May 2009 Archives

I’m constantly being asked to post news of various events on my blog, which misunderstands the fundamental aim of it: though some see critics as merely part of the publicity process, I sometimes (perhaps mistakenly) believe that we serve a higher purpose. We’re here, I hope, to provoke discussion and opinion, and that’s precisely what I try to use this blog to do. You can get news in lots of other places - including here on The Stage website, that this blog is part of. And I daily twitter on breaking news that I hear about, and provide links to other columns and stories that I find interesting.

On the other hand, if I’ve got something to add to the news element, I may find a way to introduce it here in this blog. Perhaps a peek into my weekend diary could provide the launch pad for offering the following bulletin board notes and further thoughts….

In an interview in the Daily Telegraph a few weeks ago, Wallace Shawn admitted to Dominic Cavendish that he is not welcomed in his home territory as much as he is over here: In the US, he said, “few people like what I do.” And, with the Royal Court currently presenting an entire season around his work, Dominic writes that “British theatre’s enthusiasm for him has kept him going”; but then asks him, “Doesn’t he worry about having so much attention lavished on his oeuvre?”

Shawn replies, “Well, people might say the Royal Court have made fools of themselves for presenting a fraud so seriously. I wouldn’t take it too badly because in all periods there must be a lot of artists in order for some good art to be produced. Some of us must be fakes. I suppose if someone said, ‘It has been decided your writing has nothing to offer’, that would upset me. On the other hand, I wouldn’t accept that judgment as final because after my death, others might come along who disagree.”

The last time Hamlet came to town, some commentators who should have known a lot better rushed to advance judgement to moan about the casting of David Tennant of Hamlet for the RSC - and ended up looking pretty stupid when that performance and production emerged as one of the defining ones of our age.

As Charles Spencer put it in his Daily Telegraph review of the London transfer, “This is now without doubt one of the finest productions of Hamlet I have ever seen, led by an actor of extraordinary courage and charisma who has made a persuasive claim to true greatness.”

Yet the Sunday Telegraph’s theatre critic Tim Walker had said before it opened of the RSC’s artistic director Michael Boyd, “This is the man who has got it into his head to cast the Doctor Who star David Tennant as Hamlet to ‘connect’ with modern audiences”.

Although I do not post entries here over weekends or on Bank Holidays, my theatregoing life doesn’t stop just because my writing (and even, mostly, my “twittering”) takes a temporary leave of absence. And I, along with many of my colleagues, spent much of the bank weekend “working”, since the theatre isn’t (fortunately) going on hold anytime soon, even if we’re simultaneously seeing the West End clearing out some of its less well-performing product (it was farewell last Saturday for the brief West End transfer of The Last Cigarette from Chichester, and this coming weekend sees the departures of Spring Awakening, Sunset Boulevard and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat).

But with one less night to the week caused by yesterday’s bank holiday, there are duly clashes both today and tomorrow for major openings, with the RSC opening a new production of Julius Caesar tonight while Hampstead premiere a new April de Angelis play Amongst Friends, and tomorrow the Royal Court continue its Wallace Shawn season with the opening of Aunt Dan and Lemon (the play’s third major London outing, since its original Royal Court premiere in 1985 and was subsequently staged at the Almeida), while the Duchess sees the West End transfer for the Chichester Ronald Harwood double-bill of Taking Sides and Collaboration.

So we’re chasing our tails everywhere at the moment.

I’ve written before about the onward proliferation of star ratings here, and the fact that every national paper now offers them, except The Observer and Independent on Sunday (who offer confusing pictorial representations instead of an audience member caught in various states of enthusiasm, or lack thereof - an idea stolen, I’m sure, from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook supplement).

Nearly everyone, too, uses a five-star table (though Time Out bizarrely introduced the possibility of a sixth star, which is hardly ever used); but since there’s no agreed universal standard as to what each star rating means, we each make our own calls on it.

Back in March, I was heralding the welcome return of a full-time cabaret club at last to London, with the establishment of a permanent residency of the American Songbook in London at Pizza on the Park. But last night, sitting amongst a meagre audience of just 19 spectators including myself and partner (plus four more who arrived later) for the long overdue return of Maureen McGovern to these shores, I started wondering if we actually deserved such a club - or artists of such calibre - if they can’t be more actively supported.

Already the producers have been forced to “postpone” two of their planned artists, Paula West (who was due to appear there from May 5-16) and Andrea Marcovicci (June 2-13) - the first completely unknown over here, though I’ve seen (and loved) her in San Francisco where she is based, so she was probably a tough sell, while Marcovicci has visited more regularly over the years, most recently in 2007 as part of the inaugural American Songbook in London season at Jermyn Street Theatre, so she may have become over-exposed.

That’s part of the paradox of musical cabaret: there’s only a tiny pool of artists to draw on, and to build and sustain an audience for them is a fine juggling act.

