June 2009 Archives

It’s very nearly time for me to check out of here for a week - and for once, I am intending to go fully cold turkey. Not only am I once again deliberately going to a destination — Gran Canaria — where there is no theatre that I know of (apart from the street variety that takes place nightly in the environs of the Yumbo Centre, including the terrible drag shows that are a feature there), but I am even planning on putting my out-of-office assistant on my e-mail and not checking in at all.

Will I manage it, I wonder? (I have always allowed myself to be chased by e-mail wherever I have gone, whether it be Barbados or South Africa; but I have, at least, never succumbed to the temptation to get a Blackberry, or I’d never be away from e-mail ever. This summer, however, I am at least reassured that I won’t be entirely out of contact, thanks to Vodafone Passport’s deal where receiving and making calls in Gran Canaria will cost exactly the same as if I were at home!)

Regular readers of this blog will know that usually I take a “busman’s holiday”, and my most frequent destination is therefore New York.

A round-up of some recent quotes I’ve been collecting on acting and other matters….

• Tom Hardy, interviewed in Tuesday’s Guardian by Gareth McLean:

“Actors, like all artists, are deeply self-interested. But I’m also aware of how unimportant I am. In the majority of actors, there are battles between massive egos and low self-esteem. Look at me! No, don’t look at me! Love me but don’t touch me!”

McLean refers to a time when Hardy became an alcoholic and a crack addict, and quotes him admitting, “”I went entirely off the rails and I’m lucky I didn’t have some terrible accident or end up in prison or dead - because that’s where I was going. Now I know my beast and I know how to manage it. It’s like living with a 400lb orang-utan that wants to kill me. It’s much more powerful than me, doesn’t speak the same language and it runs around the darkness of my soul. I would sell my mother for a rock of crack.”

Hardy, McLean goes on, is candid about his own damage (“The drink is a symptom of a problem - an inability to accept life on its own terms”) and about what, initially at least, seems to be the paradox of the entertainment industry: it is a business based on rejection and yet it attracts an awful lot of insecure individuals. “It’s a brutal business but it’s masochism, isn’t it? If you have a capacity for damage and you live with damage, then you seek damage.”

Another day, another story of bad audience behaviour - or is it bad behaviour by performers instead? Broadway performer Patti LuPone gave another show-stopping performance when she appeared in Las Vegas last Sunday night - but it was “not the good kind”, as the New York Times blog report headlined their story.

After her previous diva fit during the last week of the Broadway run of Gypsy, when someone dared to take a photograph of her in the middle of “Rose’s Turn” that I blogged about here back in January, she stopped mid-rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” in her show at the Orleans Hotel, when she caught sight of someone in the third row using an electronic gizmo, and berated them publicly: “What were you doing? I promise not to be mad at you. Just tell me, what were you doing — videoing? Taking photos? Texting? I really want to know.”

As the Las Vegas Sun reports, she got no answer.

Blogs come in all shapes and sizes, and with different levels of frequency and detail. I write one myself every day, of course (on weekdays only - I have to give myself a break occasionally, and here’s early warning that I won’t be here at all next week, as I’m heading to a beach in Gran Canaria on Saturday), and I also contribute occasionally to those on The Guardian website here, and I regard them as an integral part of my journalistic life now.

You’ll also regularly find Lyn Gardner, and occasionally Michael Billington, contributing to The Guardian’s daily theatre blog, and Dominic Cavendish also posts occasional blog entries on the Daily Telegraph website. But the only other national critic to blog almost as frequently as I do is The Independent’s Michael Coveney, which he does at Whatsonstage.com.

I once wrote here of Wicked that “it’s no surprise that this phenomenal production has become such a phenomenon”. Though I prefaced it by saying that “it may be a little bloated and indigestible overall”, you only need to sit amongst its youthful audience to see just how it seems to plug directly into speaking to them loudly so that they claim it as their own.

And just as the show becomes their personal property, so do its stars: last night I saw living proof of just how far that phenomenon transcends the show itself, to touch those that have associated with it with a fine green mist of popular appeal.

