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.
But I’m amazed to realise that it’s now nearly the end of June and I’ve only been there once this year, so far (I may be heading back in August, though, in an effort to ‘escape’ Edinburgh this year). But I’ve also been taking an annual beach holiday for the last three years, and having ‘discovered’ Gran Canaria, am now heading back for the third time. The first time I remember going with some trepidation, and it wasn’t just me who wondered how I’d kill the time.
I remember telling Bill Kenwright that I was taking some DVDs with me to catch up on, in case I needed something to do. He replied asking me what they were, in case we shared similar tastes, and I duly told him: “Almodovar’s Volver, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Team America, Centurion Muscle III and Big Muscle.com”.
No, the last two were not fitness videos - though I was in the gym this morning at 7am (and am even newly employing a personal fitness trainer) - so I doubted that Bill would be interested in those, though I’m sure a stage version of either would be sure to sell tickets (if it was legal to put them on, that is)…. !
This time, I’m not even taking DVDs, the laptop or iPod. I’m just taking suntan lotion and books. The theatre, I know, can live without me; but can I live without the theatre? Time will tell….
Meanwhile, some quick thoughts before I go:
The news of Michael Jackson’s sudden, but somehow not entirely unexpected, death prompted this irreverent thought from a theatrical friend this morning: “Silver lining for Nica Burns — Thriller Live! could run for years now.”
Thriller Live, of course, is running at the Nimax-owned Lyric Theatre. When I saw Nica a few weeks ago at the London opening of Sister Act, she told me that she had tickets for one of Jackson’s O2 dates that had already been cancelled by then.
In a story in today’s Guardian, Jackson had originally only planned ten concerts, but debts of over £100m pushed him to agree to 50, and Alexandra Topping writes, “From the outset there were doubts over whether the star would ever complete the gruelling residency, his first live shows for 12 years.” She quotes Pete Waterman, of Stock Aitken Waterman, as warning fans to buy tickets to earlier shows, in case his health faltered; but in fact those early shows were the first to be cancelled, when he delayed the start of his residency. Also quoted is Arthur Phoenix, former publicist to the Jackson family and adviser to Jackson’s brother Tito, said soon after the dates were announced that he doubted Jackson would complete the concerts. “I just don’t see it happening. I think there were 10 shows planned and then ticket sales were overwhelming and another 40 concerts were added. But Michael is not mentally, physically or spiritually ready for these shows. There’s something missing in his soul. He’s like Mike Tyson - it’s over!”
The West End show that celebrates his music and career, however, is far from over; already an established hit, it could now become a shrine for fans from around the world.
But the news of his passing has pushed the death of Farrah Fawcett off the front pages. It’s one of my eternal regrets that I missed her all-too-brief Broadway debut nearly six years ago: she started previews in a play Bobbi Boland on November 4, 2003, but the curtain came down on November 9 before the play even opened officially. In an interview in New York magazine, Farrah Fawcett was asked for her side of the story about its closing, and she replied, “I can’t really explain it. I would rather have gone up against the critics. So they didn’t like it, so it closed - at least we would have known. But I’m the outsider. I’m from Hollywood. I said, naively, ‘Can a play close before it opens?’ And they went, ‘No a play has to open before it can close’. Oops, guess what!” Did she try to convince the producer to keep it open? “Yes, but she said, ‘No, it’s not working’. And I said, ‘Joyce, let’s just have one more week of previews. It’s not in my nature to give up!’ She said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to work in this venue. It’s certainly not you, Farrah’. I said, ‘Joyce, I will not go gentle into that good night. I will rage, rage - Dylan Thomas. That’s my nature!” And when it came to her life, and not just a play, that is exactly what she did. May she now rest in peace.
I was next door to Thriller Live yesterday afternoon, seeing Carrie’s War, another of those productions that has drawn such mixed responses from the critics (four stars from Nightingale, Spencer and Hitchings; two from Billington, Coveney and the London Paper’s Kat Brown) that one simply has to make up one’s own mind. Arriving at the theatre yesterday, however, I was confronted by the sight of so many school parties of very young children that my heart sank - yet though my guest commented that watching the play was like hearing mice scuttling about all the time, in fact they were mostly scrupulously behaved (except in moments of emotional intimacy in the second act, when they cooed in unison). Even the party in front of us who were sharing crisps around until my friend shushed them came up to us in the interval to apologise for the disruption! So there’s hope yet for future generations of theatregoers to shut up and behave!
