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.
As Nick Hytner said in a recent Sunday Times feature, “We may be experiencing an unprecedented profusion of performing arts from ever-growing and ever more various communities of creators. Theatres have embraced the need and the responsibility to respond to this profusion and to get out there and find audiences for the kind of stuff that not so long ago would have caused bewilderment among a much more homogenous crowd.”
The National’s own contributions to this includes the current Juliette Binoche/Akram Khan collaboration in-i, which has indeed caused bewilderment, not least amongst some dance critics. But if artists are straddling new divides, the fringe has fed into the mainstream much more, too: as Hytner observes in the same piece, “Maybe the biggest change in the British theatre since the foundation of the National in 1963 has been, if not the assimilation of the fringe into the mainstream, then at least the blurring of the line between the two. It’s a mark of the health of our theatre that artists and audiences now travel happily between the two, and that the discoveries of the new wave are hungrily co-opted on behalf of the wider audience. The fraternal dialogue between fringe and mainstream means an artist like Emma Rice can base her company, Kneehigh Theatre, in Cornwall, work at both Battersea Arts Centre and the NT, and collaborate cheerfully with an enterprising commercial producer to draw the crowds to the West End. And if you go to Edinburgh now, you can’t really tell whether the Fringe or the official Festival represents the establishment. “
But it’s not just artists who are pursuing those kinds of free-range dialogues between different forms and places nowadays. Toby Young, who amongst numerous other endeavours had a spell as a drama critic of The Spectator (and simultaneously restaurant critic of the Evening Standard), turned his journalistic exploits in America into the hilarious book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, then Tim Fountain adapted it for the stage of Soho Theatre (and Toby took over the role of his own self when the play was revived at the West End’s Arts Theatre). And the film version opens in London this Friday. A story about the failed pursuit of celebrities is in imminent danger of turning Toby into a celebrity himself, if he isn’t already; and he has turned that story of failure around into one that has made him a success.
It has been his stock-in-trade for a while now: even a right royal failure like the reception that greeted the play A Right Royal Farce that he co-wrote with Lloyd Evans two years ago at the King’s Head was turned into a full-page Daily Mail feature at the time about what it felt like to be on the receiving end of such hostility. And when I wrote about it here at the time, he wittily responded to me, “Stop revelling in my failure, you bastard. That’s my job.”
But Toby is no longer alone in the journalistic ranks of turning his life into prose and then theatre. Yesterday came an announcement that a stage version of Jasper Rees’s autobiographical book I Found My Horn, a chronicle of his attempt to master the French horn 25 years after abandoning it, will come to London’s Tristan Bates Theatre in December. Jasper is one of the best writers of arts profiles in the business, filing them for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times; but how will his own profile of himself stack up as theatre? I can’t wait to find out.
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