August 2011 Archives

As the Edinburgh fringe enters its home stretch - and I’ve just come back home myself from my second weekend there last night - the little arts journalism bubble in which Scotland briefly became the epicentre of the cultural world is being burst, and indeed just tonight we have a big London opening to prove it as the Barbican hosts the UK transfer of the recent smash hit Broadway revival of South Pacific, ahead of an extensive countrywide tour.

Of course, this does mean that the arts axis merely shifts mainly back to London, as if most theatrical and artistic endeavour only happens there, and Edinburgh in any case sometimes seems to be largely made up of transplanted London folk playing away from home, whether audiences or performers, though of course that can’t be true.

Even one thousand and one nights would not be enough to see everything in Edinburgh, especially now with the proliferating free fringe (which is so big now that it even produces its own brochure featuring over 320 entries, and is turning into a real challenge to the established fringe where few enough turn a profit anyway, so why not give it away and hope to make some money in a hat collection instead?).

The Edinburgh International Festival, by comparison, has fielded just a feeble total of four shows, but the afternoon and evening I’d saved yesterday for its centrepiece original work One Thousand and One Nights proved too much: I fled after the first part. 



One useful fact of this new regular feature of shorter commentary to a range of different subjects is that I can return with updates to things previously covered. In the last Short Shorts, I drew attention to a story about an autistic child who’s family were asked to move seats during a performance of Wicked because the boy was creating a disturbance, and referred to a new project called Autism Friendly Films that worked to provide special screenings of films that were tailored to the needs of filmgoers with autism, in which the sound will be softer, the lights will be left up at a low level and audience members will be allowed to make noise and sit where they feel comfortable.

It led to an excellent reply on the blog itself from Kirsty Hoyle, access manager at the Unicorn children’s theatre in Southwark, that the Unicorn “already provides operates an autism friendly environment with specialist performances”. Amongst the features offered, “These performances have unreserved seating so that you can have the seat of your choice. The sound will be at a lower volume and the lights will be dimmed rather than a completely dark auditorium. We also send out a social story which has pictures and notes about the show so parents and guardians can prepare their children for the visit. During the show there is an open door policy and the audience is welcome to take breaks and visit our ‘chill-out’ room. We also encourage nervous or first time visitors to come and have a look around the set before the show.”

There are currently a whopping 19 musicals on seemingly full-time residencies in the West End (though one, Love Never Dies, closes at the end of next week), plus limited runs of Crazy for You at the Open Air, London Road at the National, the return of Fela! to Sadler’s Wells, and South Pacific, now previewing at the Barbican (ahead of an official opening next Tuesday). By contrast, there are just 12 plays on commercial runs, plus 8 plays in repertory at the National and Shakespeare’s Globe. And of those plays, only the inevitable Mousetrap, Woman in Black, 39 Steps and now War Horse are on open-ended runs.

So musicals not only dominate the commercial West End, but they also stick around a lot longer, leading to the paradoxical state that though there are fewer plays over musicals in terms of numbers running overall, many more of them actually open in the West End and at the National across the year.

According to a news story in The Scotsman, some venue bosses in Edinburgh jokingly referred to yesterday — the second Tuesday of the fringe — as “suicide Tuesday”, since its one of the toughest mid-week days to bring in audiences. Clearly there’s an ebb and flow to the fringe, as there is to any box office-led industry, but with Edinburgh the stakes are even higher simply because there’s such a limited period of time in which to draw and build audiences and then hopefully sell out.

The fixed costs of making and marketing a show - the capitalisation - have to be aggregated across a very short run indeed, which at its most will be three and a half weeks (the so-called Week O, followed by the official three weeks of the fringe itself which now stretches to the Monday of the late August bank holiday weekend). 


Two key bits of advice on the Edinburgh festival are to pace yourself and to remember to eat (and to try to eat healthily). I’ve failed on both accounts over the weekend and paid a price for it with my waist: on Saturday night the button on my trousers popped, so I spent all of Sunday propping them up just by my belt, only to have the belt snap yesterday morning, too, as I was putting them on. Perhaps the emergency crepes and curried chips were not such a good idea, after all.

