July 2009 Archives

The Met Office at last revised its predictions for the summer yesterday, confirming what we’ve actually known for a while now: that far from being the promised “barbecue summer”, it isn’t materialising after all.

In The Times, Caitlin Moran eloquently wondered aloud about the origins of the phrase back in May, even before it failed to actually happen, and now what she says then seems very prescient: “I believe that this Government has come up with the phrase ‘barbecue summer’ as a cynical tactic to influence the course of events in this country.”

There’s life - and lots of money - in old songs. Earlier this year, Imagem Music Group — the music publishing investment fund of the world’s third largest pension fund, the Dutch-based ABP, and CP Masters BV, one of Europe’s leading independent music publishers - bought the rights to the Rodgers and Hammerstein catalogue, until then a private business owned by their heirs.

The amount they paid was unspecified; but according to news reports when bidding first started, those heirs were looking to raise somewhere between £200-£325m. And, presciently as it turned out, the Daily Telegraph report pointed out, “Private equity firms and hedge funds are also reportedly attracted by the song publishing assets, which are seen as a source of regular income through a high volume of song licensing.”

A couple of Christmases ago I wrote here of a visit to the Croydon Warehouse, and mentioned my own small part in its history when - all of a quarter of a century ago now - a Cambridge student company that I had produced transferred its work there after Fringe First winning success on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1984. I mentioned at the time that the shows were directed by Nick Ward, who I commented, “went on to have plays produced at the National and made a film, Dakota Road, but seems to have disappeared since”.

He may have been gone, but wasn’t entirely forgotten: last month, the Finborough staged a short season of Sunday and Monday performances of his play Apart from George, and Michael Billington’s admiring review in The Guardian began by stating, “We tend to bury the recent past. So all credit to the Finborough for reviving this forgotten Fenland tragedy by the Australian writer Nick Ward, who made a big impact on the London fringe in the late 1980s. This hour-long piece reminds us of Ward’s gift for creating a potent poetic atmosphere with a minimum of words, and for suggesting a direct link between lonely landscapes and emotional inarticulacy.” And Michael concluded, “It’s a bleakly powerful piece about word-hoarding isolation that makes one regret Ward’s own theatrical silence over the last two decades.”

So I wasn’t the only one to remember him.

• Ruby Wax on finding an outlet in performing - and the dangers of being imprisoned by it — interviewed in The Guardian by Decca Aitkenhead. In her 2002 autobiography, she wrote about discovering the power of making people laugh at around then age of 15, and said, “I went from a VW to a Ferrari. Like someone from Las Vegas was inside me, moving my lips. Overnight, I became the class comedian and found to my surprise I was suddenly valued by the very people who had spat on me. It was like growing tits overnight - I was a hit.” But it can’t last forever she tells Aitkenhead: “Comedians are usually only funny because they’re infantilised. You know, they have to do things about cats or diets - ‘the funny thing about’ - you know, this stupid observational stuff comedians talk about - ‘isn’t it weird about chairs?’ - you know the stuff. It’s not enlightening. But it’s funny because they get into that rhythm and it’s hilarious. But they can only get to a certain age. You know a lot of them have heart attacks because they can’t grow up; they’re stuck. As we get older we change, but nobody allows the change - and actually, you’re making money and you get addicted to the attention, so you have to pretend. And the harder you pretend, the more stress it is on your body.”

Comedy also comes at another price: “It’s very, very hard to get through it unscathed,” she comments. Aitkenhead asks her if she thinks a career in comedy attracts people who lack confidence, or gradually erodes it: “I don’t think you’d bother standing on the stage by yourself if you had a great home life. I don’t know every comedian, but my hunch is something’s not right. Something happened to make you want that attention, that hit. Why does somebody go into cocaine, and another gambling? It’s in that area. I know it’s a drug. It gives you dopamine. Well, why aren’t you getting dopamine elsewhere?”

