Critical Comment for Jul-Aug 06
I hate missing lunch. But recently, through mild illness, I missed a bit of a corker. Four West End producers invited the daily and Sunday critics to a do at The Ivy. What was meant as a convivial social occasion apparently turned confrontational. The assembled producers accused the critics of double-standards: of judging new West End plays more harshly than subsidised work. That night my colleagues were positively buzzing with indignation at the unfairness of the charge.
But might it have a smidgin of truth? I don’t honestly think any of us sets out in the evening donning the poisoned boot simply because it’s a West End show. Critics, by and large, are stage-struck figures who manage to preserve an innocent faith in theatre even into mature years. And, if you know what you think in advance, why bother to turn up? The most I will admit is that, if I sense a stinkeroo coming up, I sometimes exercise the privilege of not reviewing it.
What critics less readily admit is that judgement is often affected by context. Let’s talk turkey. In 1998 I saw Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Watching an Irish play, steeped in magic and folklore, before an Irish audience, I was captivated by its weird charm. Olwen Fouere, one of the great unsung actresses, also gave a startling performance as the demonic heroine. But when the same play was done at Wyndham’s in the West End a few years later, with Holly Hunter as the swan-lugging Hester, I was distinctly under-whelmed. The play seemed to have been severed from its roots and Hunter’s accent owed less to the Irish boglands than to Skid Row. Same text. Same play. But a totally different aesthetic experience.
There are myriad ways in which context influences judgement. You can see a duff play at the Bush, the Gate or the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs and feel that only you and 60 other people have had a rotten evening - sitting in a commercial theatre with 900 people, who have paid high prices, your sense of indignation is likely to rise. Kevin Spacey, for instance, came in for a lot of flak over an opening season that included Cloaca and National Anthems. If we’d seen those same plays in a fringe theatre, without the Old Vic’s historic associations and the same aura of expectation, I suspect our disappointment would have been less.
This raises yet another issue: the whole question of hype. Given the precarious economics of the West End, I can see the need for advance publicity. What I resent is the kind of carefully orchestrated build-up that pre-empts critical judgement. A classic case was The Lion King which was heralded by a mountain of puffery. The normally sane Peter Conrad, despatched to see the show in New York, even told us in the Observer that the musical wasn’t merely based on Hamlet, it was better than Hamlet. My own mild disappointment in the show was, I suspect, a reaction to the ludicrous expectations created. Not that my review mattered a damn - the show has been selling out for years.
All I’m suggesting is that critics don’t live in glass bowls and are bound to be affected by context. What we should also all acknowledge is that the West End has a different ethos from the subsidised theatre. The one is there for profit; the other isn’t. Critics also build up a different relationship with institutional theatres. We visit them regularly. We often nod politely at the artistic director. We know the theatre’s track record. It is difficult, I’d suggest, to feel the same kinship with the Apollo, the Vaudeville or the Duke of York’s, which are simply garages for hire and which may house anything ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Which brings me - you’ll be pleased to hear - to my one constructive point. I suspect the West End can only survive, long-term, by becoming more like the subsidised theatre. In other words, individual theatres have to acquire a clearer identity and character. It actually happened in the days of the old actor-managers: of Irving at the Lyceum, Beerbohm Tree at Her (or His) Majesty’s, Gerald du Maurier and Charles Hawtrey at Wyndhams and Gladys Cooper at the Playhouse. You went to those theatres knowing roughly what kind of entertainment you were going to see.
Times change. I would like to see theatre owners appoint artistic directors to programme particular buildings, so why not give Simon Callow, Richard Eyre, David Hare or Thea Sharrock the chance to put their stamp on individual West End addresses, as Spacey is trying to do at the Old Vic? I’ve also long argued that it’s absurd that West End theatres should be dark until 7.30pm each night. Why not have lunch-time or early-evening talks, concerts or poetry readings to make the theatres more continuously accessible? Tentative steps have been taken in that direction with great success, but on nothing like the scale required.
This, for me, is the nub of the issue. When the public goes to the National, it feels it is visiting its own building. When it goes to the West End, it is stepping nervously into someone else’s; and I suspect there is a still a sense that the chief aim is to extract as much money as possible from the public’s pocket before expelling into the street. The West End has to become more available, open and artistically distinctive. In fact, more like the subsidised sector. Only when that happens will the charge that critics apply double-standards become irrelevant and absurd.
