South Bank Follies
It really is all happening on the South Bank these days, with Anthony Gormley’s statues popping up all over the place, everyone praising the re-treated acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall and the bars and restaurants packed to the gills in the summer sun.
On my way to collect my tickets for Philistines at the NT the other day, I bumped into Stephen Pritchard of The Observer en route to his choir practice for the opening Festival Hall concert; and snacking by the river with my producer friend Tom Siracusa I found two more practising choristers on a break, my former neighbours and hot shot Welsh lawyers Gareth and Gerwin. Stephen was singing in a modern piece. The lawyers were singing Schiller’s Ode to Joy. I think this may signify something, but I’m not sure what.
The next day I had lunch in the new Terence Conran restaurant in the Festival Hall with chief executive Michael Lynch and artistic director Jude Kelly, both a little pasty-faced after the previous night’s celebrations. The restaurant is now called the Skylon but it retains the refreshing river atmosphere of the old People’s Palace, and the food is still good, if less hearty.
Lynch is an immensely likeable Australian who was chuffed at the head count of celebs and fellow arty types in the gala audience. Kelly is much more low key and politically correct. Just about to direct Carmen Jones, she is clearly doing the piece because it employs black artists, rather than because she thinks the work is a masterpiece.
On my way to another appointnment I lay down in the sun in the gardens by the Eye for half an hour and pondered the new artspeak, in which directors — including Nicholas Hytner at the NT — now talk about their audiences more than their reasons for directing anything. John Berry, artistic director at the ENO, is exactly the same.
Oh, and Philistines. What a production! Gorky’s first play is one of the few that David Jones didn’t direct in the days when he did lots of Gorky at the RSC. But John Caird did, in a version by Dusty Husghes, in the little Pit, with Fiona Shaw as the depressed teacher. That role is taken by new star Ruth Wilson, Cathy in the recent Wuthering Heights on television, and she’s superb. But so is the whole cast. Just more evidence of the South Bank ascendancy. How will Nicholas Kenyon at the Barbican fight back?