January 2009 Archives

10.39AM: The other day I had an internet problem and didn’t post a blog entry till after lunch; and there were waves of concern — well, two e-mails, at least! — from regular readers enquiring where I was! So I’m going to pre-empt those today, by saying I’m heading to The Stage’s annual New Year’s party today — and the blog will be delayed until after I get back this afternoon! Please return later!

3.30PM: With all due respect to correspondent Nick, who responded to my earlier statement about my whereabouts today that I could surely have written my entry for the day before attending The Stage party, this isn’t the only job I do. I know and appreciate the value that regular readers put on this blog, and I won’t deny that it is a job I take very seriously too; but sometimes I have to live a life in order to have something to actually write about!

Besides, as someone jokingly (I think) pointed out to me at the party, the only reason they came to it was because they read here that I was going to be there, and it was a good way to know they were going to see me.

The annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, which I hosted for the first time on Tuesday, are a rare coming together of critics and practitioners in joint celebration - an event at which those of us whose job it is to go to the theatre night after night publicly acknowledge some of the great achievements of the previous year.

For once, too, it’s the critics onstage and the artists in the audience, so the relationship is completely altered. And yes, I admit it: I did have a bit of stage fright as a result. (I choose to spend my nights in the stalls, not onstage, for a good reason; I’m not a thwarted actor. But it is also good experience, I keep telling myself, to come out of the shadows that we typically occupy, and face those whose work it is we judge).

First of all, I am much later than usual today - the internet access has gone down at the office I rent, so I have had to come home to file from here instead. It is amazing how vulnerable we are to forces outside of our control.

And as with internet failure, so Hampstead Theatre last night proved itself vulnerable to the laws of first nights, where if things can go wrong, they will. The set famously broke down during the first night of the current West End revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat a couple of summers ago, provoking a long delay during the first act (and dark murmurings of sabotage afterwards).

No, I’m not going to pre-empt the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards that I’m hosting the presentation of at lunchtime today by announcing them here. (Though there would, in fact, be something of a precedent for doing so: There was a year when the late Sheridan Morley forwarded the results to the New York Times, which duly published them several days before the actual event).

I’m not even going to repeat my own votes in each of the nine categories that we vote in, though you can start to work out what some of them, at least, were, by listening in to the Theatrevoice round-up I hosted with regular contributors Charlie Spencer, Matt Wolf and David Benedict of our review of the year.

The high street may be facing unprecedented economic challenges and slashing all its prices - walking down Jermyn Street last night I was amazed by the number of shops having sales even there. And not a day seems to go by without another bank or industry in crisis: no sooner did I get home from the West End last night than I turned on the news to find that the steel manufacturer Corus is preparing to shed 2,000 jobs, nearly 10% of its workforce. But today has brought news from SOLT that its 52 member theatres - both commercial and grant-aided - have set all-time records in 2008, for attendance (13,807,286, up 1% on the previous year’s record of 13,636,540) as well as income (£480,563,674, up 3% on the previous year’s takings of £469,729, 135, which had also set a record).

This is an astonishing result - perhaps wary investors need to start shifting their money into theatrical stock instead of banking. And proof of this advance sales are not only holding up, they’re actually improving, too, all the time: according to Richard Pulford, quoted in today’s Guardian, “Advance ticket sales are at historically high levels. At the moment they’re at £57m - about two years ago they were £30m.”

It’s an occupational hazard: I spend so many of my waking hours either seeing, writing about or arranging to go to the theatre that it now affects my sleep, too. This morning I actually awoke from a dream in which I had imagined that Priscilla, Queen of the Desert has already recouped its investment - before it has even opened! (If only, I can hear the producers muttering….)

But don’t put your money on it: my own track record in predicting what will be a hit and what will flop is notoriously unreliable. I would have told Cameron Mackintosh not to transfer Les Miserables from the Barbican to the Palace; and I actually told a friend not to invest in the London production of Hairspray, since I didn’t rate its chances.

