Critical notes….

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Christopher Hart began his review of the Rose Theatre, Kingston’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by using it to attack the train service that had delivered him there: “Thanks to the moronic incompetence of South West Trains and a view of passengers as The Enemy rather than valued customers, I arrived at Kingston’s Rose Theatre with -30 seconds to spare. I know listening to someone’s commuting woes is about as interesting as listening to their dreams, but the point is, I was in a really foul temper to start with. I emerged nearly three hours later with a fixed and goofy smile on my face, undismayed even by the prospect of my return journey.”

So the theatre cured his mood. But pity poor David Benedict, London theatre critic for Variety, whose trip to the Sheffield Crucible opening of An Enemy of the People came with a novel excuse for his tardiness: his train actually caught fire! He ended up hailing a cab for the rest of the journey, but still only get there half an hour after the show had begun.

And then there was my trip to the Almeida’s opening of Measure for Measure on Thursday evening: its typically a 15-minute drive to Islington from my home in Borough. I left home with plenty of time, at 6.20pm. But on Thursday evening it was raining, and we all know that a little bit of rain brings the streets to a standstill. And thus it was to prove: as I drove towards Blackfriars Bridge, I noticed an ominous tailback. So I diverted over to Southwark Bridge instead, then wound my way through the city up to Islington. I parked my car at 6.58pm. I arrived at the Almeida at 6.59pm. The show started at 7.01pm.

Mind you, how anyone gets anywhere at the moment is a mystery to me: travelling on the tube on Friday, they made an announcement that closures would affect seven of the lines over the weekend. There are only 11 tubes line in all.

Reviewing the situation (even after the artistic director leaves)….
Pity poor Anthony Clark, the now departed artistic director of Hampstead Theatre. While at the helm, of course, he became used to the slings and arrows of outrageous bad reviews like one of a new play in 2004 play, Love Me Tonight, that called it “a play so ghastly that I can only assume Hampstead is now using a pin to select plays for production”, amongst others that I variously chronicled here.

But now that’s gone, he’s still getting lousy reviews: last week the theatre hosted the first in the RSC’s season of two new plays there, David Greig’s Dunsinane, and it drew this opening remark from Fiona Mountford in her Evening Standard review: “‘A cracking evening of new writing at Hampstead’ isn’t a phrase that has been much heard in theatrical circles recently. Superb contemporary commissions from the RSC have been in equally short supply, so when it was announced that David Greig’s Macbeth sequel would have its premiere at this beleaguered venue, there was cause for all-round consternation. Yet the naysayers are proved gloriously wrong by this gripping, first-rate drama from one of the country’s most talented and versatile playwrights.”

Reviewing the venue….
The very act of going to Hampstead Theatre, of course, used to be a drain on one’s expectations. But one of the clever things about Roxana Silbert’s production of Dunsinane, which I caught on Saturday, is that it immediately plunges us into unfamiliar territory by reconfiguring the auditorium, for the first time in my experience. Of course those seats are still a killer - no modern theatre has surely ever had less ergonomically friendly seats - but the front few rows have been displaced and swept to the right hand side of the stage, placing the audience on two sides.

It therefore makes a useful break with the past, and reinvents the space and our relationship within it. As Lyn Gardner wrote in a recent Guardian blog, “Often we think of theatre simply as the event itself, but the journey to and from the theatre, the seats in which we sit, the people we go with and the building itself are all part of the experience too.” She tells a revealing anecdote that coincidentally involves the old Hampstead Theatre: “A theatre, particularly when it’s local, can be an essential part of the fabric of people’s lives, part of their own personal maps of the world. A friend’s widowed mother who was a regular attendee, with her husband, at the old Hampstead Theatre, was devastated when the new venue was built, feeling as if the umbilical cord of memory had been irrevocably cut.”

Sometimes, of course, the memories can be sour as well as sweet. Last year the Arts Theatre returned to theatrical use, after what was alleged to be an “extensive four month refurbishment”, but it proved to be the same old decrepit hole of a theatre, as I wrote here at the time. But maybe, just maybe, a good show can turn it around. As Lyn Gardner wrote in her review of its current tenant A Man of No Importance, “The Arts is one of London’s most cheerless theatres, but this musical transfer from the tiny Union fits it snug as a bug, sending a flood of warmth through the stalls.”

And part of the pleasure is that the room actually helps establish a connection with the piece itself: as she goes on to comment, “In part it’s because the surroundings add to the atmosphere and the feeling that we are in a Dublin church hall in the early 1960s, where the St Imelda’s Players are rehearsing a performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome directed by Alfie, a bus conductor.”