One of the things I dislike about a play with no interval is that you never really get to see who else is in the audience. On the other hand, in a promenade performance, there’s no escape whatsoever from your fellow punters.

Strange though it seems, I found myself last night in a Shepherd’s Bush shopping centre rubbing up against Sally Greene of the Old Vic, Nick Hytner of the National, Nick’s mum, fund-raiser Joyce, as well as actress Diana Quick, gorgeous Lili Geissendorfer of the Arcola, top agent Dallas Smith, Josie Rourke of the Bush and the usual crowd of flyblown critics and hangers-on.

The occasion was High Tide’s production of Stovepipe, a picareque tale of pursuit through the low dives and back streets of Ammam in search of a missing security agent. But really, these affairs are all about the audience watching each other.

The challenge is: how to arrange your features in an appropriate response without drawing attention to yourself; or, how to greet a colleague or friend without breaking the spell (such as it was) of the performance contract; or, again, how best to position yourself in the scrum in order to second-guess where the action might swing on to next.

You see, it’s all about tactics and war games, much as the play itself purported to be. One or two critics made an unseemly rush for the restricted seating in each location, and Benedict Nightingale jolly well got what he deserved — a big bear-like  hug from an actor playing a drunk — when he nabbed a bar stool in the hotel reception area.

Sally Greene, well booted and perfectly coiffed, particularly seemed to enjoy the scene where the English wife of the South African “Mr Big” tried to compel the story’s Candide to help her choose a silk blouse and stripped down to an exotic brassiere.

And Christopher Hart, the Sunday Times man who recently confessed that he could hardly bear to watch two men kissing on a stage, was bravery itself as guns popped and hand fights flared right under his sensitive patrician nose.

Lili occasionally completed some discreet stretching exercises, having recently been kicked by a horse in Switzerland, and Nick Hytner glided even more discreetly about the place, materialising at a crucial vantage point in each scene without apparently making any physical exertion to get there. He really is remarkably inscrutable.

His mother, Joyce, told me before the lights went down how she’d gone to Oxford from her nearby country cottage at the weekend to see a film but discovered they were showing a live broadcast of Anthony Minghella’s gorgeous Madam Butterfly relayed live from the Met in New York. The tickets were priced at £17.50 and she had a whale of a time.

Nick’s National is about to embark on a similar scheme, when Helen Mirren goes “live” around the country on fifty big screens as Phedre on Thursday 25 June. And tickets will be only £10 each.

Once the girls find out that Dominic Cooper is playing Hippolytus, object of Helen’s misplaced mother love, there could well be a riot in the streets more frightening even than that we endured in the grim Shepherd’s Bush bunker last night.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 10:16 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.