Going to the theatre as often as we critics do, it’s inevitable that things will go wrong from time to time. And it sounds like Michael Billington had a full dose of it last night, when he attended the opening of Mincemeat: as he puts it in his review in today’s Guardian, “Some evenings are a nightmare. I was late arriving at this Shoreditch arts centre. My car had vanished when I came out. I was even accosted by a stranger during this promenade production, who mistakenly claimed he had been in a play of mine in Canonbury.” But sometimes such coincidences and even calamities can actually amplify the experience: as Michael goes on, “That was oddly appropriate since this extraordinary Cardboard Citizens show by Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh revolves around questions of identity and, whatever my private hassles, I was utterly gripped by this marvellous production.”

In another column in today’s Independent, Tom Sutcliffe reports that when he attended a late preview of the National’s Phedre, “a woman in the row immediately in front of me slumped unconscious and I heard, for the first time ever in reality, that inquiry as to whether there was a doctor in the house.” At least he wasn’t on the plane flying from Belgium to Newark where not only a doctor was needed but also a spare pilot: according to news reports today, the Continental Airlines pilot had a heart attack in the cockpit and died. Fortunately, there was a relief officer on board, who was able to take over.

There was a happier outcome at the National.

I like to be proved wrong sometimes. Only the other day I was admitting that I didn’t expect the Edinburgh Fringe to keep growing as it does: as I wrote here, “every year I expect the bubble to burst, as I think the message will finally get through to participants that it’s usually a fast way to lose money. And this year, with less of it about than ever, I thought far fewer would try.”

But as Lyn Gardner writes in an Edinburgh preview feature in today’s Guardian, the fringe “seems to be defying the recession: now in its 63rd year, it is still expanding, albeit by the tiniest of margins (there are 10 more shows this year than last).”

Just as I was naturally cautious and said, “Let’s hope audiences remain similarly confident about taking their holidays in Edinburgh, too”, Lyn has also registered the same worried note: “On the Fringe, of course, bigger doesn’t always mean better: an ever-expanding festival must also find an ever-expanding audience, which could be tricky in the current climate.”

But then such worries are nothing new.

• Advice to Young Critics….

The Guardian launched its annual young arts critic competition yesterday, and while its terrific that the next generation is being actively sought out, I can’t help wondering what opportunities will still be there for them to work in when they get there. The times, as Dylan famously said, are a-changin’, faster than ever - but artists need feedback to challenge them, so perhaps we will survive somehow, somewhere.

While last year The Guardian announced the competition with advice to aspiring critics from the paper’s own working critics, this year’s advice comes from practitioners on the receiving end of that criticism that have been conscripted into being judges. And it makes for some salutary and revealing reading.

Several comment on the effect that bad reviews can have.

In yesterday’s Guardian, there was a full-page quotes ad (plus a teaser ad on an earlier page) for the Donmar’s production of Hamlet at Wyndham’s. Since the entire run of this production was sold out in advance of the first performance - bar the advertised “day seats” held back for sale on the day of the performance - why was such an expensive gesture necessary?

Could it merely be “vanity” advertising, to trumpet some of the good reviews the production has received (and counterbalance some of the advance criticism of Jude Law’s casting, for instance on The Guardian’s own website that his personal PR had sought to have removed and I recently wrote about here)?

Of course, some advertising is merely corporate branding, to let the world know that the Donmar is there.

Only the other day I was quoting Charlie Spencer’s comment in a recent column: “When I started as The Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic almost 20 years ago, I was never out more than four nights a week, sometimes only three. These days, it is almost always five and sometimes six. I don’t grumble. It’s work I love.” But at the end of a week in which we’d spent all day Tuesday in the theatre (in the Old Vic double bill of The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard), and then suffered the tube strike on the next couple of days that made getting to Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens more of an ordeal than usual (if only we could have followed Peter’s lead and flown there!), some were grumbling that we were spending Saturday night in the Royal Albert Hall, seeing the press performance of The King and I.

One of my colleagues even said he’d threatened to deduct a star from his rating of the show as a result. But you can see producer Raymond Gubbay’s problem: since the entire run is for just 20 performances, he had to get it open and reviewed as quickly as possible. So, after just two previews (the night before and a matinee on press day), he did so. It’s his bad luck that he comes at the end of a week in which our patience has already been tested.

But by a curious coincidence, it also means that this production has brought a different approach to such a well-worn property in the same week that, just across Kensington Gardens, the tented, cinematically-driven Peter Pan has done the same for JM Barrie.

