Banging the drum for regional theatre….

There are still, fortunately, a couple of nationals that properly address the regions: Lyn Gardner regularly gets out her travelling shoes for The Guardian, which also has good local stringers in Alfred Hickling for points north and Mark Fisher for Scotland, while Dominic Cavendish collects the road and rail miles for the Daily Telegraph.

One of the issues of reviewing shows that play out of town, of course, is that you’re only addressing a limited potential audience who might see them - unless a play is going to tour, it’s going to be seen only by those in the immediate vicinity. Mind you, we regularly go, of course, to plays at the Arcola or the Cock Tavern (where my own production of Shrunk opens tonight), which can’t necessarily be seen by many either, given that the Cock only seats 60 people. But at least we don’t have to spend a lot of time getting to them.

Last night I realised, not for the first time, how much effort it is to actually travel beyond London sometimes, and felt for Lyn and Dominic who do this all the time. I went to Sheffield for its new production of True West, starring John Light and Nigel Harman as the siblings and whom I have interviewed for a feature that’s running in next week’s Stage, hence my curiosity to see it. I left home at 3pm and didn’t get back till 12.30am this morning, all for an 85-minute play in the middle of it.

I wouldn’t say it wasn’t worth it - but it was undoubtedly tiring. The train going up was so unbearably hot that I ended up standing in the corridor for some of the journey, simply trying to cool down near a window that could actually be opened. And because the play was so short, I managed to get the last train home - leaving at 9.15pm, changing at Doncaster, and arriving back at King’s Cross at 12.10am. Happily, the East Coast line (that seems to have replaced GNER and then National Express trains) offers free wireless internet access throughout onboard, so I was actually able to work on the return trip - and write and file my review column for this weekend’s Sunday Express.

But while reviews for London shows may have a long shelf life simply because shows run longer here - and people will travel from all over the country, and even the world to see them — it also occurred to me that reviewing a show like True West, running for just three weeks in all, is a particular luxury. In fact, the point has been well made previously by a correspondent to The Guardian blog that regional theatre is necessarily a local activity, rather than a national one: “Theatre is for most of its audiences a local medium, not a mass medium. Very few people will see shows in London and Edinburgh and Leicester, unless they live in Leicester, or are Lyn Gardner. And yes this is short-sighted because of course the headline-grabbing West End depends upon other theatre to nurture its talents and develop its material but I still don’t see why the general public or the media are going to start celebrating that work.”

What’s great is that there is still, just about, a critical climate that does go out of its way, in every sense, to do so - Sheffield was reviewed earlier this week by the Guardian’s Michael Billington, the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, the Mail on Sunday’s Georgina Brown, plus Dominic Maxwell for The Times and Patrick Marmion for the Daily Mail before I got there myself. And tonight, I’m happy to say, distinguished colleagues like Michael Billington, Charles Spencer, Paul Taylor and Henry Hitchings are going to be at the Cock Tavern, too, to review Shrunk. I may be less happy after what I read they write about it, of course, but I’m delighted that they’re coming. It’s all part of the creative process. And if critics, thanks to budgets, timetables or inclination, are no longer able to review smaller things like this or go out-of-town, we’ll all be the poorer for it.