But if reviews for Carrie’s War were interestingly divided, they have been unanimous so far for Medea/Medea, Dylan Tighe’s “multi-media assault”, as Lyn Garder labels it, on Medea at the Gate. I have to say I feel I have dodged a bullet in not seeing it. As Lyn goes on to report, “”Just like the bleach that Helen Schoene’s brooding, immigrant Medea whizzes up in a blender, Tighe’s approach to this work turns out to be a slow-acting poison, one that lasts for 76 minutes - every second of which is counted out on a digital display on one of the on-stage screens. It’s like having teeth pulled slowly without anaesthetic, while the dentist tells you exactly how long it is taking.”
In the Evening Standard, Fiona Mountford declares, “There are scarcely any spoken words, the longueurs seem endless and it doesn’t help that every second ticks away before us on a clock on a monitor. It’s an object lesson for all aspiring directors: to learn where inventiveness stops and mess begins.”
And for Michael Coveney, the production is “an almost intolerable mish mash of badly digested, old-fashioned avant-garde clichés”. He goes on to say, “It’s all like some terrible joke spoof of how to make Euripides trivial, how to replace great drama with bad art, and how to try and look avant garde when there’s nothing going on inside your head or your heart. I will only say this: it’s not quite as boring as the Helen Mirren Phedre at the National.”
Michael, of course, gave that production of Phedre only one star in his review in The Independent. In today’s paper, however, last night’s live screening of the production into cinemas around the country drew a four-star review in The Independent from Alice Jones. The production, of course, is sold out in the theatre; and she writes, “Last night those not lucky enough to have a seat at the Lyttelton Theatre had an alternative - when the live performance was beamed by satellite to 70 cinemas across the country, from Glasgow to Guernsey, and a further 200 worldwide. As an intriguing cultural concept, would it work? Would the actors falter, caught between projecting to the gods and caressing the lens? And would the audience crunch on popcorn as they watched Mirren in her death throes? The answers were: very nearly; not for a second; and yes (but guiltily)”.
About the actual experience of watching it on film rather than stage, she writes, “There was not a hint of aspic about the performance. From the moment the curtain rose in the theatre, and the coughs from that auditorium were broadcast into the cinema, it all felt thrillingly live and alive. The excitement was in seeing the actors, if not in the flesh, then in intense close-up, from the veins in Cooper’s neck to Mirren’s rather un-regal and anachronistic tattoo on her hand. Every fleck of spittle and bead of sweat was picked up.”
There were one minus - “While Bob Crowley’s set, a pock-marked cavern set against a cerulean blue sky probably looked magnificent from the stalls, some of the shots made it look as though the actors were acting against a blue screen.” But there was also a possible plus: “Acoustically, Mirren was a little muddy at first but every word was clear - which is not always the case at the back of the circle.”
See you back here in a week; and back in the cinema for NT Live’s next live broadcast of All’s Well That Ends Well on October 1!
Andrew Haydon has been raving about Medea/Medea, but not yet in sustained, published form. I was curious enough to consider going, until I noticed that Dylan Tighe had been involved in a (by the sound of it) similar deconstruction of Oedipus last year that got up my nose like a little finger.
There will, after all, be two more Medeas before the summer's end, at the Arcola and the Scoop, and there have already been two others so far in 2009, at the Arcola (I know!) and the Cock Tavern.
Yup, that unanimity of opprobrium for Medea/Medea gets shattered when this week's Time Out comes out with a four-star rating for the show. I'm preparing to cop a load of flak for it, as I think it probably is pretty minority taste stuff, but that said, I did genuinely enjoy it and I've been careful to qualify my preferences and outline precisely why I enjoyed it and that's all any of us can do. In the same issue, I'm also four-starring Zanna Don't!, so at least no one will be able to accuse me of relentless avant garde pseudery...