Nice to see The Observer making good their relationship with inveterate first nighter 82 year-old Blanche Marvin; she’s the person you see scuttling around theatre foyers and making a nuisance of herself, dressed like a night in old Baghdad.

Some years ago, the newspaper nearly took her to court after she was found recycling theatre articles (mine, actually) without acknowledgement or permission in one of her vanity publications.

These days, for reasons that escape me, she is taken seriously, even by the great guru Peter Brook. Still this doesn’t stop her shouting the odds at press conferences and being outrageously rude to theatre staff, as she was yesterday at Hampstead.

Artistic director Anthony Clark was announcing an autumn season including Antony Sher’s new play about Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, The Giant.

“This production contains nudity” is not a phrase that will recommend the play to old Blanche.
She took exception in the Observer piece to seeing “Harry Potter in the nude” in Equus, and found Ian McKellen’s willy-waving in King lear “absolutely vulgarising.”

I hope Hampstead give Blanche a front row seat for Sher’s play so she can fully employ her “nose for what’s happening” (she’ll stick it anywhere) when LAMDA graduate Stephen Hagan gets his kit off as the male model. But watch out for even more flapping, clucking and salts-sniffing should Roger Allam as Leonardo decide to strip off as well.

It was a big day for theatre press gatherings. The Hampstead “do” followed the mid-day announcement of Jonathan Kent’s Haymarket season, while John Tusa bad farewell as general manager of the Barbican at a delightful lunch on Level One.

Sir John, who leaves to chair the University of the Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum — you’d think he’d want to go and lie down in a dark room by now — used his speech to bemoan his three failures: that he had never got anywhere with the big city companies; his relationship with the Arts Council was in tatters; and he had not positioned the Barbican in the upcoming culural Olympiad.

How refreshing to find honesty in inadequacy. Fat chance of that with old Blanche.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 9:06 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.