[Show as slideshow]

A great evening’s entertainment was had by the Whatsonstage.com theatregoers that attended last night’s performance of Tim Firth’s stage adaptation of his 2003 screenplay Calendar Girls.

This very British tale of five extraoridnary women in the Yorkshire Dales is handled with laughter and heart by the five female leads including Lynda Bellingham and Patricia Hodge. Having enjoyed this poignant and quirky tale we were treated to an amusing Q&A with Tim Firth himself. (more…)

There was an unusually high class turn out for the opening of Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette (adapted from his autobiographies by the author himself and Hugh Whitemore) at the Trafalgar Studios last night.

Barry Humphries breezed in with Maurice Saatchi and Josephine Hart, producers Robert Fox and Michael White renewed old friendship (Robert started in Michael’s office), Anne “Weakest Link” Robinson basked in her own recognition factor, Herbie Kretzmer beamed sartorially, and Prospect editor David Goodhart proudly showed off a beautiful daughter.

And just how highly rated Gray was by his fellow writers was evident in the presence of novelists David Lodge, Lynne Truss and Nigel Williams, brooding poet Tony Harrison, and the bitter bard of Bristol, Peter Nichols, who was chatting (and even, shock horror, smiling) with Anna Carteret and her director husband Christopher Morahan.

David Bradley — whom I saw in Stratford at the weekend being greeted by the RSC chairman Christopher Bland with the crass remark, “I last saw you acting Michael Gambon off the stage” — told me he’d not been at the Whitehall Theatre (as the Trafalgar was more happily known until recently) since 1952, when he saw Seagulls Over Sorrento, or something very like it.

(more…)

We had glorious weather in Stratford-upon-Avon for the Shakespeare Birthday weekend and I completed the half-marathon race in just over two hours — three minutes faster than Meg Dobson, press officer at the Orange Three in Richmond, but twenty minutes slower than my friend and neighbour Neil Cameron, who finished in a personal best time of one hour, 47 minutes.

A crowd of us congregated on the terrace of the Dirty Duck to compare notes. Sam Jackson, the manager of the pub, completed the course in two hours, 22 minutes, an amazing achievement for someone who has battled cancer and obesity and also raised hundreds of pounds for his cancer ward in Warwick General Hospital. 

Michael Billington and his wife were chilling out after church with Nicolas Walsh, chairman of the birthday celebrations committee, and Liz Flower, scion of the great local brewing family who more or less founded the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The whole place was the most wonderful melee of runners, actors, tourists and locals. We met a man who was over seventy who’d run the race in one hour, 36 minutes! Then Neil and I tootled off to see the Cobbe portrait in the Shakespeare Birthplace. It is a marvellous painting, but there is no shred of convincing evidence to suggest that it either is or isn’t the Bard.

(more…)

Today’s Happy Returns to William Shakespeare became soured this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme as historian and art expert Roy Strong contemptuously dismissed Professor Stanley Wells’s claim that the Cobbe portrait is almost certainly that of the Bard of Avon.

We already know that RSC associate director Greg Doran is happy to comply with Wells’s view, as Doran finds the fellow in oils distinctly dishy and attractive in his light ginger face fuzz and silver earring.

The painting is on show this weekend during the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations and I shall certainly wend my way to the Birthplace to take a look for myself. So will Michael Billington, who is to be honoured for his contribution to Shakespeare studies at the big civic lunch that takes place each year on the banks of the Avon in a grand marquee.

It’s a great weekend, this, every year in Stratford, and I fully intend to enjoy as much of it as I can. But I won’t be going to the lunch as I’m running in the half marathon race on Sunday morning and I want to improve on my best performance so far, when I breasted the tape in 793rd place out of three thousand entrants five years ago.

(more…)

Confusion bordering on the  chaotic reigned over the London opening of Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls at the Noel Coward. Last night, everyone had turned up for the 7pm start except the Press officer, Peter Thompson, and a few stray critics, who all thought the show began at 7.30pm.

The tickets were clearly marked 7pm, and the date and time had been registered with the Society of London Theatre months ago. So why the mix-up?

Producer David Pugh faced the first night crowd (Norma Major, Cilla Black, Anthony Andrews, Christopher Biggins, A A Gill, the usual top notch mob) to say that we were being held up by the Press — bloody cheek! — and was met with a chorus of good-natured boos and “We love you, really, Nicholas de Jongh” — before inviting the house to disperse to the bars and swig a free glass of champagne.   

But the fact is, Pugh has tried to exclude the critics from a show he rightly believes doesn’t depend on them. He had to be vigorously persuaded by the host theatre to allow the Press in to review the premiere at Chichester last September.

And this time, he and Tommo have picked off the critics by allowing them the option of creeping into previews over the past week and scattering their notices to the winds of chance and indifference.

