The news that David Tennant is to step down soon as Dr Who is certain to fuel the widespread speculation that he might be succeeded by Adrian Lester as the first ever black time-traveller in the long-running television series.

It sounds a very good idea to me, though the subject didn’t come up at all last night at the National Theatre, when I joined Adrian and his delightful actress wife Lolita Chakrabarti for a drink after the premiere of DV8’s To Be Straight With You.

The couple met when both studying at RADA and they now have two young daughters and live in London, despite Adrian’s international film and television commitments. We only had the one drink as they were dashing away to check out yet another possible venue for Adrian’s upcoming fortieth birthday party.

He said one very interesting thing. That when he played Rosalind all those years ago for Cheek by Jowl in New York, people he met around town refused to believe that he wasn’t gay. In other words, an audience assumes you must be gay to play a woman on stage.

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Actors act. Directors direct. Critics criticise. Right? Well no, not exactly. Sometimes we invade each other’s patch. I’ve just emerged from a month directing LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Drama) third year students in a triple bill of Harold Pinter plays. And, while I couldn’t possibly comment on the quality of the finished product, I can honestly say I’ve learned a lot about Pinter, the theatrical process and possibly myself as a result.

My point is that people with a passion for theatre shouldn’t be confined to a single role. Antony Sher acts, writes and paints. Michael Pennington and Simon Callow have as great a talent for putting words on paper as they do for projecting them from a stage. Mark Ravenhill is an adroit columnist. But, when a critic ventures into new territory, there is invariably shock and surprise. A decade ago, four critics, including myself, were invited to direct a season of plays at the Battersea Arts Centre. We were treated by the media as a freak show. And although Nicholas de Jongh earlier this year wrote an excellent play, Plague Over England, there was faint astonishment that a critic could challenge regular practitioners on their own turf. Why on earth not? (more…)

It’s not every day of the year I sit through a show and end up trying on the costumes after the curtain call. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t hanging around on the off-chance of a free swagger in the silken schmatter.

Nor am I looking to step up to the plate as an understudy for La Cage aux Folles. But as I tried to execute a modest exit from the Brunswick Gallery in the Russell Square shopping centre last night, I was hauled back my companion, fashionista Georgina Godley, and instructed not to be a spoilsport.

After all, as was all too shockingly obvious, Donald Hutera, ballet critic of The Times, was already giving us a monumental twirl in a floor-length silver grey coat with coloured flashings that made him look like a shameless reject from Strictly Come Dancing.

So I sullenly adopted an unsuitable garment and subjected myself to the derisive hoots of my friend and the unconvincing compliments of takis, the lower case Greek designer and installation artist whose work this all was.   

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No disrespect to Michael Billington, a critic I relish and a true friend, but I simply don’t understand why students at LAMDA, one of the country’s top five drama schools, would want to be directed by him in their “showcase” final year performance.

Admittedly they were doing Pinter plays, and Billybong’s the world expert. But it’s a bit like inviting someone round to fix your sink who’s not done much plumbing, or hiring someone to conduct an orchestra merely because he can read music.

The performance of the Pinter plays — Party Time and  Celebration (plus an almost totally embarrassing half-read, half-recited ensemble “go” at Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech) — was okay. Over-italicised, under-lit, awkwardly grouped, but okay.

Two or three of the actors obviously have good futures. The entire cast of nine was individually greeted by an extremely frail and croaky Pinter on Saturday night. He shook each one of them by the hand and said he took his hat off to them. Emotions ran high.

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“Listening in acting is everything. Listening in life is everything.” So said Anna Chancellor during the course of a remarkable masterclass she gave at the Donmar Warehouse yesterday.

The audience of students had completed their performances of devised dramatic responses to the Donmar’s two current productions, Creditors (in which Anna plays Tekla, the sensual novelist) and Ivanov. Now she told them there were two approaches to acting: using your own emotions; or absorbing stuff from outside, as she once did on trips to the zoo.

So she picked four schoolkids at random from the crowd and sent them outside to follow, stalk even, innocent civilians for ten minutes, then return and recreate their walks and physical habits.

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I don’t mind — well, not really — actors who can write a bit clogging up the arts pages, but it’s a bit rich when Michael Simkins, a nice cricket-loving chap and a good actor, gets his theatre history so woefully askew filling up theatre programmes.