No wonder that, when this same friend asked me the other day for further investment advice on a possible Broadway transfer for a recent London hit and I said “I wouldn’t put money on it — especially now. Heck, I wouldn’t put money on ANYTHING!” - he instantly replied: “I have just invested my entire life savings on this venture. When Mark Shenton says ‘flop,’ bet the farm!”

But seriously, I’m not a tipster - if I were, I’d be a rich producer, not a humble hack.

After referring to the controversy around the delayed opening of the Old Vic’s Complicit yesterday, I received an e-mail last night from a friend who had just been to see it: “All I will say is that I can see no reason why it couldn’t have opened as scheduled if tonight’s performance was anything to go by.” He went on to say, “There was no sign of Richard Dreyfuss, who gives a committed and passionate performance, needing any assistance from the earpiece he is visibly but discretely wearing. I really think all the ugly rumours and naysaying ought to stop. It deserves a little more respect than such cheap shots.”

Now it may well be that my friend’s expectations might have been low, given the early feedback that had surrounded the show; it’s also possible that more of the so-called “development time” had already bedded in a much better show. But there’s a definite danger of fuelling a climate of distrust around a show, and I realise I am part of that here; but then because previews, of whatever duration, happen in public, there’s also an inevitable danger of the public exercising the right to the opinion they have paid full price tickets to attend.

Who needs critics? Some shows are happily critic-proof - their success is assured whatever the critics say. Oliver!, carrying a reported £15m advance before it opened, may be one such, as my Stage colleague Lisa Martland noted in her review of the show here. But other types of theatre, particularly straight plays, crave critical endorsement to send them on their way and help them reach out to the public: the National’s import of the Steppenwolf’s production of August: Osage County, playing its final performance today, was a slow sell until the reviews came out, and then quickly (and justifiably) became a returns-only show.

Though the popular view of the Donmar Warehouse - and one that I’ve indulged in myself before - is that it sells out in advance of a show’s opening, that’s only for a handful of star-led productions, but otherwise the theatre typically keeps its preview period as short as possible — hopeful that the reviews will do the rest of their marketing for them, they are keen to get them in as quickly as possible.

But other shows apparently need to keep the critics out at all costs.

The banks may be imploding around us yet again, but today is also about new beginnings, at least Stateside where Barack Obama is being sworn in as the new US President. So let’s be positive - and note that, even as jobs are being lost in every sector, there were at least three recruitment ads in yesterday’s Guardian for new artistic directors of leading regional theatres.

And they provide between them a microcosm of the theatrical ecology on which the enduring health, or otherwise, of our theatre scene is built. Sheffield Theatres, who managed to lose their artistic director Sam West in only his second term in office after the board proceeded with refurbishment plans that left him without much of a theatre to actually run during the 2007/08 season, will finally be replacing him ahead of planning to re-open the Crucible and its studio.

This is one of the biggest jobs in British theatre: between its three performances spaces - as well as the Crucible, there is also the Lyceum to programme - there are over 2,000 seats to fill nightly, akin to the National. Sheffield could do worse than try to persuade West to return: in his time away from Sheffield, he has been emerging as one of our best directors, with terrific revivals of Dealer’s Choice at the Menier (that then transferred to the Trafalgar Studios) and Waste at the Almeida.

There’s no sitting on the fence when it comes to performers like Mandy Patinkin: you either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. Last night he finished a brief nine-performance run at the Duke of York’s, and - having been away for his first night - I finally made it to his final performance last night. Sitting in the Café Nero across the street before the show, I ran into West End performer Jessica Martin, who like me, was taking a Patinkin virgin to see him, and appropriately warned them both: “He’s a bit like marmite - you either love him or hate him”.

My friend Barb Jungr, who saw him last week, put it in a similar way to me on the phone today: “He’s a very strong taste - like anchovies.” But though I always ask Pizza Express to hold the anchovies whenever I order one of their Four Seasons pizzas, Patinkin’s strong flavouring and sometimes weird stylistic choices aren’t just idiosyncrasies that can be turned on or off to order: they are an integral part of his performance template.