So I staggered to a dry cleaner repair service that was luckily just down Johnson Terrace, a stone’s throw from Shandwick Place where I’ve been staying, and I hid behind a clothing rail in my underwear while a lovely assistant rescued me by sewing on a new button. (Thank God I’m going back home this afternoon and seeing my personal trainer first thing tomorrow morning!) And then the best bit: she didn’t charge me, either. “It’s our good deed of the day,” she said.

I wrote and posted Friday’s blog aboard the train heading to Edinburgh. 3 days and 15 shows later, I still have two days to go before I head home tomorrow evening, then I’m home for a few days before I return again next weekend for another three days. There’s something curiously addictive about Edinburgh: seeing fringe stalwarts Fascinating Aida, whom I first saw on one of my earliest trips here in the mid-80s, Dillie Keane pointed out between the three of them they’ve been coming to Edinburgh for 81 years now — and that she has herself been coming here for longer than new member Sarah-Louise Young has been alive!

I first saw Keane, Adele Anderson and original FA member Marilyn Cutts in the Supper Room at the Assembly Rooms (where I remember being tickled pink by one song in particular, “Kay Why, Kay Why, Kay Why did you leave me”, but that’s another story). But while Cutts has long gone - and a third spot has been like a revolving door of performers over the years that have also included Issy van Randwyck, Liza Pulman and even, briefly, Bonnie Langford - the Assembly Rooms have been another constant of the Edinburgh fringe.

Edinburgh here I come! I am writing this aboard the East Coast line, and thanks to free WiFi on board, will be able to post this here, too. So I’m going to keep it (unusually!) short, and merely reply to a correspondent yesterday who billed themselves “Festival Fan”, and admonished me for yesterday’s entry in which I wrote of how I’ve been keeping an eye on the reviews so far, and using them to help guide my choices of what to see.

S/he wrote, “Why are you bothering coming or even bothering to write about the Edinburgh Festival when you are relying on your fellow critic’s reviews? Are you or are you not a critic yourself? Make up your own mind. How feeble and more to the point, lazy.”



The arts pages (and review sections of papers’ websites) are being saturated by coverage from Edinburgh, and that’s even before the “official” International Festival kicks off tomorrow. I’m heading up north myself tomorrow for an extended long weekend to Tuesday, so I’ve been keeping an eye on the hits, misses and maybes. I feel, for example, I can safely give a miss to Grid Iron’s What Remains, a site-specific performance at Edinburgh University Medical School, which Michael Coveney damns with the dread words “worse than Punchdrunk on a bad night”, and Lyn Gardner calls “a rare Grid Iron dud”.

On the other hand, I’m going to have to see Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tesco’s for myself, since I’m torn between Libby Purves calling it a “clever brave piece… pretty damn good”, while Lyn Gardner describes it as a “dull monologue which is about as thrilling as someone else’s shopping list.”

Fringe theatres in Dalson, Clapham, Islington and Southwark cancelled performances last night in response to the London riots the night before and fears of a reprise last night. In the event, all was eerily quiet in the capital, flooded with extra police and with large parts of the city in “virtual lockdown”, according to a report in today’s Guardian.

And although I adjusted my own routine slightly - I tubed it to town instead of driving, after reports from a friend of having his car “molested” on he way home from Regent’s Park the night before - I otherwise went about my usual business, which last night was the Donmar Warehouse opening of Anna Christie, featuring the returns of Jude Law and Ruth Wilson to the producing powerhouse under whose auspices they had both appeared last on the London stage in Hamlet and A Streetcar Named Desire respectively.

There’s nothing like the theatre to shield you from reality: while the biggest worry in Regent’s Park was whether rain would stop play (again), after a brief downpour meant that the opening night of Crazy for You there had to be stopped and the stage mopped before the second big dance number — London was burning outside. In the parallel universe of the inner circle of Regent’s Park, though, we were in delirious, intoxicating oblivion.

So much so that I got home and immediately set to tweeting my pleasure, unaware that everywhere from Hackney and Croydon to Peckham, Lewisham, Clapham, Ealing, Camden, Bethnal Green, Stratford, Notting Hill, Colliers Wood and Dalston there was a war zone. According to a news report in today’s Guardian, “a 100-strong mob cheered as a shop in the centre of Peckham was torched and one masked thug shouted: ‘The West End’s going down next’.”

