Peep Show pops while the Globe glows
The new David Mitchell and Robert Webb Channel 4 comedy series Peep Show opened with a grumpy pop at the theatre. Which is somewhat ironic as Webb is about to open in a West End play himself, Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig.
Our two soliloquising Croydon anti-heroes booked a double date at a fringe theatre (exterior shooting suggested the Finborough) where something so terrible was going on that Mitchell exploded, under his breath: “If this were on television nobody would be watching…I can’t believe this costs more than going to a film…” and so on.
Webb’s earlier assurance that it was safe to go as theatre’s moved on …”They use proper actors now; Americans and people off the telly”…suggested the duo were being at least semi-ironic themselves.
This was lost, of course, on a dedicatedly ignorant theatre-hater such as Andrew Anthony in The Observer (did he have to use that unlikely name, I wonder, because his real name is Anthony Andrews, just as director Matthew Francis had to reverse monikers in obeisance to the senior actor Francis Matthews?) who promptly applauded the show’s dissing of a bum-numbing art form where you long for the interval the moment you sit on it.
Webb’s role in Fat Pig is that of a man who can’t bring himself to admit to the world at large that he’s in love with a super-sized burger muncher he meets in a lunch bar. It’s a very funny play to read but how funny will it be in the theatre, I wonder, with Webb joined by other “proper actors off the telly” such as Joanna Page from Gavin and Stacey, Kris Marshall from My Family and Sold and Ellie Smith (as the large lady) from Cape Wrath?
Marshall we know from his appearance opposite Billie Piper in Treats can really hack it on stage. And as the quartet is being directed by the author, and the style is definitely new TV sex n’ sitcom throwaway (but a bit of a cut above, naturally, as it’s LaBute), the chances are probably better than even of a good night out.
If the joy of theatre-going passes you by anyway, as it does the dismal Anthony (one of the late middle-aged, left-wing-turns-right brigade over Iraq and Islam, led by Martin Amis, recently chewed up in the Guardian with admirable analytical lucidity by playwright David Edgar), the glorious experience of summer days at the Globe will be lost on you yet again this year.
Saturday’s matinee of King Lear showed no signs of hangover after the Friday night opening, and David Calder was magnificent in the title role, pulling the sky down into the cockpit and loosening our corporate tear ducts when he hugs the disguised Bedlamite “Poor Tom” of Trystan Gravelle’s compelling Welsh Edgar.
Only two people fainted in the pit on a sweltering afternoon, and not even at the blinding of Gloucester, which is done with a fine old squelch of rubbery, bloody eye matter; one in the eye for good taste, you might say.
The four newly painted stage boxes look resplendent, the new brasserie is a triumph on the river and even the pigeons on the roof joined in, paying grave attention to the mightier scenes and copulating merrily in the lighter ones.
I bumped into director Dominic Dromgoole soaking up the sun with his three daughters. He gave no hint that he was about to divide his artistic fiefdom between them — though the eldest did betray a fine critical mind in her comments — nor was he asking them how much they loved him. He didn’t have to; and suddenly I realised that it was Lear’s real tragedy that he did.
