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!
The listing further promises, “We will be screening the inauguration ceremony live in the cinema with American beer, pretzels and cheerleaders completing the party.” (Proceeds,by the way, go to the Tricycle Education Programme).
The Tricycle’s artistic director Nicolas Kent is quoted in today’s Independent declaring, “”We certainly never entertained the idea of holding Bush parties but with Obama it felt like the natural thing to do. We do a lot of political theatre and we do a lot of black theatre, so celebrating Obama’s arrival at the White House makes perfect sense.”
American theatre people are certainly being energised by Obama’s imminent arrival in the White House: Mandy Patinkin, currently appearing in concert at the Duke of York’s, wears his support literally. As Matt Wolf writes in his International Herald Tribune review, “How can you not love someone singing ‘God Bless America’ wreathed in a necklace made out of buttons in support of Barack Obama, for whom Patinkin avidly campaigned?” And when I interviewed Patinkin in the current issue of The Stage, he told me, “I’ve never felt more hopeful. The world is charged with hope”. He added that he hopes Obama’s victory would now “reverse the course the world has been on in its plummeting fashion. I hope we can take a page out of his book, and elevate our stuff and get away from our ipods and this moronic waste of our lives.”
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