I tuned in to listen to Celia Imrie talking to Michael Ball on my car radio on Sunday morning and had a bit of a shock.

Celia said she doesn’t read reviews till the show’s all over (fair enough) and then said…she doesn’t really have time to read anything at all anyway. Good grief, I’ve only ever heard the footballer Michael Owen admit he never reads a book before.

Ball-ey of course saids he reads all the reviews of himself and anyone else he can get his hands on. But he won’t be reading Nicholas de Jongh for much longer. Nick says he’s planning to keep more in touch with his creative side after seventeen years as the Standard’s critic, and is working on a new play and a screen adaptation of his current one, Plague Over England.

Celia is playing Sybil Thorndike in Plague Over England and having said that she thought the title was a bit of a bummer went on to say that having agreed to be in the play at all would surely guarantee her nice reviews in perpetuity from old Nick.

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As the critics disappeared into the night after the premiere of Jez Butterworth’s brilliant new play Parlour Song at the Almeida last night, and sponsors and guests mingled in the foyer with drinks and canapes, artistic director Michael Attenborough was coming across the road to join in at his own party.

“It’s all over, ” I cried cheerily, “you’ve missed it.” But as he sped towards the milling throng, he explained that it was a superstition of his never to attend his own first nights, and he hadn’t done so in twenty-five years.

I find this faintly astonishing. Obviously he’s been involved with the play since its earliest rehearsals — the director is Ian Rickson — and he’s seen previews. But he’ll never know how it went on the big night with that strange convocation of semi-interested parties including his own peers, his sponsors, the critics and many Almeida supporters and regulars.

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 Trafalgar Studios 2 is a wonderfully intimate space and last night our whatsonstage.com theatregoers were out in force taking over the whole theatre to see the stage adaptation of William Sutcliffe’s best-selling novel New Boy.

With the theatre all to ourselves we laughed out loud at this tale of friendship, love, sex, and how the lines between these can often blur. The entire cast carry this rapidly moving coming of age story with perfect comic timing and a great deal of honesty. After this wonderful show we were joined by the whole cast, as well as the adapter/director Russell Labey, for a post-show question and answer session which was both interesting and amusing. (more…)

One critic notes that another, sitting next to him at the opening of Marlowe’s Dido at the National last night, displayed the fruits of her long night’s labours as a shopping list.

That same critic, Ruth Leon, started zipping her bags and gathering her skirts as Dido expired on the pyre, obviously ignorant of the last scene and not all that bothered about how Marlowe might finish his first and rarely seen play.

The quality of boredom is not strained and however astonishing I find it that a critic would be indifferent to Marlowe, or perhaps this production of him, no doubt others would find it equally astonishing that I didn’t much like Priscilla Queen of the Desert. One man’s meat, etcetera…

But my fellow blogger Mark Shenton is a little out of order to suggest that I eased up on my Whatsonstage review of Priscilla because the company is now housed in a building owned by the Really Useful Group, hosts of Priscilla, too.

Such idle speculation ill becomes a fellow critic, not least one who prides himself to the point of vanity on being chairman of the Critics’ Circle drama section, a post so coveted and respected that he was the sole nomination in the recent election. 

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Whatsonstage.com theatregoers were treated to a stunning piece of physical theatre at last night’s Outing to Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation of Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

The twelve strong cast impressed us with their effortless shifting between roles from gangster to dockworker and even pigeon! All this done not only by subtle changes in costume but by well-thought out and executed mime sequences. Having been amazed by the beautiful construction of this piece we were lucky enough to have Stephen Berkoff join us for a question and answer session. He was joined by the producer of the show Julius Green and Simon Merrells who portrays leading man Terry Malloy. (more…)

Odd though it may seem, the late Ken Campbell went to Chigwell School in leafy, upmarket Essex, a scholarship boy from down the road in the more Cockney-infested Ilford and Becontree borders.

In his last few years he’d reopened a relationship with his alma mater for two reasons: he lived very near, in a Swiss chalet in Epping Forest (now occupied by his daughter Daisy and her family), and he liked the school’s new theatre and its affiliation with E15 Acting School, where he taught.