While blogs and even “tweets” are increasingly the way for theatre news, discussion and opinions to be disseminated by, the reviews are still the major channel of theatrical communication, since they offer something else: a judgement on quality that is also, hopefully, a quality judgement from an expert who is paid to offer it.

It’s a recurring theme of this blog that there’s no such thing as a “right” or “wrong” review, and that differences of opinion are not only inevitable, but also valuable. Hence the interesting spread of reviews yesterday and today for Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colours, that range from two star notices from Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph and Benedict Nightingale in The Times, to three stars from Michael Billington in The Guardian, and four stars from Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard and Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com, and presumably, the Independent when it publishes him there.

But if there’s no right or wrong when it comes to opinions, they need to be supported by the facts, at least.

Theatre is typically something you can’t do at home alone; it’s an event you usually have to go out for (though it can occasionally come to you, as I recently reported here when Kathryn Hunter brought Rockabye to Blanche Marvin’s living room, for one performance only, when she was ill last year - a testament to the high regard that Blanche is held in by nearly everyone in the theatre, from Peter Brook down). Masturbation, on the other hand, is usually conducted in private (though earlier this month, a charity public Masturbate-a-thon was held in San Francisco, in which a new world record was set of 9 hours 58 minutes for the longest time spent masturbating).

But last night I went out to the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs for the opening of Grasses of a Thousand Colours, a scripted public ode to onanism by Wallace Shawn, which - if it didn’t eclipse the San Francisco record - felt like it was heading that way, as the show ran for exactly a third as long, 3 hours 20 minutes. And while the theatre, at its best, feels like a shared, communal experience, here I felt like I was bearing witness purely to one late middle-aged man’s delusional sexual fantasies: what a colleague once described to me as “penile dementia”.

It happens in all walks of life that children regularly follow their parents into the family business, hence the ubiquity of shops that have names like “John Smith and Sons” outside of them (though you seldom see the “Joan Smith and daughters” alternative, for some reason). Whenever I interview an actor and find out they have children, I inevitably ask the prying question: are they going into the business, too?

Last year I interviewed Lesley Manville for The Stage, and she told me about her son, Alfie, from her first marriage to actor Gary Oldman, who was then 19 and at college, studying performing arts and film-making. She told me, “He can’t quite decide which side he wants to work on.” She then added that she was neither encouraging or discouraging him in whatever path he might choose: “I’m not saying don’t be an actor - I know the downside of it, but I would be assuming he would be a failure to say that, because I’ve had a wonderful life being one, and if I said, ‘don’t, it’s really hard’, that would be making the assumption that he would fail and it could be hard for him. On the other hand, what he’s seen has been success - he doesn’t see enough of the other side of the coin, perhaps. Maybe that’s a conversation I need to have with him - thank you for flagging it up for me!”

The clock is ticking, in every way, for bold, adventurous new musicals: I’m still reeling from the news that Spring Awakening is closing in a fortnight, but last night I was right across the street at the Duchess, for the even briefer West End season of …tick…tick… BOOM! — it’s only running there till this Sunday. But that, at least, is for no other reason than that is all that was scheduled; a seven performance run in all.

Anyone who cares about modern musicals needs to get to both fast: they each bring a hip rock sensibility and youthful vitality to the genre that can be found nowhere else in London.

“We critics are constantly dishing it out and we ought to be able to take it too”, declared Charles Spencer recently, publicly replying to Judi Dench’s letter that had called him “an absolute shit” after his review of her in Madame de Sade. Those who receive our criticism obviously have the right of reply - but we’re journalists, too, and as Charlie proves, we may get the last word, too.

And other journalists may weigh in as well: as Tom Sutcliffe duly noted in The Independent on Tuesday, “While Dame Judi may feel better after striking back at Spencer, her asperity surely only confirmed the accuracy of the original piece. Actresses who are confident that a critic has got it wrong and they’re doing a good job in a great play don’t generally feel the need to put pen to paper to tell him so.”

On the one hand, as La Cage Aux Folles so valiantly declares, “the best of times is now” (and I had the best of times seeing it yet again on Monday, when a press night was put in for critics to see Roger Allam and Philip Quast taking over the lead role; though no similar opportunity was provided for the previous cast change that included Graham Norton, perhaps we should be grateful).

But that’s only a kind of wishful thinking. Last night came the news that Spring Awakening, the freshest and most invigorating new musical in years, is to shutter at the Novello at the end of the month, after a West End run of just 10 weeks. It would make me depressed if I wasn’t already.

In the age of Twitter, of which I am now a part and Facebook, it has never been easier to stay connected; but it’s also possible to start losing a sense of perspective about what’s actually important to know, owing to the constant barrage of information being presented. Just as a blog correspondent only yesterday pointed out, after my blog about not being able to catch everything in a Punchdrunk show, life is always a matter of choices, and you can never see it all. Or read it all.

