It stars Alec Baldwin, an actor I’ve had a lifelong crush on(!) – and also the exceptional young British actor Tom Sturridge. It was also due to star Shia LeBoeuf, but he made a very widely (self-)publicised departure during rehearsals. He’s been seamlessly replaced by another superb young actor, Ben Foster (not to be confused with our own Ben Forster, who won the Jesus Christ Superstar reality TV contest casting).

The play is a tight, taut, claustrophobic three-hander, and it is no fault of these fine actors that it (and they) feel a little over-magnified in such a large Broadway house, one that is frequently home to musicals. So perhaps that is part of the reason for its failure.

But Baldwin has bitten back hard at something else, both familiar and unfamiliar. The latter is the effect of “tabloid journalism and its viral impact through the internet.” He’s referring to the way the news of LeBoeuf’s departure was reported, and says,

Bad press about films or shows of any kind can negatively affect your chances. The opportunity to influence an audience through any kind of well-conceived or well-timed ad campaign is lost. First impressions do count. If “trouble” is that first impression, it’s difficult to swim out of that riptide.

But that was then consolidated by the power of the critic, and in particular one critic: Ben Brantley of the New York Times. Here we’re on more familiar, but also deeply personal, territory. Ben, he says, is “no fan of mine (every John Simon must have his Amanda Plummer, I suppose)”.

But then the feeling seems to be mutual. Baldwin writes that Brantley is “not a good writer” and “viewed as some odd, shriveled, bitter Dickensian clerk who has sought to assemble a compendium of essays on theatre, the gist of which often have no relationship to the events onstage themselves.”

He then goes even further:

No one I know of in the theatre reads Brantley except in the way that a doctor reads an x-ray to determine if you have cancer.

And he urges his dismissal:

With the more insightful [Charles] Isherwood sitting there, writing circles around Brantley, I think it’s time for the Times to get rid of Brantley. I don’t know anyone, anyone at all, who will miss him or his writing.

I’ve often said that critics, used to giving criticism, have to be able to take it, too. But this vicious attack, however provoked he may have felt to write it, seems to cross a boundary. I don’t think that  Brantley would ever dispute Baldwin’s right to actually tread the boards.

And, checking in on Brantley’s review of the show, I see he was right about one thing: writing of Sturridge, he says,

Mr. Sturridge is playing the sort of role that comes with “Tony nominee” tattooed on its forehead, that of a mentally challenged, education-deprived person who learns to assert himself. But the physicality with which he inhabits his part is something else. He occupies John Lee Beatty’s vast, derelict set (lighted by Pat Collins) with an obsessive knowledge of its every crevice, moving as if he suspected it were rigged with land mines.

He did indeed get a Tony nomination – as did the production for Best Revival of a Play. Its closure, by the way, means that there is just one nominee of the four still running: that of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, with Golden By and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? also both long departed.

Going the distance as theatrical clowns

Twenty years ago, I had one of my most mortifying of all theatrical experiences, when I was hauled onto the stage of the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway (now the Richard Rodgers) to participate in a finale to Fool Moon, in which theatrical clowns David Shiner and Bill Irwin recreated the shooting of an old silent movie, for which I was made the clapper board man.

Now the two are back in New York for their first major theatrical collaboration since then at off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre, Old Hats. And though the show isn’t quite old hat, there’s a similar sequence in this one. Happily I wasn’t chosen this time, so I could watch as someone else entered into its spirit with more facility and lack of embarrassment than I ever did. (I still shudder at the memory).

But this trip down memory lane for these clowns also proves their ageless and peerless comic inventiveness, with an alternately manic and mellow show that is sweetly inflected by original songs performed live at the piano by the wonderful Nellie McKay and a band.

I also loved their own reflections on their art in a companion magazine put out by the theatre company. Talking of how they develop their material, Irwin notes:

No one ever knows how you make clown material – you pretend like you do, so as not to seem dumb (or to seem worth being paid a teaching dollar) – but it’s really a sort of doodling until you feel you may have started to draw something. I cannot now remember how we began on some of the bits and ideas that feel most promising in Old Hats. Sometimes it’s because something is at hand – a prop happens to be there. But then how did that prop happen to be there? Better not to think about it sometimes.

And as for passing on the legacy to another generation of clowns, David Shiner says:

I tell them to find another profession. Actually, I tell them to have patience and more patience. It’s long hard work to find something that’s original and lasting. I tell them to first focus on an eight-minute routine that works. That can take five years or more. Patience and trust in yourself. If you are fortunate enough to have a good teacher, all the better. However, do not work with Bill Irwin! His classes are full of psychological mumbo jumbo. All he does is confuse people.

But I also like to be seen to be supporting a show I love – and I’m particularly proud that my declaration for Once is all over the posters. “Seeing it once is definitely not enough…I will be seeing it again and again. Unmissable”, the Sunday Express is quoted as saying. And those are my words, though they’ve not used my name.

And this week I’ve been true to my word. Though not in London (yet), but in New York: I’ve just caught up with it again on Broadway for the first time since the original leads left, to be replaced now by our very own Arthur Darvill and Joanna Christie.

From his bio in the Playbill, it doesn’t appear that Darvill has done a musical before, yet here he is, on Broadway of all places, showing that he has is an alternately contained and impassioned singer/musician (the cast of Once, of course, play their own instruments), and he looks the part, too, with an everyman troubadour charm that is as natural and effortless as his singing. And this summer he’ll be represented in London by songs he’s writing for the premiere of Che Walker’s The Lightning Child at Shakespeare’s Globe, reuniting Darvill and Walker after their 2009 collaboration for the Young Vic, Been So Long.

I love actors who are capable of springing these sorts of “who knew?” surprises, and his co-star Joanna Christie is another: I first saw her onstage opposite Daniel Radcliffe in Equus in the West End, shedding her clothes as the woman he seduces, and her credits show no musicals, either. Yet she, too, has a concentrated grace and spellbinding musicality (this time as a Mendelssohn playing pianist and singer).

