Issue 19, 2007
Prompt Corner 
Producer Greg Ripley-Duggan has written:
to correct an error in Prompt Comer [in Issue 16-17] which caught my eye. When Simon Gray says that The Old Masters (which I produced) enjoyed an "extended" run in the West End, he means the following: the play pressed in early July having announced, as I recollect, an eight-week limited season. Business, in spite of the time of year, was very brisk — so I put on sale the rest of the run of my artists' contracts — through to the early November. Business continued steady (albeit unspectacular) through the autumn, and then ATG, who own the Comedy Theatre, asked me to extend the run again, this time up to Christmas week. I talked to the cast who were agreeable and we therefore added another 5 weeks. In all then, the run of the play was twice extended. Though of course, it may be that Simon means the other sense of the word — and, actually, seven months counts as a pretty extended run for a West End play these days. Or am I wrong?
No, not at all. The Old Masters was in fact one of the few plays in the West End in mid-2004 which did not close before we had the chance to reprint its reviews. I was entirely mistaken to question Simon Gray's use of the word "extended", and apologise unreservedly to Messrs Ripley-Duggan, Gray, Pinter (its director) and anyone else whom I may have offended. I have no excuse; my memory played me false, as simple as that; well, I did call that column partly an "imaginative exercise". Oh, if only I had access to a magazine that regularly printed details of all major productions' dates and casts, and perhaps even their reviews...
Mug's game
More immediately, Greg goes on to question my sanguine view of the ongoing West End climate:
As a producer of new plays, and as Chair of the Society of London Theatres' Independent Producers Forum (and a member of the SOLT Board), I think you might well be wrong and that a sea-change might well be taking place with respect to the West End play. Too many colleagues have lost too much money to really want to continue — I find myself surrounded by play producers who have gone into musicals. Of course, they may lose money with those too — but I fear the reality is they are more likely to give up producing altogether than go back into play production. It really feels like a mug's game and has done for a while. I hope I'm wrong about the sea-change — apart from anything else, I personally have no future unless I am...
SOLT has recently released figures showing that West End takings are currently up 14% on last year, and even allowing for block-busting autumn musical openings in 2006, the full annual figures are likely to show a rise even on those record results. However, if Greg is right — and his long and distinguished record as a producer certainly lends weight to his view — then these headline figures do not in
themselves indicate a strong theatrical culture in the West End as a whole. Andrew Haydon, in his blog at http: //postcardegods .blogspot.com (26 Sep entry), suggests that one of the factors militating against plays, and in particular new plays, is the simple 'wow" factor: reporting on a discussion on celebrity casting in the Finborough Forum strand, he recounts that "Paraphrased only slightly the basic argument [of the West End representatives] ran: 'We are in the business of making £45-per-ticket events for people who have got that sort of money.' [...]This point was quickly followed by the frank admission that, since this was their policy, they were in the business of trying to make theatre, or rather 'events' — this was the word that kept cropping up — that would specifically appeal to this moneyed demographic." We've long known that the big hook (be it a name, a spectacle or whatnot) has become ever more crucial to West End productions; but to hear it so baldly described as, in effect, the raison d'être of any production is a real cause for despair.
Tango
Then again, I'm so generally despairing that, as I wrote in an opening paragraph to my FT review of The Ugly One, which I regret was excised for publication: "For some 12 or 13 years now — this is neither an exaggeration nor a joke — I have been almost entirely unable to bear seeing my own image, whether reflected or photographic. (The picture which sometimes appears by my name on this page is out of date.) I do not know whether that makes me more qualified, or less, to comment on Marius von Mayenburg's play about the commodification of image." Readers may be relieved that I have no plans to introduce picture by-lines to Theatre Record.
Beauty is also a vexed issue for some reviewers of A Disappearing Number. "Can [the beauty of maths] truly exist if hardly anyone can understand it?" asks Quentin Letts. He might as well ask whether Beethoven's symphonies can be truly beautiful if far more people prefer Britney Spears. Mind you, that arts/sciences divide makes itself felt in all walks of life. Twenty years ago, I was briefly married to a theoretical physicist; my ex-wife is now one of Britain's most respected tango teachers.
