Jogging on the heath over Christmas I overtook my old friend, financial journalist William Keegan, and jovially greeted him with a “Good morning, Sir William.” He was entitled, I now realise, to feel irked by this salutation as I note from the honours list today that he’s only been given a CBE.

Still, congrats to him, and to the Lady Vaizey, art critic mum of Tory politician Ed Vaizey, who’s been similarly gonged, and indeed to Michael Sheen, dubbed OBE for services to impersonation with special reference to David Frost and Tony Blair.

It’s been a wonderful few days of not quite knowing which day of the week it is. My highlight was a day trip to Whitstable and lunch in an oyster bar on the beach. And we’ve been singing carols for England, not in church, but in neighbours’ houses.

The Christmas dinner itself was interrupted by news of Harold Pinter’s passing and this had to be dealt with in between the goose and the pudding. But our toasts were full and hearty, as he would have wished.

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It was a mixed weekend for David Edgar, both on an off the pitch. First, the Newcastle United defender scored his side’s only goal against Liverpool before conceding a penalty that sealed a heavy 5-1 home defeat. And secondly, he mourned the passing of Harold Pinter with the best piece written on the playwright in yesterday’s Guardian.

Of course one shouldn’t be surprised that a footballer should share the name of a playwright, but I experience a jolt of illicit pleasure, almost, in contemplating that David Edgar might make a telling contribution while careering down the right wing, or that the other David Edgar might miscue his own defensive clearance and score an own goal.

I doubt somehow if Edgar the playwright often gets the misdirected mail of the footballer, though even a writer as well known and widely performed as David Edgar might not pooh-pooh the wage slip of the Premier League soccer player.

There’s a chap somewhere called Michael Coveney who’s the chairman of the Goons Appreciation Society, and as I quite like the Goons myself, I’m happy to be muddled up with him.

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The best thing about Christmas is the daily delivery of cards, the news from friends and the pleasure of decorating the house. The worst thing is sudden bad news, to whit that of Adrian Mitchell’s death on Saturday at the age of 76. Like Ken Campbell, the year’s other too early departing genius, he seemed ever youthful, indestructible, child-like in the best possible way.

Mitchell was a marvellous and unpretentious poet whose impressive theatre work included a key collaboration with Peter Brook on Marat/Sade and US at the RSC in the mid 1960s, and joyous associations with with Declan Donnellan on the National’s Fuente Ovejuna and Adrian Noble on the RSC’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A free talent and an incorrigible free thinker, Adrian lit up like Christmas day every time you met him.

Anyone who says they don’t enjoy this time of year I regard with the deepest suspicion. The streets are alive with happy anticipation, the air tingling with joy, the day closing in round the glowing fires before it has even properly begun.

Bar humbug, bar credit crunch, bar misery. My past few days have involved joining in with people making the best of it, a feeling intensified this year that we may as well, as next year is going to be even gloomier than the last few months of this one.

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What use is sitting alone in your room? There’s no option, really, at this time of year, but to come hear the music play. Which I did big time last night, first at my literary agent’s party in Soho and then at our office do near Oxford Circus.

Mind you, I had something to celebrate anyway. Our son rang from a snowy New York where he said he had proposed to his girlfriend at the top of the Rockefeller Centre and had been accepted. He did so on his birthday, which he happens to share with Beethoven, Noel Coward and Christopher Biggins, so I hope the genius of all three shines on their future life together.

The A P Watt gathering in Soho House was a wonderfully eclectic crowd including Arthur Smith — who confirmed he will be gracing the Critics Circle awards at the end of January; “one of my favourite gigs” he said — Junk novelist Melvin Burgess, journalists Nick Cohen and Andrew Anthony and such eminent literati as Andrew O’Hagan, Helen Dunmore and Philip Pullman.

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Christopher Biggins is sixty today and he celebrated last night by throwing a small bash for four hundred of his closest friends. The Landmark Hotel in Marylebone was awash with dignitaries and stuffed shirts. The atmosphere was calm and well-mannered, a little on the dull side.

So much for the Conservative Party’s Christmas party. Upstairs in the same hotel, the Biggins bonanza was adorned by the real showbusiness aristocracy: Joan Collins, Cilla, Barbara Windsor, Tim Rice, Cameron Mackintosh and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd.

Everyone had their Biggins history, which was the wonderful thing about the party. On our table, Mel Smith had worked with him years ago and known him for ever; two delightful dames from Brighton  (actress Pam Parry and artist Anne Magill) had become new best friends at a charity auction; and the novelist/playwright Fidelis Morgan, first cousin of Lynda La Plante at an adjoining table, had appeared with Biggins in amateur dramatics in his adopted home town of Salisbury when she was fifteen.   

We had to make do without producer Michael Codron, who failed to report to our table, and Biggins’ face collapsed through several storeys when he hopped by to find him. Still, he recovered briefly in our company, and I gave the old rogue a big hug; my arms scarcely circumnavigated his tummy and reached in vain for each other behind his bottom.

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Friday night’s preview audience of Sunset Boulevard at the Comedy Theatre were allowed in at ten past seven for a show starting twenty minutes later. I therefore had plenty of time to peruse my programme which informed me that the foyer bar would be open forty-five minutes before the performance (it wasn’t). 

I also had plenty of time to work out that the programme did not list the musical numbers in the show — a crime as heinous as not listing the names of the orchestra; which aren’t listed either, as the musicians are also the actors on the stage.

