In the line (of fire)….

The play is The Line, whose opening night was at the Arcola last Monday. As The Guardian report has it, “Wertenbaker believes that the actors were not given a fair crack of the whip because many of the critics had spent the day being liberally wined and dined at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards - a four-hour affair at the Royal Opera House that involved a champagne reception followed by lunch and as much wine as they wanted to drink.” Wertenbaker herself is quoted telling The Guardian, “I’ve had bad press nights and bad reviews but I’ve never had the sense that the critics were too tired to engage. It is a complicated play, it’s difficult, you have to pay attention to it.”

The clear inference, of course, is that we were tired and/or drunk. But in fact it doesn’t bear scrutiny: by my reckoning, there were only five critics in attendance on Monday night who had also been at the awards - Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph, Benedict Nightingale of The Times, Susannah Clapp of The Observer and Matt Wolf of The International Herald Tribune (all of whom were on the judging panel for the awards) - and myself. Neither Charlie nor I drink at all; and I didn’t spot any of us nodding off. In fact, in the theatre-in-the-round configuration adopted for the play, the most conspicuous sleeper was none other than Wertenbaker’s own literary agent Mel Kenyon, who sat opposite me and spent much of the first act “resting her eyes”, before occasionally stirring and promptly shutting them again. (She, too, had been to the Standard lunch, so perhaps the suggestion of a merry time being had by all came from her). On the other hand, I assume she had already read the play, so knew just how dull it was.

Wertenbaker herself goes on in The Guardian to lament, “I just felt that the play didn’t have a chance. The actors said they had a great night the previous evening and the atmosphere was very different.” I’m sure it was: there hadn’t been a performance at all the night before. Perhaps that’s why the actors had a great night: they were relieved to have had a night off. But Wertenbaker says more: “They [the actors] did feel they were wading through something quite heavy. They [the critics, I hope, not the actors!] weren’t all drunk but it’s hard to get through something like that [a long awards ceremony] without being tired. It was very unfortunate that our press night was after it.”

Maybe so; but it’s not the press who decide the press night - it’s the production that chooses the night. But The Guardian also reports her saying that “some critics had had the grace to say they would come on a different night, but most came after the lunch.” Again, this also suggests we have the luxury of free diaries, with different nights at our disposal to go to the play on instead; but the rest of the week was packed with openings: the next night we were at the National’s opening of Nation, then on Wednesday it was La Clique at the Roundhouse, and Thursday was The Priory at the Royal Court. So it’s not a question of grace what night we choose to favour a show with our presence, but a matter of logistics and practicality.

The Arcola usually gets a decent turn-out of major critics; but it’s not necessarily on a level with, say, an opening at the National or Donmar. That the play had the turn-out it did was impressive; and now being cross that the reviews aren’t what you hoped for seems like incredibly sour grapes. It may also have done the Arcola serious damage: why will we want to rush back now, if this is how our efforts to cover the place rebound on us? As I’m quoted telling The Guardian myself, “Actors, writers, directors do from time to time attempt to discredit critics as a distraction from their own bad work.”

And Charlie Spencer adds, “I stayed awake throughout the entire play and I rather wish I hadn’t. It’s just a very, very dull play.” And there’s the problem: far from highlighting a problem with the critics, Wertenbaker has merely seen the bad reviews being given even more prominence. (My own review, by the way, and that of Susannah Clapp, were yet to appear at the point that the playwright spoke up; and just for the record, you can find Susannah’s negative review here, while in yesterday’s Sunday Express I wrote, “Despite the strong visual references to Degas’s art hung all around William Dudley’s set for The Line, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s dogged theatrical biography of the artist’s life and his relationship with his protégée Suzanne Valadon fails to come to either theatrical or physical life. There’s a lot of earnest talk about the method and meaning of art, and how it relates to life. But this dreary, episodic play only drains the life out of its characters, and in turn its audience.”