Lest anyone feels tempted by the hype on Too Close to the Sun that here’s a musical that’s so bad it might actually be good, the simple answer is: Don’t. As Dominic Maxwell concluded in his overnight review in The Times on Saturday morning, “It’s not good; it’s not so bad it’s good. It’s just bewilderingly drab.”

The Friday opening night audience was doing its best to have jeer instead of cheer, but even so their hearts were simply not in it. A group of young men seated in front of me were desperately trying to find things to laugh out loud about, but this was simply no laughing matter, and the kindest response was the one they took which was to leave in the interval (as did many around them).

Not that I’m complaining (much), but there are never enough days (or rather nights) in the week, it seems. It’s a perennial problem for critics trying to cover the breadth and extraordinary depth of the London theatre scene - never mind the one further afield in the regions. And as many of my colleagues rushed - in Charlie Spencer’s case, straight off a plane from New York where he’d just had a short family holiday - to Chichester on Wednesday night for the opening of Enron there, it meant that the opening that night for Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare’s Globe got seriously displaced. (As for myself, I was at Sky Arts Theatre Live on Wednesday night, as I reported here yesterday).

Yesterday’s matinee therefore turned into an ad hoc press performance instead.

Regular readers will know that I often travel for my art, and I love nothing more than to discover a new venue. Last night fulfilled both criteria: I hurtled down the A4 to Sky TV’s Studio 6 at their Osterley plant, to discover a small television studio made out to resemble nothing so much as a hot, compact Edinburgh fringe theatre, complete with plastic tip-up chairs.

Something both incredibly ordinary yet utterly extraordinary is happening there every week: under the stewardship of Sandi Toksvig, Sky’s Arts channel is bringing live television drama back to British TV for the first time in over 20 years, in a project called Sky Arts Theatre Live. A series of six short new plays - all of them specially commissioned by debutant playwrights but who have written in other genres - are being performed in front of a live audience, and simultaneously broadcast to the nation (or at least those with subscriptions to Sky).

Of course, there’s nothing new to the idea.

“Strange to think that a small room, 30ft by 40ft, has transformed British theatre. But the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court in London, as it’s now officially known, has had an impact wildly disproportionate to its size,” writes Michael Billington in today’s Guardian, in a feature to mark the 40th anniversary of its founding as a studio space for the English Stage Company in 1969.

In fact, its history goes back even further: as Mike Leigh mentions in an accompanying interview, “I worked in the Upstairs before it was even a theatre. In the mid-1960s, the space was used as a rehearsal room, with a bar at one end. Squaddies from the nearby Chelsea barracks would come to drink after hours. The English Stage Club put on experimental work on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Conditions were crummy: people performing at one end, people drinking at the other end, with the audience in between, struggling to concentrate”.

It’s fascinating, though, to follow how from these early, somewhat inauspicious beginnings, a powerhouse of British theatre was born.

There’s no business like show business, goes the immortal Irving Berlin song, and nowhere are the ups and downs of it better expressed than in the opening lines: “The opening when your heart beats like a drum/ The closing when the customers won’t come”. As critics, we’re there for the openings, of course; and though some may say we hasten the closings at times, we’re typically not there for those.

But sometimes - with a show I’ve loved and supported, like Spring Awakening, or just occasionally with one I’ve not liked, like Desperately Seeking Susan — I return for one last look, to lock them in the memory somehow. As I’ve admitted before here, “Call me morbid, but I love to ambulance-chase dying musicals on their way to the graveyard”.

So it should be that a new fringe musical revue, the appropriately though clumsily titled Blink!… and you missed it, is right up my street.

This is the first summer I can think of for years when arts journalists haven’t rushed to file their customary “Death of the West End” feature as theatres fall over themselves to go dark. On the contrary, each theatre side by side on Shaftesbury Avenue is lit - and every other West End theatre either has a sitting tenant, a “filler” arrival (like Too Close to the Sun, which has just gone into the Comedy, or Dreamboats and Petticoats, which goes into the Savoy this Wednesday, while both theatres have their next attractions beyond them also already lined up in Prick Up Your Ears and Legally Blonde respectively), or a future attraction booked (the Novello already has its front-of-house up for An Inspector Calls, arriving in September).

