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With Nicholas de Jongh’s playwriting debut making waves across theatreland, whatsonstage.com were delighted to take 130 Theatregoers to the Duchess Theatre to see the revered reviewer’s very own first play.

And what a first play it is, both amusing and poignant, Plague Over England set in England in the 1950s tells of John Gielgud’s notorious arrest in a Chelsea public toilet. Not only did we get to enjoy the play itself but we were also treated to a question and answer session after the show with Mr de Jongh himself, the director Tamara Harvey, and key members of the cast, including Celia Imrie (who plays Dame Sybil Thorndike). (more…)

Two students at the Central School of Speech and Drama, Thomas Gilbey and Peter Manchester, showed taste, courage and real artistic discernment in refusing to take part in a course work production of Jerry Springer, The Opera.

Instead, they’ve been directed by Sara Kestelman in a gripping production of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, playing two small time crooks waiting for the worst to happen: and the worst is worse even than Jerry Springer.

The show was performed yesterday as part of a ceremony at the drama school to mark the late playwright’s acceptance of the presidency of his alma mater last September, a post he was finally too ill to occupy to any great extent.

He was much tickled, it was said, to know that he was replacing Peter Mandelson in the job, and the principal, Gavin Henderson, passed on to his widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, a facsimile of child Harold’s application to join the school.   

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Over the coming months you can see a vampire show in one of the car parks, or Peter Brook’s po-faced tribute to a Sufi sage, or Michael Clark dancing up a storm to Iggy Pop, or even a six-hour Dutch take on Shakespeare’s Roman plays.

Sometimes you do wonder if the Barbican programmers ever sit back and think: how do we get away with this?

And then you spend a night like last night, listening to the German baritone Thomas Quasthoff singing Bach and Handel and you say to yourself: I just died and went to heaven, thank you very much Barbican team.

It was a close call, though. As Nick Kenyon and Graham Sheffield rattled through their future plans, bigging up their commitment, in equal porportions, to excellence and controversy, the assembled Press corps waited patiently for a bit of a laugh or a suggestion that some show or other might be a risk, or a problem , or a challenge to your cosy intellectual equanimity.

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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.

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Mark Ravenhill is the toast of the Berlin theatre while David Hare always gets booed there.

Ravenhill’s new play, Over There, at the Royal Court makes artistic metaphor of the still divided city without its wall. Hare’s new monologue, Berlin, which he’s delivering to packed audiences in the Lyttelton, suggests the city has forgotten its history and is dedicated only to clubbing and lifestyle.

He also says that a Berlin production of a play of his set in Guildford had some inappropriately Gothic lettering smeared all over the signage on the railway platform, while a group of youths in leather played on a pinball machine, drinking schnapps.   

I don’t think Edward Fox would have put up with that when he played in the original production of Knuckle.

It’s a fascinating rift in attitude between two major playwrights, one right in the swim of things, the other sceptically swimming against the tide. Ravenhill’s play is co-produced by the Schaubuhne in Berlin, where it will be seen immediately after the run in Sloane Square.

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In sniffing out homophobic tendencies where none exist — put it this way: Graham Norton can make jokes about leather pouffes because he’s obviously gay but I can’t because I might not be –  my old friend Mark Shenton has committed a notable clanger in suggesting that my book The Aisle is Full of Noises was withdrawn as a result of legal action taken by Milton Shulman after I dubbed him a kosher butcher.

That implies an accusation of anti-semitism Mark is unwise to have touched on. I suggest he starts checking his own copy before he spends all day policing other people’s.

Shulman’s grounds of complaint were that in stating how wrong he’d been in print about Brecht, Osborne, Pinter and Beckett when they first crossed his bows, I was impugning his professional reputation.

This was funny enough in itself — beware the fate of the self-important critic, Mark — but doubly amusing as I went out of my way in that book to promote the idea that the job of a critic was not to be “right” but to be interesting.

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My, what a lot of low-level twittering and chattering is going on over the rights and wrongs of Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague Over England, and the critics’ reactions. A veritable storm in an eggcup.

Jokes in the reviews are being misconstrued as signs of homophobia, Mark Shenton even thinks that the critic in the play is de Jongh’s revenge on Milton Shulman — who would care about that, even if it was, which it isn’t; the old fruitcake is more like an amalgam of T C Worsley and James Agate (horrid thought) — and there is even wild talk of the critics doing Nick an insincere favour by pumping up the numerical star factor to suggest the piece is better than they think it is. Perish the thought!

I’m more intrigued by an interview Nick gave to The Stage last week wherein he reveals he’s 60 (he’s at least three years older, though, like Zoe Wanamaker, he doesn’t state his age in Who’s Who) and hisses that he finds all theatrical biographies extremely boring.

He may well of course be referring only to the biographies of John Gielgud that’s he’s read, and I’d have to concede him some ground on this point.

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You have to think seriously about taking a South Coast cottage for the summer after Chichester’s announcement of its six-month season stretching from Felicity Kendal in The Last Cigarette, adapted by Hugh Whitemore from Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries, through to Stephanie Cole in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables by way of Joseph Fiennes as Cyrano, Diana Rigg as Judith Bliss in Hay Fever and Iain Glen in Schiller’s Wallenstein.

The Schiller might frighten the horses and sounds a little too much like the sort of thing critics love reviewing but audiences find less essential on the Sussex Downs. Still, it is in the smaller Minerva space.

I heard a lovely story about veteran Chichester and West End producer Duncan Weldon chiding Ruth Mackenzie, one of the triumvirate who ran up huge debts before Jonathan Church started to turn things round two years ago. (more…)

There’s one subject critics never write about: their relationship with individual theatres. Some playhouses, like the St Martin’s and the Fortune, become permanent strangers because they house long-running hits. Other spaces, such as the Donmar and the Almeida, have a short-run policy and so are like constantly visited old friends. But of all the London theatres, the one to which I feel most attached is the Royal Court. The relationship is a bit like a marriage which sometimes blows hot and cold; yet I can’t imagine life without it.

It all dates back to 1956. I was at school when Look Back in Anger was first presented, but became obsessed with it and gave nerdy talks to the sixth-form about Osborne and the young angries. In my first year at Oxford I was in a Coriolanus directed by Anthony Page, who was then an assistant at the Court, which only served to increase my fascination. And when I first came to London in late 1964, I was taken on as a play reader by the literary manager, Tom Osborn. I only realised my services were no longer required when Tom regretfully told me that artistic director George Devine thought my assessments read too much like reviews! (more…)