Mobile phones and Essex connections
Mobile phones going off in theatres are a fact of life nowadays, but five going off around me at the first night of Peter Hall’s magnificent revival of Pygmalion at the Old Vic (one belonging to a critic) was a bit of a record.
We’ve all been there. My mobile went off during a quiet bit of an opera in Edinburgh a few years ago. But nothing compares to the sweat you break out into when you discover your phone was on all the time as you leave the theatre.
I’m so paranoid about this now that I double check my phone even when I know I turned it off as I entered the foyer. It’s quite common, though, to find yourself sitting next to someone who looks at their messages on silent during the play, oblivious to the visual distraction such behaviour entails.
Theatres should instal sin boxes for offenders to drop in a fiver when they’ve transgressed. Most people are so embarrassed they would be only too happy to make such a contribution to the theatre’s restoration fund.
This is preferable, surely, to the venal new custom of theatre owners adding a £1 charge to the ticket price for the restoration costs for which they alone are responsible. When you know this has been done, you should demand a refund in the same way as I hope you demand a refund when a service charge has been added, without your permission, to a restaurant bill.
It’s high time audiences bit back at producers and theatre owners. Here’s my pet complaint at the moment: at the first night of Gone With the Wind, my guest bought two large glasses of mediocre red wine at the bar and was charged £16.40.
This has to be taking the mickey. It’s disgraceful that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group should charge such prices. And then there’s the dreadful show to sit through, for God’s sake!
You get a jolly good glass of red for £3.50 in the Nimax-owned theatres of Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer. Andrew has always said he wanted to give better value at theatre bars, and it’s high time he renewed his vows. I’m sure he will.
Meanwhile, theatregoers should get more audible in a good way, and I fully approve the customer who shouted his disapproval at the Martin Crimp play The City at the Royal Court the other night. Not because I agree with him, but because he’s entitled to say what he likes once the play’s over and to let the actors know what he thinks at the curtain call.
Apparently this unhappy chap, an actor and RADA lecturer — I’m assured it wasn’t my old friend Lloyd Trott, but I can’t nail his identity at the moment — shouted out, “Well, that was terrible, thank you.”
An angry debate then ensued involving at least twenty members of the audience who had enjoyed the play and spilled over into the foyer. That’s more like it! If only there was such vivid audience participation every night instead of the usual bovine complicity or indifference.
Many years ago I went to a Galt MacDermot (the composer of Hair) musical called Isabel’s a Jezebel at the Duchess. Towards the end of the first act, one of the actors — I think it was Carole Hayman — advanced to the front of the stage and unwisely asked the audience, “What is all this, anyway?”
Several disobliging members of the audience told her in no uncertain terms before beating a retreat at the interval. I was among this small but discerning band of customers, but I hasten to add I wasn’t a critic at the time.
In fact, I was barely out of short trousers. When I really was in short trousers, I lived in Chadwell Heath, Essex, as did the new Eliza, the gorgeous Michelle Dockery and the producer David Ian whom I sat near last night.
We are all of different generations, but I like to think that we all have something in common because of this connection. It’s a sort of East End overspill type of thing involving beauty, talent and a sense of humour. Michelle and David score highly in all three categories and I’m happy to claim a stake in the third.
It turns out that David went to the Chadwell Heath primary school, St Chad’s, that my Saints Peter and Paul team beat 5-3 in the semi-final of the H G King Cup in 1959, going on to lose the final 1-0 to Barley Lane at William Torbett’s school playing field in Seven Kings.
David passed his eleven-plus and went on to Ilford County High grammar school, whose other alumni include Sir Trevor Brooking and Raymond Baxter — as well as Michael Hutchings, our speedy left winger in the cup final team (I don’t know what happened to him).
Michelle Dockery is the second great Eliza from Chadwell Heath. The first was Liz Robertson, who starred in Cameron Mackintosh’s first Arts Council-sponsored revival of My Fair Lady in the late 1970s.
And like Liz, whose father was a policeman, Michelle has a gazelle-like willowy beauty and a forensic on-stage intelligence.
So much for the slatternly image of the sterotyped Essex girl. And David Ian and I are splendid antidotes to the East End barrow-boy image of the Essex boy, I like to think.
