September 2011 Archives

I blogged just yesterday about some papers and tweeters jumping the critical gun on posting their reviews and comments for Rock of Ages, following confusion and/or wilful disregard over when such things could appear.

But it’s not the only thing that’s making the system of letting critics into shows in advance of whatever the actual opening is unworkable; there’s also the fact that, by inviting critics to one of six performances, we’re not all seeing the same show anymore.

In my Short Shorts blog last Friday, I mentioned that one tweeter/critic, who was there on press seats as a guest of the management, had tweeted - as early as the interval - how much she was hating Rock of Ages that she’d seen the night before. And then again at the end of the show, her tweets made it perfectly clear how much she had hated it, before noting, “My review is embargoed till next week though.”

Never mind that she’d effectively already declared her critical hand. The reviews are officially out this morning; but in fact yesterday two papers, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph, both jumped the gun and put their reviews up already.

I picked up a theatre book yesterday reviewing the previous year in theatreland, and was immediately struck by its very first paragraph: “An uneasy twelvemonth for the British theatre: the imposition of VAT, the petrol shortage, the railway drivers’ go-slow, rising wages, rates and insurance costs together with the slump in the economy (coming as it did at a time when the cost of going to a play was, in London at any rate, already becoming prohibitive) all added up to a year in which survival was the main achievement.” And, it went on, looking at the shows that opened across the year, “it has been a safe and cautious time in the West End, while of the two leading subsidised companies the National has been in a state of transcience and the RSC in one of curious indecision.”

There are some clues there that we are not, of course, talking about last year, not least around the current state of the National and the RSC, but nonetheless, you can’t help thinking, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

Regular readers will know that I’ve been banging on for some time now about the rampant greed of West End theatre producers and owners who are marking an ever-widening area of their floorplans off to sell off at premium prices, though I’m also regularly told anecdotally that it isn’t always working for them: an actor friend who went to see South Pacific at the Barbican recently told me that he was put off paying the £85 asked for most of the stalls seats, so instead opted for a top balcony ticket at £20, only to find himself moved down to the stalls anyway when the theatre closed the top level.


So maybe it’s a way to get a good bargain, and I shouldn’t be discouraging producers from over-pricing their tickets to an extent that no one buys them at all. In a recent interview with ATG chief executives Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire in The Stage - who happen to be the UK producers of South Pacific - Alistair Smith suggested that the way premium pricing is supposed to work is that “if the seats aren’t sold at that inflated price, they might later be reduced to the official top price and then offered at that lower price instead. It’s a model that marks one of the first steps that the theatre industry has taken towards fully dynamic models of pricing - a move that has already been fully embraced by other industries such as airlines.”

The classic Broadway musical was largely built out-of-town and on the road, working out their kinks and problems away from the pressure cooker (and home comforts) of New York, but creating a different sort of intensity as creative teams and their casts were locked down in cities like Boston or Washington DC with nothing to distract them but the work itself.

This was, of course, also a pre-internet age, so word only travelled slowly back to Manhattan about how things were going, too, and local critics held more power as they provided the only interim reports. Many shows got transformed in the process: the out-of-town addition of “Comedy Tonight”, for instance, to open A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, radically altered how receptive audiences became to what followed.

It’s very easy to throw both praise and brickbats around a little too indiscriminately. People will conversationally often say something is the best or worst thing ever, to somehow give their opinion about it extra weight; but it actually usually has the paradoxical effect for me of giving that opinion less weight, because I think that they simply cannot have thought it through enough.

Yet yesterday I wrote a blog in which I described a revival of Pippin that I saw at the Bridewell in the late 90s as “hands down, the worst musical revival I have ever seen, before or since”. I assure you that I had thought that one through, and though memory has a pleasant way of erasing some poor productions, the truly terrible ones do stand out: I can still feel the pain of it.

It was an innocent enough tweet that Lyn Gardner sent out on Tuesday evening as she was on her way to the theatre: “Off to Street Scene at Young Vic Theatre. High hopes this is going to be a really good one.” It’s only human to have expectations; even theatre critics can never be entirely blank slates.

