How long, ideally, is a play? In a way, it’s an absurd question. It all hinges on what the writer has to say: Pinter’s One For The Road at 30 minutes feels as right as King Lear at three-and-a-half hours. I’ve no wish to tell dramatists what to do. But a recent week of theatregoing led to some unexpected conclusions. Having sat through a nine-hour Robert Lepage epic and two 80-minute pieces, I began to wonder whether we weren’t succumbing to the inordinate or the needlessly cryptic and losing sight of the middle ground.

The happiest night of my week was spent at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. This was partly because this restored Georgian gem is, for my money, the most beautiful theatre in England. It also helped that the play, a rare piece by Elizabeth Inchbald called Wives As They Were and Maids As They Are, was a jolly account of the late 18th-century sex war and ran exactly two-and-a-half hours. At that length I felt this charming piece had, as Jane Austen’s Mr Bennet said of his daughter’s piano playing, “delighted me sufficiently”. (more…)

Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, generally known as Cav and Pag, are two wonderful short Italian operas given a right seeing to at the ENO by director Richard Jones in translations by the poet Sean O’Brien and Billy Elliot’s own Lee Hall.

The first, set in a Sicilian village square, is relocated by designer Ultz in a grim, cramped warehouse with a surprising lack of staging for the great interlude (Zeffirelli had his church-goers streamimg down the stairs) and no fatal orange grove.

But the second, echoing the same themes of tragic love and crime passionel, is a country harlequinade requisitioned as a Ray Cooney farce in a 1970s British rep climate of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, with backstage intrigue, comedy chaos and an onstage audience where mothers march out angrily with small children when the air turns blue with sexual innuendo.

This is funny as far as it goes, but the music doesn’t allow for the theatrical dynamic imposed upon it and the show becomes increasingly wearisome. Pagliacci, the clowns, Canio and Tonio, are here named Kenny “Paxo” Evans and Tony O’Sullivan — they are fitted out to resemble a photo of Little and Large in the programme.

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You find jewels, sometimes, in the most unexpected of places. The Unicorn children’s theatre by Tower Bridge has simply the most enchanting and delightful piece of theatre I have seen all year and it’s a puppet show from Holland.

Yes, I’ve seen Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch, and Peter Brook’s Fragments, and David Tennant’s Hamlet, and Les Dennis in Eurobeat. But Onny Huisink’s Pero from the Speeltheater in Edam is an unflawed little gem of design, performance, acting and music, a touching and delightful sixty minutes of commedia dell’arte perfection that sets new standards in children’s theatre.

And I managed to find my way to it without any hiccups. I say this only because getting around town has suddenly become a total nightmare. The other night I had an outing to Richmond that was as awkward and eventful a trip as hitchhiking to the Hebrides.

It reminded me of James Agate’s stern rebuff when asked by his editor at the Sunday Times to review a production in Kew. “Sir, I am this newspaper’s drama critic, not its war correspondent.”

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Our much-anticipated Outing to Now or Later at the Royal Court last night (25 September) more than lived up to expectations, with principal company members Eddie Redmayne, Matthew Marsh, Pamela Nomvete and director Dominic Cooke taking part in a lively post-show Q&A session.

Running at a brisk 80 minutes with no interval, Now or Later is a tense and timely US election drama, set on results night in the hotel room of the Democratic candidate’s son (Eddie Redmayne). With compromising photos spreading like wildfire on the web, the President-in-waiting (Matthew Marsh) must try and persuade his stubborn and highly-intelligent offspring to release a statement of apology. (more…)

Great stuff in the interval, let alone on stage, at last night’s opening of Flamenco Flamen’ka at the Lyric. Sir Nicholas Lloyd, head honcho of PR outfit Brown Lloyd James, went to the bar and offered to pay with his “to do” list.

Having ordered gin and tonics and champers all round, he flamboyantly flashed what he thought was a big crisp one in the barman’s direction. The said bottle batman was surprised, nay astonished, to find himself perusing a sheet of paper bearing such hastily scribbled legends as “Collect dry cleaning,” “Buy new socks,” “Ring ALW.”

His friends, record producer John Craig and music publicist Jackie Gill, took it all in good spirit, suggesting it was high time Nick stopped airing his dirty washing in public and concentrated on the real work in hand, ie buying their refreshments.

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Yesterday’s Press conference at the National to announce the theatre’s annual report — all’s well, no complaints, sponsorship levels fine, another £10 ticket season from Travelex — was enlivened by Nicholas Hytner’s future programme plans.
 
