Issue 6, 2008

Prompt Corner

Once again, the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough has meant that I haven't been on the main theatregoing circuit for half of the fortnight covered in this issue. For Robert Hewison's report on NSDF and samples of the writing of the young critics' award-winners, turn to pages 309­310. I don't have much to add to Robert's report; as I noted last year, the wobble suffered by the Festival under its previous director has been corrected under Holly Kendrick's directorship, and the Festival is benefiting from being helmed by a producer who is both experienced and skilled at putting together entire packages of events and productions.

It was noticeable, however, that the Festival community knew better than to believe the news stories about those Arts Council funding reprieves. As I pointed out at the time, NSDF's funding was restored for this year only, with the next two years' allocations subject to a fundamental review, which was partly conducted during the week of the Festival itself. However fervently Robert Hewison may spin that in terms of the Festival welcoming a chance to re-examine and reinvigorate itself, there was at times a feeling akin to that among the staff at a school with the Ofsted inspectors carrying out their flavour of social and intellectual audit.

Fun

The rest of the week was... well, was a lot more fun than might be suggested by a viewing schedule that began with Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies and ended with Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis and Caryl Churchill's The Skriker. An imaginative company from York University even succeeded in demonstrating (to those of us who needed convincing) that there can be far better ways of performing the works of Steven Berkoff than the way Steven Berkoff performs them. Their immersive production of Berkoffs adaptation of Metamorphosis was in many ways a joy, although it gave rise to some controversy about enforced audience participation; some dissent was also voiced about the presentation of the Buzz Goodbody Student Director Award to Alexander G Wright after he effectively admitted during one of the week's formal discussion sessions that he was unable to control his cast in performance.

But these are the kind of issues that enliven a festival rather than crippling it. Thankfully, astute action by Andrew Haydon and his team on the Festival's daily magazine Noises Off managed to head off yet another repetition this year of the periodic brouhaha about "destructive criticism", which I've now seen so often that I can write articles of rebuttal in my sleep, and sometimes do. My own re-entry into the Noises Off office this year, after a couple of years of staying in the bar, was a nostalgic event, and I was rewarded with the allocation of a daily column... entitled "When I Was Your Age"! Well, fair enough, it was 20 years ago that I attended my first NSDF, so the potential for old-fart-type reminiscence was considerable, and boy, did I embrace it.

Brand

One of the guests at Scarborough was Anthony Alderson, director of the Pleasance venues in London and on the Edinburgh Fringe. He gave no hint at the time of the announcement that would be made shortly thereafter, which is the subject of the Quote of the Fortnight on the page opposite: as of this year the Pleasance, Assembly, Gilded Balloon and Underbelly will brand the comedy offerings at their venues as the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. I share David Lister's ambivalence-at­best towards this announcement. On the one hand, it's only natural that the major venues should club together in this way; until a few years ago, three of them published a joint programme anyway in addition to the overall Edinburgh Fringe programme (and that was before the Underbelly had climbed into the premier league of Fringe venue empires). It doesn't necessarily mean anything other than branding.

As against that, it is also a natural development of the increasing dominance of comedy on the Fringe; if numerical trends continue, 2008 will for the first time see more entries in the Comedy category of the Fringe programme than in Theatre. Just as the Fringe came to be an all-round bigger deal than the Edinburgh International Festival (whose 2008 programme, also announced in recent days, follows Jonathan Mills' first EIF last year by once again showing a canny and intriguing thematic preoccupation without locking all events firmly into a single constricting vision), so comedy on the Fringe has come to be a bigger deal than theatre. Which is a pity... and I say this as a critic of comedy as well as theatre. It's a pity that pretty much all evening programming in the major venues is comedy rather than theatre (although Assembly and Pleasance have launched modest correctives to this in the past year or two). It's a pity that stand-up names are driving ticket prices up, when the lower overheads of most comedy shows mean that on the contrary companies can charge less than theatre shows and still have a greater chance of recouping their financial outlay. And it's a pity, in some ways, that a full divorce couldn't take place. In practice, if Fringe and Comedy were to go their separate ways, it would be Comedy that hung on to the prime August slot, and Comedy that took most of the media attention and even more of the media money. But the Big Four's announcement does seem to hasten the time at which some greater kind of autonomy will be implemented; I fervently hope and pray that it doesn't bring the whole Fringe edifice crashing down.

Natural

These one-page Prompt Corners leave no sidebar space for acknowledgements such as the winner of the Society for Theatre Research's Theatre Book Prize. Not entirely astoundingly, the prize has gone to Michael Billington for his The State Of The Nation. I'm not privy to any of the judges' thoughts, but to me Michael's wide-ranging, constantly engaged and engaging essay on the social and political place of theatre in recent decades always seemed a natural winner.

