February 2009 Archives

I guess yesterday’s outbreak of good news couldn’t last. I duly came crashing back to earth with the “cold douche of reality” (as Nick de Jongh’s theatre critic character calls it in his play Plague Over England) when I went to the Arts Theatre last night. Allegedly re-opened after what the programme calls “an extensive 4 month refurbishment”, which it also claims has been comprehensive, “incorporating auditorium seating and Front of House”, I discovered that, apart from a new minimalist bar on street level (with a new private members’ club, the London Cocktail Club, taking over the basement bar) and a new lick of red paint everywhere, it’s the same decrepit theatre inside, complete with the same old creaky seats.

But worse was the even creakier play, Toyer, that despite two strong actors and a sleek set of high production values, turns this so-called psychological thriller only into psychological torture for the audience forced to watch it. Mind you, there weren’t many of us in last night: I counted 32.

Yesterday seems to have been a good news day all around, with The Stage reporting three stories online that could have lasting repercussions on the British theatre.

· First of all, it was announced that Tom Morris has been appointed new artistic director at the Bristol Old Vic, joined by his former BAC associate Emma Stenning as executive director. This is not just a personal vote of confidence by these two leading talents, both of them already holding good jobs at the National Theatre and Manchester International Festival respectively, in the future possibilities of regional theatre, but also a beacon of hope for the wholesale re-generation of it.

You only need to look at Chichester to see what happens when a strong artistic vision can be created for a venue.

We’ve already living through the consequences of allowing the banks to have their global ambitions unchecked: they grew too fast and too recklessly, and now we’re having to bail them out or sink together. The bigger an organisation is, the more powerful it becomes - and the more dangerous its potential failure is, too. Yet still companies are being allowed to do the same thing; and in a step that has rocked the US live music business, Live Nation and Ticketmaster recently announced their intention to combine into a new entity called Live Nation Entertainment, creating a $6billion company that would operate the majority of major American concert venues, sell tickets to events at those venues, and manage many of the artists who play there.

Just yesterday the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee marshalled a hearing on this proposed merger, and the live blog posted on the Chicago Sun Times website makes for fascinating and frequently alarming reading.

Kenneth Tynan may have become notorious as the first person to say fuck on British television, but he blew lots of critical raspberries during his time as a theatre critic, first on the Evening Standard, then on The Observer, and later as a profile writer for The New Yorker. But he also famously crossed sides - becoming the National’s first full-time literary manager under Olivier in the early 60s, and later creating the revue Oh, Calcutta! in 1969, and co-adapting Macbeth with Roman Polanski for the latter’s 1971 film version.

Now, of course, another Evening Standard theatre critic, current incumbent Nicholas de Jongh, has crossed sides, too - but while still in office. The transfer of his play Plague Over England from the Finborough to the West End’s Duchess Theatre marks, according to Michael Coveney’s review today, “the first play by a critic seen there since Kenneth More starred in Jeremy Kingston’s Signs of the Times many watery moons ago”; looking it up, I discover it ran for six months at the Vaudeville in 1973.

So Slumdog Millionaire went on to a slam-dunk victory at last night’s Oscars, producing, as Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw says today, “the biggest British victory since Chariots of Fire”. It won what he calls “one of those extraordinary Oscar-night landslides: a film whose aura of success and feelgood word-of-mouth manages to replicate itself virally inside the heart and mind of every Academy Award voter.” It swept eight awards, including Best Picture and best director for Danny Boyle, replicating its victories in those two categories that it had already won at the BAFTA’s earlier this month.

When Boyle collected his award at the BAFTA’s, Boyle quoted from a Howard Barker play that directed the original production of at the Royal Court, Victory (coincidentally being revived in a new production at the Arcola next week), saying, “There’s nowhere to go in the end, but where you came from”. And Boyle, like fellow Brit Best Director nominee at the Oscars Stephen Daldry (who directed The Reader), not to mention Sam Mendes (husband of Best Actress winner Kate Winslet) and the late Anthony Minghella (a producer on The Reader), all of course came from the theatre.