It’s part of the chemistry of live performance that it changes from night to night, and no two performances are ever completely alike. But there’s also no escaping the fact that even going to the same show on the same night doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll see the same show: a lot depends on the view, and your relationship to the stage.

Though one is sometimes put in mind of George S Kaufman’s immortal comment - “I saw the play at a disadvantage - the curtain was up” — critics are usually lucky when it does go up; it’s in the producers’ interests to give us the best possible views, though this isn’t always infallible. (I’ve blogged here about problems when seated in side seats at the Donmar Warehouse for instance, or when seated behind people I couldn’t see over or round, at the insufficiently raked Apollo).

At the National’s Lyttelton, the number one national critics are typically seated on the aisles - and since there’s no centre aisle there, that means occupying the extreme sides of the auditorium.

This blog marks a particular milestone today: this is my 1000th blog entry, since it was launched back in August 2005. It’s become amongst the most important daily journalism I do. Yes, it’s a daily task to keep ahead of it and make sure I have try to have something new to write about (I’ll let you be the judge of whether I always succeed). But I’m delighted to be here, and even more delighted that you are here, too. A lot of arts journalism feels like it is going into a void, and not just because many newspapers are in trouble nowadays. But the best thing about being here is the feedback I get, both formally (from the comments you post) and informally (from the comments people make to me privately).

As another blog I recently read from Flux Theatre Ensemble put it, ” Given the layoffs in arts journalism - a 50% decline in four years —is there any light up ahead in a life spent writing about theatre? Well, it’s hard to argue with those terrible numbers. But a few things recently have made me wonder if we’re simply in the hard part of an important transition that will leave us stronger than we were before.” The blog then goes on to cite evidence of some of the changes that are happening for the good, and says that put together, “It is possible to see a silver lining through all the economic flat lining: critics are now able to engage more immediately, more substantively and more openly with other critics, artists and audiences; with those others now able to respond immediately, substantively, and openly.”

And I’m very glad to be part of this new movement.

We’re in an attention-deficit age, where it’s hard for many to concentrate for longer than it takes to digest a tweet (maximum 140 characters) on Twitter, let alone write one (it takes a bit of time, paradoxically, to compress one’s thoughts into something that short). Now they’re even staging comedy club nights on twitter, according to an online report on The Guardian website yesterday.

The launch of the Twitter Comedy Club on Monday night, in which comedians were given ten minutes to deliver as many jokes as they could in 140 character chunks. Mark Watson, who is famous for his 24-hour Edinburgh Festiva performance marathons, was one of them, and had to quickly adapt to a briefer way of doing things! (The Guardian duly cites one of his tweet jokes: “”My dad used to say, ‘Money: you can’t take it with you.’ Which led to some pretty boring holidays”.)

Only yesterday I was reporting here on how Broadway has been bucking the credit crunch blues, recording the highest-ever gross take of nearly $1b in the season just ended. But that’s a financial gain, not an audience attendance one, which had actually dropped over the previous twelve months, and that year had been impacted by the Broadway stagehands strike of the autumn of 2007, so was down on where it should have been as it is).

As a correspondent replied to the blog yesterday, the financial gains have been achieved partly by the new notion of variable pricing on Broadway that has made it a free-for-all, though far from free, in which the producers of sought-after shows make even more money from increasing the number of “premium” tickets they sell accordingly; there is no longer an industry-wide top price for plays and musicals, but a sense that producers now will entirely charge what they feel the market will bear.

But shift the focus to the West End, and the good news appears to be holding firm, at least through mid-May according to figures I got from SOLT last week.

Though Stephen Daldry modestly told this paper’s Tabard column last week “I’d be very happy to come home with trophies, but I’ll be surprised”, Billy Elliot in fact cut a swathe through last night’s Tony Awards, taking a total of ten awards from the 15 nominations it had received, which made it by a long shot the greatest success of the night.

It had already equalled the record previously set by The Producers for taking the greatest number of nominations - 15 - of all time. And Daldry himself took home a second Tony, having won another fifteen years ago for Best Direction of a Play when his National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls transferred to Broadway. That show is, incidentally, returning to the West End this autumn, 19 years after it first opened at the National Theatre, and Daldry told me, “It seems astonishing to me. It’s quite unusual to look at work you’ve done 20 years ago again.”

