January 2011 Archives

Last week the Society of London Theatres issued figures for revenues (an all-time record) and attendances (slightly down) at its 52 member theatres last year; but this wasn’t, of course, broken down show by show, let alone week by week, as it would be in New York, with the weekly publication of the box office grosses by the Broadway League (New York’s SOLT equivalent).

Instead, we are forced in London to rely purely on anecdotal evidence, and what producers are happy to tell us (which invariably means that only good news gets reported). Last Wednesday, for instance, Nick Hytner told the assembled throng at the annual press conference he holds to tell us of his plans for the coming year that the last two months have seen the NT operating at 100% capacity. (Pride, they always say, comes before a fall, and that figure may well change after the opening tomorrow of Greenland in the Lyttelton).

Yesterday the Society of London Theatre issued results for 2010, showing that - yet again - records were broken in its 52 member theatres, with revenues over £512m, up 1.46% on a like-for-like basis on last year’s record figures, though attendances were slightly down, by 0.79% to over 14.152,230 people passing through theatre’s portals, compared to last year’s 14,257,922.

That suggests, of course, that ticket prices overall have kept their steady rise, since fewer people have obviously paid more for their tickets; but it also suggests that the West End isn’t facing too much price resistance, either, given the results achieved.

Retro is clearly the new future, at least in musical theatre terms. While Broadway is rolling out nine new musical productions in the next three months before the cut-off for Tony eligibility for this year’s awards on April 28, that includes the West End retreads of the films Sister Act and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (by way of Australia), revivals of Broadway classics Anything Goes and How to Succeed in Business without really trying, and - assuming it ever officially opens - a Marvel comic brought to 3D life in Spider-man Turn off the Dark. There’s also an inevitable musicalisation of another film title, Catch Me If You Can, but at least there are also three wild cards — The Book of Mormon, Wonderland and The People in the Picture that come from more original sources.

Meanwhile, the West End turns the clock back to tried and tested familiar titles everywhere you look.

And the award for best stockings definitely went to the Mail on Sunday’s Georgina Brown, and best trousers, offstage but not off, to James Christopher, formerly a theatre and film critic for The Times. The event, of course, was the annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, presented yesterday at the Prince of Wales Theatre’s Delfont Room, which - to declare an interest - I was hosting in my capacity as chairman of the drama section of the circle.

It is, hands down, one of the most stressful jobs I have, not least in the annual pairing up I have to make of critics to categories they can present.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the theatre free of the plays of Toby Young - his pair of plays, Who’s the Daddy? and A Right Royal Farce, both co-written with Lloyd Evans, are low spots from a lifetime of theatregoing - yesterday a new play opened at the Bush that actually has him as virtually a character in it.

The play is Little Platoons, and just as Toby’s dad had co-founded the Open University, Toby is now a key player in a rather more controversial educational campaign to found one of the first of the new “free schools” that has been greenlit by the current Coalition government.

Moira Stewart has been reminding us for weeks now that it’s time for us self-employed people to file our tax returns and I’m forever leaving it to the last minute; so it’s with a certain amount of trepidation as well as pride that I finally tackled mine yesterday, a full week ahead of the final deadline, which in my books (if not those of my accountant) counts as early.

I dread it every year, not least because it finally tells me how much I’ve actually earned, or not, after all the work I seem to have done. I keep a vague eye, of course, on the bottom credit line in my bank account, and have not, in 8 years as a freelancer, not gone into the red (yet), but beyond that I don’t usually know how I’m doing; just that when the credit balance starts running low I know it’s time to send out some invoices.

Critics sometimes think they know the “big” plays well: plays like King Lear, Twelfth Night and Hamlet come around so often that we can’t not get to see them regularly. As a result, we inevitably play compare, contrast and spot-the-difference, but clever directors and performers can, it seems, fool, even us.

Michael Grandage’s current production of King Lear, for instance, is so fleet of foot that a play that often runs to three and a half hours or more suddenly played out at just under three hours.

I landed back in London from Barbados yesterday morning at 6.06am, and just over 12 hours later, I was back at my first London opening night of the year, Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre, which weirdly put me back where I’d been before I took my enforced theatrical hiatus, namely in an operating theatre!

Nina Raine’s play goes behind-the-scenes of a busy hospital emergency surgery room, where life-and-death dramas are being played out daily, and it would be hard not to respond having myself so recently been under the surgeon’s knife.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I had an enforced 16-day (and night) abstinence from theatregoing in mid-December, when I had to have back surgery; I broke it (the abstinence, that is, not my back) on New Year’s Eve by attending an RSC show at the Roundhouse, then saw three more shows over that weekend. But now I’ve just had another 14 days off from the theatre as I continued my recuperation in Barbados, from where I have just returned this morning, making 30 days off in all.

A couple of weeks ago, just as I was heading off to the Caribbean and the rest of the world was returning to work after the New Year, Lyn Gardner wrote a Guardian critics’ notebook in which she said, “I’ve had 14 days when I’ve barely seen the inside of a theatre. I must say, I thoroughly recommend not going to the theatre - which is probably career suicide coming from the mouth of a professional critic.”

This blog has been on a temporary hiatus since the New Year, as I have been on holiday in Barbados on a theatre-free holiday! I am returning overnight tonight, and normal blogging service will be restored tomorrow; but even if I have not been going to the theatre, I have been checking in on theatre news every day while here, and even maintained a limited Twitter service (which can be accessed also via this Facebook page.

One of the tweets I posted sadly was to mark the passing in the early hours of last Saturday morning of Susannah York, and ahead of my proper blog return tomorrow, I’d like to post as a tribute to her an interview I did two years ago for the Sunday Express when she was starring in a new play at Kennington’s White Bear Theatre.

On New Year’s Eve, I broke a 16-day period of theatrical abstinence, brought on by my pre-Christmas back surgery, by attending that day’s matinee of The Winter’s Tale the RSC’s current residency at the Roundhouse.

Such was the pleasure of being back inside a theatre building again that even the 20-minute wait for coffee in the ground floor restaurant wasn’t a problem (though it begs the question just why a theatre outlet is taken by surprise at the fact that the majority of the audience arrives more or less simultaneously, or at least in the 30 minutes before the performance begins; it’s a bit like Heathrow being surprised by giant metal birds landing there, as I was writing here only the other day).