King Lear Delay
One has enormous sympathy for Frances Barber, Goneril in the new RSC King Lear with Ian McKellen, who was knocked off her bike by a jay-walker in Stratford-upon-Avon thus inadvertently causing a delay to the Press showing. But increasingly one feels that the show should have gone on and been reviewed with her understudy in the role; the critics could have been invited back to see Frances’s Goneril when the show returns to London after its world tour. If indeed it does return to London. Director Trevor Nunn put out a series of reasonable explanations for the postponement, addressing his remarks to the critics’ circle and “not for publication,” which is rather naive of him, one feels. And anyway, surely this was Michael Boyd’s call as artistic director. Or is the Nunn/McKellen company operating under a separate hegemopny within the state-subsidised RSC?
One wonders where the RSC chairman, Sir Christopher Bland,stands on the issue. His sold out production of King Lear is playing to full houses (paying full prices) and no reviews. Mind you, Sir Christopher has been busy reviewing in glowing terms in The Spectator his own new RSC-authorised edition of the complete Shakespeare, edited by his own RSC board member Jonathan Bate. He also declares that the RSC’s decision to stage the complete works was “brave.” Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
Overheard recently in the Wolsey. everyone’s favourite theatre restaurant when the hamburgers have palled in Joe Allen and the budget won’t quite stretch to the Ivy:
Chistopher Biggins: “I’m doing a new show where I play a prominent B-list celebrity.”
A A Gill: “Oh,really? How are you going to manage that?”
No sight of Biggins or Gill on Saturday night when I joined a table for a sixtieth birthday party and enjoyed a superb dinner of quail’s eggs, lamb cutlets and chocolate mousse. The birthday boy was my wife Sue Hyman’s cousin Roland Stross, a property developer in Leeds who has almost gained his profession a good name by the transformation of the Yorkshire city’s inner mercantile and shopping area.