First Night Follies
The critics were invited to review Never Forget at the Savoy last night but were requested to hold those reviews until tomorrow. The idea was that they should experience a “real” audience while the pseuds, celebrities and hangers-on have their “gala guest night” tonight.
The same trick was turned at the opening of Bad Girls last year and didn’t seem to do the show any good: the “press” night was an atmosphere-free zone clogged up with critics and their plastic bags and the show closed fairly quickly.
Last night was different. Critics were surrounded by parties of young women who appeared to have been bussed in from Basildon while consuming alcopops by the vat load. The air was blue with foul language and stale with cheap scent and fizzy burps.
The show itself was audience-proof and surprisingly enjoyable. Even better was the interval, with critics spared the possibility of an Essex gang bang by herding together in the Mezzanine bar at the invitation of the management.
Wine and fruit juice flowed, and plates of canapes supplied by PJ’s brasserie in Covent Garden — raw tuna, fresh asparagus, salty sausages and smoked cheese — were demolished with a fervour that suggested some scribes hadn’t eaten since breakfast time.
After the raucous climax to the show, with the Take That tribute band — Fake That — happily reunited, and the Gary Barlow lead singer type happy again with his girlfriend after a brief fling with Robbie Williams-style solo stardom, it seemed only too appropriate to be sucked into the Coal Hole next door to witness the tempestuous finale to the European Cup Final on television.
This was more dramatic than any play I’ve seen recently, with an unseemly riot in the middle of a Moscow downpour, the Chelsea star Didier Drogba dismissed from the pitch by the referee and the unbearable tension of the penalty shoot-out.
So you could say I experienced a full night of popular culture, which is certainly more than I did at Marguerite. For a show that has been knocking around for five or six years, Marguerite is a limp beast indeed; why on earth didn’t Boublil and Schonberg write the score themselves? The music of Michel Legrand is deeply mediocre for so giant a genius of the cinema soundtrack.
My blind date at Marguerite was a great success. Joseph Palley was indeed as friendly as befits his name, the elder brother of the businessman who paid £8,000 (at a Hampstead Theatre charity bash) for the privilege of my company and dinner in Joe Allen’s.
Semi-retired, he works in the advertising world and is a keen theatregoer, especially at the Almeida and the Donmar Warehouse. It turns out that his wife is Mexican and her father had business interests in the middle of old colonial Mexico, near a town called Guanajuato which I visited thirty years ago for an arts festival.
In Guanajuato, I was asked if I would like to go and see a Georgian theatre company performing Brecht. And they turned out to be the amazing Rustaveli Theatre of Tbilisi. My report of their work sent John Drummond, then director of the Edinburgh Festival, rushing over to Russia to see them and book them. They then came to London and were a huge hit all over Europe.
Apart from the magic of Guanajuato itself, there was the food, the heat, the new friends, and the lovely late Dolores del Rio, who was president of the festival. So I had lots to talk about with Joseph, and it seemed hardly to matter that the celebrity count was a little low in the restaurant.
Admittedly David Benedict of Variety was at a nearby table, Martin Sherman lurked in the darkness and Richard Polo, the restaurant owner, called by to say hello. But that hardly constitutes a celebrity roll call, now, does it?
Where was Biggins when I needed him most? Everyone else seemed to be noisy businessmen, no doubt waiting for their shy, retiring young daughters and girlfriends to come streaming out of Never Forget across the road.