Quot­ing old re­views

A new pro­duc­tion of Cow­ard’s The Vor­tex opened at the Rose The­atre in Kingston on Wednes­day; but even be­fore it opened there was a quote on the web­site trum­pet­ing its virtues: “An evening that mem­o­rably moves from cock­tail and laugh­ter to the rawest of drama” – The Daily Tele­graph. But that quote comes not from a re­view for this pro­duc­tion but for one that Charles Spencer wrote for the last West End re­vival of the play in 2008, star­ring Fe­lic­ity Kendal and a pre-Down­ton Dan Stevens.

But will the Rose The­atre pro­duc­tion like­wise “mem­o­rably move from cock­tail and laugh­ter to the rawest of drama”? That’s very much a judge­ment on the par­tic­u­lar stag­ing rather than the play it­self. This new pro­duc­tion may or may not be sim­i­larly mem­o­rable.

Later this year, the Rose is also re­viv­ing Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.  When Char­lie Spencer re­viewed the play’s last West End re­vival in 2001, he wrote, “Watch­ing Lau­rence Boswell’s fine re­vival you are left in no doubt that it is a mod­ern clas­sic.” Will the Rose there­fore be sim­i­larly tempted to sug­gest, “You are left in no doubt that it is a mod­ern clas­sic”? But an­other pro­duc­tion may cre­ate doubts in­stead of dis­pel them.

At­tack­ing the au­di­ence

The Sun­day Times‘s restau­rant critic AA Gill is often spot­ted in the stalls – most re­cently at The Judas Kiss, where play­wright David Hare saw him in the au­di­ence and, says Gill, “had his PR ring the Cul­ture ed­i­tor to say that he’d spied me in the au­di­to­rium, and wanted to know what I was doing”. Gill replies, “Well, mainly what I was doing was adding a lit­tle style to the groundlings, and low­er­ing the av­er­age age.”

What he wasn’t doing was re­view­ing the show. In­stead, he chose to re­view the au­di­ence –  de­spite the fact that he was ac­tu­ally writ­ing a re­view of a restau­rant, the Cafe Royal, once fre­quented by Wilde (hence the spu­ri­ously man­u­fac­tured link). And this is what he found:

I do wish the­atre au­di­ences would make more of an ef­fort. Ob­vi­ously, they can’t help being old and smelling faintly of wee, but re­ally there is no ex­cuse for them all to have made their own clothes out of hes­s­ian sacks and Pe­ru­vian llama blan­kets. And per­haps the women might forgo the jew­ellery, wit­tily con­structed from dis­tressed cut­lery and the peb­bles out of Vir­ginia Woolf’s pock­ets.

And maybe we should re­strict walk­ing sticks to just one per pair of legs. If you are in the final, livid flour­ish of con­sump­tion, wouldn’t it be bet­ter to stay at home, nurse a warm spu­tum jar and go through the photo album, yet again won­der­ing who all those dull peo­ple are?

Au­di­ences should try to add a lit­tle glam­our to the stalls. They could start by hoover­ing the dan­druff so that their shoul­ders didn’t sparkle like the tun­dra in moon­light. And the man in front of me might have clipped his ear hair, or at least combed out the lumps. It was like varder­ing nan­cies through a hedge.

When he fi­nally gets to the men­tion the play, he says, “The play it­self is a pipe-suck­ing cardi­gan, rather in tune with its au­di­ence.”

All of which is, no doubt, highly amus­ing to Gill, if not nec­es­sar­ily his read­ers who might won­der if in­stead of varder­ing nan­cies, they’re read­ing a nonce (in the cur­rent, col­lo­quial sense of the term to mean idiot, not child sex abuser). I found Michael Coveney’s reply to Gill’s at­tack far fun­nier.

Coveney hap­pened to run into Gill’s mum, an ac­tress and speech teacher Yvonne Gilan at Chalk Farm sta­tion the other day, and re­ports, “She could hardly con­tain her­self with ex­cite­ment over her visit to Julius Cae­sar at the Don­mar Ware­house. She re­ally is a game old girl, and her hes­s­ian sack looked jolly smart to me, and not smelly at all…. ” And of the au­di­ence that Gill had de­spised so much, he added,

But, d’you know what? I’d rather sit with a crowd of re­tired teach­ers and so­cial work­ers from Palmer’s Green and the Sur­rey sub­urbs than a smart crowd of puffed up tarts from the so­ci­ety pages of the glossy mag­a­zines for whom Gill, a minc­ing man­nequin with a gim­let eye, is chief cheer­leader and Not­ting Hill trend-set­ter.

