November 2009 Archives

Just the other day I reported here how reviews and reviewers are making the news, thanks to the revelation that Westminster Trading Standards are investigating the selective quotation from a major review for The Shawshank Redemption outside Wyndham’s Theatre, and how critics themselves have become the story, thanks to a spat between two of our number that has even made the pages of Private Eye.

And on Saturday the critics made the news pages again, this time splashed across the entire length and breadth of page three of The Guardian, thanks to a very strangely aired grievance by playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker in which, in the words of the report, she claimed “that critics at her first night on Monday were in no fit condition review a play after a boozy theatre awards lunch”.

Just yesterday I was reporting here on the story that Westminster Trading Standards are calling the producers of The Shawshank Redemption to account for selectively quoting from Charles Spencer’s Daily Telegraph review of the play, when they extracted a comment he made of the original film and putting it up front-of-house as if it were written about the play. But Charlie himself suggests in a column in today’s Telegraph that “Going to court would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The verbal equivalent of a rap across the knuckles would suffice.”

The only people who would benefit, he says, would be the lawyers. “Needless to say, the legal profession, sniffing healthy fees, takes a different view. Neil Adleman, a partner at the media and entertainment law firm Harbottle & Lewis, said the prospect of prosecution ‘was a wake-up call to the West End, and should not be ignored’. Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? His firm might get the brief.”

Charlie takes a more measured approach.

I always applaud when reviews make the front pages, as happened just last week for the opening of The Habit of Art at the National Theatre. But while the antics of actors sometimes propel themselves into the papers, too, as happened yesterday with the news that Ian Hart had launched a verbal assault on an audience member he thought had been talking during Monday evening’s performance of Speaking in Tongues and duly had me called out twice to respond on the radio (on LBC’s Breakfast Show and Radio 4’s PM programme), the work that theatre critics do is seldom a story in itself, except in places like this blog, of course.

But yesterday there was a sudden flurry of stories that brought our work — and even some of our physiques — to, er, even wider attention. The new issue of Private Eye, out yesterday but dated tomorrow, devotes its entire Hackwatch column to enumerating the numerous factual errors that the Sunday Telegraph critic Tim Walker habitually makes.

This summer it was reported that some West End theatres were “employing bouncers to cope with intoxicated patrons who fight, fondle one another and even urinate in the auditorium”, or as Nica Burns more tactfully put it, she was introducing additional “security front of house to keep the right balance of fun and order.”

But in fact it is perhaps the actors they need to keep an eye on as much as the audience. According to a story in today’s Times, at a performance of Speaking in Tongues at the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre on Monday actor Ian Hart ran from the stage at the curtain calls “to scream threats” at an audience member called Gerard Earley whom he alleged had been talking during the show.

The Evening Standard presented its first annual Theatre Awards back in 1955 - a fact that makes them easily the longest-running of all the theatre awards ceremonies, eclipsing both the Oliviers (which began in 1976) and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards (1989). And attending yesterday’s awards ceremony, held in the splendid surroundings of the Royal Opera House’s Floral Hall, was to participate once again in a sense of both continuity and community that always binds the theatre community.

Yesterday, for instance, as Vaness Redgrave introduced the award for Best Actress that has now been renamed in her late daughter Natasha Richardson’s honour, she poignantly revealed that she had won her own first Standard Award the year before Natasha was born, for her performances in The Lady from the Sea and The Taming of the Shrew. (And though Vanessa didn’t mention it, it was in that same Ibsen play that we last saw Natasha on the London stage, when she appeared in Trevor Nunn’s production of the play at the Almeida in 2003).

The first part of today’s headline isn’t a reference to the Evening Standard Theatre Awards that are being presented today in a ceremony at London’s Royal Opera House, and I will be attending myself at lunchtime and reporting on here tomorrow.