At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Pilsen?
The Divadlo (Theatre) festival in Pilsen (yes, where the lager comes from) has in recent years been overshadowed by that of Nitra in neighbouring Slovakia, but this year it celebrated its fifteenth edition with a strong programme – perhaps stronger on paper than it turned out – but nevertheless a varied and stimulating week of theatre. Pilsen's strength is its mix of local and international work, and the way in which it opens itself to less obvious forms such as puppetry, a Czech speciality. This year saw local ballet, opera and children's theatre rubbing shoulders with major European work, and not suffering from the comparison.
Soiled
The festival kicked off with Andrei Serban's Romanian production of Sarah Kane's Cleansed. As an exercise in overcoming impossible stage directions it was highly successful – though the rats were something of a disappointment – but I was left feeling as soiled as I was by its premiere: for all the protestations that this is Kane's most optimistic work, it is no more or less than an exercise in degradation, glorying in the perverse, and anyone watching it is as guilty of collusion as those who offer it for the stage.
The Kane was followed by the official opening production of the festival, Moby In Prison, a solo from Daniel Gulko, an American based in France where he practises what he calls "bastard circus". The opposite criticism could be levelled at Gulko after Cleansed, that he is a crowd-pleaser with not a lot to say, even if his programme notes claim that he is interweaving Melville's epic with Krishnamurti and Erich Fromm. His well-intentioned but doomed attempt to tell his story in French, English and Czech meant that anyone with only one of these languages got only a third of it, filled out with some hardly world-shattering acrobatics and juggling.
Model railway
An undoubted highlight of the week was the appearance of Rimini Protokoll's Mnemopark, in which a group of elderly Swiss and German model railway enthusiasts use their lovingly constructed layout as the setting for a Bollywood movie, some personal childhood reminiscence and a serious examination of ecological merits of the Swiss economy. Rimini Protokoll is a co-operative of directors who have made a huge impression with their research-based documentaries since the first in 2002, including a staging of Das Kapital and a touring production (literally) set on a Bulgarian truck. Mnemopark is the work of the Swiss Stefan Kaegi, and he can if anything be faulted for trying to do too much: some fault.
Nordic
Peter Asmussen's The Beach has been making its way steadily around the world since its Danish premiere in 1996 – it was well received at Theatre 503 a couple of years ago – and appeared here in a Polish production from Torun directed by award-winning Iwona Kempa. Ifs a play of deceptively simple, often unspoken emotional shifts between two married couples who meet each year at a holiday resort. It's hardly fair to judge a Polish translation of a Danish text heard without subtitles, but I had the impression that the Polish cast were not sufficiently mining it for its considerable subtleties. They were not helped by an overly fussy set with more doors than a Whitehall farce.
A genuine contribution to the festival's sub-theme of Nordic theatre came in Eirik Stubar's production for the National Theatre in Oslo of The Wild Duck, a real eye-opener which sets the play in the late fifties and cuts Ibsen's text severely, yet retains all the moral power of the original. It is played on a wide forestage bounded by a six-foot wall, behind which the eponymous duck lives and dies unseen. My only reservation about a production which stuns in the apt simplicity of its staging and the clarity of its performances is the nascent sexuality it ascribes to Hedwig, particularly in an embarrassing scene with Gregers Werle, who is, after all, her stepbrother.
Another festival hit was Alvis Hermanis's staging of Sonja, about which I wrote when I loved it in Nitra last year. Less satisfactory was the Finn Kristian Smeds' direction of a Lithuanian actress, Aldona Bendoriute, in Sad Songs From The Heart Of Europe, another somewhat misguided attempt, like Moby In Prison, to tell a major story, in this case Crime And Punishment, through a solo performer. Bendoriute spent almost two hours pottering about a prop-laden stage, emoting seriously in Lithuanian, failing completely to observe the maxim that less is more. Our programme note told us that the actress took on many of Dostoevsky's characters: the fact that this was not at all apparent to me or the rest of the non-Lithuanian speaking audience indicates that she may not have succeeded.
