November 2011 Archives

Should critics offer an easier ride to some kinds of theatre than others in order to offer them much needed support? In Monday’s Guardian, Lyn Gardner wrote of a regional show she’d reviewed and awarded what she says she had “hoped was a fair three-star review.”

But it wasn’t enough, apparently: as she goes on, “Shortly afterwards, the director sent me an impassioned email, pointing out that some regional theatres were in desperate trouble, touring costs had doubled in the last five years, and unless critics supported new writing, theatregoers outside London would face an endless diet of Jane Austen adaptations and Coward revivals. His view was that a three-star review would mean that ‘no one comes’, while four stars means ‘that they will judge for themselves’.”

OK, it’s not coal-mining or formula one racing, but going to the theatre comes with health and safety risks, too, and not just when you’re seized upon to ride on the shoulders of a comic unicyclist in La Soiree, or twirled around at furious speeds by the Skating Willers in the return of that fabulous show that I saw again on Sunday night (fear not, I wasn’t the volunteer seized; they invariably choose lighter, more beautiful candidates!)



In fact it turns out that a far more annoying, and potentially dangerous, place to be altogether was English National Opera the night before, when my partner and I went to the opening of the return run of its production of Tosca, with a couple of people who might politely be called tossers, sitting behind us.

Today I’ll be at the London Coliseum for the annual Theatrecraft day that offers a range of seminars and workshops for young people, aged 17-25, who are contemplating a career in the theatre. I am doing a session, as I have done for the last three years, on what’s involved in becoming a theatre critic.

Apart from the obvious answer — don’t! — I’m going to address some of the long-time challenges and more recent changes that are affecting the industry. And here’s part of what I intend to say. I’m chairman of the drama section of the Critics’ Circle, the professional organisation of the UK’s critics that in 2013 celebrates its centenary. So critics have been around for a long time. But will we be around much longer?

Earlier this week, the Guardian ran an extract from Sondheim’s second collection of lyrics, “Look, I Made A Hat” on his feelings about critics and the personal impact of reviews.

With the wisdom of a lifetime spent in the theatre, he wrote, “After a rotten review, you don’t remember the good ones. The only pleasure you have is to reiterate, both to yourself and to anyone who’ll listen, the bad ones, which you can quote in exquisite detail. Moreover, you have to come to terms with the truth that no matter how doggedly you try to deceive yourself to the contrary, if you’re going to believe your good reviews, you’re going to have to believe the less good ones as well, unless you’re deeply self-delusional”.


The West End theatre is rightly fretting about what the 2012 Olympics might mean for it, and as I wrote in a recent blog, some producers are so worried that they are considering putting their shows on hiatus and putting the actors on leave for the duration. 



But Julian Bird, SOLT’s chief executive who has only been in the post for little over a year but has already entirely revamped both the Olivier Awards and the TMA Awards that he is also in charge of, is not taking the threats that the Olympics present lying down, but is also looking at the possible opportunities it gives the West End, too.

This week sees the West End opening of the transfers of the National’s One Man Two Guvnors and the RSC’s Matilda to the Adelphi and Cambridge Theatres respectively; and both were, not so coincidentally, honoured last Sunday at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, too, being named Best Play (sharing the honour with another Richard Bean play The Heretic that had also premiered in the subsidised sector at the Royal Court) and Best Musical respectively.

In fact, there was precisely one award last Sunday for work that originated in the commercial sector, namely for Sheridan Smith, who won the Best Actress gong for her performance in Flare Path at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. That was seen as part of a season that mimics the subsidised model of being staged under the auspices of a resident artistic director (Trevor Nunn) and the umbrella of a season of work in his name.  

The sell-out popular appeal of Hugh Jackman’s headliner Broadway show (complete with full onstage orchestra and three back-up singers) that I wrote about on the weekend now has a serious rival for anyone who cares about Broadway musical history, An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin that opened at the Barrymore Theatre last night.

