Ian Shuttleworth has helpfully pointed out in his regular editorial introduction to Theatre Record, the publication that invaluably collects every national review published into one place, that I “unintentionally but perhaps tellingly misspelt” the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s name as Alistair Daring, not Darling, in my blog entry here on the reduction in the VAT rate; it’s obviously such a good typo I’m going to leave it uncorrected there!
The Guardian, meanwhile, called me Mark Shepton when they quoted me this week on David Tennant’s absence from the press night of Hamlet here; as Shutters, as Ian is usually called, e-mailed to suggest to me last night, “Clearly, you need to beat them about the head with a Shepton mallet!”
Ian then added, “I’m sorry, I’ve just been to Peter Pan at Richmond, and so this is the best calibre of gag I’m currently capable of producing…”
When I told him in turn that I was going to it this afternoon, he wrote back to issue a dire warning. “Mark, I know how dedicated you are, but really, if I can’t persuade you to desert this particular battlefront then take a shotgun and be prepared to unleash both barrels at Tony Rudd’s Smee before the first of his second-act front-curtain routines gets as far as the musical number. Because from there it’s not so much downhill as… well, do you know the vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn? You know the final shot, as the camera pulls back to reveal that the cantina is built on the very lip of an abyss that goes all the way down to Hell itself? ‘Nuff said.”
Forewarned, I always say, is forearmed; and it’s a critic’s job to (try to) find out for themselves. But sometimes I have to confess that enough warnings send me scuttling for cover: after reading the early reviews for the RSC’s production of The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes at Wilton’s Music Hall last month, for instance, I immediately bowed out and cancelled my press tickets.
Mind you, I wish I had heeded the warnings on Amazonia, currently at the Young Vic, which I saw last Saturday, two nights after the opening, and was every bit as bad as Lyn Gardner had already warned it was in a Guardian review that morning, in which she said called it “a production that will surely go down in the annals of theatrical history as one of the most misguided Christmas shows ever.” (It is interesting, though, to see David Lan, the Young Vic’s artistic director, putting a brave face on things on Charlotte Higgins’ Guardian blog, in which he comments, “We decided to do something completely different this year, and what it’s actually like is the popular culture shows you encounter in the Amazon. Whether people expected to see that in a Christmas show, I don’t know, but it’s doing very well at the box office, and audiences are loving it.”)
Unfortunately, too, I didn’t see Lyn’s one-star review of Hampstead’s The Little Prince that ran yesterday until after I had seen it myself on Tuesday, which concurred entirely with my own view on this site.
It can be helpful to send another critical canary down the theatrical mineshaft first, and see if it survives. Last night I fear I was that canary for the London premiere for Madame Zingara’s Theatre of Dreams, a nightmare of a cabaret/burlesque-with-dining evening that has fetched up, by way of South Africa, on a barren site in the shadow of Battersea Power Station, and I feel like I barely survived. I’m not sure if it was the fillet steak, served medium rare in a rich chocolate sauce and barely warmed up, but I had to head to the toilets long before the end of the show, and again when I got home. (That may be too much information, I know, but at least it meant I can report on one good feature of the evening: the Kenneth Turner handwash in the bathrooms).
The International Herald Tribune’s Matt Wolf was the only other critic I recognised there last night, but I found myself curiously sharing a press table with the foreign editor of Sky News and his wife instead! It was that sort of incongruous evening; and retreating from the incessant noise to the outdoor smokers’ tent (even though I don’t smoke) pointed up another, as I was saying how dire it all was and then discovered I was actually speaking to one of the show’s South African press agents. (No one else from the PR agency had bothered to actually find or welcome us).
But then this is a show that has come in under the radar entirely: I’ve not seen a single press ad or piece anywhere, and only knew about it because I had been invited to see it. But tickets are a staggering £75 to £115 - including that four-course meal, but not drinks which could add considerably to the bill - so I wonder who will actually be there tonight.
For the record, I'd like to add that my remarks were made not out of disregard for the critics' convention ("more of a guideline, really") that one doesn't discuss a show until both parties' views are in print or have at least been filed; rather, out of a greater regard for the immense amount of time and effort Mark puts into getting round such a number of shows, and a concern that his resources might perhaps be better deployed elsewhere.