These include three classics previously staged by the NT — Phaedra, Danton’s Death and Mother Courage; the first with Diana Rigg in Tony Harrison’s translation, the second directed by Jonathan Miller, the third with Madge Ryan directed by William Gaskill — and an old J B Priestley warhorse, Time and the Conways, which will no doubt see Rupert Goold, making his NT debut, doing a “number” on it similar to the revelatory re-tread of An Inspector Calls by Stephen Daldry.

But a faint feeling that the repertoire could be more adventurously explored was subsumed in the overall sense of excitement at the prospect of All’s Well  directed by Marianne Elliott, Fiona Shaw playing Brecht’s Mother (despite a routine groan of dyspeptic displeasure from Charles “Brecht-baiter” Spencer) and Rufus Norris, another NT debutant, taking on Wole Soyinka’s masterpiece Death and the King’s Horseman.

Hytner also revealed that Margaret Tyzack, playing the nurse Oenone to Helen Mirren’s Phaedra in the Ted Hughes translation, might manage to gain the show’s one laugh by saying that she had to go shopping in Argos.   

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Better late than never, I suppose. Andrew Lloyd Webber collected his bus pass last March, and the BBC marked the occasion last night with a concert in Hyde Park which goes out on Radio 2 on Friday 10 October.

Hosted ebulliently by John Barrowman — with quite a lot of “nancying about” as one ALW associate ruefully remarked in the VIP area to the left of the stage — the three hour show was a wonderfully representative catalogue of the composer’s best stuff, with knockout contributions from Idina Menzel singing “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” Denise Van Outen laying down the law with “Take That Look Off Your Face” and Elaine Paige reprising “Memory” from Cats.
  
But was I alone in liking the opening set from Jesus Christ Superstar best of all? Sarah One, ALW’s first wife, nodded quietly when I suggested this. The BBC Concert Orchestra gave an electrifying account of the overture, Joss Stone pitched in vividly with the title song and Steve Balsamo, perhaps the best Jesus ever, gave a truly harrowing and beautiful version of “Gethsemane.”

ALW himself appeared at the end in a pink shirt and revealed that the title of the new Phantom show is Let Love Live, or Love Lies Down, or Let’s Love Life, or something equally unmemorable. I think it’s back to the drawing board with that one.

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It’s funny how agitated people get over what they dislike. Take Brecht for instance. I jokingly remarked in this blog some time ago that committed anti-Brechtians like Charles Spencer of the Telegraph must be gagging to see the Hampstead Theatre’s British premiere of his last play Turandot.

I’d quite forgotten I’d said this and was wrestling with the slight disappointmnet of the play’s first act when, as I approached the bar, Spencer exploded in a fit of frothiness and pointed the finger at me: “It’s all your fault,” he tee-heed in childish glee, like an idiot with a rattle.

Obviously this precipitate squawking — flouting the unwritten rule that critics don’t discuss the show in the interval — was some sort of triumphant self-justification for his own refusal to take Brecht seriously on ideological grounds.

Like most people in the audience I was intrigued to see the last, unfinished, rarely performed (this was a British premiere) play by the twentieth century’s greatest poetic dramatist. And whatever its faults, at least the Hampstead show is continuously theatrical, as indeed is the Sam Shepard play at the Almeida, Kicking a Dead Horse.

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There has never been a funeral like it. Warren Mitchell told a Jewish joke. Someone recited a speech of Macbeth in pidgin English. And a clearly distraught former colleague rushed the coffin, trying to tear off the lid. The dead man’s daughter said that her father used to make her learn poems whenever she asked for a pair of new shoes.

Ken Campbell was buried yesterday in the heart of Epping Forest, removed to his silent resting place among tall trees by a sled drawn by his own three dogs and followed by several hundred mourners and a clarinettist in a kilt.

Tears were shed and handfuls of Essex earth thrown. Luckily, our distressed Hamlet did not proclaim himself once more and jump into Ophelia’s grave — “I don’t want him to be dead,” he had screamed while being bundled from the scene — but no-one would have been remotely surprised if he had done so. Things like that happen with Campbell around. Perhaps he’d ordered it.

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It was flags and clackers a-go-go last night (08 September) at our much-anticipated Outing to spoof Eurovision musical Eurobeat at the Novello theatre.

Sticking closely to the format of the annual show, Eurobeat has enough cheesey songs, bad jokes, dodgy accents and even dodgier wigs to sate the hunger of even the most avid Eurovision fan. And to add to the fun our first 25 bookers collected a free ‘party pack’ - replete with horn, clacker and flag of their choice (Greece proved strangely popular!). The show was a predictably noisy affair, and when the text votes had been counted, the spandex-clad Russian boyband emerged victorious. (more…)