But the biggest surprise still remains the one sprung by the show itself, a quietly insinuating, haunting and truthful account of a close but unconsummated encounter of two strangers in Dublin over a period of five days. I find it quite astonishing that a show of such eloquent simplicity and feeling and bold originality should have not only reached Broadway, but actually thrived in the often over-processed and manufactured arena that is the Broadway musical.

Sure, there are always exceptions – not least Next to Normal a few years ago, that similarly bewitched me and I went back to repeatedly, too. But then the producers of both of these apparently risky ventures could afford to take the risk: in the case of Next to Normal, lead producer David Stone of course has Wicked playing here and all over the world; in the case of Once, it is Barbara Broccoli and her Bond millions that has helped to finance it.

And the success of both shows that risks are sometimes worth taking, for both artistic and commercial reasons. Yet by a strange paradox, the transfer of Once to the West End has, so far, failed to ignite the town. I’ve written before how it seemed to adopt a low-key marketing approach: coming in straight after the saturation-coverage of the transfer of The Book of Mormon,  it couldn’t and didn’t compete. 

It has, instead, hoped that audiences would find it for themselves.

Reports from friends who have seen it recently suggest that they aren’t finding it in sufficiently large numbers. I hope that Once can adopt a different strategy now. I can’t keep flying the flag for it single-handedly!

Just the other day I tweeted after seeing the new production of Chekhov’s Platanov, as retitled Sons without Fathers at the Arcola Theatre (which may of course be the source of many a depression in itself, I suddenly reflect — not seeing Chekhov, I hasten to add, but the absence of fathers), that Chekhov is “possibly my favourite playwright – a patron saint of depressives who really understands how (we) feel!”

It was a way of outing myself as a (fellow) sufferer. There many distressing things about depression in its multiple incarnations, but one of the worst and most isolating is the sense of isolation when the fog of depression descends, as I sometimes characterise it. The world mercilessly continues to go about its business, however you feel, and however you feel about it.

And as a relatively high-functioning depressive, so do I. I have written this blog through thick and thin, highs and lows. Indeed, it probably provides me with an anchor of security and stability in a world whose foundations sometimes feel like they’re constantly shifting.

But then that’s another fact of life; change is both inevitable and remorseless.  And depression is something that changes (with) me, too; it’s indivisibly part of who I am. Of course, the hard bit is explaining it to those who don’t suffer from it – but someone on Twitter sent me this cartoon blog the other day that makes more sense of it than just about any self-help manual or session on the therapist’s couch I’ve ever had. I’ve since shared it with other friends who also suffer, and one wrote back: “You’re right. Exactly how it feels….”

Believe me, I know I’m one of the lucky ones – indeed, one of the luckiest ones alive. Not only am I not starving or homeless, but I’m living in a (relatively) stable democracy, I have a job that I love, a husband I love even more, a great home in London and another in New York and terrific friends. So what’s not to be happy about?

Yet depression, of course, can’t be cured by a simple instruction to “cheer up” or “count your blessings.” Instead, I prefer to turn to musical theatre for inspiration, as I usually do.  In Pippin, now incidentally being superbly revived on Broadway, there’s a perfect prescription for a cure that always raises a smile (even if, I hasten to add, I’m not going to act on it, as I’m now happily married!)

When the drearies do attack
And a siege of the sads begins
I just throw these noble shoulders back
And lift these noble chins
Give me a man who is handsome and strong
Someone who’s stalwart and steady
Give me a night that’s romantic and long
And give me a month to get ready

The important thing is to know we’re not alone. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve written this blog. Sharing my own experience is a way of letting others know that they are not alone, either.

I don’t wish depression on anyone – but there’s a kind of comfort to me in knowing that it’s not a problem unique to me. Amongst my fellow members of the Critics’ Circle, two of my closest colleagues Charles Spencer and Paul Taylor also suffer. I am not, of course, betraying a confidence to say as much; both have mentioned it in their writing.

And now I’ve mentioned it in mine.

I am implicated and complicit in the facts – or sometimes lack thereof – as I maintain a well-trafficked Twitter account, with approaching 16,000 followers (and counting!) Obviously this isn’t in the Justin Bieber league (who currently has fast approaching 39m followers), but I realise that in the micro-world of the West End, my tweets can have a wide reach.

So I try to do so responsibly. I’ve mentioned before how Baz Bamigboye’s weekly showbiz column that appears every Friday in the Daily Mail is often ring-fenced by PRs for exclusivity, so the rest of us are put under embargo for information that will run there, or worse, have to wait for it to run there before we even get the release later that day.

Naturally, this means that the first thing I do on a Friday morning when I wake up is check Baz’s column online, to see what sort of stories I’ll hopefully be hearing about later. And I invariably tweet the bigger headline stories. and always attribute them, either posting a link to Baz’s piece, or even referring to Baz by name in my 140-characters.

Last Friday, I duly tweeted this, at 7.56am:

It’s farewell to TOP HAT, making way at Aldwych for transfer of THIS HOUSE from @nationaltheatre in Sept, says Baz. dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/arti…

— Mark Shenton (@ShentonStage) May 10, 2013

My morning then got a lot more complicated, as by chance a TV producer who is making a behind-the-scenes series on West End musicals – including, as it happens, Top Hat – was coming to my office to film an interview with me.

When he arrived at 9.30am, I told him the news from the Mail – and it was the first he’d heard of it, even though he’d spent the previous day with Top Hat’s producer Kenny Wax. So I rang the show’s PR officer Janine Shalom at Premier PR to check if she knew anything about it. No, she didn’t – it was still booking till next April, as far as she knew. 

So I tweeted an update:

I’ve just spoken to the press rep for @tophatonstage, who tells me the show is still booking thru next April. So no confirmation on close!

