Worst night of the year….

I took what little pleasure there was to be had from observing their reactions from time to time from my perch in the back row of the middle gallery - a location I always request, since at least you have a back rest; the Globe doesn’t give you much in the way of creature comforts otherwise. And of course it leaves the lights on, so it’s easy to make out your fellow audience members - if not always the actors on the stage itself (whose faces become bleached out in the generic lighting “wash” that prevails).

Of course you can’t always read too much into a critic’s body language - Michael Billington in particular is good on appearing inscrutable - but you can read a lot into what they are reading; anyone who looked at me would have seen me regularly consulting the printed script that the theatre had provided, if only to check how much more we had to endure in the punishing three hours traffic of the play. And I spotted that at least three of my colleagues regularly had their eyes not on the stage but somewhere in their laps and reading their scripts or programmes or scribbling notes.

However miserable I was feeling, however, I had to stay put; the least you have to do is sit the thing out (and try to stay awake, if not actively engaged, in what’s happening onstage). But if critics have to have an in-built masochistic streak for theatrical endurance, at least I don’t have a sado-masochistic one, and always give my guests permission to leave early - one mine last night gratefully took at the interval.

The play may only be getting 13 performances at the Globe, but after it ends its run there it goes onto a six-date regional tour; I worry that not it will not only empty those theatres up and down the land, but seeing this kind of turgid, lifeless play could put off those audiences who unsuspectingly see it from going to the theatre again in a hurry.

The audience, on the other hand, for Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett at least knows exactly what it is getting; and getting these two titans of the stage, who both helped change the course of theatre in the second half of the last century, together on the same stage for Fragments at the Young Vic produces a kind of hushed reverence that is maintained for much of the hour that follows. I finally caught up with it on Monday, having missed this bill of five short Beckett plays when it was premiered in the smaller Maria studio last year, and I also missed last Thursday’s opening, about which Michael Coveney reported on his blog, “It is curious how certain theatre events are defined by their audiences. Last night’s crowd at the Young Vic seemed enthralled from the start, no doubt basking in the benign glow emanating from director Peter Brook’s apricot shirt. Amazingly spry at 83, Brook twinkled like a star in that shirt, seated next to his wife actress Natasha Parry. People were having a good time before the show even started. And there was a marvellous moment when the audience collectively took a false cue and a sudden hush descended, reducing the sweet usherettes in their red shirts to a state of muffled giggles.”

I wish I had been there - that might have given me something to laugh about. I barely raised a smile throughout, not even during the so-called comic interlude of Play without Words II, that could have been a parody of the theatre of absurdity if it wasn’t finding itself so clever for itself.