I usually try to make my blog entries here approach single topics every day, but sometimes there’s paradoxically not much to say but a lot to talk about! So here, in no particular order, are a few random issues, each of which could be a blog entry in themselves, but I’m going to combine in a single entry.

· Theatrical traffic: First nights regularly stop traffic, both inside and outside the theatre, but on Tuesday, a photoshoot outside the Cambridge Theatre to announce the arrival of Jerry Springer in Chicago had the traffic at Cambridge Circus stopped at 11 in the morning! You would have thought there would be better places to hold a photoshoot than with the photographers lined up in the middle of the traffic island to shoot Springer and the girls standing in front of the theatre itself. But one truck courteously stopped to allow the photographers to do their work, holding up the traffic behind him - who promptly took themselves around the other side of the traffic island entirely! It was an exercise in impromptu traffic control that was a lesson in resourcefulness.

One of the hit songs in Avenue Q, of course, is “The Internet is for Porn”; but one of the things that has also been proved by this production is how much the power of the internet can also be harnessed to help sell the show. It has done so with such creative interventions as specially filmed clips, available on youtube, like the day out that puppets Rod and Nicky take around London, which ends up with the closeted Rod ending up in a bar on Old Compton Street, G-A-Y, and is seen scanning the escort ads at the back of the free weekly club magazine QX and admitting, “I think I know that guy”. That’s just one of over 5,000 clips currently available there that reference the show.

And now that Avenue Q is finally departing the West End (it closes on March 28), another show has come up right behind it that’s also designed to appeal to a youthful market - and has already built up a substantial following online, too.

Christian Voice founder Stephen Green, who waged a very public campaign against Jerry Springer - the Opera and sought to bring a private prosecution on the grounds of blasphemy against BBC director general Mark Thompson and Jon Thoday of Avalon who produced the original stage version of the show, subsequently lost that case and was ordered to pay the £90,000 legal costs incurred by his opponents. It was money he insisted he did not have, and he duly turned victim, insisting that he would have to declare himself bankrupt if they sought to pursue the debt: “‘It should be enough for Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday that they got away with blasphemy, insulting God and the Lord Jesus Christ, at least in this life,” he declared. “For these rich, powerful men to pursue me into the bankruptcy courts over money I don’t have would be vindictive.”

But as the BBC replied, “It is important to remember it was Mr Green who chose to seek to bring a private prosecution for a criminal offence. We always believed the case had no merit and should never have been brought but clearly had no choice but to defend against it. It is regrettable that the BBC was forced to spend considerable public money doing so.”

I hope they got their money back. I only say so because a quick google search reveals that, despite Green’s public failure to bring this prosecution, he is still up to his old tricks.

We go to the theatre for many things - to be challenged, excited, enlightened, exhilarated, surprised, delighted, charmed and much, much more — though, of course, we don’t always get those needs or wishes met. For some of us who go to the theatre for a living, it is one way of living our lives vicariously through observing the lives of others, and being paid to do so; it’s a kind of licensed professional voyeurism. It also allows all of us to escape our own lives, too, for a few hours every night. (Maybe I should take this stuff to my therapist, not my readers, but then this blog is a kind of confessional sometimes).

But most of all, I suspect, those who go the theatre, whether for a living or to make sense of their lives (or merely to fill some time in them), want to be entertained. And no show currently playing in London ticks quite as many boxes in terms of offering sheer pleasure as La Clique, the burlesque carnival running at the London Hippodrome.

Just a few weeks ago I reported here on the press night for Hampstead Theatre’s current production of Private Lives that was interrupted by an errant fire alarm going off, though it took the theatre a little while to actually finally stop the show in response to it. I recalled in that entry how first nights of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Gods of Carnage were respectively disrupted by the set breaking down and a power cut. One correspondent also reminded me of the first night of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys at the National where a fire sprinkler system had been activated in the lighting grid and caused the show to begin an hour late with reduced lighting.