I am instead, of course, referring to a lyric in “Have Yourselves a Good Time”, one of the opening numbers to Jerry Springer - the Opera. Those dual promises - to bring on the losers and also to have myself a good time - were duly delivered all over again when I saw the show again on Saturday night in a production by third year graduating students in the BA Musical Theatre course at the Arts Educational School in Chiswick.

I spent the day in Richmond yesterday, where - between the Orange Tree in the afternoon and Richmond Theatre on the green in the evening - I bore witness to the persistence of the theatregoing habit in this village-like part of south-west London, where the sense of contented English peacefulness is only shattered by the roar of planes from being on the direct flightpath into Heathrow.

Both houses were packed for respectively cranky, quirky morality plays about religion and sex from Nigel Dennis (The Making of Moo, first seen at the Royal Court in 1957) and Bernard Shaw (Mrs Warren’s Profession, originally premiered in 1893); and like those planes, both plays guarantee to shatter the peace of theatregoers looking for a comfortable time in the theatre

I’ve previously drawn attention to the large numbers of producers it sometimes takes to put a show on; as I pointed out here in March, “It has long been a sport on Broadway to count the number of producers on the billing outside the theatre or in the programmes: that new production of Hair, for instance, that I saw on Friday has 30 separate producers, executive or associate producers listed. But that number has been eclipsed in London by the names attached to the West End transfer of Spring Awakening, where a total of 31 (23 above the title, plus 8 more associates below it, including - curiously - Kevin Spacey) producers have lined up to put their money into it (and is two more than it even had on Broadway!). This simply reflects a new reality to producing apparently risky shows - you need lots of friends and you have to spread the risk between them to get them on nowadays.”

Of course, a big part of that billing was inherited from Broadway; and the rest of it came from passionate supporters over here, who believed in it and wanted their names publicly attached to it. As Matthew Byam Shaw, one of the producers told me at the time in an interview that ran in The Stage, “Producers are going to have to get used to being teased about this, but the reality is that in the great days of theatre, it used to cost fifty quid to put on a play, but now you have to pay an awful lot of money to everyone from the theatre owners to marketers, and a producer has limited currency if he’s not returning a profit on a successful show nowadays. Quite simply, I cannot supply a million pounds out of my own bank account. I have to raise that money - and people who put in decent-sized cheques want to feel part of the ride.”

It’s always good when theatre reviews make the front pages - and the National’s opening of The Habit of Art last night not only sees Paul Taylor’s five-star (and 1,183 word) review getting a huge banner trail announcing “Alan Bennett’s new Masterpiece” on the front page of the Independent (though the review itself is relegated to page 11, where it takes up the entire page), but also The Guardian puts the beginning of Michael Billington’s review on its own front page, too (with a turn to page two for the rest of it). It means that, at least in broadsheet terms, the theatre can still be a newsworthy event, even when a play doesn’t star Dr Who (or Keira Knightley).

Still, I think it is probably over-egging the pudding to claim, as Paul Callan does in his Daily Express review this morning, that “the opening of a new play by Alan Bennett is, theatrically speaking, a national event to be greeted by trumpeting fanfares and a joy throughout the land.” I’m not sure that the nation’s joy will be this unconfined; but then that’s one of the themes of the play: about those who are left out, culturally speaking, both from the appreciation of art and their contributions to the lives of those that make it.

No, the headline today doesn’t refer to the fractious relationships amongst some of my critical colleagues at the moment, where one minor player who, in the words of Michael Coveney, “is just a bit more blatantly ignorant and stupid than is usual”, has been proving it by responding as if he was actually being supported by him.

There are more important things to worry about, and even sometimes celebrate, in the world - or at least our corner of it. Like the news officially confirmed yesterday that the classic counter-cultural musical Hair is taking a big step across the Atlantic to change at least one small bit of our theatrical culture and insularity from the inside out: this reportedly marks the first time that an entire original Broadway company will transplant their efforts wholesale to the West End.

