May 2011 Archives

I’ve gone to some interesting places for theatrical performances in my time: there was a performance of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carnage in the State Rooms of Kensington Palace, for instance, three years ago, or a Manchester semi-detached house that Johnny Vegas showed us around as a man trying to sell it in a show presented as part of the Manchester International Festival. But I haven’t, until now, seen a show presented at bath-time in the bathroom of the performer’s own home in Brighton.

With an audience of just six people crammed into it on seats arranged around the bathtub — with one audience member sitting on the toilet itself — there’s Abba playing on the radio and a warm, welcoming tub of foamy water ready.

A critic’s place is usually on the page, not the stage, and for good reason. We’re the sort of people who know (some of) the directions, but can’t drive. Sometimes, of course, we can’t avoid making impromptu stage appearances.

I was once summonsed onto a Broadway show called Fool Moon where comedians Bill Irwin and David Shiner recruited audience members to take part in a silent movie recreation, and the floor could have swallowed me up. More recently, Henry Hitchings of the Evening Standard was put to a public spelling test (which he failed), as part of the Donmar’s 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

I’ve often said that it’s a nice problem to have, but it’s a problem nonetheless: there are just so many things opening all year round now, and all over the country, that as a critic you simply can’t be everywhere. There simply aren’t enough nights in the week available in which to see it all, and producers, too, routinely run out of nights on which to open their shows.

While SOLT maintain an excellent diary of all scheduled first nights — which all press agents get and is also e-mailed every fortnight to the Critics’ Circle (or at least me in my capacity as chairman of the drama section, which I then forward to members) — there are still unfortunate clashes.

There’s something absolutely tangible and unmistakeable about a show that, on its first night, plays with such blissful confidence on one side of the footlights, and is met by purring pleasure (and utterly helpless laughter) on the other, that you just know it is going to be a hit.

Such was the case at the National on Tuesday with the opening of One Man, Two Guvnors, the play that has brought James Corden back to the National where almost exactly 7 years ago he was first noticed as part of the remarkable original troupe of The History Boys, also directed by Nick Hytner. That opening, on the other hand, was altogether more tentative; when the press arrived at the National, we were told that there would be a delay to the performance.

Now that the internet has us all more or less permanently connected, some are also permanently communicating, too. For those of us in the communication business, who make our living passing on news and views, we have to be part of it, but it’s a particular challenge nowadays to actually be heard above the din. If everyone is talking at once, it’s difficult sometimes to think, let alone try to speak.

It’s one of the many reasons why I value going to the theatre every night, or getting on a plane from time to time: for a few hours, at least, I’ll be out of reach, either listening to others on a stage or alone with my thoughts. But just as the possibility of internet access and using mobile phones moves inexorably closer in the air, so theatres, too, are no longer immune to the internet. And I don’t mean all those people you constantly see surreptitiously (and sometimes not so surreptitiously) checking their blackberries mid-performance.

Just yesterday I wrote that it was only professional duty that kept me in my seat during the Barbican’s new production of The School for Scandal, and in my full review for The Stage commented that “this aggressive display of director’s theatre comes full of baggage.”

It could, of course, equally be remarked that critics come to the theatre full of our own baggage, too, and it is the perennial artist’s cry to be misunderstood. Yesterday I happened to be reading Jonathan Croall’s new biography of John Gielgud, and there’s a story about Gielgud professionally rushing to the defence of Terence Rattigan’s French without Tears against a negative review by James Agate in the Sunday Times. Croall points out, “The play had been a success for over a year, despite a running attack by Agate, who thought it childish nonsense without wit, plot or character. Gielgud wrote to the Sunday Times to protest at his continual sneering at a play which was ‘delightful and original both in conception and execution’; an opinion ‘endorsed by the public and almost every critic’.”

So the world didn’t end after all at 6pm on Saturday night. But just over an hour later, I was in the bureaucratic faded splendors of Brighton Town Hall, sitting in the council chamber listening to a politician holding forth on the new society that is being created there, before we move next door and he’s now not so much interrogating as intimidating someone who has apparently crossed the line, and tells him, “Critical dissent is acceptable if it is left at home”.

Then we’re ushered down to the depths of the building, and a semi-derelict labyrinth of tunnels and corridors leading to cells and showers, a room stuffed with old filing, and worse. This is the perfect site specific setting for Hydrocracker’s production of a collection of five of Pinter’s short political plays presented under the umbrella title The New World Order, and soon enough this is how you feel our world may hurtle towards the future.

