Beating up over Brecht and West End actors
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.
I’m fully expecting most reviewers to be more sympathetic towards Christopher Shinn’s cosily predictable and inert play at the Royal Court, Now or Later, than they are towards Brecht and Shepard, two of the finest theatre artists of our times.
It’s deeply unhealthy in a culture when prejudice and personal boredom take hold as some sort of orthodoxy of opinion. It’s happened with Brecht, and it’s happened with the public discussion of the West End play and the abundance of musicals.
There was Michael Grandage on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning arguing that his new West End season was somehow a signal that the straight play was not ready to roll over and make way for yet more musicals.
This was a bit rich coming from someone whose last two shows in the West End were Guys and Dolls and Evita, but let that pass (they were both bloody good, as it happens). One almost tires of pointing out that market forces rule the West End and that producers are not charities obliged to serve up straight plays just because critics think (again, misguidedly) that a straight play is inherently superior to a musical show.
The audience for straight plays is spoilt for choice at the National, Royal Court, the Donmar, the Soho, Almeida, Hampstead, Orange Tree, everywhere you turn on the fringe; you could go to the theatre thirty times a month and still not sate your appetite for straight plays if that’s what you want. So what’s the problem?
And plays in the West End have to have star names. “Why?” asked the incredulous BBC interviewer, as though this was something new. Tom Stoppard dealt with the Jonathan Miller objection to David Tennant playing Hamlet with an elegant swipe and said that he was not going to object to Kenneth Branagh being a very good actor, nay a star, in his and Grandage’s new Ivanov.
Audiencers like to see actors they love and have heard of. Simple as that. John Osborne and Christopher Hampton would not have had sold out audiences at the Royal Court thirty years ago, let alone the West End, had not Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield graced their plays.
The trouble is there are too few stars around these days to support new writing in the West End, so it is very good news indeed when competent television names or young film stars with theatrical pedigree boost the chances of the straight play.
And it’s always a risk. Who knows whether Josh Hartnett or Kelly Brook are going to be any good in Rain Man and Fat Pig, respectively? It’s a bonus, and a producer’s dream, if they are. And more fodder for the glib and ignorant argufiers if they’re not.