This is what you want, this is what you get

Following the recent discussion of “celebrity casting” at the Finborough Theatre, I’ve been having troubled thoughts about the nature of the West End. Thanks to a small and, in some cases, brilliantly incisive audience, the discussion turned into a heated debate - not so much on the merits or otherwise of casting celebrities in plays, but of why the concept was employed, by whom, for what reasons and to what effect.

What was most immediately apparent was just the sheer size of the gulf between the thinking of West End theatres and the subsidised sector. More interesting was hearing the raisons d’etre of West End theatre put so frankly and bluntly. Paraphrased only slightly the basic argument ran: “We are in the business of making £45-per-ticket events for people who have got that sort of money.” In these days of outreach programmes, subsidised ticket costs and price reductions for the under-26/unwaged, it is quite a culture shock to hear someone effectively say 'if you can’t afford a [very expensive] ticket, that’s your problem'.

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.

I should record that the Old Vic has an ongoing commitment to subsidised tickets for under-25s, and £5 tickets for members of the Old Vic’s immediate geographical community. The excellent work done by the theatre’s youth programme since its inception, and the help this gives to young emerging artists should also be noted. But these very elements make the Old Vic wholly distinct from the other West End theatres.

The West End proper is essentially like private education: if you’ve got the money, you can go. There might be a few sops by way of bursaries or scholarships to squeeze in a few of “the deserving poor” but basically, it is only an option for the wealthy. The irony with this comparison is that it suggests a universe where British state-education is some of the best in the world. Compare the National to any West End venue you care to name: it’s hardly like comparing a bog-standard comp with Eton, is it? And the West End knows it. If you ask any commercial producer about the subsidised sector - stand well back; their irritation is explosive, their contempt blistering. Subsidies are viewed as cheating spinelessness, the compromises forced by the arts council’s politics as an untenable, bureaucratic burden.

And yet, in spite of the Arts Council’s admittedly often ridiculous box-ticking, British subsidised theatre continually artistically outstrips commercial theatre. When Matt Wolf in the Observer a few weeks ago wailed “where, oh where, is the new play?”, he only managed to broadcast his narrow West End-centric agenda (Lyn Gardner quite rightly tears him a new one here). Already this month (in London alone, and off the top of my head) the New Play could be found in the Hampstead, the Bush, the Royal Court, the Gate, Theatre 503, the Oval House and the Lyric Hammersmith.

Yes, the West End appears to be abandoning new plays at precisely the moment that new plays are enjoying their strongest bloom since the mid-nineties. And it seems harder and harder not to blame a narrow-minded, corrosively cynical management structure which appears to be utterly risk adverse. That said, when there is no funding safety net and the consequences of failure run to potential millions of personal loss, risk-aversion seems like an infinitely sensible option.

The main problem here is the cost of tickets. Putting on a new play and asking audiences to punt £10-£15 of their own money seems like a fair enough deal. It’s the price of a bottle of wine in a pub - and for much of the audience, often a straight swap. But somehow the West End has found itself in a situation where it cannot stage plays cheaply. It needs to sell large numbers of tickets which cost a minimum wage-earner’s daily pay packet (before tax) in order to break even. Putting on an untried new play and charging £45 a head is a big ask.

Worse is the fact that by and large West End theatres don’t seem to have much faith in their audience. There is more than a hint of condescension, of corrosive cynicism, and of scorched earth policy theatre-making. The whole beast is stuck in a cycle of attrition: bad production begets poor takings begets increased conservatism begets bad production, and so on. The situation seems to be such that soon the only projects generated for the West End by the West End will be Shaw, Wilde and Shakespeare acted by former-Big Brother housemates, -EastEnders and a handful of the more frequently televised theatrical knights and dames. Of course there will still be TV-backed audition musicals, American transfers, and a smattering of great work with commercial potential from subsidised theatres.

The oddest thing about the West End is - despite its apparent “event-y-ness” and the so-called glamorous atmosphere - no one actually has any affection for the buildings. Rightly so. They are, in the main, pretty dreadful. Give me the Olivier or the Barbican over anything on Shaftsbury Avenue any day. And this is another of the problems. One of the comments beneath Lyn’s piece about new work argues that it is sad that new writers are not given access to big stages. Quite right. It would be. That is why many theatres frequently bend over backwards to facilitate young writers’ access to such spaces, even if only for rehearsed readings and workshops. No one, on the other hand, is saying that it’s a shame that new/young writers aren’t writing more plays for deadly pros. arch spaces. Sure, it is a skill, and plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf make an enduring case for that model, but in general, don’t most people prefer different sorts of auditoria? Does every West End theatre have to be kept in this configuration? The Trafalgar Studios - in spite of its ridiculous pricing policy which refuses to let companies visiting Studio 2 charge less than £22 for full-price tickets - seems to point the way forward.

