A good shout has gone up for actors’ power from the elegant throat of Dame Diana Rigg, no less, who has taken to the warpath over theatre posters: why the names of directors and designers on them, but not of actors?

She’s right in one way, of course: no stage designer ever sold a play to the general public. But how many actors’ names on posters these days — apart from her own, of course, and those of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, ever really shift tickets?

For someone so grounded, Dame Di’s a bit hazy on history, even her own. She didn’t join the RSC in 1958; she joined the Stratford company. The RSC was formed in 1960 — she was a shooting star in an ensemble whose very existence denied the individual actor any place on the poster billing. And quite right, too.

We didn’t need to be told who was in the company in those days. You went along and expected the best, and usually got it. It was a company of great actors — Ian Holm, Ian Richardson, Elizabeth Spriggs, Brewster Mason, Dame Di’s favourite Paul Rogers — who were all “unknown” as names but whose work represented an ethic of excellence.

Paul Scofield, Donald Sinden and Peggy Ashcroft had huge status in the film and theatre world, but their names were never on the posters.

It was a bad day for the RSC when they put Judi Dench’s name on the poster for All’s Well That Ends Well.  The poster billing was an indicator, to me at least, of a sort of corruption in the RSC, and also of its wilting identity with the public.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe as the showbusiness world is so fragmented and the competition so intense, all companies, even the RSC, have to do everything they can to woo the casual punter.

But there is no justification for having an RSC, or a National Theatre, unless it represents something greater than the sum of its individual parts and the vanity of its artists and the demands of their agents.

I see the Donmar Warehouse lists its actors alphabetically on the posters for Othello, with no special case made for the presence of Ewan McGregor as Iago. They can afford that democratic luxury as the show will sell out anyway.

But I bet the advertising would be different in the West End. And so it should be. Will Jude Law’s name be lost in a blizzard of nonentities when the posters go up for the Donmar’s Hamlet at the Wyndham’s next year?

So I half agree with Dame Di. Having directors and designers names on posters is pointless. Its nice for the nominees but means nothing to the public.

If Ian McKellen’s in the West End, you want to know about (these days, at least) in several large sizes of typeface. But if he’s playing King Lear with the RSC, forget it. (You might as well, anyway; I gather the show’s completely sold out at the New London already!)

And I’m not sure if Dame Di’s example of the NT not splashing the names of Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker on the posters for the forthcoming Much Ado is a very good one. Do these marvellous actors have a direct line to the British public’s affection and concerns any more than did Alan Howard,  Janet Suzman or even Dame Di herself in her pre-Avengers era, at the RSC? I’m not at all sure.    

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 6:46 pm 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.