Billington directs Pinter, sort of

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.

How strange that youngsters on the brink of a career should experience something that will probably remain the highlight of whatever follows.”Michael Billington’s hanging around here somewhere,” croaked Pinter, resuming his seat.

And indeed he was, professional notebook at the ready even though this was the last of three performances.He greeted me nervously, not sure whether or not he should speak with a mere critic. “Harold’s here,” he whispered, almost breaking out in a sweat. I dived into the bar and gratefully chanced upon a good friend, actors’ agent Denise Silvey.

We decided on a fortifying beaker of wine. The student bar staff fumbled with corkscrews and produced two generous quaffs for a total charge of £4.40. Now, that really is a cheering improvement on barbaric West End tariffs.
 
Inside the Macowan Theatre auditorium — a friendly, scruffy horse-shoe arena I’d not visited for twenty years — I sat next to a LAMDA board member who explained that this site near the Cromwell Road had been sold (much to the relief of local residents, fed up to the back teeth with screeching drama students prancing around all day) and there were plans to extend the headquarters on the noisy Talgarth Road and build a brand new theatre from the bottom up.

With RADA revamped, Central basking in splendid new facilities at Swiss Cottage and the Guildhall School launching a new £57m re-build campaign, these are stirring times on the drama school front. Let’s hope all these plans survive the recession.

But what of new actors? It must have been nerve-racking enough for them performing right into the lap of the playwright, sitting stock still and sphinx-like next to his wife, the lustrous Antonia Fraser. They held their collective nerve.

Odd, though, how they all seemed too young for the characters they were playing, as if they’d not really lived enough to play such snake-like, verminous specimens at the celebration dinner in a top restaurant, and in the sinister new club of Party Time.

In the foyer, each actor had a Spotlight photo and sheaf of CV’s bracketed to the wall, so that agents like Denise could pluck the information for future reference and indeed possible recruitment.

This cattle market aspect of the exercise is faintly distasteful. The poor mites will come creeping out of the show later on to see how many of their biogs have been taken. Imagine your dismay if none have gone at all!

In the interval, I named three actors I thought were worth a second look and they were exactly the same as the three on Denise’s shopping list. And at the end of the show, she plucked a couple more. I know it’s invidious, but I’m pretty certain we’ll be hearing a little more from Nikki Julian, Eleanor Fanyinka and Sam Clafin (if he learns not to keep talking out of the side of his mouth) in the coming years.

The others shouldn’t worry about not being selected by agents straight away. I once reviewed a freshly cast production of Romeo and Juliet and banged a big drum for the (now forgotten) actor playing Mercutio while hardly pausing to note the eager young Romeo. His name was Ralph Fiennes. And I confidently predicted a limited future for an actor doing a rather stilted one-man show on the fringe an ice age ago. His name was Jeremy Irons.

And what of Billingspoon’s directorial career? He’d be the first to say he doesn’t have one, but likes to have a go once every ten years: he did a Marivaux one-acter for the RSC in 1989 and a double-bill of Pinter and Strindberg at the BAC in 1997.

I’m sure he learns a lot and the actors must enjoy sharing his knowledge and critical perceptions. But if you think that being a director is a serious occupation, an artistic vocation even, you must think, to adopt the Pinteresque vernacular, that the whole LAMDA project was a bit of a piss-take.

Only practice makes perfect, and you can’t play the easiest of piano sonatas without doing your scales and arpeggios every single day of the year. I can’t imagine that directing a play is any less of an artistic challenge. In fact, I know it isn’t.

Richard Eyre once said that he’d been directing plays for thirty years and still wasn’t sure how it’s done. And if he doesn’t know, what price a critic’s understanding, let alone qualification?