— Mark Shenton (@ShentonStage) May 10, 2013

Baz had also revealed that the show would be replaced at the Aldwych in turn by a transfer for the National’s This House, followed by the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical Stephen Ward. I had also tweeted this, and when I received an e-mail from the National Theatre’s in-house head of PR Lucinda Morrison to clarify this, I posted an update on that, too:

Transfer of THIS HOUSE from @nationaltheatre to Aldwych is’t confirmed yet, according to the NT.

— Mark Shenton (@ShentonStage) May 10, 2013

So I had covered all journalistic bases. I had reported a story from a national newspaper, written by a widely respected (and usually right!) source.  And I had followed it up to see if there was any further validation to it.

But later in the morning, I received an aggrieved message from a principal cast member, who implored:

Please, please check your facts before making announcements. Clearly something is up at The Aldwych but NOTHING is confirmed. Cast have not been told. Producers still in meetings. People’s livelihoods affected by all this. Please be a) accurate and b) sensitive. And surely you know better than to take anything BB says in The DM as gospel.

But as I replied, please don’t shoot the messenger! I was reporting something, with clear attribution, and then reported my further findings as I made them.

I can, however, also see that the cast is, at least, paid the courtesy of finding out before the media (or twitter) storm follows. That’s a responsibility for the producers of the show, of course, not the Daily Mail or me. So perhaps it would have been wise for the producers to have called a company meeting the day before – the show’s first anniversary, as it happens – and told them that some news might be coming out that may affect their futures. (At least it isn’t hard to find the company; they’re usually all on stage at the same time for the curtain call!)

There’s a right way to do this – as Viva Forever! did, telling the company the night before any further press coverage followed – or a wrong way to do this, as Love Never Dies did, whose cast members again found out via the Daily Mail and the subsequent Twitter storm.

I appreciate, too, that Top Hat may not have had its ‘ducks in a row’ to give the cast formal notice, or the National ready to sign contracts for a transfer, but courtesy towards the people whose livelihoods depend on it would suggest that the people employing them should keep them informed.

As my actor tweeter told me,

It’s distressing to hear of news like this via gossip, rumour, social media and press. But hey, that’s showbiz, and ugly it is too sometimes.

No doubt all will be revealed in due course about what exactly is happening at the Aldwych. Yesterday morning James Graham, who wrote This House, tweeted,

So yes, sorry, despite rumours, no transfer to the West End yet for THIS HOUSE. Nevertheless, that was an ‘interesting’ few days.

— James Graham (@mrJamesGraham) May 13, 2013

So watch this space (or my Twitter feed)! But don’t shoot me if I jump the gun on an ‘official’ announcement, whatever that is.

The online haters

A sad fact of internet life are the “trolls” – people who don’t generate anything original themselves, but casually throw stones at those of us who do. There sometimes seems to be someone ready to comment on anything that’s said.

Some of it is constructive – I welcome those! I genuinely believe that the internet has helped create conversations around art, and in my case specifically the theatre. One of those conversations is the one I’ve just referred to above, and if it leads to other conversations about how best to keep casts informed of what is happening to their shows, that may be a good thing. (In a world of fast-moving information, producers need to think about it).

Critics, I’ve often said before, are only the start of a conversation, not the end of it (and we’re not even the start of it anymore; quite often, too, the conversation starts long before we get there, owing to the extensive series of previews that shows undergo).

But sometimes the internet is full of just abuse. And one of the things that those of us who put ourselves or our opinions on the frontline have to do is learn to deal with it. Again, I’ve sometimes thought that as people who give criticism, we have to learn to take it. But there is sometimes a world of difference between considered criticism of the sort we (try to) do, and open abuse.

There is, however, some comfort to be taken from the fact that we’re not exactly alone in being on the receiving end of such stuff. In an interview in Sunday’s Observer, Adam Buxton said,

It’s a steep curve in the net age, learning to deal with a new type of casual, brutal criticism from people you’ve never met…

I guess the internet has created an environment where people aren’t forced to consider the consequences of what they say. Maybe it’s unlocked a part of people that in the past they were taught to hide. But, you know, even saying something like that nowadays sounds reactionary and snobby. Of course everyone has the right to express themselves – and people just go for it.

And we don’t even know who those people we’ve never met are; they expose their feelings, but hide themselves. I try not to give them too much energy, but I once checked the twitter feed of someone who came after me to find out that his entire timeline is about exactly that: going after people. What a sad, useless specimen of (lack of) humanity!

Kelly Oxford, whose career as a writer and now screenwriter started on Twitter, was also interviewed in The Observer,  and as Hermione Hoby puts it, there is a downside:

Of course, when you have that kind of online reach, you’re also going to attract a lot of bile. Oxford’s narrative in particular – attractive young woman achieves huge success through the internet with seemingly minimal effort – is, unfortunately, real troll bait.

Haters gonna hate, or as she put it in one early tweet: “It’s too bad that everyone who has a solution for everything is at home commenting on the internet.” Disappointingly, she finds that most of the negative comments come from women. Their most common jibe: “That I think highly of myself – like that’s a bad thing!”

But this week, though there’s not exactly a famine on the horizon it’s a relatively quiet week – if, by quiet, we mean the opening of a major new fringe London theatre (with another opening next week, each of them with two spaces, so really that’s four!), as well as openings at the Young Vic, the Royal Court and the immediate transfer of a play from Bath’s Ustinov Studio to Notting Hill’s Print Room. All that, and an Australian drag tribute to Liza Minnelli briefly stopping by in the West End!

I’m sorry I’ll be missing all of the above this week, as I head off to New York today. But I’ll be catching up with some when I return, and meanwhile won’t be missing in action here in this space, but filing from there.