“Taught” may not be the word: set a bad and dangerous example would be nearer the truth. All these elements came together on Friday night when a group of final year E15 pupils, supervised by Campbell’s fellow improvisers Josh Darcy and Sean McCann as “goaders”, took over the Chigwell Drama Centre with a riotous evening of impro and revue sketches.

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Exactly one year to the day after he died, Paul Scofield was remembered in great style yesterday, first in a noon service at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster Abbey, and secondly in more anecdotal vein on the Lyttelton stage of the National Theatre, where he gave his last great stage performance as John Gabriel Borkman in 1996.

Prince Charles was represented by Sir Tom Stoppard, who joined the congregation in St Margaret’s to hear Eileeen Atkins read from T S Eliot’s Little Gidding, Seamus Heaney from Beowulf and Ian McKellen from the Gospels; Simon Callow gave what was generally agreed to be a superb address.

The Lyttelton celebration was hosted by Alex Jennings and Samantha Bond, starting with Scofield as the Ghost in the Mel Gibson Hamlet and ending with him alone on the seashore in Peter Brook’s film of their legendary King Lear.

Scofield’s Lear is probably the greatest and most influential Shakespeare performance of the last century, as anyone who saw it will testify, and the film does preserve the outline. Jack McGowran replaced Alec McCowen on film as the Fool, and it was a dagger of nostalgic pleasure to see him capering again, with Irene Worth and Susan Engel stiff as Mayan masks as Goneril and Regan.

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Although not exactly a mummy’s girl, Natasha Richardson, who has died after a freak skiing accident, was most definitely Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter, from first to last.

Sightings of her on the London stage were rare but unforgettable. As Nina in The Seagull in 1985 she trod the very same boards — the Queen’s in Shaftesbury Avenue — as had her mother in the same role in a famous production by her father, Tony Richardson, in 1964.

That 1985 Chekhov revival had opened in Hammersmith and toured to Oxford, with Charles Sturridge’s production also including Samantha Eggars as Arkadina and John Hurt as Trigorin. Both were missing in London, Vanessa joining her daughter as the overbearing actress.

Natasha positively erupted on the stage in a tumult of joyful innocence, making her fourth act desolation all the more powerful. You closed your eyes and you heard the same voice as Vanessa’s: caramel-smooth, lustrous, riveting.

And in her last London stage appearance, as Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, at the newly refurbished Almeida in 2003, she echoed Vanessa’s performance thirty years earlier as the land-locked water spirit, a cascade of emotion and yearning, haunted by her past liaison with a maritime murderer, in thrall to the call of the deep.  
 
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The season has started so early in Chichester that we’re still travelling on the winter timetable out of Victoria Station. But the sudden onset of balmy weather fooled me into wearing a summer jacket.

Luckily I packed a cashmere scarf in my briefcase, which came in handy on the night bus home from Victoria in the small hours.

It had been a pleasant expedition — apart from the play itself, really, a not very dramatic dramatisation of Simon Gray’s final diary volumes through which various stray critics were rootling and chortling on the train down.

That’s the thing about Gray: you want to take a few dips while keeping a casual eye on the overall meandering undergrowth of his supple, self-questioning prose. At any rate, it’s a more pleasurable occupation than sitting through most of his plays. 

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Seeing as our old friend A A Gill instigated some sort of stand-off between food and theatre critics, I culled further evidence this weekend as to why he and his foodie friends are so smarmily self-advertising in their copy.

They have nothing worthwhile to write about, so they may as well write about themselves. To be condemned to sit in the sort of places where people like them go to all the time must be the equivalent of being a life member of Dante’s seventh circle of hell.

And then there’s the food. On the whole, it’s ghastly (with the honorable exception of the nosh at the Wolseley). I was stuck in a place called Wild Honey in Hanover Square for lunch on Saturday and was assured of its pedigree as it’s owned by the same people who run Arbutus. 

It was utterly revolting. The waitress asked if I had any questions about the menu. I had two questions. Why wasn’t it written in plain English? And why was everything so ridiculously expensive?

I had two more later on: why have you added a service charge without asking my permission, and where’s the exit?

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