The show’s pleasures are comparatively more intimate (there are just two musicians, veteran Broadway pianist Paul Ford and bass player John Beal, neither of whom get an onstage name-check, which seems a huge discourtesy given their exemplarily subtle and supple support), but in its own more determinedly eccentric way, it is every bit as powerful and frequently even more poignant.

I’ve just had a flying visit to New York in every sense — I went out on Thursday afternoon and am returning overnight tonight. I will have seen five shows in just three nights, and it was mostly as a punter, not a critic, too. I paid for tickets to three and a half shows — the half being a ticket for my partner to join me for Hugh Jackman - Back on Broadway, since the producers of this hottest of all shows only extended their hospitality to a single ticket. (But it was worth paying for the second).

I’m seeing Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone’s new show at a matinee press performance today, before it opens officially tomorrow (Monday) and I will therefore be able to post a review blog about on Tuesday.


I regularly interview leading players in British theatre, whether actors, writers or directors, both publicly in front of audiences, or privately for features that I write up afterwards. Not all of the material I collect in this way can always be used, so today I’ll begin with quotes from a couple of interviews I’ve done over the last week — and some quotes from interviews I’ve not done myself. 



Last Saturday, I interviewed Rikki Beadle-Blair, playwright (and, according to his Wikipedia entry, also “actor, director, screenwriter, singer, aerobics teacher, designer, choreographer/dancer and songwriter”), onstage at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, following a performance of his new play Shalom Baby that ends its run there tomorrow.

Two new musicals in London this week revealed opposite problems: Burlesque, at Jermyn Street Theatre, has a little bit too much of everything; and EX, at Soho Theatre, has too little of anything (a problem its lead lothario character admits to suffering from inside his underpants).

Excess is a better problem to have (in every department) - it means there is material to work with that can be pared back. It’s difficult, with the second show, to see what there is to build on.

Theatre is unquestionably a lot of fun. It’s live, it’s inter-active, it’s immediate, it’s sexy. Audiences love going to it. It stands to reason that a lot of people want to be part of it professionally, too, somehow. I never contemplated doing anything else with my life. And luckily, I found my niche in a little corner of it, namely arts journalism.

Though it may well be severely threatened as a career you can still be paid to do, thanks to the changing landscape of how and where the media is forced to operate now, I’m still hanging in. I didn’t work this hard to give it up without a fight. And that’s exactly what the arts also require: it’s no soft option, but something you have to be utterly committed to.

Last Friday evening, I saw one of the most vivid, intense and horrifying theatre productions I have ever seen: Roadkill, which takes you on a journey, literal as well as emotional, to another place. With twenty other theatregoers, you board a small coach outside the Theatre Royal, Stratford East; just before it leaves, two more people join it, with suitcases in hand.

One is a young Nigerian girl, newly arrived in London, and looking forward to a new life here; the other is someone she calls “Auntie”. As we drive towards what is going to be her new home, she chatters away with us; asks us what we do for a living, and asks maybe if we could give her a job, too.

A story last week on financial website ThisIsMoney.co.uk reported that the Really Useful Group are considering shutting down some of its West End shows during the Olympics next year. “It’s being discussed, although nothing has yet been confirmed”. a RUG spokesman tells the site.

According to the story, this coincides with a collapse in tourist bookings —the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) are quoted reporting that bookings for the period are down a phenomenal 95%.

They’ve got (another) little list: continuing the Evening Standard’s current obsession with list-making, they have followed their publication of their shortlist for this year’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards that I blogged about earlier this week with a much bigger one: a listing of whom they reckon to be the 1000 Most Influential Londoners.

Of course this is both an exercise in generating PR (which I am duly indulging by writing about it again here) but also an excuse to throw a party, which they also did, in the expectation that at least some of those mentioned will turn up because they were mentioned.

