A West End matinee used to be defined by decorous ladies from the Home Counties taking tea on a tray at the Haymarket, or silver-haired seniors sitting dutifully through Schiller at the Donmar or Judi Dench in something on Shaftesbury Avenue.

It’s all change at the Novello, where yesterday’s matinee of Into the Hoods — a show I’ve promised myself to catch after hating the first twenty minutes in Edinburgh and leaving two years ago — was nothing short of a joyous riot.

The place literally rocked as hundred of schoolkids who’d never even heard of Ivor Novello tore the place up and went hip hop mad in the urban jungle fairyland dance non-drama. Even I tapped my feet and clapped my hands a couple of times.

Kid culture has taken over the London theatre big time, with West Side Story packing them in at Sadler’s Wells and Bola Agbaje’s Gone Too Far! bringing a fresh black crowd to the Royal Court for a play that speaks directly to its audience about peer pressure, national identity crisis, weaves, moves and knives. 

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My annual fix of Ken Dodd — the greatest performer I have ever seen live (or dead, for that matter) on stage — was not a disappointment at the Rose, Kingson, last night, though I feared none of us would make it on time.

Doddy turned up with his partner Anne Jones, black poodle and van load of props and costumes just ninety minutes before curtain up, hot foot and slightly exhausted from a two-night gig in Malvern. And the slow front of house and badly designed access in the auditorium meant a crush of seniors in the foyer not seen since the January sales at the Wincarnis and Complan counters in Boots.

My guests were Petroc Trelawny, the Voice of the Proms on Radio 3, and Roger Foss, editor of our Whatsonstage magazine. Petroc was a Doddy virgin, Roger had not seen the King of the Diddymen since the London Palladium date in September 1974; and that was ten years after Doddy had peaked in the national fame and television stakes, having played two famous Palladium seasons (the first of an astonishing forty-two weeks) in 1965 and 1967.

Petroc had told some friends he was going to see Ken Dodd. They thought, great, Candide! No, Ken Dodd. Never mind, Dodd is the best of all comedians in the best of all possible worlds, and Knotty Ash.

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Although I am reserving my real birthday treat for Sunday, when I go to see Ken Dodd at the Rose in Kingston — like the Arctic explorer, I may be away for some time — the day itself was marked by the opening of West Side Story at Sadler’s Wells, though this anodyne, “international”-style production rather punctured my over-excited expectations.

And in a year when seventeen teenagers have already been stabbed to death in London, the brutality of the gang warfare and the ever brilliant social pleading of “Gee, Officer Krupke,” seemed more poignant than ever. Except that it didn’t, really: the whole show now needs an overhaul, an update, new choreography and, for heaven’s sake, a cast of kids. Tony looked about thirty-five.  

I see that Sir Richard Attenborough, with no evidence whatsoever, is blaming violence in the movies for the knife culture. I’m afraid he’s wrong, as knives are just a by-product of what’s going wrong in society, as West Side makes abundantly clear.

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Action for Children’s Arts, ACA, yesterday launched a manifesto, welcomed and endorsed by all three major political parties, based on Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Creative activities in schools have been submerged under endless testing and the barmy curriculum requirements of numeracy and literacy that mean nothing if unrelated to self expression and a mood of discovery.

Beverley Hughes, Minister at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (the DCSF) hoped children would now catch “the culture bug” while her Labour and Lib Dem opponents, Jeremy Hunt and Don Foster, shadows at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (the DCMS), chimed wisely on the intrinsic value of art and music in schools and the need to “free up” again the creativity of children and, perhaps more importantly, that of their teachers.  

I’m right behind the ACA, the DCSF and the DCMS. Even members of the APOATH (A Plague on All Their Houses) department, the BBCPIS (Bring Back Corporal Punishment in Schools) movement and the SPATBFE (Stupid Parents Are To Blame For Everything) league muttered their approval as they sat hypnotised by some quality arguments in the Unicorn Theatre yesterday.

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I’ve only just caught up with Jay Rayner’s  piece about critics and bloggers in The Observer last Sunday and it seems a fair summary of the situation.

Critics can write, and know what they’re talking about, concludes one of Jay’s witnesses, whereas bloggers mostly only fill one side of that equation.  