Here’s the day-by-day diary:

Tonight (May 13), sees Ibsen’s Public Enemy open at the Young Vic in a new version by David Harrower that the great Richard Jones will direct. Jones, whose work has stretched from the West End’s first production of Into the Woods to the glorious original production of Titanic on Broadway (but not seen here, though the show is finally being produced at Southwark Playhouse this summer), has previously directed The Government Inspector and Annie Get Your Gun at the Young Vic.

On Wednesday (May 15), the new Park Theatre in Finsbury Park officially opens with the UK premiere of Melanie Marnich’s These Shining Lives. Loveday Ingram – a name who once graced productions from Chichester to the West End but has lately disappeared – returns to direct a play that tells the story of the female Radium Dial workers of the 1930s who became unlikely pioneers of their time, breaking with protocol to stand up for their rights.

Future productions at the Park will include the world premiere of Daytona, a new play by Oliver Cotton (currently in Passion Play in the West End), that David Grindley will direct Maureen Lipman in, and a revival of Ben Travers’ Thark. The last production of Thark to be seen in London was supposed to transfer from the Lyric Hammersmith to the Savoy – only for the Savoy Theatre to burn down (and the set with it). I hope that this one is luckier!

Also on Wednesday, the UK premiere of Amy Herzog’s 4,000 Miles, which only just ended a run at Bath’s Ustinov Studio on Saturday, transfers to London’s Print Room for a brief run through June 1. It’s not the only production from Bath that has already announced a future London run: Richard Greenberg’s The American Plan (http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/events/the-american-plan-2/\), also directed by the aforementioned David Grindley, will move to the St James Theatre in July.

Also on Wednesday, Australian actor (and drag queen) Trevor Ashley will open his solo tribute to Liza Minnelli, Liza (on an E) to the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre for a run through May 18 only.

On Thursday (May 16), Lyndsey Turner co-directs Will Adamsdale’s new devised piece The Victorian in the Wall with the author at the Royal Court, following a UK national tour. Turner previously directed Laura Wade’s Posh at the Court, which subsequently transferred to the West End’s Duke of York’s.

On Saturday (May 18), Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is adapted for the (puppet) stage of the Little Angel, directed by Peter Glanville with music by the wonderful Barb Jungr.

3-19

It’s amazing how fast word spreads on Twitter and beyond it – in just the last few days, I’ve spoken to everyone from Dominic Maxwell and Libby Purves, both of The Times, about it, and the Menier Chocolate Factory’s David Babani.

But Twitter is also, as I’ve often remarked before, invaluable for establishing other connections. Last week I rang the Royal Albert Hall to book a table in the restaurant, and when I gave my surname, the box office clerk at the other end replied, “Is that the famous Mark Shenton?”

Fame is a relative quality, of course, but it turns out he followed me on Twitter so knew me already. (And by coincidence, when I turned up at the box office to collect my tickets on the night, he had my tickets and programme ready to hand over before I even gave my name: he also knew what I looked like, from my Twitter profile).

And earlier this week, I was in Manchester to see Cush Jumbo in A Doll’s House at the Royal Exchange, and the next morning met her for an interview that will run in The Stage. It was the first time we had met in person; but it felt like we were old friends. And the reason? We’d tweeted each other before! But then I suspect that the infinitely warm Jumbo makes everyone feel like an old friend; it’s just her way. (The press rep for the theatre told me that she’s likewise embraced and been embraced by everyone in the building).

There is, though, a kind of approachability and informality about Twitter that breaks down barriers like nothing else I know. And here’s more proof: just last weekend Ramin Karimloo was headed to Texas to play with his Broadgrass Band, and an elementary school teacher (and long-time fan of his) tweeted him to see if he could pay a visit to her class.

Emily Greer, the teacher concerned, posted a blog explaining what happened and it is all rather extraordinary. She had got her class to draw scenes from the Phantom and had instagrammed them to him. He replied asking, “Where is your school? Not sure we can make it though.”

But then, behind her back, arrangements were put in place to surprise her – and the kids. As she reports,

…During my afternoon conference period, my principal walked in with the superintendent and a guest visitor from another district. They wanted to take pictures of the kids with their Phantom pictures. Everyone was all excited that the kids had tweeted someone (you know, 21st Century learning and all). We took some pictures, and I explained to the guest visitor that this was our attempt to get Ramin Karimloo to come visit us as the Phantom. After pictures, the principal and superintendent got called away, but asked that the kids stay put so they could visit with them later. A few minutes later, we were summoned to the library to meet with the superintendent instead.

And when they arrived there, Ramin was there with his band – and two TV cameras, too. They had become a local story.

But more than that, he’d reached a new audience.

He sang an acoustic version of ‘Music of the Night,’ in which the kids started applauding about halfway through. He had to told up his hands and say “I’m not finished!” Pretty cute.

After singing, he introduced his band and had them talk about their instruments and play a little bit. Then, best of all, he fielded question after question about Phantom. He told them about how he applies the prosthetic pieces for his role as Phantom, and explained how the boat moves through the “water” on the stage. He talked about when he started singing and how he went to the library all the time to read about “Phantom” and learned the songs by singing them with a tape he bought over and over again. He called kids up to do the moonwalk and loved hearing their names and graciously accepted their hugs and praise. As soon as the kids left, Ramin pulled me aside. “I just want you to know that we didn’t do this for the cameras,” he told me. “I didn’t realize they’d be here; I hope it’s okay.”

When I congratulated him myself – on Twitter, naturally! – he reiterated that, replying to me: “Felt guilty a bit that the school called in the cameras but what was important was the kids’ faces. Amazing.”

And on the teacher’s own twitter account, she posted a reply to a message from Ramin, saying:

@raminkarimloo They loved it. I think you’ve got a new fan club and have all but guaranteed their continued love and appreciation for music!