And today comes news that the curse of the first night mishap is also affecting the opera world. While English National Opera were forced by the snow two Mondays ago to postpone that night’s planned premiere of La Boheme, the London premiere of composer George Benjamin’s opera Into the Little Hill took place at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio on Saturday evening, presented in a double bill with Harrison Birtwistle’s Down By the Greenwood Side, found itself even more seriously compromised.

“I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum,” says Terry Molloy, the Brando character in the film of On the Waterfront. And that kind of rueful regret for opportunities missed clings to many of us in all walks of life, which is why those words resonate so loudly more than 55 years since they were first heard in the 1954 film. And last night, as the film was transposed to the stage of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, their original author, Budd Shulberg, was there to hear them again - and, now aged 94, he took to the stage at the curtain call to declare that this was an evening he would remember for the rest of his life.

It also coincidentally brought Steven Berkoff - once an enfant terrible of the British theatre, but now one of its elder statesmen - back to the West End, too. He was once a serious contender himself in the theatre landscape.

Undoubtedly the biggest innovation of Nick Hytner’s regime at the National Theatre has been the Travelex £10 season, and its return last night for the 7th year running with the opening of England People Very Nice, the first production of this year’s season, brings a big, boisterous, noisy public play to a (hopefully) big, boisterous, noisy audience. This is exactly one of the things that the Travelex season is here to support: to push audiences into supporting new work that they might otherwise not take a chance on - and to push playwrights into creating it.

The Environment Agency apparently issued 101 flood warnings and 190 flood watches by 8.30am yesterday, mostly in South and South-West England. Even Northolt in North West London gets a special mention in a news report in The Times today for receiving its full monthly average of 3.8cms of rain in a day. Shaftesbury Avenue was not on their list, though in fact it has been raining both outside and inside the Apollo for a good few months now. First it was the turn of Rain Man, with Josh Hartnett; now, after a short break, Three Days of Rain has taken over, officially opening last night.

There’s real rainfall onstage here (as there would have been next door, too, had Never Forget transferred, as was originally planned, from the Savoy to the Lyric, though it was fortunately cancelled before it did); the West End Whingers have already blissfully labelled the show “Pure theatrical Niagara”.

Playwrights necessarily write alone; but the process doesn’t necessarily need to be solitary. For 37 years now, an innovative programme - originally launched under the auspices of Thames Television as the Thames Television Theatre Writers Scheme, subsequently taken over by Pearson plc in 1993 and since duly known as the Pearson Playwrights’ Scheme - has both nurtured and financially sponsored young writers embarking on a career in writing for the theatre, and done so by funding a year-long attachment to professional theatres that enables them to be part-financed as they are supported in other ways, too.

Those theatres, from the National and Royal Court to the Donmar, National Theatre of Scotland and the Finborough, put forward the candidates they would like to be attached to them themselves; after being interviewed by the judging panel that currently comprises veteran producer Thelma Holt, playwright Catherine Johnson, novelist Beryl Bainbridge, former Head of BBC Radio John Tydeman, TV and film producer Sue Summers and critic Michael Billington, five bursaries are awarded every year. The plays that are subsequently written also go forward to a competition for best play, with a prize of £10,000 being given to the winner that for the past two years has been personally funded by Johnson (presumably putting a little bit of her Mamma Mia! fortunes back into a scheme that she had once personally benefited from when her play Dead Sheep was a winner in 1991).

No, I’ve not gone straight. (The Daily Mail’s attempts to out me last week by chronicling the sightings of me and an “equally barrel-chested new companion” I’ve been escorting to West End first nights lately can hardly be said to have any effect, since I’ve never exactly been “in”, but I’m flattered that they care). But as regular readers will know, too, I’m a huge fan of cabaret, and though it is distressingly under-represented in London, I’ve seen two acts this weekend that I was mad about - and not in a crazy way, but in an entirely loving one!

Back in December I wrote here about what a fan I already was of Maria Friedman, and how, in the space of a single week, I’d seen her four times over in different guises.

