Issue 25/26, 2011
Prompt Corner
Victory for THEATRE RECORD's campaign against Westminster parking charges! ...Oh, all right, but that's the way most newspapers report decisions on matters they'd previously written strongly about. In fact, it couldn't have had anything to do with this magazine, as Westminster City Council reversed its decision after our last issue had gone to press but before it reached subscribers. And to be precise, the decision has not been reversed as such but— following a High Court ruling to permit a judicial review of the parking proposals — postponed until after the Olympics. Society of London Theatre president Mark Rubinstein commented: "It was enormous relief across all of London's theatres because we all believe that increases in the parking fees can only be detrimental to the vibrancy of the West End and do not believe that there is a problem with congestion or parking that requires that increase in charges or those kind of measures. We need to make it delightful and enjoyable and easy for people to come into the West End to see shows."
Bloodbath
Last issue I reported that SOLT's figures indicate that block bookings for West End shows during the Olympic period are down 70% on their usual volume, and that the lead times of such bookings mean that this is not simply a matter of later than usual take-up. Andrew Lloyd Webber has gone further, claiming that West End bookings are running at around 10% of their normal figures and predicting "a bloodbath of a summer" for theatres. On BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he claimed that he knew of three major musicals planning to close for the duration of the Olympics, but would not name them and added that "big, big, big hits" such as The Phantom Of The Opera would continue to play through the Games.
Lord Lloyd-Webber's sometime lyricist Sir Tim Rice, however, begs to differ: "I don't see why [the Olympics] should be anything other than a plus. There will be a lot more tourists floating around and I simply don't see why they would only want to see the Olympics. They will want to do other things in London and the theatre is one of the things the city is famous for. 'Bloodbath' seems a slightly strong word to use. I don't think shows will do worse during the Olympics — I think they'll actually do better." Perhaps he hasn't seen the actual figures.
Authority
In other matters, the tectonic shifts in the critical landscape continue, as exampled in the Story of the Month opposite. I've often commented here about the role of blogging and bloggers in this respect... most recently only a few weeks ago, when I spent two successive columns considering the reactionary and "progressive" sides respectively of what has seemed to me an increase in vitriol in critical writing. I quoted Isaac Asimov's remark about "the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" as summing up a broad trend of anti-intellectualism. This is as noticeable in scientific matters (with flaws in individual climate-change studies being used to fuel lumpen incredulity at the entire thesis, and adherents of creationism demanding equal classroom status with evolution on the specious grounds that both are "theories") as in artistic or more abstract areas, and it touches on what — as I've also remarked before — is to me the principal problem of online publication: authority.
There is, I think, a fallacy that authority is inherently authoritarian, i.e. top-down and repressive. This isn't so, of course: authority is always something conferred, but it can be conferred from the bottom up in a democratic process. Yet even in such areas a distrust persists. That's why we see American political candidates repeatedly trying to portray themselves as "outsiders" from the political machines and hubs of activity even when they are in fact career politicos who have spent most of their lives in such environments, and why it was so easy for the British parliamentary expenses scandal to lead to the public reviling the very people we had ourselves voted into office.
Discrimination
And, particularly in a medium like the Internet without a meaningful structure — where the process of publishing one's view is no more complicated than the process of expressing it (we don't even need to go as far as to write it down, what with podcasts, Youtube etc.) — it's harder for reliable indicators of authority to coalesce. We're left with simple metrics of attention: the idea that the more one is listened to, the more one is worth being listened to. This is a similar kind of confusion to that between what is "in the public interest" and what is "of interest to the public", such as led exjournalist Paul McMullan (in his recent testimony to the Leveson inquiry into newspaper intrusion) to repeatedly justify any and all techniques of lying, hackery etc. on the grounds that people bought the papers containing the stories thereby obtained.
This woolly prejudice against expertise and responsibility is precisely what Jill Dolan's award does not endorse. As Karen Fricker notes in a passage which I had to edit out opposite for reasons of space, "Dolan's academic chops are beyond question: professor of English and Theatre at Princeton University, she is one of the leading figures in feminist theatre studies worldwide (the title of her blog is taken from her vastly influential 1988 volume of the same name, due for reissue this year) and she rumbled the field yet again in 2005 with the volume Utopia In Performance: Finding Hope At The Theatre, suggesting with audacious optimism that the theatre event can provide a temporary model of ideal community." Dolan, in other words, already writes with authority: her blogging style is freer than that on paper, but the knowledge, experience and discipline are already present. The Nathan award is in this instance serving to encourage discrimination (in the best sense: distinguishing qualitatively between the good and the bad) among online readers and writers alike.
Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com