— Emily Greer (@emilykgreer) May 8, 2013

And then she added in another tweet a day later:

@broadgrassband The kids (and teachers) are still talking about yesterday. Thank you again! twitter.com/emilykgreer/st…

— Emily Greer (@emilykgreer) May 9, 2013

Let It Be? Surely not…

When I reviewed Let It Be for The Stage last September when it first opened as a winter filler at the Prince of Wales, I ended my review by stating,

Backbeat in the West End did something far more interesting, telling the back story to the formation of the Beatles. Here, on the same stage where they performed at the 1963 Royal Variety Show, we get nothing more than a live jukebox hit parade. It makes the West End hurtle ever closer to theme park oblivion. Let It Be? Let it not.

But I thought, at least, we’d be able to forget it soon enough, as it made way for the scheduled arrival of The Book of Mormon. However, no sooner did it shut at the Prince of Wales than it promptly transferred to the Savoy, where it continues to run today.

I’ve previously also blogged about how, just before it moved, it proudly declared that it had managed to recoup its £1.6m capitalisation in its 18 week original run. As I wrote at the time,

It is also rather extraordinary that a Beatles tribute show – featuring just five players (the four Beatles, plus a fifth percussion player) – can cost £1.6m in the first place. I’d be interested to know how much of that is marketing spend, given how visible this show has been around town.

And now it seems to be going full-circle back to Broadway: it’s been seen there before as Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway, when it played at the Neil Simon Theatre in 2011, recouped its $2m investment in seven weeks and moved to the Brooks Atkinson, but is now headed to Broadway’s St James Theatre from July 16 under its new London title.

That’s an intriguing way of selling an old show in a new way.

But earlier this week the Evening Standard published a reader letter from Simon Ruddick that said everything you need to know about the show:

However dreadful Viva Forever! may have been it pales into insignificance compared with Let It Be. Conceived for the discount-tickets-to-tourists market, the worst Beatles tribute act in history fails woefully to look or sound like the band. The first half-hour is spent speculating on Lennon turning in his grave. The rest of the show leads one to envy him his final resting place.

Twitter is a place, of course, for instant opinion and gratification – and also sometimes instant fame, too.

Now that @WestEndProducer has virtually become a West End institution in his own, still-anonymous right (and is even regularly seen in public these days, albeit behind a plastic face mask that led my colleague Georgina Brown to ask me at the first night of Once, where he was in attendance, what horrific injury he must have suffered to have to go thus disguised), there’s a new pretender to the throne of self-importance, and it’s even more brilliant for spoofing a writer who is himself prone to gestures of self-importance.

No wonder that Twitter, or at least the theatrical parts of it, were abuzz with his arrival – but he signed off, alas, within days of arriving. In case you missed it, here are some choice moments from the timeline of  Little Sir David Hare (as he styles himself) , who can be found @LittleSirDavidH. On Monday, for instance, he blissfully tweeted about his afternoon:

I’m meeting my NT *deep throat* near The Globe. I go there to see Howard’s plays of course and I’m perfectly pleasant to Dromgoole.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

But I couldn’t resist quipping he should recall what happened to the first Globe on the 29th June 1613.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

That’s the four hundred year anniversary coming up people of twitter. The Full Room is gone but not forgotten.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

Two real issues to tell *deep throat* about. Firstly, Nick has not replied to my note about The Hare at The Dorfman. Why?

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

Secondly, while Stephen has my ear does any one at all know if Dominic Cooke is doing, shall we say, a Hillary?

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

@LittleSirDavidH’s riffs on female playwrights on Tuesday were no less irresistible:

If you ask the younger female playwrights, I think most of them will acknowledge I have been a huge influence in their work.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

In Sarah Kane’s Blasted, I see the clear influence of The Secret Rapture. How the critics missed that is quite beyond me.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

I am given to understand that debbie tucker green was inspired to write for the stage by My Zinc Bed.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

Laura Wade would not have written Posh without my own The Breath of Life.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

I am proud to have been, in my small way, responsible for their achievements and their success. My shoulders are broad; stand on them.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 5, 2013

Even his farewell sign off on Tuesday was priceless, as his wife Nicole urges him to leave twitter.

If you continue to tweet, will The Worricker Trilogy be completed? she asks. It will be your masterpiece, she adds.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 7, 2013

I am about to object that Racing Demon is my masterpiece but she stills me with a look. Leave Twitter, she says. The words hang in the air.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 7, 2013

Nicole wants me to close the account, but I shall leave it up, as a gift to the nation.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 7, 2013

Having sold my papers to the University of Texas for a small contribution, I feel it is right to donate my wisdom gratis.

— LittleSirDavidHare (@LittleSirDavidH) May 7, 2013

“Little Sir David Hare” has given me more pleasure than Via Dolorosa, the real Hare’s own autobiographical one-man show, ever did (though not as much pleasure as Amy’s View, Skylight or The Judas Kiss).

Interview quotes of the week

A writer’s legacy

Mark Haddon, interviewed in The Guardian after the stage version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time won multiple Olivier Awards:

On the press night, I got a sense, I think for the first time, that this might be around when I’m dead. That’s a peculiar feeling, because I think for a lot of people that’s why you write. And the amazing thing about writing is you can arrange words on a bit of paper and if you somehow get it right, they will last longer than you. How extraordinary is that?

It is brilliant but, of course, it’s a bit weird. I expect it’s a bit like looking at your grandchildren and thinking, I’m so proud of them and then thinking, but I won’t be around when…

Putting work before pleasure, leisure and kids

Actor Colin Farrell, interviewed in the Daily Mail on his life as a movie actor:

The hours are hellacious — not just for me, the overpaid lucky actor guy, but for hair people, make-up people, catering people, everyone involved…

People working on films miss important things. They miss weddings and funerals, and some of them even miss the births of their children. It affects their marriages. But there is another life out there.

Sheridan Smith, interviewed in Metro:

When a woman gets to 30, you ask her about having kids. I don’t mind – all my friends are settled with kids so I can understand people asking, and I even get it from relatives, but I’d be a fool to miss these work opportunities. And there’s no time limit. One day I’ll find my prince but, at the minute, I’m enjoying kissing a few frogs.