But from time to time I am offering a catch-up for notes and quotes you may have missed here.

Just as Banksy has now gone mainstream, with Sotheby’s and Bonham’s now auctioning his work, so the once avant-garde theatrical art installation company Punchdrunk have now officially, it seems, been similarly absorbed: their latest work, Tunnel 228, that is being shown for free in a dank collection of vaults below Waterloo station, is co-produced in a partnership between the Old Vic and Young Vic, and with major sponsorship from Bloomberg.

“Everyone loves Punchdrunk”, declare the Young Vic’s Gabby Vautier, Jennie Sutton and David Lan, in their foreword to the glossy, full-colour 72-page plus cover brochure that you receive on the way out of the installation — a souvenir which proves, if nothing else, just how far the company have come in the last nine years of their existence. “This adventure”, they go on, “is the perfect opportunity to make something together we couldn’t do on our own.” The Young Vic have brought their “network of talented young directors and designers, the thousands of local adults and young people and the many community groups who already have strong connections with us” to participate, and connect them “to the Old Vic’s and Punchdrunk’s brilliance, boldness and imagination.”

Everyone, it seems, now wants to be in on the Punchdrunk act.

I am, as regular readers will know, usually diligent about posting a blog entry here every morning. The time may vary a bit, but I usually achieve it by around 11am. It’s one of the things that keeps my work-day focused; and I really value the chance to order my thoughts and life around it.

But sometimes, like today, I fail, and I have now reached the mid-afternoon and not managed to post anything (though I have managed a few “tweets” - the rolling series of “microblogs” that are posted alongside these entries, and offer a different kind of discipline entirely. You can also follow them, or join to receive updates regularly, here). I have, of course, come to realise that I can’t do or see everything - and sometimes choices have to be made. Today has been one of those days, so far; but I can’t go into the weekend neglecting this, either, so I am attempting to make good on it!

As always, it is not so much a case of what’s been nominated as what’s been left out that now matters when it comes to the Tony Award nominations that were announced on Tuesday this week.

Some 43 shows opened in the Broadway season that ended April 30, 2009, and only 27 of them received any nominations, so 16 were left entirely in the cold. That’s inevitable: not all were good. (No one can be surprised by the failure of the musicals A Tale of Two Cities and The Story of My Life or the short-lived revival of Mamet’s American Buffalo to register on the nominations lists). But what about the snubs to the Royal Court originated revival of The Seagull — which New York Times critic Ben Brantley had called “magnificent” and labelled “the finest and most fully involving production of Chekhov that I have ever known”, when it opened last October?

Of course, The Seagull has long since closed - and has clearly already been forgotten as a result.

“Get your stink out of my house”, the actor/writer/director Steven Berkoff once admonished Charles Spencer. On another occasion, Berkoff even issued a death threat to Nicholas de Jongh, then on The Guardian: Berkoff subsequently laughed it off, claiming in an interview, “I just did it to turn him on.” But at the time de Jongh took it rather more seriously — he even contacted the police.

Usually the threats are verbal, not physical - but on one famous occasion, playwright David Storey, who had in an earlier life been a professional rugby player, turned on the critics in the bar of the Royal Court (and one in particular, the Guardian’s Michael Billington), after their scathing notices of one of his plays.

One of the great dangers of this job - or at least latecomers to it - is being out-of-touch. The late Vincent Canby, a long-term film critic of the New York Times (who reviewed movies the paper for some 28 years) before moving over to the theatre beat at the end of his career (first on the Sunday edition, then on the daily, then back on the Sunday), committed one of the classic howlers of out-of-touchness when he reviewed a Lincoln Center production of The Heiress on Broadway in 1995, and referred to its star Cherry Jones as “a splendid young actress who’s new to me”. He was, of course, speaking as he found: she was no doubt new to him. But she had a long pedigree as a New York stage actress, with some 50 credits to her name (including a Tony nomination for her appearance four years earlier in the Broadway production of Our Country’s Good).

So perhaps I was out-of-touch, too, to finally get to Hoxton Hall the weekend before last, as I revealed here, even though it has been around for nearly 150 years. And over the bank holiday weekend, I went to another theatre for the first time that’s been around for a while: the Catford Broadway, which first opened back in 1932!

The papers are screaming headlines daily at the moment that the threat of a global outbreak of swine flu is “imminent”. And Mexico City, it has been reported, is “to virtually shut down this weekend”: restaurants, schools and federal offices have been closed, and now the health minister there has extended the ban to health clubs, gyms, museums and theatres.

Going to the opening night of Romeo and Juliet last night — that launches this year’s season at Shakespeare’s Globe and where there was a returns queue outside the theatre - made me realise that we can’t take such splendid public gathering places for granted.