Are there a more deadly set of words in the English language than “on the syllabus”? On the one hand, as the headline of a Guardian blog in April put it, “For schoolchildren, his plays often mean homework and exams.” So, when the Sats tests for 14-year-olds in English and maths were scrapped last October, some educationalists were delighted, including the RSC’s director of education Jacqui O’Hanlon, who wrote in a Guardian blog soon after, “We know countless teachers who wanted to work actively with Shakespeare in their classrooms but who felt that the test encouraged a reductive approach that filled them with as much dread as their students.”

On the other hand, it could mean that Shakespeare won’t figure at all in their education anymore. As O’Hanlon went on to say, “one of the unintended consequences of the announcement seems to be that Shakespeare is falling off the curriculum by default.” As The Guardian reported at the time, “The RSC said up to 50% of teachers have dropped out of the training courses it runs to aid the teaching of Shakespeare to teenagers since ministers abolished the national curriculum tests, which included a section on the playwright, last month.”

It’s not often that a trailer to a theatre review makes the front page. OK, it has only happened in today’s Independent, not the other papers, but immediately below the title there is a large banner, “Jude Law’s Hamlet - The Verdict” that directs readers to page three of the paper. There they will find Michael Coveney’s overnight review - all 761 words of it - that he filed directly after the performance that ended at 10.18pm last night. (Michael is a past master at this kind of fast reaction: last year, he managed to file an overnight review for the Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of A Little Night Music even though the show didn’t end till gone 11pm).

But then Jude Law in Hamlet is news - in the same way that David Tennant’s was last year at Stratford. And inevitably, too, comparisons are being drawn.

No sooner has one musical featuring singing nuns, The Sound of Music, departed the London Palladium than another has promptly taken up residence there: Sister Act, a new stage version of the 1992 film. In his Daily Telegraph review today, Charles Spencer offers a possible explanation for this: “What is it about Andrew Lloyd Webber and nuns? No sooner has The Sound of Music closed at the Palladium, than he books in this new musical about another closed order of holy sisters. There has always been something dark and brooding about Lloyd Webber. Could it be that he harbours dark erotic fantasies about nuns?”

At last night’s opening, those nuns were doing weird things offstage as well as on: arriving at the theatre I was greeted with the spectacle of two of them abseiling down the front of it, for no apparent reason.

It used to be the way that you measured the arrival of the summer by the official opening of the Open Air Theatre season at Regent’s Park, but now Shakespeare’s Globe get there first (and starts it incredibly early, too: it opened for business on April 23, and extends the summer in the other direction, too, running to October 10). But while the Globe often feels like an ordeal - those bum-numbing seats; those officious stewards - the Open Air Theatre always feels like one of London’s most welcoming theatres, especially on a balmy night like last night’s opening for Much Ado About Nothing.

Timothy Sheader’s second season at the helm sees him breaking with convention - there’s no Midsummer Night’s Dream this year at all, but as well as an interactive kids’ version of The Tempest, the other major play is going to be Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, before the annual musical that this year is a production of Hello, Dolly! (a show not seen in London since Danny la Rue, who died yesterday, starred in the title role at the Prince of Wales in 1984).

The best thing about going to the Open Air Theatre on a warm, dry night is that you don’t have to worry about the air-conditioning - nature provides its own.

On Saturday, I seemed to encounter mob scenes wherever I went. First at the Novello, where the final matinee for Spring Awakening was entirely sold out, with a returns queue snaking down the stairs - where was the audience just a few weeks ago when the show was in trouble? That’s the problem with open-ended runs: there’s no need to go today, since it’ll still be here tomorrow… until it isn’t.

The queue to collect tickets, too, virtually swamped the box office - I know West End foyers are crushed at the best of times, but there must be a better means of crowd control than the chaotic scenes at the Novello, where there were so many people trying to collect tickets in a ramshackle mob that it meant that it was difficult for other ticketholders who already had tickets to actually get past them.

Then I tubed it up to Wembley to get to Fountain Studio for the finale of Britain’s Got Talent - and emerged blinking into the sun to face a huge surging crowd coming the other way.