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.
A dance audience knows to find the kind of work they like at Sadler’s Wells or the Place; and audiences go to the RSC with expectations of strong classical work, for instance, or the Royal Court for provocative new plays. But sometimes they can mix it up: just yesterday the RSC announced plans that re-affirmed its artistic director Michael Boyd’s “long-cherished desire to balance new plays alongside Shakespeare”.
So a theatre like the National throws down the gauntlet when it presents a dance theatre piece like the current in-i, especially when it, too, pushes its creators out of their own territories, in this case with Juliette Binoche having to become a dancer and Akram Khan stretching his acting muscles alongside his dancer/choreographer ones. But if they are working outside of their own boxes, it’s interesting to notice that all of the reviews I’ve seen so far have come from ones within the dance box: dance critics, not theatre ones, have been sent to review it, and it’s probably just as well, since they are typically more familiar with expressing the abstract in words. Mind you, in a conversation between Khan and Binoche reprinted in the programme, Binoche asks Khan what he wants people to take home with them, and he replies, “I want them to be unable to describe in words what they felt or experienced.” A critic who duly attempts to do so must, on that reckoning, represent a failure of Khan’s intentions.
But the expert critic can, of course, also do something else, and that’s analyse the technique as well as the content; and on that reckoning, says the Daily Telegraph’s dance critic Sarah Crompton, in-I fails: she wrote in her review, “Dancers have the ability to express thought and emotion through precise movement. Juliette Binoche simply cannot do that. She looks exactly what she is; an attractive woman who has spent some six months in intensive dance training. It’s been enough to teach her to move but she still can’t communicate anything. Worse, on this showing, the intelligence and finesse she brings to her film work is dwarfed by the stage. Her voice sounds reedy; she looks dangerously exposed.”
But if Binoche, to invert the song in A Chorus Line, offered “looks ten, dance three”, dance is also spreading its wings beyond the National and into the West End as well - last night I went to the West End opening of Flamenco Flamen’ka, a flamenco and tango hybrid that has come to London by way of Paris and been re-worked from a series of dance vignettes into a fully-fledged narrative show under the guidance of Craig Revel Horwood. And in this case, my verdict has to be “dance ten, book three”.
It was too dark in the Lyric Theatre to attempt to read the two page plot synopsis before the curtain went up, so I was floundering around the dark in every sense as I tried to watch what Horwood insists in a programme note is a “fast-flowing coherent story”. Instead, I allowed the fiery, if occasionally repetitive, passions of the Latin dancers take over. It’s certainly more authentic-feeling and passionate than Zorro the Musical.
And finally, at the Apollo Theatre next door, the stage version of Rain Man — that I’ve also reviewed for this paper here — prompted a salivating four-star review from the Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh that finds “Hollywood heartthrob” Josh Harnett “as charismatic on stage as screen,” and claims that his “riveting performance rises high above the erotic”. Though there is a scene where he gratuitously removes his shirt (and reveals an interesting tattoo on his back), I saw no reason to find that his appearance was in the slightest bit erotic. Beauty is, of course, always in the eye of the beholder, but Nick seems to want to speak for a wider constituency than his own tastes, writing that “his classic good looks and physique, in the style of a college Jock, will surely drive the libidos of thousands of heterosexual women and gay men into excited top gear.” Not mine; and even if his looks are ten, the play’s a three.
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