One of the most exciting things about being a theatre critic, apart from the joy (and occasional despair) of being able to go to the theatre every single night of course, is the diversity and range of those experiences: one night we’re jostling the red carpet, photographers, TV crews and assorted minor celebrities outside the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for the opening night of Oliver!; the next, we’re being crammed into the unbearably hot (yes, even in this weather) upstairs room of an Islington pub, sitting on uncomfortable pews, for the Old Red Lion revival of Sam Shepard’s Simpatico.

That’s something to be both embraced and celebrated, and it’s wonderful to see the tenacity of so many of my colleagues in doing exactly that: both Michaels Billington and Coveney were in each place with me on the last two evenings. But not everyone, of course, can get to the theatre as often (or as easily) as we do; apart from the fact that it’s our job, we also all live in London - and it’s free. So we can afford to take the chance, in every sense, on each of these experiences; but even so, we can’t get to everything, as I have often written here before, since there is happily simply so much to see at any given time.

But what about the general public?

It’s always encouraging when the theatre makes front page news. For last night’s opening of Oliver! at Drury Lane, today’s Times has a two-column picture of Rowan Atkinson running the full length of the front page, trailing a review and news story on page 4; while The Independent has a banner, immediately below the masthead with Atkinson’s face cutting into the paper’s own name, running the full width of the page, trailing its page 3 critical verdict. The Daily Mail devotes most of page three to Quentin Letts’ review, accompanied by two colour pictures. Even The Guardian splashes Michael Billington’s review across page five, with two colour pictures.

No expense had clearly been spared for the show we saw last night. As urchins spilled out over every corner of the huge stage in the opening number - Michael Coveney says in his review in The Independent that he lost counting at ninety, though by my own reckoning there were in fact 48 - and Anthony Ward’s astonishingly detailed and realistic sets looked like something out of a soundstage for a film as much as a theatrical one, you couldn’t but marvel at the scale of the thing. Though this is a re-tread of Cameron Mackintosh’s 1994 London Palladium production in terms of most of its technical credits, it seems to have been amplified and expanded.

And I couldn’t help wondering if, in these credit crunch times, this could be the last gasp for productions of this scale and expense.

Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre has long forged a bracing policy of criticising and holding our political and judicial leaders to account, re-playing public enquiries as theatrical events that bring them alive (and helpfully précis them along the way) as no amount of trawling through newspaper articles can. These have ranged from dramatisations of the Scott Arms to Iraq Inquiry in 1994 to one of the Hutton Inquiry, investigating the circumstances of the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly, in 2003, to ones that have looked at events abroad, such as the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal and the detentions in Guantanamo.

Less seriously, one of the Tricycle’s staff has also recently, as I have previously written here, been holding theatrical bloggers to account, too, for daring to criticise their unreserved seating policy. (Further to which, here’s a note to the West End Whingers: I was pleased to see last night that the Leicester Square Theatre, which has previously bizarrely operated one itself, has now introduced fully reserved seating).

But next week the Tricycle is going to let its hair down, and its guard, and unashamedly celebrate: there’s a listing on its cinema website for an Obama Inauguration Party next Tuesday, billed as having a running time of 210 minutes and a classification rating of U!

A EU directive issued in 2007 promised - or threatened - that theatre producers who misleadingly quote reviews in show publicity material could face the threat of legal action, as reported in The Stage at the time. It hasn’t yet, as far as I know, yet been put to the test. But I may have just found a case that might work: leafing through the Guardian’s G2 today, I spotted an ad for Madame Zingara’s Theatre of Dreams - a show I am astonished to discover is still apparently running in a tent in the shadow of Battersea Power Station that I reviewed here.

They have understandably at least not quoted from that review, misleadingly or otherwise, but offer, in their display ad in today’s Guardian, one that offers this testimonial: “Delicious food, fabulous show, talented cast, all in all, an enchanted evening”; and it is credited to The Outside Organisation. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? They’re none other than the show’s London PR agency!

