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.
As Michael Billington notes in his Guardian review today, “Big spectacles are all the rage in Kensington. At one end of the park we have a hi-tech Peter Pan. Now comes a lavish staging of The King and I in the circular arena of the Albert Hall.”
But while there’s a new sense of scale to both shows - the Peter Pan boasts some stunning flying and even more stunning visuals, while The King and I is projected as a lavish spectacle, there are also losses, and not just to our free evenings. As Michael Billington also remarks, “Although the musical values of Jeremy Sams’s production are high, the scale seems wrong. Even from a good seat, the characters are distant, and in the more intimate moments one feels as if one were watching table-tennis in the Colosseum.”
I was seated on the centre aisle of Row 8, a few rows behind Michael, and often felt the same thing. During the interval, I visited a friend in a grand tier box, and it looked it even more remote from up there. And audiences are being asked to pay what are very nearly top West End prices for the privilege: the entire stalls is £59.50, with box seats ranging from £56-£62.50. Cheapest seats, in the remote recesses of the top circle, go for £21.50. Yes, it has to make its money back fast across such a short run - but with a seating capacity of some 5,500, the Royal Albert Hall run could be seen by 110,000 people in 20 performances; by comparison, it would take London’s other largest musical house, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, nearly 50 performances to achieve the same audience figures.
Peter Pan isn’t a whole lot cheaper (and the bottom price is actually more expensive): they range from £22.50-£47.50. And the discount for under 16s is a mere 25% off the ticket prices (but not on Saturdays). A theatrical investor I know told me he examined the budgets for the show, and the recoupment schedule was based on a ratio of 3 (full price) adult tickets being sold to 1 child ticket - surely an unrealistic proposition - and so declined to put his money in.
The brilliant antidote to such inflated pricing remains the London fringe; and it’s still a source of inspiration that one night we can be summonsed to the Royal Albert Hall, yet the previous find ourselves at the tiny Theatre 503 to see the world premiere of a play, The Mountaintop, starring David Harewood as Martin Luther King. But the really interesting credit on this production has to be its young director James Dacre.
It turns out he is the son of former Daily Mail editor (and now editor-in-chief) Paul Dacre. Five years ago, James - then a Cambridge undergrad - directed a play by Torben Betts at the Edinburgh Fringe, and as Michael Coveney reported in The Observer at the time, “If someone at the Edinburgh Festival fringe presented a revival of Noddy in Toyland it would turn out to be a catalogue of sexual perversity and police brutality. So a contemporary drama presented by Cambridge University students which features ‘unsparing visions of everyday hell using characters from heaven’ in a regular litany of masturbation, swearing, blasphemy and authoritarian violence really is nothing special at all. Except that, in this case, it is. For the director of Torben Betts’s Five Visions of the Faithful at the C Venue (that might as well be the C-word Venue) is the talented young son of Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, unequivocal spokesman of the moral majority and scourge of the trendy, the debauched and all artistic self-indulgence.”
Michael goes on to reveal, “James Dacre, 19 and tall and strongly built like his dad, welcomed me to the den of iniquity on Chambers Street as though I was a supportive junior fellow in his Cambridge college - Jesus, as it happens - where, wait for it, he is reading theology.”
Michael tells us, too, “His parents have not yet visited the show. While I cannot imagine that my former editor (I was Daily Mail theatre critic until being invited to leave last March) would get much out of the Five Visions, I am sure that his wife, Kathy, a drama teacher and staunch admirer of Harold Pinter, one of her husband’s bêtes noires, will find a great deal to enjoy.”
Dacre senior, of course, still part-presides over the Evening Standard - though the Russian oligarth Alexander Lebedev now has a controlling interest in the paper, the Daily Mail and General Trust still retain a 24.9% stake in it - so it is curious to see that it is the Standard who have been the first to review James’s production today. And last week, they also offered a profile of its star David Harewood. It’s good to see the paper getting behind a small fringe production; but it’s surprising to see it given this much prominence.
Harewood, whom the Standard profile refers to as “one of the foremost stage and screen actors of his generation”, is surprised to find himself in it, too: “”I was hoping that the phone call from my agent would be the next big Hollywood film or a nice chunk of telly work, and then someone says: ‘Do you want to do a show in a theatre above a pub in Battersea?’ You kind of go…”
But he went: as he says, “I was really moved by the power of the script — and it’s taking me right back to why I wanted to act in the first place.”
Mark,
Please remember that not all of the seats at The Royal Albert Hall are available to the promoter - a significant number are privately owned debenture seats which produce no revenue for promoters. A full house does not always represent a healthy return on investment.
NJG