(more…)

Something terrible has happened to the circus. First it became vegetarian and politically correct. Then it became anodyne and corporate. These developments were represented by Circus Oz on the one hand, Cirque du Soleil on the other.

What happened to the Big Top, the sawdust, the lions, the performing seals and the dancing girls?

You’ve had it, chum. The nearest you can get to all that now is Zippo’s Circus which beetles modestly about the place in a greatly reduced version of the old-fashioned Chipperfields or Billy Smart’s; and now Sylvester McCoy tells me they even pinched his clown routines from the old Ken Campbell Road Show.

So I’m not all that interested to know that City Circ, “London’s new season for Theatre and Contemporary Circus”  has just been launched, or that Moira Sinclair, the Arts Council’s executive director, has declared that “the development of circus artists and circus production continues to be a priority for Arts Council England.”

(more…)

There’s a curious problem with Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, just opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre, which critics are too kind (though not at Whatsonstage!) to mention. Judith Bliss is always played by an actress at least twenty years too old for the part.

Diana Rigg looks great, but she’s past seventy, and she stoops slightly to conquer; how could this Judith be the mother of twenty-something siblings Simon and Sorel? The first Judith, Marie Tempest, was sixty, but in those days juveniles looked middle-aged anyway.
  
How Noel Coward sat through his own rehearsals of the National Theatre revival in 1964 with eighty-year-old Edith Evans making a dog’s dinner of the role without going mad we shall never know; he certainly went bananas over the old dear’s senility.

Since then, we’ve had Judiths of various shapes and sizes: Penelope Keith, Geraldine McEwan, Judi Dench, none of them ideal, none of them sexy, for a start. And as David Benedict said to me last night at the Barbican premiere of Improbable’s Panic, Judith is only saying she’s going to retire in order to be dissuaded. She’s not an OAP, she’s a drama queen, for God’s sake.

(more…)

Matthew Kelly has a unique, some might say odd, relationship with his own son, Matthew Rickson. The two of them played together in Beckett’’s Endgame in Liverpool last year then sealed their onstage partnership as ugly sisters in pantomime.

Now Matthew senior has opened, most impressively, as George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Trafalgar Studios, and Matthew junior was on hand — in the very front row — as his Dad expatiated bitchily on the son he never really had in the play.

It was as if an actor playing King Lear were to deliver the sterility curse to Goneril in an intimate studio theatre with his own real-life daughter sitting right behind him.

I have to say Matthew junior — who bears an uncanny resemblance to his Dad, being tall and gawky, though slightly better looking — suffered the ordeal with a very good grace and joined in giving Matthew senior and his co-star Tracey Childs as Martha a fully deserved and resounding ovation at the end.

And if Dad had fluffed a line or even — heaven forfend — keeled over, you felt that Matthew junior was handily placed on the end of the front row to whip off the horn-rimmed specs and moth-eaten cardigan and carry on in the role himself. 

(more…)

They closed Hendon again last Sunday as everyone went to the latest of the Lost Musicals in the Lilian Baylis Theatre in Sadler’s Wells. Ian Marshall Fisher’s season this year features two composers you wouldn’t swap for a busload of Priscillas or a coachload of tenth anniversary tenth rate Mamma Mias: Cole Porter and Kurt Weill.

Porter’s New Yorkers not only features three of his greatest songs — the prostitute’s street cry “Love For Sale,” the stomping, defiant anthem with great chiming chords “I Happen to Like New York” and the cheerful, chirpy finale hymning both East Side and West Side “Take Me Back to Manhattan”; it also made a Broadway star of Jimmy “Schnozzle” Durante.

This concert performance — repeated on the coming two Sunday afternoons — should make a star of Sandra Marvin (no relation of Blanche or Lee), a mountainous, beautiful black lady with a skin that glows and a voice that means business.

Marvin sings that great stonking anthem and does so with incredible style and velvety power, spiritedly accompanied on piano by the tireless musical director Steven Edis. This girl really does happen to love New York — and none of us sitting there was in any mood to argue with her.

(more…)

Every actor in London must have tuned in yesterday to Radio Four’s Reunion programme, the excellent series presented by Sue McGregor that last visited the theatre in a trip down memory lane with members of the Liverpool Everyman company in the early 1970s — Julie Walters, Alison Steadman, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethewaite, Bernard Hill and Antony Sher.

Even more illustrious was yesterday’s quintet of witnesses to the early days of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic — Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon and director William Gaskill.

Jogging over the heath beforehand I bumped into my neighbours Jennie Stoller and Gemma Jones rushing home to catch the programme, while Simon Callow was obviously still in character as Pozzo  in Waiting for Godot (opening soon in the West End) with two brown boxers, as opposed to Lucky, straining at the leash.

Callow of course was working in the Old Vic box office during this magical period, and I was buying slip seats in the gallery for three shillings, or two shillings to stand at the back of the stalls for Olivier’s Othello, the greatest performance by anyone in anything I have ever seen.

(more…)