There was a lunch for the critics at the Almeida on Friday but as only two critics turned up — myself and Matt Wolf — it was hard to decide whether to feel privileged or ashamed at being there at all.

The programme information we received is embargoed, for some reason, until tomorrow. Suffice it to say that with Juliet Stevenson, Christopher Hampton, Jez Butterworth, Samuel Adamson and William Shakespeare all in the mix, Michael Attenborough’s rather underrated regime to date will be no less interesting over the next year or so.

Press agent Janine Shalom did a quick ring round to discover that most of the invitees had either forgotten or simply not bothered to turn up, which one can interpret as either bad manners or just laziness. On the other hand, it had been a fairly tough week with the all-dayer at the Old Vic and a Stratford opening, so maybe the poor diddumses had just run out of steam and spare time.

Still, sultry bar manager Hannah Woolhouse laid on a very nice buffet lunch which Matt and I tucked into in the very agreeable company of Attenborough himself, executive director Neil Constable, artistic associate Jenny Worton and Janine.

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250 Theatregoers joined us for this sell out event to see Kenneth Branagh in Chekhov’s Ivanov at the Wyndham’s Theatre as part of the Donmar’s West End Season, which will also feature Judi Dench in Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade, Jude Law in Hamlet, and a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night starring Derek Jacobi. We will be hosting an Outing to Twelfth Night on 6 January which is currently booking very fast so to secure your tickets, click here.

Our Theatergoers were all treated to a free programme when they arrived, which was a good job, as we had a fantastic cast turn out for our post-show Q&A, including, Linda Broughton, Tom Hiddleston, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Lucy Briers and Whatsonstage.com Outing veterans Malcolm Sinclair, Andrea Riseborough and Gina McKee. As a last minute surprise we were also thrilled to be joined by the Donmar’s artistic director and director of this production, Michael Grandage. They were all happy to talk about what life as part of the Donmar team is like, their feelings about West End seat prices, and their involvement with this production. We also had some excellent questions from the audience and would like to thank all those who contributed. (more…)

Kevin Spacey loves Alan Ayckbourn to death, and nearly proved it when an over-zealous bear hug at the end of The Norman Conquests trilogy sent Britain’s most successful living playwright flying and gasping for air while flat on his back on the stage.

He had been led to this undiginified nemesis by Spacey himself and accorded a heartfelt standing ovation which was only marred by the unexpected tumble into the front stalls, customers aghast, spectacles shooting in all directions.

But the grand old man of Scarborough jumped up pretty smartish, aided by critic Matt Wolf, still beaming, seeing the funny side in mild mishap just as you would expect from someone who mines such comedy in the misery of our everyday relationships.

We measure out our theatre-going lives in treats like this all-day trilogy of Ayckbourn plays, The Norman Conquests, at the Old Vic yesterday. We had assembled for coffeee and croissants before an eleven o’clock morning start and departed ten and a half hours later after three plays, two meal breaks, and a host of brief encounters on the way, and not just with the plays’ characters.

Director Matthew Warchus told me he was still astonished that Ayckbourn wrote this interlocking masterpiece when he was just thirty-three years old, but I don’t think his unabated admiration stems from the fact of Ayckbourn being so fledgling an artist, but that his stock of human misery and disaffection with domestic relationships was so palpably and distressingly high.

Light comedy? Pshaw! Over three plays we have sex, so to speak, on the fake fur rug, thrown biscuits all over the place, a punch on the nose, two men snogging, cries of “slut” and bleats of suicide, binge drinking, broken plates and a car crash.

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There are some forms of theatre that remain immune to the passage of time and the whims of fashion. One of them is the music and poetry concert popular at literary festivals, and in village halls and empty churches.

Critics don’t often bother with such events and, when they do, invariably wish they hadn’t. But an invitation to see Love and the Gentle Heart, a medieval musical tableau recounting the stories of Dante and Beatrice and Abelard and Heloise in the St Pancras Old Church got the better of my curiosity.

Chiefly, I admit, because the church — one of the oldest Christian sites in the country, with a Saxon altar and the graves of Mary Wollstonecroft and Sir John Soane (and the great clown, Joey Grimaldi, was married here) — has intrigued me for years as I routinely sail pass it in either car or Number 46 bus en route from King’s Cross to Camden Town.

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The sensational revival of Waste at the Almeida still leaves a few unanswered questions. Such as: what exactly is this version? Is it a synthesis, as Sam West implied in a Guardian interview, of the early banned version and the first performed text? Is it the same text as the RSC performed? If not, what is it, exactly?

And the new Methuen Drama edition, woefully short on background information, explanatory notes (there are none), let alone dramaturgical analysis, says the action takes place in 1927 (the programme says 1924) and lists the cast lists of the first unlicensed performance in 1907 (Granville Barker himself played Henry Trebell), the first public performance in 1936 and this new Almeida cast.

This is shocking theatre history, and very confusing to audiences wanting to know what exactly were the historical issues behind the play and how were these modified in the later publication and performances. The major revivals since 1936 have been at Leatherhead in 1966, at the RSC in 1985 and the Old Vic in 1997.

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I’m very confused. When it comes to Chekhov and Strindberg I’m not at all sure that the apportioning of blame and credit is entirely correct. The triumphant Ivanov at the Wyndham’s is referred to widely as Tom Stoppard’s translation. But it isn’t. It’s Stoppard’s text based on a literal translation by Helen Rappaport.

And what about Creditors at the Donmar? It’s a new “version” by David Greig, which means he doesn’t know Swedish and has either worked from somebody else’s literal translation or lined up a few of the available English texts — notably Michael Meyer’s — and
pummeled his own out of them. English dramatists have been doing this for years with Ibsen, that’s for sure.

It’s high time for some whistle-blowing on this. People like Rappaport — who first prepared a literal translation in 1977 for Trevor Griffiths’s wonderful Cherry Orchard at the Nottingham Playhouse — should be given the prominence in the programmes and the printed text that their endeavours deserve.

They should also receive a fair whack of the star dramatist’s royalties. And people like Greig, and publishers like Faber, should tell us exactly what has been going on and how this script was arrived at. (more…)

Our Whatsonstage.com Outing to Table Manners at the Old Vic last night (1 October) was a sell-out success, with 160 Theatregoers attending the event.

Table Manners is part of Alan Ayckbourn’s comic masterpiece The Norman Conquests, a set of three plays all set in the same house over the same weekend. This is the first time that the plays have been on the London stage in 34 years, and The Old Vic has been transformed to accommodate them. Our Theatregoer’s were able to enjoy the impressive in-the-round seating, which caused some confusion when attempting to find seats, but was greatly appreciated by all of our guests. It also meant that The Old Vic has a new temporary bar underneath the stalls, giving our Theatregoers all the more opportunity to use their free drink voucher during the interval. (more…)