There are few art forms that are potentially more imprisoned by the past than opera. While in the theatre the repertoire is forever growing, with a huge body of classic works being staged alongside new plays and musicals all the time (some of which join the classic pile in due course), opera is largely defined by its classic repertoire, much as the RSC is centered around the work of its house playwright, with only occasional forays into new work, very little of which is ever done more than once.

But one company more than any other is constantly trying to reinvigorate and bring new life and new audiences (and regularly new work) to the opera: ENO. One of the company’s taglines is “Creating the future of opera” and it’s true: here is where past, present and the future regularly collide. The London Coliseum has become one of my favourite theatres in all of London, not just for the gorgeous physical space of Frank Matcham’s gloriously restored architecture, but more importantly for the emotional connection I regularly get with what’s on its stage.

Several years of year-on-year record-breaking business in the West End have defied the recessionary trend elsewhere and made the theatre feel not only immune to the prevailing economic winds but indeed has been often cited as providing a safe haven of relief for those affected by them. Where do you go when something extreme is predicted? A storm shelter, barricaded against the elements but with a community around you. But some people hunker down at home and hope to ride it out alone. And now it looks like the theatre may be seeing more of their audiences adopting the latter strategy.

Figures released by SOLT yesterday for the first quarter of this year reveal a sudden downturn in attendances and box office revenue at West End theatres over the same period the previous year: down a dramatic 10% in attendances, though that only translates into a 6% drop in revenue earned. That suggests, of course, that the 90% of tickets sold against last year’s figures are, at least, being sold at higher prices to offset some of the losses in bums on seats.

The theatre, long the training ground of British acting and the bedrock, in turn, of many an actor’s career, has hit a peculiar moment of crisis: a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog that highlighted the challenges facing actors trying (and failing) to make a living in the theatre, and as one told me, “are quietly quitting… We’re losing a huge amount of talent because people are treated so poorly.”

My blog hit a nerve: one actor friend wrote to me to say my blog had reduced him to tears of recognition. “I quit my agent in February, much to their frustration, due to much of what you have written about. It is so hard and you are right on the money.” Or rather, not; we met for lunch last week, and he told me that — at the age of 35 — he was having to take a tough look at a life of just getting by, and having to constantly juggle other jobs to actually earn a living.

Boundaries are already being re-drawn between electronic experiences of live events and the events themselves. On the one hand, things like NT Live are bringing theatrical events to a far wider potential audience than could ever see a show in the theatre; but though the audience watching a performance in the Olivier Theatre, say, simultaneously in cinemas up and down the land to the one seeing it in person in the National Theatre may see the same performance, they don’t necessarily feel it the same way or can actively participate in a way that actually affects the performance itself.

I’ve previously argued the point in a piece for The Observer a few months ago, where I wrote, “In essence, the cinema or TV experience lacks liveness. The audience outside the theatre is not sharing the same air as the performers - and crucially, they simply cannot complete the circuit of communication between stage and audience in a way that one can so directly affect the other.”

I don’t usually use this blog to blow my own trumpet, though regular readers will know that I blow everywhere (as Blanche Marvin once famously said, introducing me as one of the judges at the Empty Space Peter Brook Awards that she runs), keenly speaking up on behalf of a wide variety of causes, campaigns and personal enthusiasms.

Those include, of course, great people as well as great shows, and I have a particular passion for musical theatre and cabaret. Now I’m trying to combine all of those — plus a great cause — in the week-long season of interviews that I will be conducting from May 29 to June 4 at Jermyn Street Theatre under the umbrella title These Are A Few of My Favourite Songs.

There’s a wonderful quarterly magazine called Musical Stages, devoted to all things musical and published by the indefatigable Lynda Trapnell (whose day job is acting as a business manager to the stars), that’s been dubbed the West End’s parish magazine. And, unless you subscribe, the one place you can be sure of finding it is at Dress Circle, which is effectively the West End musical’s village shop.

But yesterday it was reported exclusively in The Stage that the shop is now engaged in a battle to stay open, and may indeed close within weeks unless further investment is found. Owner Murray Allan was quoted saying, “I’m very much struggling to keep the shop open…. By the end of June I’ve got to either be rescued or become a website, an online store only.”

Just yesterday I was writing here about the continuing controversy over premium ticket pricing, pointing out an interesting coincidence where every single seat that insider theatre website Theatremonkey.com highlighted as the best place to sit at the Piccadilly Theatre had been marked up as “premium” seats for the forthcoming run of Ghost.

