February 2010 Archives

Regional Insolvency….
Yesterday’s news that Exeter’s Northcott Theatre has gone into administration, after the theatre ‘s trustees discovered that the venue is insolvent, opens another chapter in the long-running saga of its difficulties. During the controversy of Arts Council England’s proposed spending cuts in 2008, it stood to lose its entire £547,000 grant, even though it had just re-opened after a £2.1m development scheme.

That decision was subsequently reversed, as reported here, “under the condition that the venue make urgent changes to its theatre programme and community work.” ACE South West’s executive director Chris Humphrey was quoted saying, “Northcott has been working hard to develop a business plan and artistic vision worthy of the level of investment we are making. This means that we are now confident that we are investing public money wisely. Over the next two years, the Northcott Theatre and the people of Exeter and further afield will benefit from this funding which will enable the theatre to present a wide range of exciting theatre.”

Oops. He clearly spoke too soon.

“Hold the front page! Journalist discovers that theatre from the cheap seats is crap,” the West End Whingers tweeted this morning about a feature in today’s Independent about how poor the sightlines and even hearing can be from the cheaper seats in West End theatres.

In fact, the Independent was holding its front page for the news flash: immediately below the paper’s own masthead was stretched a banner headline declaring, “God Save Me From The gods”, and was subtitled, “Cheap seats? They’re a waste of money, says Alice Jones”.

It’s the most dominant feature on the page, easily usurping the page’s other headline feature: “The worst hospital scandal for 10 years,” reporting an enquiry into failings at the Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust which concluded that it “routinely neglected” patients. Turn to page four, and we discover just how neglectful it had been.

At Sunday’s BAFTAs, the leading actor and actress categories were won by Colin Firth and Carey Mulligan respectively - two performers who, if not fully raised in the theatre, both raised their game and profile through it.

Firth got his big break via taking over Daniel Day-Lewis (who had taken over from original Rupert Everett) in the London stage production of Julian Mitchell’s Another Country — then swapped roles to make his film debut as Tommy (the part originated onstage by Kenneth Branagh) in the subsequent film version, opposite a returning Everett.

As that roll-call of talent suggests, that play provided an amazing entrée for a whole generation of actors who have become major film stars. Mulligan, meanwhile, may have broken into film first before the theatre, but she scored a massive personal success when she played Nina opposite Kristin Scott Thomas at the Royal Court Theatre in 2007, before reprising her performance on Broadway the next year.

Just last week I wrote a Guardian blog that was headlined (though not by me, since we don’t write our own headlines there) “Love Never Dies and the curse of the Phantom Menace.”

And I’ve previously pointed out here just how often that Phantom curse has struck me personally on several times that I’ve attended the show, as recently as last April in London (when the show broke down 15 minutes before the end, and took some 15 minutes to fix), but has previously also happened to me in productions as far afield as Las Vegas and Warsaw. Is it just me, or is the Phantom really sending us messages, as he now does online in tweets and on Facebook, about the show?

Last night its long awaited sequel Love Never Dies finally began performances (after cancelling the original first preview, planned for last Saturday) at the Adelphi Theatre, and the Phantom menace struck again.

Get me to the theatre on time…
We’re all of us reliant on transport systems - or our own feet - to get us to work on time; and occasionally we must fail. But going to the theatre, which is after all a critic’s main workplace, the curtain waits for no man (or woman), though there was a time, I’m told, that first nights used to sometimes be delayed by the non-arrival of the Daily Mail’s late (in every sense) Jack Tinker, and only when he was in place did they finally start. Nowadays, we’re more likely to wait for an entourage of B-list celebrities. (Or, in the case of the opening of Thriller Live a year ago, of one of the now late Jacko’s brothers, as I blogged at the time).

But just this last week it seems that several of us critics very nearly missed the curtain, or actually did.

With deep cuts in public spending on the horizon, especially if there’s a change of government soon, we may be seeing the last gasps in the last decade’s amazing regeneration of our physical theatrical landscape that has seen public theatres up and down the land, from Covent Garden, the London Coliseum, the Royal Court and Young Vic to Stratford-upon-Avon’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre, being internally and externally reformed, thanks to a combination of arts lottery funding, local council input and sponsorship.

Last night it was the turn of Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre - also known as the world’s most famous snooker hall — to make its official comeback, after a two-year, £15.3m refurbishment programme, and the first and most satisfying thing to say about it is that when you enter the core of the operation - the theatre itself - nothing seems to have changed.