There was no shortage of performers in Robert AlfOldi's staging, for his Barka theatre in Budapest, of The Threepenny Opera. Its scaffolding set was festooned with zoot-suited gangsters and half-dressed whores, backed by a sizeable band. But just as the musicians failed to conjure up that essential sax-and-tuba Weill sound, so the actors looked more like participants in a sugary, sub-Fosse Cabaret and gave no sense of Brecht's edgily seedy, dog-eat-dog world.
White box
The local contributions combined the best in Czech performance with a couple of local showcases. It says something for the dearth of good new drama in the republic that the winner of best production last year was a revival of Mozart's La Clemenza Di Tito, for which we were bussed the short distance from Pilsen to the wonderful Estates Theatre in Prague, where Tito in fact had its original premiere. The 2006 production was by the German director-designer team of Ursel and Karl-Ernst Herrmann, who have made something of a specialty of this opera since they first staged it in 1982. The Czechs were much taken with its set, a white box with deep perspective – curiously, since derivatives of this idea have been on show at their design Quadrennial for several decades. I can't believe that they were equally thrilled by the costumes, most of which seemed to have come straight off the peg at Top Shop, but everyone could be thrilled by the quality of the singing and orchestral playing.
Local drama revivals included a workmanlike but hardly revelatory Seagull from the chamber theatre in Ostrava, and a very direct, classic staging of Seneca's version of Phaedra from a finely spoken Prague company directed by Hana Buresova, which made a strong case for this version being considered in the same dramatic breath as those of Racine and Euripides, with Helena Dvorakova outstanding in the title role. Roman Polak's bunraku-inspired staging of lvanov, seen last year at Nitra when it swept the board of Slovak awards, looked rather better on Pilsen's smaller Chamber Theatre stage.
Jan Antonin Pitinsky, my favourite Czech director, had a rare miss with his adaptation of Goethe's Elective Affinities for the Dejvicka Theatre: it was a curious mixture of Marivaux and Marx Brothers, badly blocked, badly lit and not very well performed. In contrast Pitinsky's old theatre, Na Zabradle, scored a hit as Milan Uhde successfully conducted a searching examination of the Czech conscience, perhaps the best since the Velvet Revolution, in Miracle In The Black House, his first play for some years.
The two shows from Pilsen, both aimed at young audiences, were delightful surprises. Arnost Goldflam's Bloody Knees explored a series of brutal urban myths with a child-friendly glee that could have taught Ms Kane a lesson, while The Garden, a full scale ballet directed and adapted by Jiri Streda from a favourite Czech children's book by Jiri Tmka, was just as acceptable to adults in its inventive choreography (Alena Peskova) and lively music (Zbynek Mataju).
