December 2011 Archives

In the Christmas double issue of The Stage, I looked at the state of play (and plays and musicals) in the West End across 2011), Before old acquaintance be forgot, let’s pause for a moment and look back on some of the shows of the year here, too, though it won’t of course easily be forgotten, at least with a series of shows that look like they’ll certainly be around for a while longer.

Proving, once again, that laughter in the best medicine in these troubled times, three of the biggest hits in London at the moment are the riotously funny productions of One Man Two Guvnors(transferred from the National to the Adelphi, and moving next to the Haymarket while the original company go straight to Broadway), The Ladykillers (Gielgud) and (by all accounts, though I’ve not seen this incarnation yet) Noises Off (Old Vic).

I’ve always said you can’t see everything (even though I always try). But being away from London for five weeks, I am inevitably missing quite a bit: I already noted in my last blog that I was sorry not to catch Foxfinder at the Finborough or Dame Edna in panto at Wimbledon, but I’m also sorry not to be seeing Duckie’s Copyright Christmas at the Barbican.

I’ve seen every one of Duckie’s Barbican shows, from C’est Barbican (that won them a Laurence Olivier Award, and which I’ll never forget for an act called ‘Boogaloo Stu Wanks for You’, which involved him playing with a giant false penis that culminated in a volcanic eruption over the table we were seated at) to The Class Club (which involved a Christmas dinner being served in three different classes, Lower, Middle and Upper class, with entertainment to match, a concept so brilliant that I went three times to experience it in each, and of course Middle Class proved to be the most excruciating).

As I blogged on Tuesday and regular readers will be aware, I am away from London for five weeks, but the wonderful thing about the internet is that you’re never far away at all.

I arrived in Sydney last Friday, for example, to a doubly joyous set of news: first the fact that One Man Two Guvnors is to have its life extended by transferring to the Haymarket after its current run at the Adelphi ends (though what does this mean for the Haymarket’s artistic director programme? Is that over now that Trevor Nunn’s residency has ended, or is it just being temporarily suspended)?

I’m in the midst of a five-week holiday that isn’t, for once, based around theatre but about travelling instead, hence my absence from this blog last week. So where better to begin it than LA, a sprawling city that isn’t about theatre at all but has taken the world on journeys to other places, before going on to Australia?

I recently interviewed Eric Idle for the Sunday Express, the former Python who now lives in LA, and even he confirmed to me, “It’s a horrible theatre town.”

The theatre year is far from over, of course, but it is nearly for me: tomorrow I head off to Australia, via five days in LA first (not a city renowned for its theatre). So I’ll be on hiatus next week, and then resume from Down Under on a twice-weekly schedule every Tuesday and Thursday through to the middle of January.

But already on the end-of-year round-ups are starting to appear, even as early, in The Guardian’s case, as the first Monday of December, when they got their lead critics to jump the gun and choose their best shows of 2011.

It’s often noticed how those in the top jobs of British theatre routinely hail from Oxbridge; the current artistic director of the National Theatre Nick Hytner and each of his three predecessors Peter Hall, Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn all went to Cambridge.

The same, of course, is true of my own tribe, namely theatre critics: as I previously noticed a few years ago on one first night of a play set in an Oxbridge college, over half of those of 14 of us seated on the centre aisle that night went to Oxbridge ourselves.


Here’s a showbiz phenomenon: a show that keeps playing to above-maximum capacity (102% last week, thanks to standing room) also keeps breaking its own box office record. Hugh Jackman’s Back on Broadway has set a new house record at the Broadhurst Theatre where it is playing for the fifth time: last week it grossed an astonishing $1,520,929, up from $1,472,987 the previous week, which was up from $1,468,189 the week before that. 



How do the figures keep rising when, of course, the weekly attendance can’t go any higher, since it’s already — in Broadway parlance — SRO? And when, presumably, the bulk of the tickets have, in fact, already been sold?

Across this week and the next two leading up to Christmas, Theatre Record lists 32 London shows opening; and 17 more in the regions, though the lists in both cases are far from exhaustive, not including every single panto around.

That’s 49 shows in just three weeks; no wonder that critics simply can’t get to them all (but The Stage does; no other national media outlet reviews more at this time of year. Yesterday alone it published 34 new reviews of seasonal shows).

It always feels the run-up to Christmas has begun when you see your first panto of the season, and on Thursday night I kicked off, as I invariably do, with a visit to the Hackney Empire, one of London’s best addresses for homegrown panto that isn’t mass produced and shipped around the country with interchangeable stars from year to year.

In the Tricycle’s current documentary play The Riots, a fast theatrical response to last summer’s riots, there’s a brilliant quote from MP Diane Abbott that I previously blogged in full, where she said, “The funny thing was that it was all kind of coordinated and done with texts and instant messenger, and one thing that [was] flying around in Hackney on Monday afternoon was ‘Don’t touch the Empire, don’t touch the Empire’.”

Last week The Mousetrap celebrated its 59th birthday, so now the flashing counter outside the St Martin’s Theatre proclaims that the show is now in its 60th year. That’s depressing enough.

But even more so is its current producer Stephen Waley-Cohen’s quote, reported in the New York Times, “I’m very conscious that although we’ve had good houses for 60 years, the amount of people who’ve seen the show in London is about the same as a single show of Downton Abbey” (which has drawn about 10 million viewers an episode in Britain).

Last Friday I went to a celebratory lunch at the Royal Court held by the theatre panel of the Writers’ Guild to give its members the opportunity to publicly thank those who had given them a particularly positive experience in new writing over the previous year, with the presentation of the annual Writers’ Guild Theatre Encouragement Awards. 

Six awards were made, with the diverse recipients including Elizabeth Newman, who looks after new writing at Bolton’s Octagon Theatre where she runs an ‘incubate’ workshop for a group of experienced writers as well as a new young people’s writing group and Paul Milton of the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham who runs the Writers’ Lab there to support new writing.