There are still glass ceilings to be broken in the theatre, even when they’re in the open air. It took until 2008 for a new play by a woman playwright to receive its premiere on the main Olivier stage of the National Theatre, when Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin opened there; and now comes news that this summer’s premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe of Nell Leyshon’s new play Bedlam will mark the first-ever staging of a play by a known female playwright in its entire history.

So while the National’s Olivier Theatre had only been there for 32 years before Lenkiewicz made a bit of history, the Globe has taken even longer to get there: it is 411 years since the Globe was first established on the South Bank.

I recently wrote here of the joys of critical longevity, and how British theatre and the journalism that reports it is blessed with a series of commentators who have been around for a long time - next year Michael Billington will mark his 40th anniversary as the Guardian’s theatre critic, while Paul Taylor and Charles Spencer are relative newbies with tenures of half that time on the Independent and Daily Telegraph respectively.

But none of them can match the kind of theatrical partnerships that are sometimes established on the other side of the footlights; and last night saw the amazing reunion of Sir Peter Hall, 80 this year, and Judi Dench, a mere 75, working again as director and star on a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that they first did together 48 years ago, and are fulfilling the same roles on now.

No art form, as regular readers of this blog may know, gives me more sustaining pleasure than the intimate art of cabaret, when executed well. But no art form, either, is more poorly represented in London, as I’ve also regularly complained before

Every now and then attempts are made to rejuvenate it, as happened at Pizza on the Park last March, when a permanent cabaret residency was established there by American cabaret singer Jeff Harner and his partner Keith Turnipseed, but by May I was wondering aloud, as I watched the ever-sublime Maureen McGovern performing there to an audience of just 19 people, whether we “actually deserved such a club - or artists of such calibre - if they can’t be more actively supported”. Soon after - with the wonderful Alison Jiear doing a series of Sunday/Monday appearances there but not receiving payment for her services - the season abruptly ended.

But no art form bounces back from disaster quite so easily, either.

As a theatre critic, my diary is typically set by others: we’re invited to the first night (or a designated series of previews, as happened under notice with Legally Blonde, or with The Shawshank Redemption, though co-author Owen O’Neill insisted he wasn’t actually informed that some critics had been allowed in early). But the theatregoers that ultimately matter - the ones that actually pay for their tickets - are under no such restrictions: they book according to convenience and availability for dates that suit them.

And the really devoted fans, of course, like to be there at the very beginning - even though they should be aware that they are, in all likelihood, not seeing a finished product. There’s definitely an adrenalin thrill to be part of the creative journey in this way, particularly since the final ingredient to any show is always the audience: what responses and reactions they bring to it.

Just this week the cast of the touring production of Hairspray, that kicks off at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff on March 30, just days after the West End one finishes, was officially announced. It includes Danny Bayne, who previously won ITV’s Grease is the Word reality TV contest to play the role of Danny Zucko in the West End production of Grease as Corny Collins and Liam Doyle, who won GMTV’s Search for Troy TV contest to play the role of Troy in last year’s tour of High School Musical 2, as Link Larkin. And when Hairspray first opened in the West End, the role of Link Larkin was originally played by Ben James-Ellis, who had come 4th in the 2007 Any Dream Will Do search to find a star for that year’s revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (James-Ellis is currently to be found in a fringe production of The Hostage at Southwark Playhouse.)

Meanwhile, the winner of that contest Lee Mead - currently on the road in Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime up to April 24 — has recently been announced to take over as Fiyero in the London production of Wicked from May 10.

It’s not just the MPs who spend public money shamelessly (and sometimes illegitimately) on themselves, apparently in pursuit of their public duties. Wherever someone has a job, it seems, they also have right to make expenses claims, which is only right and proper - they shouldn’t have to dig into their own pockets, after all, if they’re only doing their jobs.

Except in my own little world: as a freelance journalist, I’m lucky to get fees for the columns I write, but I can’t claim for travel or accommodation. So I simply don’t, by and large, travel or stay over, if I can help it - there’s always enough theatre happening on my doorstep in London for me to cover in my weekly review column, and I try to reach the rest of the country by occasionally covering touring productions at places like Wimbledon and Richmond. I didn’t even go to Edinburgh last year. (Some regional theatres - noting that they’re not being visited by critics much — are dangling the carrot now of offering to pay for travel and accommodation, and I have gratefully accepted on occasion).