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
Reviewed in this issue: |
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London |
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BAD GIRLS THE MUSICAL New musical by Kath Gotts, book by Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus |
Garrick |
12 Sep |
1 Jan |
1037 |
THE BURIAL AT THEBES Revival of adaptation by Seamus Heaney from Antigone by Sophocles |
Pit |
19 Sep |
29 Sep |
1058 |
CHARITY WARS New play by Richard Cussands (StoneCrabs) |
Pleasance |
11 Sep |
30 Sep |
1051 |
DINNER Revival of play by Moira Buffini |
Upstairs at the Gatehouse |
11 Sep |
14 Oct |
1045 |
A DISAPPEARING NUMBER New piece by Complicité |
Barbican |
11 Sep |
6 Oct |
1032 |
FLIGHT PATH New play by David Watson (Bush / Out Of Joint) |
Bush |
17 Sep |
6 Oct |
1052 |
FRAGMENTS Revival of short pieces by Samuel Beckett |
Young Vic, Maria |
20 Sep |
6 Oct |
1060 |
THE IMPORTANCE OF SHOES New play by Jay Johnson (Weaver Hughes Ensemble) |
Broadway Studio |
12 Sep |
29 Sep |
1041 |
KURTZ New play by Robert Wynne-Simmons, based on Joseph Conrad (Rocking Cradle Prods) |
New End |
10 Sep |
30 Sep |
1041 |
THE LESSON Revival of play by Eugene lonesco (Icarus Th Collective) |
Old Red Lion |
13 Sep |
29 Sep |
1036 |
THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING Revival of adaptation by Carson McCullers from her own novel |
Young Vic |
13 Sep |
20 Oct |
1046 |
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE New adaptation from Shakespeare by Julia Pascal (Pascal TC) |
Arcola |
14 Sep |
13 Oct |
1050 |
MOONWALKING IN CHINATOWN New piece by Justin Young |
Soho |
20 Sep |
29 Sep |
1064 |
ON YOUR HONOUR New play by Colin Wakefield and Roger Leach (Double Honours) |
Jermyn Street |
11 Sep |
29 Sep |
1057 |
SHALL I KILL MAMA New play by Trevor Thomas |
Blue Elephant |
13 Sep |
29 Sep |
1041 |
STIFF ACRYLIC New play by Kenneth Emson |
Hen & Chickens |
21 Sep |
6 Oct |
1045 |
SUBWAY New piece by Matthew Lenton (Vanishing Point) |
Lyric Studio |
13 Sep |
29 Sep |
1063 |
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT SIMMY New play by Pravesh Kumar (Rifco Arts) |
T R Stratford E15 |
12 Sep |
29 Sep |
1042 |
TONY! – THE BLAIR MUSICAL New musical by Chris Bush and Ian McCluskey (White Rose Th) |
Pleasance |
19 Sep |
22 Sep |
1065 |
THE UGLY ONE New play by Manus von Mayenburg |
Royal Court Upstairs |
18 Sep |
13 Oct |
1055 |
Regions |
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BLACK EYED SUSAN Revival of play by Douglas Jerrold in a new version by Cad Miller |
Bury St Edmunds, Theatre Royal |
11 Sep |
22 Sep |
1067 |
CASANOVA new play by Carol Ann Duffy and Told By An Idiot |
Leeds, WYP Courtyard |
12 Sep |
29 Sep |
1072 |
CYRANO Revival of play by Edmond Rostand, adapted by Jo Roets (Catherine Wheels TC) |
St Andrews, Byre / touring |
18 Sep |
18 Sep |
1077 |
GODSPELL Revival of musical by Stephen Schwartz, book by John-Michael Tebelak |
Peterborough, Key / touring |
17 Sep |
22 Sep |
1071 |
HAMLET Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Glasgow, Citizens |
21 Sep |
13 Oct |
1077 |
HENRY V Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
10 Sep |
20 Oct |
1066 |
THE HIRED MAN revival of musical by Melvyn Bragg and Howard Goodall (New Perspectives) |
Nottingham, Lakeside / touring |
20 Sep |
29 Sep |
1076 |
KING COTTON New play by Jimmy Govern |
Salford, Lowry |
14 Sep |
22 Sep |
1074 |
SCENES FROM THE BIG PICTURE Revival of play by Owen McCafferty (Pnmecut) |
Belfast, Waterfront Hall Studio |
7 Sep |
29 Sep |
1066 |
THE SHADOW OF A PIE New piece devised by the company with Douglas Maxwell (Lung Ha's TC) |
Glasgow, Bridge / touring |
10 Sep |
10 Sep |
1077 |
STOCKHOLM New play by Bryony Lavery (Frantic Assembly) |
Plymouth, Drum / touring |
21 Sep |
6 Oct |
1076 |
THE WINTER'S TALE Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
22 Sep |
20 Oct |
1079 |