Last night Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge returned to the West End in triumph, in a production directed by Lindsay Posner that proves that the best way to confront the credit crunch is simply to put great plays on and put them on superbly. It’s exciting to see 15 actors on a stage and a set of hulking, brooding magnificence from Christopher Oram that seemingly puts an entire house on stage. It can’t have come cheap.

But is it worth all the effort, expense and talent if the show is going to be regularly undermined by the people who actually come to see it? The play, of course, is on the schools syllabus; and so school parties are making their way in force (and perhaps by force!) to the show. My heart simultaneously sinks and leaps at the prospect.

I know that you come here to read me, not hear me - but The Stage is now preserving me on audio, as well! Wearing many journalistic hats as I do, I am forever interviewing theatre people privately - just this morning (and it’s the reason this posting is later than usual), I have been speaking to theatre owners Nica Burns and Rosemary Squire for a feature I am writing on West End refurbishments, and Imelda Staunton about her current welcome return to the theatre in Entertaining Mr Sloane (and for those of us who love to hear her sing, too, she will be doing so for the first time in a decade this coming Sunday in a fundraising gala for the Almeida; I wish I could be there, but tickets are £150-£300).

But I am also now hosting a regular series of live interviews, in front of a paying public, at the Shaw Theatre with stars of musical theatre. I know you can’t always be there (though a gratifyingly large audience is turning up for them, particularly from London’s drama schools). And now, in a partnership with The Stage, these are being recorded and made available to a worldwide public, too, via podcast.

At last night’s opening of Spring Awakening at Lyric Hammersmith, my partner and I were sat next to a particularly obnoxious couple - they were rowing rather heatedly before they even got to their seats (the man took the woman back out into the entry doorway to sort it out), and then proceeded to talk repeatedly during the show until hushed by us. At the end of the interval, both returned to the row - only for her to leave again immediately, and come in just before the show was starting. Then, during the second act, she became so bored by what was unfolding onstage that she went on several exploratory journeys into her handbag - producing lipsticks and the like to keep herself variously entertained - and resorting to reading the programme virtually cover to cover to prevent herself from actually having to look at the stage.

The West End Whingers encountered similar difficulties but en masse, not just with one person, when they attended Oliver!, since the audience seemed to take the instruction to “Consider yourself at home” rather literally.

Yesterday, according to a Guardian front page headline, was “the day the snow came - and Britain stopped”. As the story goes on to report, “Much of Britain was overwhelmed, with conditions forcing one in five workers to stay at home.”

Some columnists and commentators today are putting both a negative and positive spin on all of this: on the one hand, comments Stuart Jeffries in a big piece in The Guardian’s G2, “Other cities - Winnipeg, say, Moscow or Bergen - cope with snow, subdue it and go to work through impeccably gritted roads. London isn’t like that: it rarely copes with anything; these days, it masters nothing. Equipped with a loveably tragi-comic public transport system, our capital fails on a daily basis. The poor suckers who live here get - at best - inured to this hopelessness. Yesterday London was so hobbled by the snow that the situation was even worse than hopeless: usually six million Londoners get to work by bus; yesterday there were no buses; the tube was even more spectacularly unreliable than usual… Just for a day Londoners got hit by something special.”

So London has gone entirely on hold today, at least transport wise, with the arrival of snow. And as always, despite plenty of advance warning about its imminent arrival, we’ve been caught apparently unawares once again. The roads, at least around me in Southwark, are not gritted. And I have just spent over an hour trying to get my car moved to a residents’ bay from the (now completely hidden) yellow line it was on before: of course no one is giving up their spaces on a day like this, but you can be sure that at the first sign of a thaw (and a yellow line emerging from below it) the traffic wardens will be out in force.

How much easier it is to enjoy the snow vicariously, with Slava’s Snowshow that was once an annual staple over here at venues from Hackney Empire (where I first saw it the early 90s) to the Old Vic and the Piccadilly, but we’ve not had it in the UK for a while now (it has just played a Christmas season at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre). This is a show that was basically launched on its now-international trajectory at Hackney.