We’ve already had the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, but now the biggie is coming up: the industry’s self-governed, own awards to itself, the Laurence Olivier Awards.

It’s always nicer, I think, when someone scratches your back for you, but it is, of course, always possible to give yourself a pat on your own back if you have to. You do run the risk of getting contorted in the process, and it’s fascinating to see just how contorted they’ve got this year: the nominations were announced yesterday, and in order to squeeze as many nominations in as possible, they’ve expanded three of the categories to six nominees. Yet others contain just five, four or even three nominees apiece, depending on the category; there’s simply no consistency at all.

Brevity, they are always saying, is the soul of wit; but these are lean times for theatre reviewing, in every sense. AA Gill famously suggested a few years ago that “no aspect of the culture is as badly served by its critics as the theatre is”, and went on to complain that “Many of the national press reviewers who haunt the lobbies of the West End, picking up their complimentary programmes and free glasses of screwtop wine, are a moribund, joyless, detached bunch. Where are the voices that ring out as being aesthetically intelligent, passionate, current and, most important, entertaining?”

Leaving aside his own dubious claims on that status - last year he began a now notorious review of an E1 restaurant with a long preamble about how he shot a baboon in Africa “last Wednesday, just after lunch”, merely in order “to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger” - he probably needs psychiatric help rather than a good meal out.

The Guardian yesterday ran a tribute to its long serving TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith, who joined the paper all of forty years ago - and is still writing for it today.

That’s an astonishing run, but so is the warmth of the tributes that were paid to her which helps to explain it. As producer and screenwriter Phil Redmond commented, “The truth is sometimes difficult to take. She is probably one of the most objective critics I have had on my back. Most critics are too busy writing about themselves, or trying to outdo each other with the best pun or joke. Nancy doesn’t have to do that because she is the real thing. Her writing is just good, honest, objective reporting. You know that she cares, and understands exactly what it’s all about.”

OK, I know this isn’t very carbon-friendly of me, and the government is already urging me to drive 5 miles less a week since car journeys account for more CO2 emissions than other kind of UK transport, but I still drive to the theatre most nights. I simply relish the convenience of having the car waiting for me afterwards, and getting home to Borough within five or six minutes of the curtain coming down.

But the news that Westminster Council is looking into a plan to extend West End parking meter charges and single yellow line penalties to midnight from Monday to Saturday, instead of the current 6.30pm cut-off, might finally get me onto my bike - literally. (Funnily enough, I was checking out bikes at a shop on Tooley Street just the other day).

Or I could simply walk to and from the West End.

On Monday, it was announced that John Logan’s Red, now in its final week at the Donmar Warehouse, is heading to Broadway, where it will begin a limited 15 week run from March 11. It’s the second transfer of the current Broadway season for the Donmar, following last autumn’s move of the Jude Law Hamlet.

And it’s far from alone amongst leading London theatres to make their mark on the current Broadway season.

Like most Londoners, I usually have to travel to the theatre, rather than the theatre travelling to me, but living in Borough, SE1, I at least feel part of a theatrical hub that means I don’t always have far to go to many of them. The Menier Chocolate Factory is less than five minutes away; Shakespeare’s Globe, Southwark Playhouse, the Unicorn, Shunt and (in the summer) the Scoop, are less than ten minutes away; while the Union, Young Vic and Old Vic are nearby, too, not to mention the National which is another five minutes from the Cut. So I’m spoilt already.

But today the Royal Court have just announced that I’ll have yet another choice soon, as they are return to the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre where the summer before last they took over an unoccupied retail unit for a week’s run of Oxford Street (a play set in a sports shop, played out in a real shop, made it very site specific).

There are seldom any guarantees in life, let alone the theatre; but yesterday the Sunday Times reported the news that Cameron Mackintosh intends to ensure that his seven London theatres are to be protected for theatrical use in perpetuity. The plan, according to the Sunday Times, is to endow them with enough cash to keep them open after his death, staging only musicals and plays.

As the Sunday Times points out, “Though most West End theatres are listed buildings protected from demolition, uncertainty hangs over their use whenever they are sold. The Empire in Leicester Square became a cinema while the nearby Hippodrome is being converted into a casino and entertainment venue.”

But Cameron Mackintosh, who has already spent far more than any other operator on upgrading each of the theatres in his stable, has long taken a different view.