Just a few weeks ago I wrote here how well plays were holding up in this economy; and though theatre owners and producers may be putting a brave face on things, it does seem that things are looking up. And it’s not just theatre. There are two separate stories in today’s Guardian that bode well to show that people are still seeking entertainment beyond their homes and computers.

I’m always reminding myself that I can’t see everything - and sometimes I have to stop myself and tell myself I can’t read everything, either. The web is such a vast resource of news, reviews, interviews and features that you could spend your entire life online, and I sometimes think I do. It wasn’t until I took a self-imposed one-week hiatus from being there at all recently that I realised it was possible to do without it. And guess what? I found myself (albeit only temporarily) far happier than with it!

But it’s also my job, and now that I’m back, the constant feeding of this addiction has also returned. I already twitter daily links to things of theatrical interest, but in case you’ve not been following these, here are some choice notes and quotes from the week.

A couple of years ago Nicholas Hytner stirred up a hornet’s nest of a controversy by publicly declaring, in an interview with The Times, that “I think it’s fair enough to say that too many of the theatre critic are dead white men. They don’t know it’s happened to them but it has.”

A lot of furious back pedalling ensued, but the cat, as they say in La Cage Aux Folles, was out of the baggage, and it has been a persistent theme since. We’re all of us simply living and working longer, and not just theatre critics: just the other day, Amelia Gentleman wrote a poignant report on a day in the life of an old people’s home for The Guardian, which pointed out that “over the next 20 years, the number of people over 85 will double, the number over 100 will quadruple, and officials expect that 1.7m people will need care and support.”

Those of us who are not looking for care and support just yet, of course, may simply have to keep working - with pensions declining and costs of living rising, it’s often an economic necessity - but critics may just want to keep working. Why give up something you love, if you don’t have to?

I’m not going to hold a pre-booked taxi that failed to turn up outside the Theatre Royal, Bath at the end of last night’s press performance of Peter Hall’s production of The Apple Cart to spirit a gaggle of critics to the station, so I had to sprint there instead (or as fast as my new gym-trained legs would carry me, at any rate!), against the theatre, even though they had apparently arranged it - nor that, having done the sprint, the train was 20 minutes late so I needn’t have rushed after all. (Everyone else managed to make it to the station somehow, too). Nor yet that the train then staggered its way back into Paddington at such a slow pace that we didn’t crawl back in till after 12.15am. But it does give you pause: being reliant on the train network, which doesn’t come cheap to begin with, did make me wonder why I’d bothered to go at all.

But then if Blanche Marvin can do it, so can I - and at 84, she remains a living inspiration to us all. And so, of course, is Peter Hall, who at 78, is just 6 years younger than Blanche, and still going strong and has now made Bath a permanent artistic home with this annual summer residency, now in its 7th year.

On Twitter today, I saw a tweet posted by Terry Teachout - drama critic for the Wall Street Journal - that declared, “I love being a drama critic more than I can say, but I guess I’ll always be a musician in my heart of hearts”. He is thus enthused because he is currently collaborating on a new operatic version of Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play The Letter (last seen, incidentally, in a West End revival at Wyndham’s in May 2007), that has been commissioned by Sante Fe Opera and will open there on July 25. He is blogging about it, too, as he goes here but is also regularly tweeting from rehearsals, too.

It’s intriguing, of course, to see a critic turn practitioner, as here, but it’s obvious, too, that he can’t resist writing about it, either. Should art be created privately, before it is exposed to public scrutiny? And just as pertinently, should we be living our lives quite as publicly as the blogosphere (and tweetosphere, if that’s a word, too) seem to encourage us to do?

Actually, I’m all for both.

