Press night pile-up
The critics have been circulated with a tetchy email from press agent Anne Mayer complaining that the Royal Court has moved its Mark Ravenhill opening “to lie on top of mine for Victory at the Arcola on 6 March.”
So Anne — who used to be the press agent herself at the Royal Court in the Stephen Daldry years — has offered a second press night for critics on the following Monday. Which now happens “to lie on top of” that already designated for the Bush Theatre’s new production of Stovepipe in a shopping centre.
It’s that time of year when the schedule does go a bit bonkers. I’m looking at one Thursday in March when Nicholas Hoult in New Boy at the Trafalgar Studios is already lying on top of of Kathryn Hunter as Kafkas’ Monkey at the Young Vic and the pair of them are pressing to death a new play at the Finborough.
All this squeezing of shows into the limited number of days in the week, not to mention all the lying on top of each other, means that you sometimes just have to shrug your shoulders and say, okay, either I have a fairly sane and reasonable life and miss a few things or I drive myself mad by spending every waking hour in the theatre.
I prefer the first option. So at the moment I can say that I’ve not seen The Pitmen Painters, nor the Caryl Churchill ten-minute Gaza strip, nor David Hare’s Berlin solo, nor David Greig’s Damascus, nor Sadie Frost in the Madonna obsession play Be Near Me at the Donmar Warehouse.
And I’ve not seen a lot less than most people have not seen. I may try and catch Be Near Me, but I’m not wildly worried. I read the first twenty pages of the novel then threw it across the room. And I shall definitely make an effort to see The Pitmen Painters before it disappears in April.
I’m more concerned about having the time to see Slumdog Millionaire, Revolutionary Road and The Wrestler, having already gone slightly cold on Benjamin Button and Harvey Milk (oh, I forgot: I saw Harvey Milk and how boring was that?).
The best show in town is often at the British Museum, so I’ve made sure of my tickets for the Babylon exhibition before it closes, which I shall pair next week with the Shah Abbas new entry in Museum Street.
One of the best films I’ve seen lately is Burnt by the Sun, which Peter Flannery is adapting for the National next week — I managed to miss that, too, first time round — and one that I’m sorry I didn’t (miss) was Priscilla Queen of the Desert…
Going to the theatre means keeping up with movies more than ever before, though whichever critic it was who thought that Marlon Brando “mumbled” through On the Waterfront probably missed that one, too.
Oh, and here’s another confession: I never go and see anything twice unless I have to. There just isn’t the time. The last show I bought tickets for after I’d reviewed it already was Candide at the National. And that’s ten years ago.