In the (not many) dull moments of Piaf at the Vaudeville, I flicked idly through my programme. Not much doing, then I alighted on a lightweight, casually compiled  page-filler by Simkins.

First of all he casts unnecessary aspersions on dear old Hugh and Margaret Williams by not even acknowledging their authorship of the catchily titled Plaintiff in a Pretty Hat. He’d never heard of it. Nor had he heard of the “delightfully named Orissia Trilling” who had written a preview of the play in a back number of Theatre World.    

Orissia? Some mistake here, surely. The critic in question was Ossia Trilling, and she was a he. Indeed, Ossia was the most he-like critic ever seen on the aisle, resembling in his thrusting manner, well-scrubbed friskiness, insistent style and shiny bald head nothing so much as an erect, pink and highly expectant penis.

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Next weekend, the Oxford Playhouse is celebrating its seventieth anniversary in Beaumont Street with two gala performances, one hosted by Libby Purves, the other by Gyles Brandreth. I hear that the preparations are chaotic.

But does the theatre have all that much to celebrate anyway? A new book by Don Chapman, the former admirable critic on the Oxford Mail, tells a sad and sorry story of blundering mismanagement and pusillanimous pottering about by the university authorities. And it’s years since the theatre had anything resembling a permanent company, let alone a national profile.

Our regional theatre is in a parlous state. I hear that the beautiful old Lincoln Rep is threatened with closure after the local authorities have withdrawn their measly annual support of £170,000.

And the Northcott in Exeter, saved from the Arts Council chop by a concerted campaign of outrage, is now advertising two highly paid jobs — that of “creative director” and “marketing and customer service director” — to work with the board and chief executive.

It’s a complete scandal. What does this chief executive, Kate Tyrell, do, exactly, if she’s not arranging the programme and overseeing the relationship of the theatre to its own community?

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Jakob Dylan, son of Bob, played a concert at Wilton’s Music Hall on Friday night and very good it was, too. His vocal and acoustic guitar set, with a three-man backing group, proved that the 38 year-old who used to have a group called the Wallflowers (whatever happened to them , I wonder; perhaps they joined in the party after all) is a fine artist in his own right.

His folk pop songs inevitably sound Bob Dylan-lite. And, boy, does he look like dad. Same face, dark glasses, pork pie hat, identical drawl and sliding articulation. But I guess he’s given up worrying about all that by now. He certainly seemed relaxed enough.  

It must be terrible being the offspring of someone famous, especially if you go into the same line of business. In his cabaret days, Peter Cook used to beg our sympathies for his next guest, a young woman who had been through a lot, had experienced a difficult home life and was trying hard to emerge from under the huge dark cloud of her father’s reputation.

He urged us to put our hands together and give a very warm welcome to…Miss Stephanie Hitler.

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There’s a new government initiative — Shakespeare Live — that has been going on all year and nobody knows about. So to blow the lid on the enterprise I took a car ride down to Coggeshall in Essex yesterday with the producer Roger Chapman. 
 
Our destination was a medieval monastic barn in the picture postcard village of Coggeshall where 250 schoolkids assembled — free of charge, transported by coach — to see Propellor’s six-man, seventy minutes version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

They loved it. So did I. And so would have my two maiden aunts who used to live in this village many years ago. One of them was severely handicapped with polio and used to slide down the stairs on her bottom, shouting “Wheeee.”

I used to enjoy her doing this so much that I used to do it myself. In fact, I’ve only just recently stopped doing it.

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What is it about French actresses? Outside of Vanessa Redgrave, we simply don’t have an English actress who gives herself in body and soul to an audience as Juliette Binoche does. Or Isabelle Huppert. Or Charlotte Gainsbourg. Or even Isabelle Adjani.

And if there’s a more astonishing performance on the stage this year than Binoche’s in the curiously under-acclaimed in-i at the National Theatre, I look forward to hearing about it.

I caught the show, belatedly, at a Sunday matinee, obviously a successful innovation as the place was jam-packed. The South Bank was jam-packed, period. And not with tourists. Everyone seemed to be local, out on a spree, spending like billy-o, credit crunch be damned. I’ve not seen anything quite like it. There was even a paraplegic basket ball game on the free theatre greensward. 

Inside, the Lyttelton crowd was more international, and markedly young and enthusiastic. Binoche and Akram Khan were received after ninety minutes of love-sick angst and ecstasy with a resounding ovation that brought them back to the stage three, if not four, times.  

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