The Comedy used to be one of my favourite London theatres. It used to have a delightful front of house manager, Michael Ginesi, long since gone, who treated each customer as though he or she was a welcome friend or long lost relative.

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I sometimes feel we’re not good enough to go into the best of the West End theatres. Wyndham’s, where Twelfth Night has opened to deserved acclaim, is a case in point. This beautiful 1899 theatre by W G R Sprague has been lovingly redecorated by Cameron Mackintosh, yet the central aisle in the stalls last night resembled a London Transport cloakroom.

A mound of old tut, bits of paper and grimy clothing accumulated around the feet of several critics. Punters squashed into bars and corridors that were simply not built to accommodate them. People are becoming so fat — though not yet as fat as they are in New York — that they can hardly manouevre themselves into their rows, let alone sit comfortably in their seats.

There was always something penitential — and therefore good for the soul — about going to the theatre. Standing all afternoon in the cockpit at the Globe can’t have been much fun unless you really wanted to be there. And the stone benches at Epidaurus are quite an ordeal today, let alone four centuries ago.

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I find our attitude to David Hare very odd. He writes good plays. He has a loyal public. He addresses contemporary issues. Yet, increasingly, his work seems to attract the wrath of the “commentariat” – not so much the critics as that vast body of men and women who have space to fill in weekly columns. It occurred with his excellent play about Iraq, Stuff Happens. It’s happened again with Gethsemane, his fascinating new play at the National Theatre which refers obliquely to recent scandals but which is really about New Labour’s lack of Utopian vision.

The play itself got mixed overnight reviews, which is fair enough, but what fascinated me was the rash of columnitis that followed. Ian Jack in the Guardian told us that it wasn’t “a play for today”. David Lister took the same tack in the Independent, informing us that plays like Hare’s “can all too rapidly become rather last season”. And Dominic Cavendish, who is at least a critic, went further in the Daily Telegraph, suggesting that Gethsemane was proof of theatre’s recent ineffectualness as “a podium for oppositional thought”. To all of which my main reaction is a polite raspberry. (more…)

[Show as slideshow]

Many thanks to those of you who joined us for last night’s trip to Treasure Island, starring Keith Allen at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. And especially thanks to those of you who dressed up  - there were some great costumes on display, and many of you wouldn’t have looked out of place on the stage! Over 100 were in attendance last night, most of whom stayed behind for our post-show cast reception in the Haymarket’s stylish champagne bar (see photos above).

Last night was actually our last Whatsonstage.com Outing until after Christmas, but we have some great trips lined up early in the new year, including Twelfth Night at the Wyndham’s, A Little Night Music at the Chocolate Factory and Well at the Apollo (which includes an exclusive 20-minute monologue by Sarah Miles). Click here for further details on all our upcoming Outings.

So, have a wonderful (and restful) festive season in the meantime, see you in 2009!

Theo Bosanquet

Content Manager
Whatsonstage.com

The choir of an all-girls school, Coloma Convent, was singing the carols in Trafalgar Square yesterday evening, and their chorus mistress introduced a beautiful Eastern European item with the words that we would recognise it as the jingle on the John Lewis television advertisements.

And indeed we did. Favourite tunes and songs often have to battle against the jarring new contexts in which they’ve found themselves: “Nessun Dorma” in Turandot and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” are the property, it often seems, of football hooligans, but the calm and beautiful rendition of the latter by Lesley Garrett in the new Carousel at the Savoy is a good fight back.

The best ever joke about this phenomenon was the kick of the jukebox in Jonathan Miller’s ENO Rigoletto, yielding the orchestral intro to “La donn’e mobile.”

But often the use of great classical music themes on film or television really can take an audience into new worlds of cultural delights, as I’m sure viewers of The Onedin Line and more recently The Apprentice have been lured into the wider Russian musical repertoire of Khachaturian and Shostakovich.

Music played its part in the wonderful selection of film clips shown yesterday at the National Gallery as part of the London Film School’s graduation ceremony, but most of it was original and newly composed.

The LFS has recently appointed Young Vic and Royal Court architect Steve Tompkins as their man for the new Covent Garden warehouse development in Dryden Street, now due to open as a BFI backed film centre in 2012.

The range of films produced by the students is truly amazing and, as veteran director Don Boyd commented, many of them are of a technical competence and professionalism unthinkable among film students of even just ten years ago.

The brilliant Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, not yet 40, was inducted as an honorary associate, and she reeled off a string of tips and hints for the new graduates: consider a job in plumbing; embrace a constant state of paranoia; make sure the first movie you make is your fully intended statement to the world — because it will always be seen as that; phone your mum regularly; and book some therapy for your partner.

I left Trafalgar Square mightily encouraged by the talent on view and momentarily transported by the carol singing. I was making my way happily towards a screening of the new James Bond movie and a long anticipated Indian dinner when a call from the office diverted me towards the opening of The Little Prince at Hampstead Theatre.

This proved a blessing in disguise, as the Bond movie was later described to me by my better half as all action and no content, and the Hampstead show was a timely reminder of the potential beauty of low-tech theatre in a high-tech media world.

It’s just a shame that The Little Prince isn’t quite as inspirational in reality as it should be in theory. Anthony Clark is a good director but I often feel his shows need a good kick in the pants; they come at us too tentatively.  

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