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.
Some critics, like George Bernard Shaw, Kenneth Tynan or latterly even Nicholas de Jongh, duly become theatre practioners in turn (just the other day I saw Nick described in his local paper, the Islington Tribune, as “celebrated Barnsbury playwright”, in a news story which revealed that he is now also turning into a campaigner against the overdue diligence of the traffic wardens in Brooksby Street, where he lives).
But relationships between critics and practitioners are nothing new, in any case. In a recent feature in Intelligent Life magazine, Irving Wardle (the former chief critic of The Times) reveals how he was courted by Harold Pinter after he had written a review, as a cub reporter, on the premiere of Pinter’s The Birthday Party at Lyric Hammersmith in 1958, for the Bolton Evening News. Pinter, Irving reports, “had read my comments and thought them ‘most penetrating’. He wondered why ‘in heaven’s name’ I hadn’t published a review in London, where there had been ‘a marked absence of such intelligent and perceptive comprehension’. He wanted to know who I was, and to express his pleasure at my ‘assured assessment’.”
Of course flattery will get you everywhere, and it led to them meeting - and playing a game of bar billiards. “We saw one another quite a lot after that, either by the river or in each other’s flats”, Irving goes on to report. And then, as a sub on the Observer, he even managed to sneak Pinter in one night to see Tynan’s notice of The Caretaker on the day before publication. “I took him down to the stone, where the pages were made up, and introduced him to Mr Lucas, a tortoise-like compositor who seldom spoke. Harold promptly engaged him in conversation. ‘You must have had a few critics through your hands.’ Amazingly, Lukie opened his mouth. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the best was J.C. Trewin. What clean copy that man had! He once gave me a book he’d written, about Cornwall. Very good. Boring. But good.’ Not only had Harold got him talking, he had conjured him into delivering a Pinter speech.”
But the relationship subsequently soured a bit after Irving, by then installed as critic of The Times, didn’t welcome The Homecoming with quite such open arms. Irving admits to the “naive idea that if I spoke my mind honestly, no friend on the receiving end would take offence”.
And that’s the problem. You steer a fine line as a critic being true to your friend and the bigger truth you owe to your readers, at least for the job you are being paid to perform. And it’s always a fine juggling act.
This weekend brought me potential exposures to such conflicts several times over. I sometimes think it’s simply easier not to go at all, than to go and have to offer an opinion as a result. On Friday evening, I found myself at Zombie Prom, an early effort - first produced in Florida in 1993, and subsequently off-Broadway in 1996 - of the writing team of Dana P Rowe (music) and John Dempsey (book and lyrics), who subsequently wrote The Fix and The Witches of Eastwick, both of which were premiered in the UK at respectively the Donmar Warehouse in 1997 and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2000.
I met Dana in a London bar some months before The Fix even opened at the Donmar Warehouse, and we became fast friends; and he has remained a good friend ever since. And I’m a great fan of his work, too. I even followed The Fix back to its American premiere at Arlington, VA’s Signature Theatre in 1998; and Dana and I once met up in Florida, too, to see a subsequent local production of Zombie Prom there.
But finding the show on my very doorstep, or near enough, last week meant I just had to drive the ten minutes down Kennington Park Road and then Clapham Road to see it again at the Landor Theatre. It may have seemed highly appropriate, of course, to see this show on the eve of Halloween, since it revolves around a high school kid being turned into a zombie after he throws himself into a nuclear power plant, but the Landor felt a little post-apocalyptic itself: there were only around 22 of us there. That may not be bad numbers for the fringe, but I’m used to the Landor musicals being far busier.
That may have been a drain on the collective energy of the night - audiences, of course, play their own part in creating an evening in the theatre - but the production seemed to misfire on several levels. It seemed to be directed on one-note of sustained camp: like High School Musical filtered via Grease into a version of The Rocky Horror Show, but without the redeeming wit or energy of any of them. The tunefulness of the score just about survived some of the resulting mangling, but little of the humour did. It was a decidedly strenuous evening as a result.
On Saturday, on the other hand, I had one of those return trips down memory lane in every sense that reawakened my senses and sensitivities. I have not been back to the Corpus Playroom, a tiny studio student theatre in Cambridge, since my days as a student producer there nearly a quarter of a century ago! It was there that I produced plays with Nick Ward and Tim Supple, amongst others. And on Saturday, I returned to see the student premiere production of Polly Stenham’s still-shattering That Face. Again, there’s a small personal connection: I’d previously met its undergraduate director Josh Seymour, who is now in his third year at Fitzwilliam College, in the summer before he went up for the first time. He had contacted me through this blog, and we have met and corresponded intermittently in the years since. A second, more bizarre coincidence was the discovery on Saturday that my brother, who lives in Cambridge, is very good friends with Josh’s college tutor!
But seeing his work for the first time, it’s a relief to find his mature handling of actors, space and feeling emerging so confidently. As a director, he harnesses the play’s forever changing and disturbing textures of loss, pain and fear supremely well (and orchestrates the scene changes in a way that Katie Mitchell would be proud of, making them part of the dramatic flow of the piece). And he solicits some spellbinding performances from his young cast: although Jessica Lambert’s Martha is inevitably far too young to play the disturbed mother in the play (Lindsay Duncan, by contrast, was 57 when she took the role in the Royal Court’s premiere), she perfectly captured the hollow, permanently needy and spaced out quality of the character; and Nick Ricketts as her son Henry, trying desperately to rescue his mother, is a complete revelation. The part was originally played, of course, by Matt Smith at the Royal Court, and we all know the stardom he is heeded for now as the new Dr Who; I’ll be watching out for Ricketts, too, now.
Then last night I was at the Apollo Theatre, to see an amazing evening celebrating the work of young musical theatre composer Michael Bruce; and again, I have to declare an interest. Two years ago, I was part of the judging panel of The Stage-sponsored “Notes for a Stage” competition (as I wrote here at the time) to find a new song, written by a previously professionally-unproduced composer, for the annual Notes from New York concert.
My fellow judges - who included performer Anna-Jane Casey, composer Grant Olding and musical director David Randall - and I selected Bruce’s song “Children”, and it was duly performed in that year’s show; but until now, that was still the only song of his I’d heard. It was a relief last night to hear that we had chosen wisely, and in fact he has accumulated a wide body of work that show he is a voice to be reckoned with. It was an astonishing act of faith that the producers of Notes from New York, Neil Eckersley and Paul Spicer, should hire a West End theatre to showcase an entire evening of his work now, since - an Edinburgh fringe staging of his latest show Ed apart - they’ve not much seen the light of day yet. But I suspect that his work won’t be remaining a secret for too long now.
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