Ian Shuttleworth | ian@theatrerecord.com

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At the Back

Can You Hear Me Singing?

At the Old Vic last month a hundred or more enthusiasts gathered for a conference on "the nurture, development and production of new musical theatre in Britain ". With the reasonably catchy title What's The Score?, it was put together by Chris Grady, who has worked tirelessly for the cause over the years in various guises, currently as the organiser of the pressure group Musical Theatre Matters, and the programmer for a musicals-only venue at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, the George Square Theatre.

Reputation

Aside from the pressure group there are a number of initiatives already in existence to promote new British musicals. Mercury Musical Development looks after composers and lyricists and has more than a hundred musicals in progress on its books. Andy Barnes' Perfect Pitch is a commercial attempt to foster new work that has had some success over the last two years and will put on a showcase at the Trafalgar Studios this autumn. And yet it has to be said that new work in Britain has had a pretty low profile since the golden eighties, when for a decade London became the centre of the musicals world. Bold initiatives like the Cardiff festival of new music have fallen rather flat, and fine talents like Howard Goodall or Styles and Drewe do not have the automatic public acceptance of Lloyd Webber or Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Now the United States is resurgent, and Broadway has regained much of its former reputation, in part because America has always taken musicals much more seriously than we do — they see them as an art form rather than a cash cow — and in part because of one or two recent initiatives which might have their applications over here.

Showcase

These were explained by some of the key speakers at the Old Vic. Sue Frost and Randy Adams, John Sparks, Sam Levy and Gigi Bolt all had associations with the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT). Gigi is a former advisor on musical theatre to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), America's rather thin version of the Arts Council, while the others all have hands-on experience of developing musicals in regional theatres such as the Goodspeed Opera House where Annie was born — Sue and Randy were in London for the UK première of their latest project, the William Finn song anthology Make Me A Song. NAMT has grown into a body of 140 members — theatres, producers, university departments — that last year put on 26,000 performances to a combined attendance of nearly 16 million. The Alliance's annual showcase — eight 45-minute presentations of shows in development — reaches 600 potential producers, and has been responsible for shows that range from Thoroughly Modern Millie to The Drowsy Chaperone. It runs on the self-interest of its members. There is a hunger for new musicals in America which we in Britain can only envy — some theatres put on only new work.

Even more evangelical in his address was Kris Stewart, Australian founder of the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF). Kris came to New York from a subsidy-conscious theatre culture like our own and quickly discovered that they do things differently in New York. He got the idea for a concentrated few weeks of musical showcase in a clutch of neighbouring off-Broadway theatres, and went out to find the money to make it happen (NYMF now gets a small grant of $10,000 from NEA). His message was loud and clear — don't just stand there, do something. NYMF is now a thriving institution which attracts an eager young audience who want to see "crazy people putting on a show".

Enthusiasm

The Americans' enthusiasm communicated itself in a big way, and the break-out groups that followed were buzzing with ideas. The session after lunch with Barbara Matthews and Emma Stenning of Arts Council England and London respectively might have dampened some of that enthusiasm: not a bit of it. Both were keen to stress that ACE is open to suggestion on musical theatre, and Emma gave a good list of projects already under way. They took on board a suggestion from the morning break-outs that money raised by successful projects could be considered return on investment — indeed something similar is already in place for Matthew Bourne's company. Barbara cautioned that only a small portion of ACE cash is flexible, but Emma stressed that flexibility by pointing out that their departmental boundaries and art from distinctions were breaking down: theatre people were talking to dance people, which bodes well for someone coming in with a proposal that crosses theatre, dance and music — like a musical. Justifying public money does mean that you must demonstrate that you are reaching more new people, both acknowledged.

Creativity

And this shouldn't be all that difficult, when you consider that whether you like them or not the recent series of Saturday night searches for musical leads has uncovered a huge audience out in tellyland who are now hooked on musical theatre. The marriage of art and commerce should work to the benefit of new British musicals. This was one of the major themes to emerge from the conference's final session, an upbeat discussion full of creativity. In spite of the bracing realism of director Phil Willmott, who pointed out that for all the new musicals activity around him it was still mighty difficult to find a good one, the meeting agreed that this was a time for musical theatre to hold its head high, as a highly successful art form that is making a lot of money in the West End and regions, attracting that new TV audience and very much in need of exciting new work.