In the theatre, the typical contract between the actors and the audience has been that the actors perform the play, then the audience show their appreciation with a round of polite applause. In opera houses, they sometimes disconcertingly boo, too (particularly when the creative team take their bows); but the days, at least, of rounds of rotten fruit being lobbed onto the stage are long gone. But nowadays audiences are increasingly expected to follow the Broadway model of showing their unconditional love and approval by rising out of their seats and giving the show a standing ovation.

Some pop musicals programme this into the show itself, by making the finale a dance-a-long, “megamix” spectacle. So you have no choice but to stand, since the rest of the audience already is, if you want to see the remainder of the show.

In Guardian blog last year, Michael Billington (who deserves a standing ovation of his own today, by the way: it is his 70th birthday) deplored the spread of the tendency to plays like The Female of the Species that had just opened in the West End at the time he was writing, though it’s interesting to note that despite that apparent first night endorsement, it came off early.

Arriving at the Phoenix Theare to see Blood Brothers again last night, my heart instantly sank: lined up outside were ranks of noisy teenage school kids. And worse still, they were seated all around the stalls, not just safely tucked away upstairs. I asked Bill Kenwright’s marketing manager if this was a typical audience before it started. And he replied that yes, it was: most nights they had school parties in. But though he didn’t want to jinx things, he said I mustn’t worry: they usually behaved themselves.

Ah, yes, I thought - we’ll see.

The Evening Standard is currently in list-making mode, mainly in advance of hosting a couple of parties so they can presumably get people interested in actually attending it. Last week they published a “long list” of those under consideration for the annual Evening Standard Theatre Awards, and this week whittled it down to a shortlist ahead of announcing the winners in a ceremony to be held at the Royal Opera House on November 23.

But in fact both lists and the winners were all selected at the same judging meeting: the “longlist” presumably emerged from all the names that were thrown into the ring, while the shortlist that followed must have been the frontrunners that the judges then selected out of them. But never mind: by dividing it into two, they are at least milking it for all its worth on the “news value” front, and it’s fun to see a paper making the news itself, as well as breaking it.

One of the great pleasures of London theatre is its sheer diversity: there’s great theatre happening in spaces large and small, both long established and newly found. And one of my recurring gripes, of course, is the utter impossibility of keeping up with it all - though it is, as I’ve also often noted, a nice problem to have.

But a sudden lull in West End proceedings has meant, at last, that I’ve been able to play catch-up on some of the fringe last week and this, and schedule a couple of return visits to long and regrettably short running West End shows, and even pay a press night visit to English National Opera, as well (since ENO have the very enlightened policy of regularly inviting theatre critics to see their work).

There aren’t many rules and regulations, at least not in the British edition of the Critics’ Circle handbook, governing our jobs - if someone is wise (or foolish) enough to publish us, we have one, but you don’t even have to be a member of the circle, of course, to be a critic.

In fact, it’s a membership organisation only: entry is by invitation only. And these aren’t extended until a critic is employed as such for a qualifying period of two years first, to prove that they - or at least their editors - think they’re in it for the long haul. And even then, you could be invited to join but decline to accept, as a couple of the existing ranks of national critics have indeed done, one on the avowed Groucho Marx principle, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”. The other’s rejection of our entreaties has been the subject of various diary columns already, and rather than repeat the story, I will merely direct you to one of them here.

We are also, by default, immediately conscripted into the ranks of the International Association of Theatre Critics, an organisation that represents more than 2,000 critics through some 50 national sections.

Going to the theatre most nights, as I do, is to see a constantly changing canvas of achievement (and sometimes not), as actors, directors and writers whose work you already know grows and changes. You feel invested in them already. But there’s nothing quite like the joy of new discovery, either, and the prospects it promises for the future as we now have someone else to follow.

