Hornchurch Echoes
I have a soft spot for the Queen’s at Hornchurch (no, it’s not a swamp). Much of my early theatre-going was done in the original Queen’s in the early 1960s, when the company included Martin Shaw, Susan Stranks, John Hargreaves and Nigel Hawthorne. It was a cosy little house that had been opened by Ralph Richardson in 1953. Its 500-seater 1975 civic successor on Billet Lane has never been as loveable, but under Bob Carlton this past decade it has become one of the most extraordinary success stories in the British theatre.
Last season it played to 85 per cent of capacity (not including the pantomime). It has the smallest Arts Council grant of any producing theatre in the land and has to earn 75 per cent of its income. It also runs a permanent company, a claim only the Dundee Rep can currently match. Carlton’s policy is avowedly populist, with musicals, Shakespeare, concerts and country music all jumbled up together in a programme that has instant rapport with its Essex heartland audience. And even if metroplitan sophisticates (well, alright, me) might flinch a little at the quaint vivacity of the “fringe minimalism as mainstream” atmosphere of the current production, Around the World in Eighty Days, with its circus setting, jokey improvisations and “poor theatre” morality, the audience laps up every second and cheer like maniacs at the end.
Orson Welles’s extravagant 1946 Broadway version of the Jules Verne classic (with music by Cole Porter) is about to feature in Ian Marshall Fisher’s Lost Musicals season; the show bombed after 75 performances and lost a Broadway record amount (at the time) of $300,000. Welles had to make up the loss by selling on the film rights to Mike Todd — who eventually made the epic picturesque movie in 1956 starring David Niven and the Mexican actor Cantinflas, not to mention Shirley MacLaine, Robert Newton, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Frank Sinatra, John Gielgud, John Mills, Robert Morley, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
Novel adaptations mean extra homework for critics — how can you comment on an adaptation without knowing the original? — but when the books are as good as they are at the moment — A Fine Romance, Absolute Beginners, Vernon God Little, Around the World and The Hound of the Baskervilles — who’s complaining?