-body experience. As I admitted then, “the audience were tuning into something that I simply wasn’t on the same wavelength of.” It even made me rashly declare that I suddenly felt sympathy with Tim Walker of the Sunday Telegraph when he declared that he’d “never really understood why critics are supposed to go to musicals…. What is more, it is inhumane to make us go.”