The Edinburgh fringe is now, of course, in full swing, and everyone there — or at least the critics — will be rushing around like headless chickens, trying to find some good shows out of the more than 2,500 that are on. Or sticking safely with the Traverse, which — being an artistically-led programme - means someone has already chosen the shows on more than just rental terms. Or following the leads of Lyn Gardner or Joyce McMillan who typically put more critical leg-work into covering the fringe than anyone else.

Come festival time, of course, everyone’s a critic now, a fact amplified by Twitter, but sometimes it seems that there are more reviewing tickets being issued than tickets being sold. And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; while you could follow your nose instead, the waft of a hit is hard to separate from the hype of one, and you may need a critical steer. But how to find one to trust from the cacophony of voices around? That’s why Gardner, McMillan and indeed The Stage’s own team of critics are so valuable. They play a vital part in helping to separate the wheat from the chaff, both on the stages and in the reviewing deluge.

Just because you call a place Stratford, the river the Avon (mispronounced here, at least to English ears) and name your local schools after Shakespearean characters and relations (there’s the Romeo, Hamlet, Anne Hathaway and of course Shakespeare Public schools), doesn’t automatically make your town Shakespearean; but place a world-class theatre — or indeed four — at its core, and you have a place that is defined almost entirely now by its cultural industry.

Operating a summer repertoire of 12 plays, four of them by the Bard, plus other that this year include two musicals, classics by Moliere and Pinter, and new plays by Canadian writers, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival was founded in 1952 and began operations in 1953 in a giant canvas tent.


The critical compass is pointing northwards today for many of my colleagues as the annual Edinburgh Fringe jamboree kicks off: I know that Libby Purves will be on the overnight sleeper, and that Ian Shuttleworth, Kate Bassett and Michael Coveney are all en route as well today. But for Libby and Kate, at least, its just a taster weekend, as both told me they’ll be back for London openings on Monday and Tuesday at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park and the Donmar Warehouse respectively.

There was a time when London theatre annually shut shop in August - or at least the usual tidal wave of openings went on temporary hiatus - but this week we’ve already had Ian McKellen in Chichester’s The Syndicate on Tuesday, and a clash of double openings between the National in London and the RSC and Stratford-upon-Avon both last night and tonight, with the National opening the two Double Feature programmes of new plays in the Paintframe and the RSC staging new productions of Pinter’s The Homecoming and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The internet is a virtual medium, of course, but it goes without saying that it’s reaching places - and audiences - that live entertainment, limited by seating capacity, cannot. It’s a whole new channel of communication and outreach. And for supposedly elitist institutions like the Royal Opera House, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to challenge that stuffy perception, even as the venue itself moves beyond its house opera and ballet companies into recently hosting a week long residency of Rufus Wainwright, for instance, or now adding the Laurence Olivier Awards to its portfolio of awards events that already include the BAFTAs.

Just yesterday the Royal Opera House’s chief executive Tony Hall was writing in The Independent that digital technology is allowing the venue to take its opera and ballet performances further.

Musicals rarely arrive ready-written. They need gestating, incubating and nurturing, as required — sometimes a gentle slap on the bottom is all that’s necessary to get them breathing on their own; at other times more intensive care is needed to help them to survive. All too often, of course, they miscarry, or are stillborn on arrival.

But just as it is widely known (at least to women) how painful childbirth is, we keep doing it, for the species to survive; and likewise people keep putting themselves through the pain of producing new musicals, partly out of the human need to create, but also because the rewards are so great when they make it.

The West End posted good second quarter results last week, with box office takings up 2% on the same period in 2010. SOLT chief executive Julian Bird told The Stage he was “cautious, but optimistic” about the prospects for the rest of the year, with “a very healthy raft of shows being announced across the autumn and into the winter.”

It is, of course, always about product and creating excitement around shows that people actually want to see. That’s the creative challenge of theatre; but it’s also a business, and as in all industries, it’s also about cost and price for both the manufacturer and consumer. Can the manufacturer create the product efficiently enough to return the initial investment (the capitalisation in theatre-speak) and pay ongoing charges (the weekly running costs), and will the consumer find it sufficiently good value to keep buying it en masse?