And that’s especially the case when a show has been done before, and comes already garlanded with awards: this is a production, after all, that won the 2008 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical when it was first done, winning from a shortlist that included the still-running Jersey Boys and the Menier revival of La Cage Aux Folles, the latter of which would go on to be named Best Musical Revival in the 2010 Tony Awards when it transferred to Broadway.

Just last week I was in Scarborough for the world premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s 75th play, and noted in this blog that the only other national critic in attendance that night was Sam Marlowe for The Times (though Michael Billington and Charles Spencer had been in the night before).

Yet exactly a week later, I’m back in Yorkshire, this time in Sheffield, and everyone’s here: the chief critics for The Guardian, Independent, Financial Times, Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, deputies for The Times, Telegraph and Observer, and representatives for the Daily Express, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times.

In an edition of Reunions on Radio 4 last week that looked at the making of Les Miserables (or at least the London making of it, since it had been done previously in a concert version in Paris), one of the most revealing moments was an audio clip from a story the day it opened at the Barbican; that it was opening, said the presenter at the time, to “stiff competition from twelve other musicals already running in London.”

Those were the days - as of today, there are twenty-one, and 13 of them have been running for a year or much, much longer. Les Miserables, of course, last year celebrated its 25th anniversary in the West End, and next month Phantom of the Opera does the same. Blood Brothers is not far behind - though the show is, in fact, older than both Les Mis and Phantom, having originally opened in the West End in 1983, that original run was a flop, and it wasn’t until it came back in 1988 that it embarked on the continuous run it is now on.

“What a dump!”, as Bette Davis might have said. But what a treasured, beloved dump it was, too: the Bush Theatre is, of course, finally bowing out of its old premises above the pub on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush Green, after a 39 year residency that has established it as one of the most important centres of new writing in British theatre, offering early tasters of the work of some of the biggest names in contemporary playwrighting, from Jonathan Harvey and Dennis Kelly to Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh, Joe Penhall, Mike Bartlett, Simon Stephens and Steve Thompson.

It is moving from one found space, a function room above a pub, to another found space: a former library, just around the corner. And to bid farewell to its old space, it has commissioned the interactive performance troupe non zero one to make an audio tour of the space in which we are taken into and around the theatre one last time, for a show called this is where we got to when you came in that I saw on Friday.

Thanks to the internet, journalists are no longer the sole distributors of news and critics no longer have the monopoly on opinion, but it has become a process that literally everyone can now participate in. That new democracy is undoubtedly welcome, though ironically, given the vast number of voices that are now clamouring to be heard, it is ones that have some authority that are more necessary than ever, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So published newspaper reviews and features still have more clout than self-published blogs and random bulletin boards, and news stories that are found, validated and researched by journalists, are more useful than ones merely recycled out of press releases.

New plays and playwrighting lies at the heart of British theatre. As Michael Coveney suggested in his blog just yesterday, “David Edgar is surely right to argue, as he does in the current issue of the New Statesman, that the contemporary writer is what makes the British theatre really tick, flying flat in the face of an Arts Council policy document of ten years ago which argued that text-based drama — everything from Aeschylus to Ayckbourn — was in terminal decline.” And as Michael goes on to point out, “What really distinguishes our theatre from the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, is its writers.”

Brand new plays may, as ever, be thin on the ground in the West End, but there’s plenty of new writing about: just this week we’ve had new plays from Alan Ayckbourn (Neighbourhood Watch at Scarborough, of course, which I reviewed for The Stage yesterday) and David Hare (South Downs, which opened at Chichester last night — my review will be online later this morning), who would both be on most people’s lists of our greatest living writers, along with Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett.

If Stratford-upon-Avon will forever be associated with Shakespeare (and has even spawned an offshoot in Canada that I visited earlier this summer with a tiny town that even changed its name so that it could forge a theatrical pedigree around his work, which has duly become the centre of its creative and economic life), then the North Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough is, of course, the adopted home and creative centre of Alan Ayckbourn.

Last night saw the premiere of his latest there - his 75th play, and coincidentally the 300th new play to be staged at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, proving that there’s life beyond Ayckbourn in Scarborough, too.

There was a definite autumnal chill in the air last night to mark the beginning of the end of the summer, and it all coincided neatly with the beginning of the end of my 40s, too. Yes, yesterday was my 49th birthday, so I’m now technically - in the language, at least, of the long-running shows like The Mousetrap or Les Miserables which always seem to work a year ahead of the actual anniversary date - now in my 50th year.