No wonder that the most intruiging categories in both the annual Evening Standard and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards are the two each boast for most promising playwrights and newcomers (other than a playwright) respectively. The Standard have just announced their shortlist of nominations for this year’s awards, and found room for Lenny Henry on their non-playwright list, on the basis that his current Othello marks his Shakespearean acting debut.

It’s been a busy week for British theatre offstage as well as on, in ways that will have lasting repercussions for the way the theatrical landscape plays out in the coming years. And its both on the commercial and subsidised fronts, not to mention the often-forgotten sector in between, that can’t and doesn’t make money, but doesn’t get subsidy, either, namely the London fringe.

On the commercial front, the big news, of course, is the consolidation of Ambassador Theatre Group into the largest theatre owning group in the country with their acquisition of Live Nation’s portfolio of 16 theatres, including two in the West End.

The critic, as I’ve often said here before, isn’t the final word (or even the first) on the state of the art we’re criticising: we’re just part of the dialogue, in which its various makers and its consumers converse. I do hope, though, that by virtue of our passion and our knowledge, we (or at least some of us!) are an informed part of it. But the gauntlet is being thrown down, of course, by the expanded opportunities that the internet provides for everyone to take part in that conversation; and I always welcome it.

I still hope there will be room for professional critics, though, and not just because I am one. Just yesterday, I was noting here how I’d been speaking to a prominent West End theatre producer and theatre owner, who was saying that critics may vanish entirely within the next ten years, to which I had responded: “You’ll miss some of us when we’re gone”.

A reader of my blog duly posted a reply, “Been going to the Theatre, here in the UK for over 40 years, and I’ve never allowed the critics to influence my decision to see or not to see a particular production, so I wouldn’t miss any of you, or your contributions to newspaper’s ‘show page’.”

Commercial theatre ultimately lives and dies by the box office; and the shock decision of the Broadway producers of the revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs on Sunday, just a week after its official opening, is no surprise when you look at the box office figures for last week: It grossed just $119,561, selling 44.5% of its potential capacity at an average ticket price of $27.99. And those figures were actually lower than the week before, as the New York Times pointed out in a blog, so the reviews on which the producers were apparently so dependent failed to create any buzz around the show.

By contrast, the two-hander starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, A Steady Rain, grossed $1,187,455, selling 101.2% of capacity (the extra is standing room), at an average ticket price of $137.01 (the official regular top ticket price is $130, but they’re actually averaging more than that since so many seats at premium prices).

Critics seldom speak with one mind: just look at the reviews last week for Katie Mitchell’s new production of Pains of Youth, which spanned the gamut from five stars (Paul Taylor in the Independent, in which he offers to take a lie detector test against those who think “that my recurrent four- and five-star ravings about Mitchell is the career-conscious gambit of a dead white male critic who wants to blarney his way into being granted a clean bill of health”), to two (Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, which actually reads like a one star review, ending with the declaration that “Frankly the only remotely enjoyable thing about this show is the moment when it stops”; and Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard, who writes that “Although the erotic charge has been extravagantly talked up, it is about as sexy as a cold hip bath.”)

In between, there are four stars (Michael Billington in The Guardian) and three stars (Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage)

Yet somehow people outside the critical business often speak as if critics routinely speak with one voice.

Of course you go to the theatre hoping to be personally affected, or at least somehow addressed, by what you’re watching. But unless you’re a supreme narcissist, it can’t always be all about you. And some plays will inevitably affect some spectators more than others, depending on where you are coming from. None of us watch plays in a vacuum: they’re all filtered through our own experiences, or not, of what we’re seeing. And sometimes also, of course, of whom we may know connected to putting the productions on, too.

And if you stick around the theatrical business long enough - even, as journalists typically are, on the peripheries of it and not directly involved in its day-to-day operation - you inevitably start to form bonds and affiliations, and sometimes even friendships, with some of the people whose work you regularly see.

There’s a potential for the critical faculties to be compromised, I know - but I like to think that there’s also a deepening of the understanding of how the work is made, too.