Interesting that the Guardian puts Michael Billington’s rave review of the new David Hare play Gethsemane on its front page today. The minute the political and cultural life of the country comes under proper scrutiny in the theatre, the media takes the theatre more seriously.
How rarely the theatre these days deals with public issues in a serious, challenging and highly intelligent manner may be judged by this very phenomenon. And the Cottesloe was packed with political as well as arts journalists last night.
Peter Riddell, genial political commentator on The Times, greeted me with a cry of “I’m one of you lot tonight!” David Aaranovitch of the same paper barged in on a conversation I was having with John Wilson, radio producer and son of former Arsenal goalkeepr Bob Wilson, on the renewed fortunes of our soccer team Tottenham Hotspur.
And Dame Liz Forgan confirmed that she has indeed applied for the chair of the Arts Council but doubts she’ll get it. I do hope she does. I don’t much like “the great and the good” in the arts world, but I do make an exception for Liz.
Hare’s play is not a bald satire but an exhilarating dramatic fiction with some recognisable jumping off points in the cash for peerages scandal, the embarrassment of a Home Secretary’s family life (huband in financial trouble, child on drugs), and so on.
But Hare is writing a blistering play about the world going to hell in a handcart in public life, the idea that journalists write mostly about people they admire (ie, themselves) these days and, most movingly, about the demoralisation of teachers.
Riddell had read the play in advance and told me on the way in that, whatever Hare said, the play was definitely “about” Lord Levy, Tessa Jowell, the Daily Mail (well, it is certainly and specifically, for some of its length, about the Daily Mail) and Tony Blair. But I don’t think, overall, it is. It takes elements of all those people and the surrounding stories and melts them in a really brilliantly conceived dramatic crucible.
I sat next to Razia Iqbal, the delightful arts correspondent of the BBC, who said she was finding it increasingly hard to get stories about the theatre onto the screen. The BBC isn’t really interested. But she also said that the theatre itself made it hard for itself by refusing access to filmed excerpts. She does feel, though, that Nicholas Hytner is sympathetic to her plight.
Mark Lawson, naturally, was swelling the throng, as was veteran political analyst and pungent political documentary filmmaker Michael Cockerill, actress Zoe Wanamaker and husband Gawn Grainger, playwright and NT board member Kwame Kwei-Armah, directors Nicholas Wright and Jonathan Kent, costume designer sans pareil Fotini Dimou with actor partner Richard McCabe, and all the usual suspects.
The play is heavily sold out and looks certain to transfer straight to the West End. It certainly deserves to. And how, I wonder, will the Evening Standard awards now look without even a nomination for the best play of the year? Pretty damn silly, is the answer. And there is still Tracy Letts’s August:Osage County and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out! to come…
Your goal can be clearly felt in your writing, which is to make sure everyone will enjoy it. I need to say I absolutely did enjoy and am excited for the entertainment. You are appreciated for bringing joy to others.
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