My understanding of British geography and indeed even London neighbourhoods is largely defined by whether or not there is a theatre there. So it wasn’t until I visited a pub theatre, Ye Olde Rose and Crown, earlier this summer that I ever visited Walthamstow Central, as I reported on this blog at the time.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that it wasn’t until Tuesday night that I ever stepped foot in Peckham, despite the fact that it is maybe 10 minutes drive from where I live. I have to confess that a former partner and I once drove there to go to see a movie at the Peckham multiplex, but when we arrived he was too scared to get out of the car so we simply drove home again, so no footprint was left there.

Overheard on Twitter on Monday: “How can a show that hasn’t officially opened end up on a London based theatre awards shortlist???”, asked @publicreviews. And a reply came from @3rdspearcarrier: “Because the Evening Standard awards are and always have been batshit crazy, with no discernible eligibility rules?”

That’s probably putting it a bit too strongly: awards are an imprecise science at the best of times, and they inevitably reflect the make-up of the judging panel (in this case, critics from several national papers joining the the local Standard’s own man).

In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer re-visited an old party game that the late John Osborne used to play on long car journeys or dull dinner parties. Called “Who Would You Rather Sleep With”, the only rule was that those in the hot seat had to choose one of the two options put to them by the other player.   In 1985, Osborne himself offered some of these choices:

• Fay Weldon or Salman  Rushdie?
• Andrew Neil or Kenny Everett?
• Glenys Kinnock or Boy George?

I may complain regularly here about aspects of the theatre, from greedy producers and high ticket prices to the lack of good original musicals being produced and the absence of enough new plays in the West End. But I never complain about my job: I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

Sometimes I’m asked if I ever tire of going to the theatre night after night and writing about it afterwards, and the truth is I never do. There’s always the prospect of being excited, exhilarated, challenged or even bored. (Boring can be enjoyable, too; we all need a contrast from time to time).

Low theatre producers are setting new highs for ticket prices: just yesterday I was pointing out that to see Driving Miss Daisy in the West End at the premium price of £90.25 a ticket works out at £1 a minute, since the show runs for 90 minutes.

This week it was revealed that Hugh Jackman’s still-previewing new Broadway concert show Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway has already set the house record in terms of revenue at the Broadhurst Theatre after it is played in its first week there.

Last night saw a sighting in the West End of a species on the verge of extinction: the opening of Three Days in May, a serious new play produced under commercial auspices that isn’t a transfer from the National or Royal Court.

Right now, the only new commercial play in the West End is otherwise the stillborn Cool Hand Luke (curtailing its run at the Aldywch early, on November 19); the rest are either long-runners like The Mousetrap, The Woman in Black and The 39 Steps (each of them new plays in their day), return runs for Jerusalem and Yes Prime Minister, or revivals like Driving Miss Daisy, Broken Glass or The Lion in Winter (which begins previews at the Haymarket on Saturday).

While yet another awards season is about to kick off for London’s theatres with the Evening Standard Theatre Awards due to be presented at the Savoy Hotel on November 20, followed by the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards in January, the Offies in February and the revamped Oliviers in April, two more award ceremonies have taken place over the last few days each honouring less widely recognised but even more prolific theatrical endeavour in British regional theatre and studio venues.

I should declare an immediate interest: as well as hosting the annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards myself in my capacity as chairman of the drama section of the circle, I was also a judge of parts of each of Sunday and yesterday’s Theatre Awards UK 2011 and the Peter Brook/Empty Space Awards respectively (and I will also be serving on the panel for the Offies, too).

No man (or woman) is an island, but there are times, of course, when we all feel alone. At a first night, one is seldom the only critic in the room, of course, so there’s a sense of in-built camaraderie, even though we’re effectively writing for rival publications, which may also affect how our opinions ‘land’ and what sort of impact they may, or may not, have. But it’s interesting that, though we’re writing for our readers, most critics I know worry mainly about what the rest of us think.

Hence the first thing a critic says to another about a show they’ve seen the night before, unless they’ve already read his or her notice, that is, is invariably “How many stars?” And as I’ve often pointed out here before, there’s no such thing as a right or wrong when it comes to reviews, and there’s often a healthy divergence of critical opinion on the same show.