I reckon we’re stuck with it and producers aren’t going to backtrack now on a new source of revenue; since they are stuck with a fixed inventory of seats that they can sell, they want to maximise the possible return out of them. But at the risk of beating a dead horse, I’d rather beat that than look at a dead industry in a few years time. And my own campaign on it has obviously hit a nerve, both inside the industry and amongst the theatregoers who support it so faithfully.

I’ve often sung the praises of Theatremonkey.com, a work-of-love (and word-of-mouth) website that offers a seat-by-seat guide to every West End theatre with hints about where its best to sit by price and location.

It’s mainly compiled by the Monkey’s own diligent research, but also is a magnificent work of crowd-sourcing: it is full of notes from readers who’ve reported their own experiences. (The site also does an invaluable aggregating of special offers currently available show by show that helps consumers to cut through the huge number of contradictory offers out there to find the best ones).

But it now looks like it’s not just wise theatregoers who are paying attention, but also greedy producers.

The rules over the way news is being handled are changing forever. When even legally-enforced superinjunctions are insufficient to stop news leaking out, what hope is there for keeping anything secret nowadays? The challenge now lies in how to manage the runaway train once the brakes come off and trying to stop it from hurtling off the nearest bridge.

Many celebrities, faced with imminent exposure by the News of the World, for instance, take control (and power) away from that paper by taking the story elsewhere. You may not be able to change the story, but you can change the way it is presented. What you can’t do, though, is hide your head in the sand and hope that it goes away.

For a festival that was only established five years ago and takes place in a remote Suffolk town, over just two weekends, the Hightide Festival has put itself on the map very fast indeed. It has transferred shows to London’s Bush Theatre and a found space at Shepherd’s Bush’s West12 Centre, to the Old Vic Tunnels and Tafalgar Studios 2, as well as appearances on the Edinburgh Fringe and Latitude Festival.

No wonder that Sam Mendes — now a patron of the festival — has said, “‘With remarkable speed, HighTide has had a significant, positive effect on theatre that will resonate for years to come”; and it’s certainly acquired friends in high places.

“We always find something to give us the impression we exist,” says Estragon in Waiting for Godot, summing up the existential terror of the human condition. For those of us who have found the theatre, it not only gives us a reason to exist, but it also helps to explain our existence to us.

But you can’t only live on air and promises, as underlined my recent blogs here about the lack of actors’ pay on the fringe (and often its lack in some sectors of journalism, though that’s another story). We all need to eat, too, and to pay the bills. (There’s only so much sustenance to be gained from free meals at the Ivy and Wolesley).

I know I run the risk of shredding every last ounce of critical cool and credibility I have left, but I’m a fanilow of Manilow. Yep, I just outed myself. But in the contemporary pantheon of singer-songwriter greats — Billy Joel, Carole King, even Dylan and McCartney — he’s carved out a unique niche, not just of longevity (as the others have, too), but of memorability.

“I write the songs that make the whole world sing,” goes the lyric to one of his greatest hits (though, ironically, he never actually wrote that song; it was written by Bruce Johnston). But another line in the song, “I am young again, even though I’m very old”, had a different ring of autobiographical truth when he sang it last night in London at the start of a four night engagement at the 02 Arena.

Given that just 39 shows opened on Broadway in the 2010/11 eligibility season for this year’s Tony Awards (that ran from April 30, 2010 to April 28, 2011), the Tony nominating committee spread the wealth a bit, acknowledging excellence in some 26 of those productions.

Even Baby It’s You and The People in the Picture managed to summons a single Tony nomination each for their stars Beth Leavel and Donna Murphy respectively; though Leavel is unlikely to hear the words, ‘baby, it’s you!’ on Tony night itself, where she faces stiff competition from local darling Sutton Foster (now finally grown up from ingenue to leading lady in Anything Goes) and Sister Act’s newly buxom Patina Miller, who has more front, in every sense, than she did when she originated the role of Dolores in London.

London itself was turned into a huge site-specific street theatre installation on Friday, with centuries of tradition and spectacle that attend a Royal Wedding being distilled into a television-age occasion where the best views, of course, were to be had not being there but by attending it at home.

That’s what I duly did, and London looked resplendent; so did the hordes of Londoners who thronged the streets to be part of a piece of history. And even if a global television audience was able to be part of it, too, the occasion demanded a live audience to provide the sense of atmosphere and urgency. And its why live theatre will never die: as much as digital 3D TV and live relays of theatre events into cinemas around the world bring theatre to a much bigger potential audience than ever before, it still demands a live component to not only complete the picture but to make sense of it at all.