I embarked on it by heading to Chichester, which also had an overwhelming end of season feeling about it, too. It’s a bit like hanging around in Edinburgh for the third week of the International Festival, after the fringe has got out of town and all that remains are stray fly-posters on every fence and leaflets that have not been cleared out of sandwich bars all over town to remind you of what’s just been.

I love the West End with all my heart, but I fear that the soul is going out of it, now that a deadly combination of chronic greed and desperation is setting in all over (and that’s before we even reach the Olympics, and the audience drifts away with them).

Whether it’s Thriller Live, now hogging the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue - once a major address for plays - for an indeterminate run, and an even more ghastly, opportunistic successor Respect La Diva that opened on Friday offering a pop jukebox parade that is more end-of-the-pier (and the road) than even a Vegas floorshow or cruise ship, the West End is scraping the barrel now.

The theatre necessarily exposes you to people and life experiences that you might not otherwise ever encounter, so how can we ever be sure how truthful they are? Plays about sport - not to mention The Vagina Monologues - are generally so far from my own personal first-hand experience that they’re like they are from another planet. Yet I obviously leave them a little less ignorant than I arrived; and it is indeed one of the functions of art to shine a light on other human experiences so that I can enrich my own.

You find what meaning you can in whatever you see. When The Vagina Monologues first played at the Arts Theatre in 2001, the publication I was writing for at the time hit on the ruse to invite reviewers from four totally different perspectives to review it: a straight woman, straight man, lesbian and gay man.

Do you entirely rebuild the theatre from the ground up but keep the name, or keep the theatre just as it was and merely change the name, in an attempt to introduce lasting improvements?

Yesterday there were examples of both, and they reveal a fascinating difference in priorities. In the morning I took a trip down to Canterbury to see the brand-new Marlowe Theatre, the third building to bear the name of that city’s most famous literary son (who was born and went to school there); and in the afternoon a press release arrived from ATG announcing that the Comedy Theatre in Panton Street — which has had the word ‘comedy’ in its name, initially as the Royal Comedy when it first opened in 1881 and subsequently merely the Comedy — is throwing away 130 years of history to re-dub itself the Harold Pinter Theatre.

Yesterday morning saw a gathering of the great, the good and Ruth Mackenzie to launch the World Shakespeare Festival, the centrepiece of the Cultural Olympiad that Mackenzie is curating for next year’s Olympics, and that the RSC’s Deborah Shaw has been instrumental in pulling together.

“You can never have enough Shakespeare,” Ruth told me as we chatted before the event began and exchanged compliments about following each other on Twitter. We disagreed, however, on the Wooster Group, whose Elizabeth LeCompte is joining forces with the RSC’s Rupert Goold to stage a multi-media production of Troilus and Cressida. I found the last Wooster Group show I saw, their riff on Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carre at the Edinburgh Festival, well nigh unendurable; Ruth thought they got to the heart of the play.

The Broadway summer effectively ended yesterday, marked by the Labor Day holiday and the closing the day before of a couple of limping shows, Catch Me if You Can and Baby It’s You (a jukebox musical that got locally dubbed as Baby It’s Poo, and I managed to miss).

I returned home from New York yesterday, as it happens, and on either side of the week I spent in Provincetown that I have already reported on here, I caught both Catch Me again and its thunder-stealing main competitor in the original musicals stake, The Book of Mormon, and it’s just a shame that there’s no room in New York for both.

I’ve been on blogging leave for the last week and a half, having a post-Edinburgh holiday on the other side of the Atlantic and thankfully, despite Hurricane Irene arriving on the east coast while I was there, not in it.

In fact, it was more of a Hurri-can’t where I was: we travelled from Beantown (as Boston is nicknamed) to P-town (as Provincetown on Cape Cod is known locally) a week ago Saturday, and although we were renting an apartment around fifteen feet from the beach and maybe twenty five from the sea, the only inconvenience was a six hour power outtage, and sudden intermittent brief losses during the week that threw the town into temporary darkness as we walked down the main drag (in every sense) of Commercial Street there.