Negotiating sex scenes on stage

Actors tell The Times about the perils of sex scenes onstage:

Anna Chancellor:

I hadn’t done a play for a while and was taking over from someone else, which is always quite difficult. I was meant to be femme fatale-ish, and come on stage and kiss my boyfriend really sexily. I was really nervous and thought, “Oh, just go for it.” So I went in: big snog… then we carried on rehearsing all morning. I thought I’d done quite well. Later the guy took me aside and said: “Anna, listen. Do you mind not using tongues?” I wasn’t even aware I had. I had to go into the loo and changed different shades of red, purple and white with horror. I was mortified.

Janie Dee:

When you don’t have chemistry you have to work a bit harder. A long time ago there was somebody I was struggling a bit with, and I was using all my powers of imagination to give me the feeling that I should have been feeling. Then I noticed, as we were about to kiss, that he had a bit of food on his lip. We went into the kiss… it wasn’t nice.

A storm in a teacup, or at least a classified ad, erupted in New York last week when Scott Rudin lit the touchpaper of a feud with the New York Times theatre reporter Patrick Healy by posting a not-so-coded message within a daily ad posted in that paper for the show.

Earlier in the week the Tony nominations had been announced – and although Rudin’s production of Colin Toibin’s The Testament of Mary was nominated for Best New Play, it had failed to secure a nomination for Fiona Shaw as Best Actress. Within an hour of hearing the happy news of the Best Play nomination, the playwright had received a call from Rudin, to tell him that the show would close five days later.

Healy, reporting this story, said that Toibin, who has another life as an academic, “took the news in stride – commercial Broadway is a brutal business, with only 25 percent of shows ever turning a profit – and went off to his teaching job at Columbia University.”

Toibin is notably sanguine about the news – and praises Rudin.

These are hard calls to make. He was very nice about it. But you know, about 30,000 people will have seen the play over a 6-week run by the time it closes, with a standing ovation every night. In European terms, that’s a huge success. In Dublin I’d be walking around with everyone saying, what an amazing success you’ve had with your play.

But Healy won’t let go and repeatedly returns to ask him directly for his feelings about Rudin (five times in all). And Toibin, to his credit, remains unflustered and refuses to rise to the bait, staying fulsome in his praise of the producer. What was working with him like?

The amount of care and work he did was extraordinary. He was around all the time. There was a moment two weeks ago, after seeing a performance, when I thought a line needed fixing, needed one more thing in it. I said afterward to everyone, I’m sorry but I think we need to fix a line. I began to describe it when Scott turned to me and he just delivered the line as it should have been delivered. It turned out that, at the performance, Fiona had gotten one word wrong in the line. But Scott knew the line by heart – he knew the whole play by heart, I think.

All of which is a testament to Rudin’s remarkable attention to detail, and I think that he emerges with a lot of credit. But last Saturday, Rudin used the ad he pays for in the New York Times to strike back, with the classifieds in that day’s paper stating below the show’s logo:

Let’s give a big cuddly shout-out to Pat Healy, infant provocateur and amateur journalist at The New York Times. Keep it up, Pat – one day perhaps you’ll learn something about how Broadway works, and maybe even understand it. — Scott Rudin.

Ouch! But it says even more about how the New York Times is run nowadays that an ad antagonizing one of its own members of staff can make it into print in its own pages.

(Non) audience behaviour

I’ve written often in this blog about audience behaviour and the responses from both sides of the footlights, from my own toward Bianca Jagger (taking flash photography regularly through last year’s Olivier-winning Einstein on the Beach), to those of the late Richard Giffiths, Ian Hart, Ken Stott to mobile phone intrusions, talkative audience members and disruptive kids respectively.

But last weekend the challenge came at a performance not inside the Gielgud Theatre but outside it, when Helen Mirren and her co-stars in The Audience found themselves competing with the sound of a troupe of 25 gay drummers promoting a forthcoming festival just beyond the stage door.

Magnificently, it seems, Dame Helen took matters into her own hands and left the stage door, in full costume as the Queen, in the interval to demand that they stop. According to the Independent‘s report, she “effed and blinded” at them.

In the Telegraph, there’s a fuller explanation – from Mirren herself.

I’m afraid there were a few ‘thespian’ words used. They got a very stern royal ticking off but I have to say they were very sweet and they stopped immediately. I felt rotten but on the other hand they were destroying our performance so something had to be done.

The drumming just slowly got louder and louder and then settled right outside the stage door. There was just a thin wall between drumming and the theatre so it was unbelievably loud on stage. Paul Ritter and I could hardly hear each other speak and the audience couldn’t hear us speak at all. We were doing this last scene of the first act where the Queen is being told she is going to lose Britannia [the royal yacht], it’s quite an emotional scene. I thought, we can’t carry on like this, they have to stop.

I was so upset from struggling through the scene with Paul that I literally walked straight off stage, straight up the stairs and straight out the stage door and banged my way through the crowd who were watching and said ‘stop, you’ve got to stop right now’ – only I might have used stronger language than that.

They were very sweet and stopped the minute they knew I wasn’t just a batty old woman haranguing them on the streets of Soho on a Saturday night.

Co-star Rufus Wright, who plays Prime Minister David Cameron, posted his own account of the matter on his Twitter account, though they appear to have disappeared now. According to the Independent, he posted,

Just fulfilled a lifelong ambition by bellowing at 25 drummers to shut the f*** up. West End theatres got thin walls. You should have seen Helen. She came out in full Queen costume and shouted at the drummers too. Honestly. It was breathtaking.

A critic retires after 50 years, as the Critics’ Circle marks its 100th birthday

On Sunday came the sad news that Philip French is retiring after 50 years as the Observer’s film critic.   And yesterday, as it happens, the Critics’ Circle marked it own centenary with an event at the Barbican Centre in which the five sections of the circle honoured the lifetime achievements of leading exponents of each of them.