One of the special privileges of being a critic, and one I try not to take for granted, is that while the rest of the public scrambles for impossible-to-get tickets, we’re actually invited to be there. And last week, even as David Tennant’s late return to Hamlet put an even greater premium on those seats, we were invited to see it again last Wednesday, even though most of us had seen the production twice already - once at Stratford last August, then again at the London opening, when Tennant’s understudy Edward Bennett had to stand in for him.

But one of the special problems of being a critic, and one that I know most of my friends try not to take me for granted over, is that sometimes it is thought that we have special access for others, too.

It was a back-to-school moment for the critics last night as we formally met for the first time since the Christmas break, at the now traditional first show of the New Year, the annual residency of Cirque du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall. But in fact there wasn’t a huge turnout, even so: of the first string critical tribe, I only saw only Charles Spencer for the Telegraph, Benedict Nightingale for The Times and Georgina Brown for the Mail on Sunday, with Patrick Marmion standing in for the Daily Mail and Bruce Dessau for the Evening Standard; and from the arts correspondent’s corner, Mark Brown of The Guardian.

There was, of course, a West End press night wedged in between Christmas and New Year, too, when Well made the move from Trafalgar Studios 2 to the Apollo last Tuesday, but I’m not sure how many made it there that night.

I’ve previously admitted here that I’m what a friend of mine from New York calls a “repeater” - and as I explained at the time, “No, he’s not complaining that I endlessly say the same things again and again (though I probably do that, too!), but that I like to re-visit productions more than once. It’s not, of course, possible to go back to everything you enjoy, but I’m not a ‘seen it, done that’ kind of person. If I like something, I’ll happily go back to see it again. And again.”

You may have spotted that I even do it for shows I’ve not liked: I recently went to the last night of Imagine This, as I wrote here, which may indicate an unduly masochistic streak, someone with too much time on their hands or being prepared to give something the benefit of the doubt, or all of the above.

But theatre is a living, breathing and therefore forever mutating organism, and not only do shows change over time but so too does one’s possible responses to them.

Isn’t it weird that they managed to dim the lights of all Broadway’s theatre marquees for a minute last Tuesday to honour the passing of Harold Pinter, as reported here - yet the West End could only finally muster a partial response four days later, when ATG did so at the Duke of York’s on Saturday evening, prior to the final performance of the revival there of No Man’s Land, and also at its other theatres as well?

Where was SOLT in the midst of this? Why did it not arrange a co-ordinated response of all of its member theatres, and rather sooner than ATG’s belated response? Of course it didn’t help that Pinter died on Christmas Eve, but even if various theatre offices may have been shut between then and Boxing Day, this is traditionally one of the busiest weeks of the theatre year, and its trade body should have been on the case to arrange a timely honour, rather than one thrown out as an afterthought by one theatre group only.

In Britain we’re obsessed with hierarchy, honours and pecking orders. On New Year’s Eve, the Queen’s New Year’s Honours were issued, and of course the list was big on our Olympic heroes from last year’s Beijing events; but on the arts front, the pickings were surprisingly slim. Despite a public campaign on behalf of Bruce Forsyth to be elevated to a knighthood (he already has a CBE), which included an online petition signed by more than 15,000 people, he was overlooked - according to a story in the Daily Telegraph, he was out of the running because he received his CBE in 2005, so was unlikely to be considered for an honour again until at least 2010. A source is quoted from within the Cabinet Office explaining, “There is a convention within the honours system that individuals who have received an award in the past will not be considered for another honour for five years. It is not a hard and fast rule, but unless someone does something exceptional, it tends to be adhered to.”

At least that’s now clear. But what do the awards themselves mean? When I wrote a story on Tuesday for an American website about Michael Sheen being awarded an OBE and Liz Smith receiving an MBE, the editor replied requesting clarification as to what those awards meant.