But of course, refurbs don’t come cheap, and so there needs must be countless more series of Lloyd-Webber grooming “unknowns” for musical theatre stardom before anyone can afford one. Unless, that is, either the government or a consortium with a serious amount of money step in to save the day. As it stands, the West End seems increasingly part of an entirely different universe, and one which has precious little to do with theatre.
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Having said that, I’m terrifically excited to be going to see Patrick Stewart in Macbeth in the West End tomorrow night, in Rupert Goold's production that every initial review from the Chichester run assured us was an absolutely seminal production. So maybe I'm wrong about the West End after all.


Meanwhile, Michael Coveney in his latest WhatsonStage blog proves that the subsidised sector can be every bit as star-struck with his name-dropping-tastic report from the opening night of Life After Scandal. For the record, I beat Mr Coveney's star-spotting hands down last night, since by some strange stroke of fate I spent the whole bus journey back from the Hampstead sat next to a rather bemused looking Jonathan Pryce. I find it oddly comforting to know he still gets buses.

Life After Scandal - Hampstead Theatre

First draft - Written for CultureWars.org.uk

Robin Soans hit verbatim gold in 2005 with his edited collection of interviews Talking to Terrorists. It was showing at the Royal Court on 7/7, and what had been relevant drama became urgent, required viewing. Its level-headed compassionate inquiry became a vital corrective to the media hysteria that followed in the aftermath of the bombings. His new play Life After Scandal, perhaps inevitably, lacks any such immediacy and punch.

As the title suggests, the piece looks at the effects on the lives of those who have been vilified in the national press. It is an interesting subject, but the nature of verbatim theatre casts a long shadow over the evening’s proceedings. For a start, the subjects are a self-selecting sample. The piece begins with a barrage of refusals from potential interviewees, all saying that they don’t want to talk on the subject. Others do, of course - at great length in many cases. But what of those who wouldn’t/didn’t? Perhaps as a result of this reticence, or perhaps as a result of Soans’s specific interests, the range here is remarkably narrow - Two disgraced former Tory MPs (three, if you view Edwina Curry as a disgrace), two MP’s wives, four or five hereditary peers, but no Jeffery Archer, and not a single guilty party from a sex-scandal.

At a stroke, the piece stops being so much about Scandal in general and starts looking at the important results of some serious investigative journalism. Granted, elsewhere Lord Brockett pops up, as does Charles “the coughing major” Ingram from Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? But then we’ve already seen these people (Lord Brockett, the Hamiltons, etc.) on television innumerable times since their “scandals” broke, rehabilitating themselves as media-friendly figures of celebrity fun eating jungle insect life at the behest of Ant ‘n’ Dec. The subjects here are those who have made a living from their notoriety.

Beyond this, there is the problem that one only has the subjects’ insights to illuminate the subject. Only if they betray themselves, or cast new and unexpected light on the subject, can the play really take off; which, by and large, those interviewed do not. There are exceptions - Robin Cook’s ex-wife gives a chilling insight into the circumstances of her divorce from the late Foreign Secretary - but mostly what we are offered is a lot of self-pity and anger. All quite understandable, but it feels that in order to get the interviewers to talk, Soans threw nothing but underarm balls while offering tea and sympathy. There is a spark when the words of Guardian journalist David Leigh, who broke the Jonathan Aitken story, are intercut with Aitken’s personal attacks on him and vice versa.

Ironically, one ends up making precisely the sort of judgements that the subjects of the play rail against so vociferously. The Hamiltons come out of it fine, as does Edward Lord Montague; Charles Ingram is understandably angry, if unintentionally hilarious; Lord Brockett is bluff, blokey and fine. Edwina Currie and Margaret Cook are both enormously sympathetic characters, although this may have as much to do with Geraldine Fitzgerald’s portrayal of both, which lends humour and gravity in precisely the right measures. Jonathan Aitken fares less well at the hands of his actor; Philip Bretherton often crosses the boundary from portrayal into pastiche. The potential for Aitken’s words to sound pompous, self-deluding and grandiose is gleefully seized - with the odd result that he comes out of it looking and sounding much more like a louche, self-ironising Alan Clark. David Leigh doesn’t do himself many favours either, preferring to remain vitriolic against Aitken and the Hamiltons, where simple indifference would have looked more humane. Craig Murray, despite being by far the most courageous character on stage, at times runs worryingly close to sounding every inch the paranoid mess that the British establishment paint him as.