While critics inevitably spend most of their time looking at and after the art of what they criticise, it has also been a time for reflection on our past, present and future, too – a recurring theme, of course, on this blog. As this year’s President of the circle Simon Tait noted in a piece for The Stage,

In this centenary year, critics are facing an uncertain future. In current times we have not only seen reviewing savagely cut in the printed press, but we are watching the press itself dwindle, it seems, inexorably.

What has risen in contrast is the extent of on-line review, and while much of this is amateur, clumsy and potentially damaging to the perception of proper criticism, there is a detectable sign of editorial control and responsibility beginning to have an effect on these online blogs. The temptation is to dismiss them, but critics do so at their peril and many even find themselves contributing, almost certainly without payment, to online publications.

The truth is that this is the future, and if the 440 members of the Critics’ Circle are the past they are also the best: they have the knowledge, the experience and the connections, and serious art imbibers will always want their guidance.

And Philip French himself, who has been one of those best, has advocated the continued role of the professional critic and proved his worth time and again. As The Observer’s report of his departure puts it:

French believes that alongside the growing ranks of online amateur film writers, there should still be a role for an experienced critic. A narrow understanding, he argues, can breed its own kind of arrogance: “No critic should ever say they are bored. It is not enough just to understand a film; you must try to say something of interest or value.

But it is also about knowing when to stop. And commenting on the great directors, The Observer reports him saying: “not all artists have a life-lease on their talent”, and the same may apply to critics: “But at least I am giving up now, while I still have my mind.”

The result, as I’ve often pointed out on this blog before, is that I’m routinely chasing my tail. Sometimes I wish I could just follow the example of several of my colleagues and just confine myself to two or three a week (while one or two confine themselves to just one a week), but I fret about how much I’d miss out on!

Tonight (May 6), sees the return to the West End of Passion Play, Peter Nichols’s play that was originally premiered in 1981 by the RSC when they were resident at the Aldwych. You know that you’re getting old(er), of course, when you can still clearly remember seeing a play the first time around, and have now lived to see it revived not once, but for the second time in the West End! It was last revived at the Donmar in 2000 by director Michael Grandage in a production that subsequently transferred to the Comedy, now the Harold Pinter.

It is a play I regard as Nichols’s finest (of the ones I’ve seen, that is; he has a whole trunk full of unproduced ones): a bruising, audacious and personal portrait of modern marriage and the cost of infidelity that’s in its way as clever and poignant as Pinter’s Betrayal. I can’t wait to see it again – and in fact I didn’t wait! I snuck in early, with permission, last Saturday, to see a cast that includes Zoë Wanamaker, reunited with director David Leveaux with whom she previously collaborated on Electra at the Donmar Warehouse for which she won an Olivier Award, before taking it on to Broadway, joined by such stellar talents as Owen Teale and the always wonderful Sian Thomas.

Also tonight, a new production of the Ibsen classic A Doll’s House sees Cush Jumbo return to the Royal Echange in Manchester, where she previously starred in Pygmalion in 2010 and As You Like It in 2011 (for the latter of which she won the Ian Charleson Award given every year to reward the best classical stage performances being given by performers under the age of 30).  She is reunited with director Greg Hersov, who directed by both of those, and I’ll be there tonight to review it for this paper.

I’m also looking forward to meeting Cush tomorrow for an interview, and catch up with this stunning young actress in the midst of a busy year that last Sunday saw her in contention for this year’s Olivier Award for Best Supporting Performance for playing Mark Antony in the Donmar’s all-female Julius Caesar (though as she hilariously tweeted me after the ceremony, “TWO women asked if I was the girl that sang the Whitney Houston song??!!” I guess there are worse things to be mistaken for than Heather Headley, but Cush is heading for stardom in her own right).

No sooner will she finish her run in this than she will be testing her own versatility as a writer as well as actor, reunited with the director of Julius Caesar, Phyllida Lloyd, who is directing her in the title role of Cush’w own play Josephine and I, about the late, great Josephine Baker, at the Bush in July.

On Wednesday (May 8), four more actors test their versatility playing a multitude of characters in Giles Havergal’s adaptation of Travels with My Aunt, being revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory. First seen at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre in 1989, it has since had several West End seasons, as well as an off-Broadway run. Now it is being directed by another versatile actor-turned-director Christopher Luscombe. But whatever happened to his own production company Brighton Theatre Royal Productions that was launched last year under the ATG banner, for which he staged Pinero’s Dandy Dick and a revival of Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, but has not announced further work?

Also on Wednesday, another actor-turns-director in the wonderful Lia Williams, transferring her world premiere production of The Matchbox to the Tricycle from Liverpool Playhouse’s Studio, where it was seen last year.

On Thursday (May 9), Jamie Lloyd directs the second of his resident season in the Trafalgar Transformed season he is staging there, with a new production of Pinter’s The Hothouse with a cast that includes Simon Russell Beale and John Simm. This is the play that Pinter wrote in 1958 but remained unproduced until 1980 when he directed its premiere himself at London’s Hampstead Theatre, in a production that subsequently transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre. Pinter subsequently starred in a production at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in 1995 that later transferred to the Comedy Theatre (now, of course, the Pinter), and Ian Rickson also revived it at the National’s Lyttelton in 2007. So this is its fourth major London outing, too – and I will have seen them all by next Thursday – just as I have with Passion Play (see Tuesday above).

I only hope that the Trafalgar Studios have got their toilets in working order. When I last visited to see Imogen Stubbs and Amanda Daniels in Third Finger, Left Hand at Trafalgar 2 a few weeks ago, there was an ominous pipe draining the overflow from the male urinal, and the seat in one of the cubicles had shorn clean off. (I hasten to add not because I sat on it; it was broken before I entered).

