Matinee hip hop fever
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.
You’d hardly expect the same audience to take any interest in Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, probably the hottest ticket in town right now, and yet I was astonished to find at a schools matinee of the superb Donmar production that the inner city students had responded more than enthusiastically to the archly phrased comedy of plant plots and strained maternal relationships.
Not only that: the kids gave the show a standing ovation and peppered the actors with pertinent questions at an after-show Q and A. You could have knocked me down with an aspidistra.
Which only goes to show that once you get young people to the theatre, they will find their own way of enjoying it, and you don’t necessarily have to take them on in their own territory or make undue allowances for culture gaps and rifts.
Bola’s play, however, stands in an important Royal Court tradition of front line city reportage going right back to Barry Reckord’s Skyvers in the mid 1960s and Nigel Williams’s Class Enemy twenty years ago.
The difference now is the race issue — Reckord was a black writer but his characters are all white — and the marked absence of virtually any reference to schools or education. The authority figures of teachers loomed large in Reckord and Williams, even if they were ridiculed or ignored. The comedy policemen in Gone Too Far! find their precedent in Officer Krupke in West Side Story.
I find this all immensely encouraging for the health of the London theatre, though I am slightly downcast to learn that the packed early audiences for David Eldridge’s excellent Under the Blue Sky are not being maintained at the Duke of York’s.
I love the Duke of York’s but it’s looking a bit dowdy at the moment. The place needs a spruce-up and a lick of paint and if you go out on the pleasant Circle balcony overlooking St Martin’s Lane you have the nasty experience of seeing the filthy marquee from above.
If I owned the theatre, I’d be out there with a pot of paint right now. Doesn’t the Ambassador Theatre Group take any pride at all in these wonderful theatres they own? Come on, Howard and Rosemary, I’ll hold the ladder while you skip lunch to slap on some weather proof.
The refurbished Novello of Cameron Mackintosh is a model and a marvel of how it should be done. The front of house was spotless at yesterday’s matinee, the welcome enthusiastic, the interior a breathtaking masterpiece of renovation and good upkeep and the posters and photographs on display a fascinating living testimony to our theatrical heritage. Then we all got down and boogied!