How to foster it? From the ground up. Joseph started as a school production, and schools everywhere are making musicals, often original ones of their own. They need encouragement and expertise. The drama schools are realising more and more that their students need all-round training for musical performance — another golden opportunity to develop new musicals. And the producing bodies, from ITC through TMA to SOLT, can help by setting up groups (or one overarching group, along the lines of NAMT) to encourage the development of new musical product. A direct consequence of the day was the setting up of a working party to look seriously at a London version of NYMF. It met for the first time last weekend, for a lively brainstorming session that is likely to bear serious fruit. For once, we are not sitting around waiting for a financial miracle — there are people out there determined to create their own.

Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com

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Contents / Reviews

Reviewed in issue 6, 2008:
London
THE ARAB, THE JEW & THE CHICKEN New show by Conflict Relief		Courtyard	13 Mar		30 Mar	306
CHAINS OF DEW Revival of play by Susan Glaspell		Orange Tree	14 Mar		26 Apr	292
DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE Revival of play by Roy Williams (Royal Shakespeare Co)		Tricycle	18 Mar		29 Mar	294
FRANKENSTEIN New adaptation by Catriona Craig from novel by Mary Shelley (Love & Madness)		Riverside	11 Mar		27 Mar	290
GUERILLA / WHORE New plays by John Cargill Thompson 1 Carol Vine (Two Bob Th)		Tabard	19 Mar		5 Apr	287
THE HARDER THEY COME Revival of musical by Perry Henzell, based on his film		Barbican	11 Mar		5 Apr	288
HELLO MARU-CHAN New play by Kazenoko		Unicorn (Clore)	12 Mar		29 Mar	305
JERSEY BOYS New musical by Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe, book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice		Prince Edward	18 Mar			299
THE PROVOKED WIFE Revival of play by John Vanbrugh (Camarilla Th)		Courtyard	4 Mar		30 Mar	306
RANDOM New play by debbie tucker green		Royal Court	10 Mar		12 Apr	284
SIVE Revival of play by John B Keane (Inda UK )		White Bear	11 Mar		31 Mar	293
SNOWBOUND New play by Ciaran McConville (Debut TC)		Trafalgar Studio 2	13 Mar		19 Apr	307
STAN LAUREL, PLEASE STAND UP! New play by Bob Kingdom		Warehouse Croydon	14 Mar		30 Mar	291
TALENT Revival of play by Victoria Wood		Upstairs at the Gatehouse	11 Mar		6 Apr	291
THE TEMPEST Revival of play by Shakespeare (Love & Madness)		Riverside	12 Mar		22 Mar	306
THREE HOURS AFTER MARRIAGE Revival of play by John Gay		Union SE1	13 Mar		5 Apr	308
THE TWIN STARS New play by Mike Kenny		Unicorn (Weston)	18 Mar		6 Apr	305
Regions
BRIEF LIVES Revival of play by Patrick Garland		Windsor, Theatre Royal / touring	17 Mar		22 Mar	320
THE CHILDREN'S HOUR Revival of play by Lillian Hellman		Manchester, Royal Exchange	10 Mar		5 Apr	311
DEATH OF A CRITIC New play by Keir McAllister (DumDumDum Prods)		Glasgow, Ramshom	20 Mar		22 Mar	325
THE DOUBTFUL GUEST New piece by Shòn Dale-Jones from poem by Edward Gorey (Hoipolloi)		Watford Palace/touring	19 Mar		22 Mar	318
JONAH AND OTTO New play by Robert Holman		Manchester, Royal Exch. Studio	13 Mar		5 Apr	318
THE LADY FROM THE SEA Revival of play by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Mike Poulton		Birmingham Rep	11 Mar		29 Mar	313
ONE NIGHT IN NOVEMBER New play by Alan Pollock		Coventry, Belgrade B2	11 Mar		29 Mar	312
OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD Revival of play by Timberlake Wertenbaker		Keswick, Theatre-by-the-Lake	15 Mar		22 Mar	321
PEOPLE AT SEA Revival of play by J B Priestley		Salisbury Playhouse	28 Feb		22 Mar	319
THE RISE AND FALL OF LITTLE VOICE revival of play by Jim Cartwright		Perth! touring	14 Mar		29 Mar	324
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of play by Shakespeare		Dundee Rep	12 Mar		29 Mar	321
SATURDAY NIGHT & SUNDAY MORNING Revival of adap. by Amanda Whittington from novel by Alan Sillitoe		Oldham. Coliseum	14 Mar		29 Mar	320
VANITY FAIR Revival of adaptation by Declan Donnellan from novel by William Makepeace Thackeray		Edinburgh. Royal Lyceum	15 Mar		12 Apr	323
YEAR OF THE RAT New play by Roy Smiles		Leeds, WYP Courtyard	12 Mar		5 Apr	314

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