The play’s arguments and presentations are a little muddled, and come across more like a mass of source material than a finished product. That said, the acting is consistently engaging throughout and, on a moment to moment basis, the play is never less than interesting. Sadly it never manages to go much beyond this to offer new insights into the nature of scandal, other than to suggest that “the establishment” deliberately use it as a weapon of control to uphold the status quo.

This suggestion is rather punctured by the fact that virtually every scandal-struck interviewee is at least very upper-middle class, if not actually aristocracy, while the press are uniformly presented as cockerney oiks en masse and, when interviewed, are clearly from less privileged backgrounds than their targets - giving the overall impression that all scandal reporting is an elaborate form of class war being waged against our rulers by a bunch of ill-bred, uppity proles. Ultimately, however, despite the interesting subject matter and, no doubt, good intentions, Life After Scandal is too polite to make enough noise to hit any big targets.

Coming soon...

The shattering "eyeball-eating scene" from Mark Ravenhill’s one-man Edinburgh version of The Complete Sarah Kane*.


I’m still in Edinburgh detox mode. To this end, I have finished the latest Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel, and played on YouTube. I can’t recommend the Rebus novels highly enough as a mode of de-Festivalisation. They are all set in Edinburgh and almost all of them totally ignore the Festival. It is a good way to reclaim the city as a functioning place rather than a three-week drinking binge. Reading them while actually there is even better. I was very pleased with my morning routine this year, which included buying a newspaper and getting on the bus and reading it on the way into town from Morningside - yes, I know it’s lazy, but it was lovely to keep pricking the Festival bubble every day.

On the bright side, it’s nearly September and thus the new rash of London openings kicks off pretty soon...

The Cut sees an unlikely twin-set of films about cross-dressing adapted for stage with Ma Vie en Rose already running at the Young Vic (already drawing a stinking review from Charles Spencer). A more hopeful bet may come in the form of the Old Vic’s star-studded production of Almodovar’s All About My Mother. I emphasise “may”.

Also recently opened is the Emperor Jones at the National, which also reopens the doors on its enormously popular Enda Walsh/Mark Ravenhill pairing from last year’s NT Connections, Chatroom/Citizenship.

I suppose everyone who has ever cared about theatre should probably try to get excited at the prospect of the new Complicité show A Disappearing Number which opens next week at the Barbican. With original music by Nitin Sawney, we are promised. As if that helps.

Over in Hammersmith, the Lyric chucks on the first of the long march of Edinburgh refugees with the NTS Bacchae and Subway from the Traverse. Similarly, at the Soho, Tam Dean Burn in the adapation of Luke Sutherland's novel Venus as a Boy opens shortly.

Over at Hampstead their inventive and interesting Daring Pairings season kicks off the week after next, with a collected/edited selection from Mark Ravenhill’s excellent series of shorts that comprised this year’s Ravenhill For Breakfast, followed by a selection of works created by collaborations between diverse writers. This is followed by another verbatim play from Robin "Talking To Terrorists" Soans - Life After Scandal - which is based on interviews with Neil and Christine Hamilton, Charles and Diana Ingram, Jonathan Aitken, Edwina Currie and Craig Murray (again).

Probably the most exciting forthcoming London season is the Royal Court’s ambitious international season, kicking off with Martin Crimp’s new translation of Ionesco’s seminal anthropomorphic fascism parable Rhinoceros running in rep with a new version of Max Frisch’s Fire Raisers (here translated as The Arsonists) from Alastair Beaton, while upstairs there is: The Ugly One by Germany’s Marius von Mayenburg, Kebab by Romanian Gianina Carbunariu, Free Outgoing by India’s Anupama Chandrasekhar and in a double bill, The Good Family by Swediah Joakim Pirinen alongside The Khomenko Family Chronicles by Natalia Vorozhbit from the Ukraine.

Another couple of interesting items come in the form of Punchdrunk’s Masque of Red Death at the BAC and the new production of The Country Wife at the Haymarket, which marks the theatre’s new lease of life as a producing house.

Somewhat less inspiring on paper, but no doubt deftly executed are: Awake and Sing! at the Almeida and Flight Path at the Bush (whose entire first season under Josie Rourke lacks the same excitement as the Court under Cooke, but we shall wait and see). Similarly Fragile and (what sounds like a woefully misconceived) Merchant of Venice at the Arcola both sound slightly on the worthy-but-dull end of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, for those of you unable to achieve Edinburgh closure just yet, there’s still Hippo World Guest Book - Redux if your afternoon isn’t quite the same without sitting in Brooke’s Bar listening to Chris Goode yelling: "AND I AM NOT A MORON OR I WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO TYPE!" through the wall at tea time.

Alternatively, this mad little song from Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, which I was overjoyed to find on YouTube, might just do the trick.



* not really.