He alone among his own crowd would even know or care who David Hare, let alone Oscar Wilde, re­ally was. My im­pres­sion at The Judas Kiss was that the moth-eaten, el­derly char­ity shop-dwellers, ad­mirably rep­re­sented as a type by Gill’s own mother, had gone along to the the­atre not just to be seen, or as­sessed by crit­i­cal smart alecs, but to en­gage with the work of a lead­ing play­wright and the leg­end of a ge­nius. Whiffy or well-dressed, the Judas Kiss au­di­ence is the most at­ten­tive in town.

Obit­u­ary of the Week: Richard III

He’s al­ready been im­mor­talised in one of Shake­speare’s great­est his­tor­i­cal plays, but now the dis­cov­ery of the skele­ton of Richard III has pro­voked a bril­liant re­vised obit­u­ary in The Econ­o­mist:



No viper, toad or hedge­hog; no un­formed bear-whelp, or lump of foul de­for­mity. In­stead, the man dug up from the car park of Leices­ter So­cial Ser­vices in Sep­tem­ber had, for the most part, an or­di­nary shape. His height was a lit­tle above av­er­age for the time when he had lived. His limbs were reg­u­lar and del­i­cate—al­most fem­i­nine, the sci­en­tists said. Pace Shake­speare, there was no with­ered arm. There was, how­ever, a se­verely side­ways-twisted spine, the re­sult of sco­l­io­sis that had prob­a­bly emerged in ado­les­cence. It would have put one shoul­der higher than the other, mak­ing him stand shorter than he was. He might have needed extra cush­ions in his chairs, and extra tugs when putting on those robes of green vel­vet and crim­son cloth of gold so lov­ingly de­tailed in his or­ders to the Wardrobe. But then a king would get that sort of help any­way.

…Yet all the CT scans, en­vi­ron­men­tal sam­pling and DNA analy­sis in the world can­not re­veal whether, when he kissed the small nephews whose guardian he os­ten­si­bly was, he re­ally meant it, or whether he was al­ready con­tem­plat­ing an order that would snuff them out.

Play­wright quote of the week

An­ders Lust­garten, whose new play If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep be­gins per­for­mances at the Royal Court tonight (prior to an of­fi­cial open­ing next Wednes­day), in­ter­viewed by Richard God­win in the Evening Stan­dard on Wednes­day:

If I had come to the­atre through the con­ven­tional mid­dle class road, I would never have had any in­ter­est in it. My mum took me to a David Hare play for my 18th birth­day and I was sat there think­ing: ‘WHAT is this? I didn’t go again for an­other 10 years.

…I’ve been to many plays where I think ‘This isn’t for me, but I can tell it’s a well-crafted piece of work.’ But there’s so much stuff that you just think: ‘This is SHIT. Why is this on? And why has it got five stars?…. What was that hor­ren­dous Tom Stop­pard piece of shit? Rock’n’Roll. That was a dis­grace­ful play.

Di­rec­tor quotes of the week
Stephen Daldry, whose re­turn to the the­atre as di­rec­tor of Peter Mor­gan’s The Au­di­ence starts pre­views tonight at the Giel­gud, in­ter­viewed in last Sun­day’s Ob­server:

On his ap­proach to work:

What­ever you do, it’s al­ways got to be the most ex­cit­ing thing in the world. Rep­e­ti­tion is the fear. You don’t want to re­cy­cle, re­peat the same old ideas. That’s why di­rec­tors have a short shelf life.

On deal­ing with crit­i­cism (with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to his Os­car-nom­i­nated film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close):

Some peo­ple liked the film and a lot of peo­ple didn’t, and that’s just life. It’s disin­gen­u­ous to say that crit­i­cism doesn’t get to you or you don’t hear it or that you ig­nore it. When every­body says, ‘That’s crap. I hated that,’ you hear it. But it’s much, much worse when they’re right: when you feel that it is an ab­solute piece of tosh. I made the film I wanted to make, so you just have to find a way of get­ting over it.

On the­atre vs film:

I’m a the­atre per­son, that’s who I am. I’m happy to make so­journs into the world of movies but I’m ba­si­cally a the­atre di­rec­tor that pot­ters off and does a cou­ple of movies. I’ve never been to Hol­ly­wood. I can count the num­ber of times I’ve been to Los An­ge­les on my hands. I’ve never made a movie there and I’ve never been there for work­ing rea­sons. The only rea­son to go there is for silly awards shows.

On split­ting his life be­tween Lon­don and New York::

In terms of car­bon foot­print, it’s ob­scene how many times I cross the At­lantic. And treat­ing it as if you were going to Bris­tol is slightly in­sane.