I’m not going to Edinburgh this year. After years and years of chasing my tail as I try but fail (as you inevitably must) to see everything that you should or want to, I am admitting defeat before it even begins and simply not going at all. Perhaps, after a year’s abstinence, my enthusiasm will return next year; and I know, for sure, that I will feel a pang of regret, but also hopefully another of relief, when the saturation coverage starts again next month and I read about just what I am missing.

I’ve just spent the weekend instead at a far more manageable festival, where you can see everything you want to - tickets and budget permitting, of course. I am talking, of course, about the second Manchester International Festival.

This week Channel 4 have been broadcasting a lunchtime series, ending today, of life drawing classes, featuring nude models, and the Daily Telegraph duly reported yesterday that the station has been hit with complaints. A spokesman for Ofcom is quoted as saying, “We have received a small number of complaints which are being assessed against the broadcasting code.”

But the title of the show means viewers shouldn’t have been surprised at what the show contained: It’s called Life Class: Today’s Nude.

All artists want to reach as big an audience as possible. But in the live arts, there’s typically a limit, prescribed by the size of the auditorium they are appearing in, and the duration of the run. It’s what, of course, makes productions at the Donmar routinely such a hot ticket: with only 250 seats per performance, and runs that are typically only nine or ten weeks,it means there’s inevitably an upper limit to the number of people who can be accommodated.

I’ve previously wondered aloud here if that makes it an “exclusive club”, but artistic director Michael Grandage has always been keen to dispel those notions. He told me when I interviewed him for The Stage last year, “I don’t believe it is an exclusive club. The anomaly that was Othello was the first time it has happened in my five years of running the theatre; and the last time before that it happened was with The Blue Room with Nicole Kidman. I am genuinely sorry that more people could not have seen it; but is the alternative not to put it on, just because quite a lot of people didn’t get the experience of seeing it? We run a 250-seater theatre - that is what we do; and this one production happened to have the kind of cast that meant that more people wanted to see it [than we had seats].”

This week Michael Jackson should, of course, have been beginning his 50-date residency at the 02 - and the sold-out run was destined to be the biggest event of the year. Instead, the memorial service yesterday for his passing has turned out to be the biggest showbiz event of the century so far, maybe ever.

As Stacy Brown, one of Jackson’s biographers, was quoted saying yesterday, “This is Princess Diana’s funeral times 20. He was Elvis and The Beatles rolled into one.” As TMZ, the celebrity website that first broke the news of his death, said in a posting yesterday, “Michael Jackson will create even more pandemonium in death than he did in life.”

The one bit of theatre news that chased me down to my holiday last week, as I mentioned here only yesterday, was the fact that Antony Clark has finally resigned as artistic director at Hampstead Theatre after seven years at the helm.

In some ways, it is amazing that he has lasted this long: I can’t think of another theatre that has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous bad reviews like it has over the same time period. In 2004, Nick Stafford’s play Love Me Tonight was described in one review as “a play so ghastly that I can only assume Hampstead is now using a pin to select plays for production.”

Yes, I did it! When I was last here the Friday before last, I was about to head off on holiday - and promised myself a week of no theatre at all, and no e-mail either. I wondered aloud whether I’d actually manage it, and a friend duly replied, “I really do wonder if you won’t check even once what’s going on in the glittering West End - you’ve thrown down a gauntlet and now let’s see how strong you are”.

He also offered me some tempting morsals of what I might miss: by the time I get back, he said, “Ben Brantley will have handed in his verdict on lots of West End shows; 9 to 5 will have posted a closing notice on Broadway; Rupert Murdoch will have bought Boosey & Hawkes [the music publishing company who recently bought Rodgers and Hammerstein]; and your trainer will have googled you and gone into a witness protection program so that he doesn’t have to see you again! Oh yes, and Lorna Luft will be standing by for Sheridan Smith in Legally Blonde… but don’t you give these things another thought!! It’ll all wait for you.”

Actually, it all did wait for me - along with an inbox of 216 e-mails — when I finally landed yesterday (at 5am - those charter flights are hell!).