You begin to wonder, though, when you open the Sunday Telegraph and find our old friend Tim Walker claiming — oh no, not this again — that new plays are under threat from musicals (not true; they’re just outnumbered by them, as usual, in the West End) and that The Female of the Species writer, director and leading actress last collaborated in 1984 (wrong: it was in 2002).  

Walker’s blunders and lack of knowledge and experience have led him proudly to assume some sort of martyred status, as though he’d acquired a reputation for silliness by being a fearless truth-teller in cahoots with no-one.

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There’s no doubt that Eileen Atkins is playing a character loosely modelled on Germaine Greer in Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species at the Vaudeville, though why Greer should be so touchy about it is beyond me.

Dubbing Murray-Smith an insane reactionary — though she has neither read nor seen the play — Greer suggests the piece might be worth a production in Auckland, New Zealand, not the West End.

Maybe, but then we’d be denied the pleasure of Dame Eileen protesting that Margot Mason, the alliterative GG clone, is not a life coach, but a provocateur and responding, in true GG style, that her sleek French windows are French “because they’re thin, stylish and up themselves.”
 
Greer knows a bit about drama, and shouldn’t be surprised that characters in modern plays from Bernard Shaw to Alan Bennett are often — if not, indeed, always — modelled on real-life and contemporary public figures.  Even Atkins herself has written an impressive  theatrical study of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. 

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On Tuesday night Whatsonstage.com was happy to return to the National Theatre with over one hundred Theatregoers to see Thomas Middleton’s bloody Jacobean play, The Revenger’s Tragedy. The production uses modern day dress and music to set off the extravagant, incestuous and bloody antics of those who dwell around the old lascivious old Duke and his sons.

With a boisterous start to the evening, our Theatregoers were plunged into a frenzy of Jacobean action from the comfort of their air conditioned Travelex seats. We were very pleased to greet all our Theatregoers in the beautiful surroundings of the National’s Olivier box office and to offer everyone a copy of our latest double issue magazine featuring all the latest news from across the West End. (more…)

Ten years of bite at the Barbican — the arts centre’s ongoing year-round festival of the performing arts — was celebrated at a lunch yesterday hosted by artistic director Graham Sheffield and head of theatre Louise Jeffreys, goaded on briefly from the sidelines by the ever ebullient Barbican supremo Sir Nicholas Kenyon.  

Guests at a long table in Searcey’s Restaurant on Level 2 waged war with big lamb portions and arts figures like Alan Davey, new chief exec at the Arts Council, Kerry Michael of Theatre Royal, Stratford East, reps from Michael Clark’s dance company and Complicite, as well as Thelma Holt, magnificent as ever in her inevitable Issey Miyaki.

But why were we there, apart from having a bite to eat? To celebrate the departure of the RSC which allowed bite to expand so spectacularly? To ask why yet more Laurie Anderson and Robert Lepage? To speculate on the future of internationalism and the Edinburgh Festival and to wonder why Sheffield hasn’t been transferred to the Athens of the North?

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It’s been 40 years since the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil was banished from theatres, but that’s no excuse for critics to censor their own moral values.

Everyone has been banging on about 1968. But people tend to forget one of the most significant events of that year – the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s power of censorship over British theatre. I’m not sure whether any celebration is planned or what form it should take. Maybe Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, Bill Gaskill and other luminaries who suffered from the censor’s prescriptive power could gather outside his old office in St James’ Palace and utter a few choice expletives. Or maybe someone could sing a medley of numbers from Hair, the first show to benefit from theatre’s new-found freedom. (more…)

As I’m going on holiday — in order to be back in time for Zorro the musical — I thought it appropriate to take stock.

It’s awards time, folks, for the first six months of the year, and I won’t be influenced by any fellow judges because there aren’t any, or by any popular vote because, unlike dealings at the great Whatsonstage awards nominations party to be hosted on 5 December by Joan Rivers — yes, folks, the one and only Joan Rivers — there’s no democracy here.

So, worst show by famous authors is a dead heat between Michael Frayn for Afterlife and Tony Harrison for Fram, both at the National. A close second was everything at the Arts Theatre and third was The City by Martin Crimp at the Royal Court.

Best West End comedy was a dead heat between Fat Pig by Neil LaBute and God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton. Best play was also a dead heat: Philip Ridley’s Piranha Heights and Anthony Neilson’s Relocated.

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