On Friday (May 13), another regional transfer to London sees Coventry’s Belgrade bring Sons Without Fathers, a new adaptation of Chekhov’s Platonov written and directed by Helena Kaut-Howson, to the Arcola. Just the other day here I quoted Clare Brennan’s wildly enthusiastic review in The Observer in full; and I have to say that it is that review that has made me want to see it more than anything. So perhaps the lack of substantiating detail was actually a positive; it prompted my curiosity.

On Saturday (May 14), I’m looking forward to a night off duty at the opera – English National Opera, one of the most exciting companies working in any area of British theatre, have the nice habit of inviting theatre critics to see their shows, and I’m delighted to take them up on it whenever I can. On Saturday, they open a new production of Berg’s Wozzeck, in a production that marks the ENO debut of Carrie Cracknell – former joint artistic director of the Gate who recently did such a stunning job of A Doll’s House at the Young Vic. This production was originally announced to have been directed by Rupert Goold, but as I previously wrote about, “unforeseen conflicts with his first feature film” saw him pulling out of both this and the RSC/Wooster group Troilus and Cressida.

On Sunday (May 15), I wish I could divide myself into three: there are three cabaret or concert performances around town that I wish I could be at. At the St James, Stuart Matthew Price – one of our very best singers – will perform a show entitled The Roles I’ll Never Play, giving him an opportunity to sing songs he’s always wanted to but never could perform the roles they’re attached to. That sounds like a real one-off, so I think that’s where I’ll be; but I’d also like to see Kerry Ellis launching her latest concert tour with a night at the London Palladium, and the delightful Daniel Buckley, currently appearing in The Book of Mormon in in the West End as the standby Elder Cunningham, will play a night at the Pheasantry in Chelsea.

Back in February I wrote that Judy Craymer, producer of Viva Forever!, had told the Evening Standard, “The critics were always going to give us a hard time but the truth is it’s sold out until June.”

I was more than a little surprised at the time, given the fact that seats were freely available online and at the half price booth. Then in March, I noted a ticket price sale for the show, too, that also contradicted Craymer’s previous statement.

On Wednesday night, the cast of Viva Forever! were informed that their show will now close on June 29, so presumably that’s after the “sell-out” run to which the producer alluded. I know producers like to put a brave face on things, but there’s no point brazening it out against the evidence.

And as much as I don’t like shows to fail, it sometimes pays to face up to “the cold douche of reality”, to quote the most resonant phrase in Nicholas de Jongh’s play Plague over England. I admire Judy greatly for her work in turning Mamma Mia! into a global stage, and then film, hit. It’s not her fault that its process of turning back pop catalogues into new musicals became a much-imitated phenomenon; and of course having created it, she was in her rights to imitate herself.

The last time I saw her, however, at the opening of Peter and Alice, she beckoned me over and said, “I think I’m going to have to cut off your willy.” It is, I am happy to say, still intact; but her ego is bruised. And I was part of it – she told me that she cried when she read my review. I take no pleasure from such news, but it is also my job to call it like I see it, and replied accordingly. “Yes, but we’re theatre people – we should stick together,” she replied.

To a point. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t honest about my feelings. Integrity is the first job of a critic. But I also see my job as a support, too – and I seriously hope that she’s not discouraged from developing future, hopefully original, new musicals in the future.

Musical madness

The other day my colleague Fiona Mountford tweeted:


I’ve seen five musicals in eight days. I am turning into @shentonstage. Time for me to follow in his footsteps and head for New York…

— Fiona Mountford (@FionaLondonarts) May 1, 2013

I know it isn’t a competition, but in the last eight days I’ve seen six musicals, so I’m in the lead – and I’m off to New York again a week on Monday, too! Fiona and I were both at Rooms at the Finborough and The Pajama Game at Chichester. My week also saw me at Rent in Concert at Hackney Empire, Bare at the Union, Merrily We Roll Along’s transfer to the Pinter and A Man of No Importance at Salisbury (for which my review will appear on The Stage website today).

t’s all very well having the actors, dancers, musicians, directors, choreographers and designers who can give imaginative flight to work that is already created – but what about nurturing it at the point of creation?

It is striking just how many musicals are around at the moment, both large and small, good and bad. But it is also striking that every single one of those shows was first premiered in America – as always, I wonder where the new British musicals are (though Rooms is in fact written by a Scottish-born composer Paul Scott Goodman, but was originally premiered in New York where he is now based).

For all that we now clearly have the expertise and talent to stage great musicals, as robustly and to an equal standard to Broadway, we still lack the producing nerve and talent to originate new shows. The biggest hole we have is on the producing front. It’s all very well having the actors, dancers, musicians, directors, choreographers and designers who can give imaginative flight to work that is already created – but what about nurturing it at the point of creation?

By the end of this year, we may have two new British musicals running in the West End in Stephen Ward and From Here to Eternity – but they’re co-written respectively by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, working separately. Those two names have dominated British musicals for over 40 years now. Who’s going to give the next generation a leg up?

Prices of tickets… and ice-creams

We know that managements reserve the right of admission. Now, it seems, they reserve the price of admission, too. At the (heavily subsidised) Chichester Festival Theatre, I’m struck by a price advisory on the leaflets for their current production of The Pajama Game and also the forthcoming Barnum: “PLEASE NOTE: the earlier you book, the better the price. These prices are guaranteed until 15 April and are then subject to change.” 

I just checked the website on The Pajama Game, which were being advertised on the leaflet as £31.50, and are now £34.  Prices for Barnum, meanwhile, advertised on the leaflet with a £35 top, are now £40.

But if ticket prices are now subject to dynamic pricing, I was astonished at the opening of Merrily We Roll Along at the Harold Pinter Theatre to discover that the humble pots of Loseley Ice Creams offered in the interval are now a whopping £4.50 each. (I’m also told that a glass of wine in the bar is £8.50; thank God I don’t drink). With prices like this, I’ll be nipping across to the Spar across the Haymarket the next time I’m at the Pinter.