Perhaps Wertenbaker was right about one thing: that sense of the energy draining from the room was very palpable on Monday. But then surely the play has to bear some responsibility as much as the audience watching it. (And to say that the critics somehow created that atmosphere would also be wide of the mark: we were just a small fraction of the overall audience on press night). It does, however, raise a bigger issue: that the special chemistry of the theatre doesn’t always ignite on demand. And press nights, with all the attendant pressures on both sides of the footlights, don’t of course always serve the play and its actors best.

Just last week Michael Billington wrote a critics’ notebook column in The Guardian, in which he asked, “Are first nights a bad thing for actors and critics alike?” He had chaired a talk with Richard McCabe, currently playing Sir Toby Belch in the RSC’s London-bound production of Twelfth Night, who he reports said that during the run at Stratford, “Twelfth Night had gone like a dream at previews and all subsequent performances. Only on press night, in front of what he termed a “stuffed shirt” audience, did the show fail to take off. In his whole career, he could only recall two first nights where a show had been at its best. It’s an argument I’ve often heard from actors. My knee-jerk response has always been to say that, whatever the backstage butterflies, there’s a buzz about a first night you don’t find later on. But I’m beginning to think Richard is right: first nights are often worst nights for all concerned.”

He goes on to point out, “Big West End openings are now a nightmare. Shows start hopelessly late as the paps jostle to snatch pictures of B-list celebs, the intervals go on for ever, and critics start to fret about deadlines.” (At the first night for Hairspray, it was Michael who began a slow handclap for the failure of the curtain to go up on time.)

And he also says, “Even off-West End first nights are highly artificial affairs: when I saw Cock at the Theatre Upstairs last week, I calculated almost everyone present was either a critic or part of the theatrical profession.”

He duly advocates adopting the New York system of critics’ previews, where critics are invited to review designated previews, but the reviews are embargoed until after the ‘official’ opening. On Saturday, the Guardian leader column duly echoed this suggestion, and wrote, “It would reduce actors’ first night nerves and give critics time to collect their thoughts. Inevitably, it won’t stop the online embargo-breakers. For everyone else, though, it’s well worth a try.”

Maybe - and indeed the West End opening of Legally Blonde in January long ago announced, as I reported here that “there will be five press performances on January 7, 8, 9 and 12, with reviews embargoed to January 14 - the day after the gala night on January 13.” That may work fine in January, which is typically a slow month for theatre openings, but it may prove far more difficult in a week like last week, where we were already committed every single evening as it was. As I wrote, “Time will tell how it works out in practice, but since we typically have far too many demands on our evenings as it is, I suspect there’ll still be a shortage of nights whatever happens, even if we now have more opportunities in which to be short of them in.”

But there’s also a longer-term danger, as witnessed in what recently seems to have occurred in Toronto. Critics could simply get marginalised out of the process entirely; David Mirvish, the former owner of the Old Vic, suddenly “uninvited” all the Toronto critics to several of his opening nights a few weeks ago. J. Kelly Nestruck - former Guardian blogger and now theatre critic of the Globe and Mail - tells me, “In one case, he re-invited us two weeks after opening and, in the other, re-invited us a month after the opening. The Toronto Star, The National Post and my paper, The Globe and Mail, just went ahead and bought tickets - which led to miffed emails and phone calls asking us to abide by the ‘media nights’, which we didn’t.”

Those media nights were suddenly so far in the future that critics were clearly being deliberately marginalised. As Kelly has written in a blog, “Mirvish did not postpone the official openings of these shows, just the ‘media night’. And the ‘media night’ wasn’t pushed back just a few days, but weeks or a month. The shows in question would no longer be in previews, tickets would be sold as regular tickets and everyone going to see the shows would assume they were up and running — but the professional critics weren’t being invited to weigh in on them.”

Mirvish has since responded to the skirmish by laying down new rules by which his organisation will now operate. But let it be a lesson to us in Britain; we clearly surrender our historical role to attend the first night at our peril.