There’s no stopping designer William Dudley on his lone crusade to turn theatres into senssurround cinemas with video projections doing the job of scenery. Next up is Peter Pan flying round a virtual Neverland in Kensington Gardens, following on his filmic, non-stop vistas in The Coast of Utopia and The Woman in White.

But the new Julius Caesar at Stratford goes even further, with a crowd of replicated film extras boosting the crowd scenes and generally carrying on like a regimented troupe of Pina Bausch dancers.

This celluloid mob is life-sized and choreographed on six gauze screens that swing into the thrust stage area as if they might actually come to life and run across the Roman forum. That would be a very funny thing to happen on the way to it.

Something even funnier happened on opening night: the ghostly plebs took their very own curtain call, bowing in unison and then — wait for it — waving at the audience! Max Reinhardt, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

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There are so many aspects of theatrical interest in Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant new film, Synechdoche, New York, it’s tempting to say it’s the most important film about the theatre ever made — well, since All About Eve, perhaps.

Hoffman plays a small town director — he’s first seen producing a revival of Death of a Salesman with an under-age Willy Loman — who wins a major award and decides to mount an epic of his own life in a huge warehouse.

Into this project he pours, or the film streams, the disintegration of his own personality, his marriage, his ambition and libido, in scenes that cross-fade with reality and exchange fictional characters for their real-life templates.

It’s a dizzying Pirandellian enterprise, breathtaking cinema with an absolute hold on its theatrical nature.

The choice for the Hoffman character is simple: do I want to be Trevor Nunn or Jerzy Grotowski? It’s a dilemma Rupert Goold must face every morning in the shaving mirror.

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The Eton boating song comes to mind in this glorious Bank Holiday weekend and not just because of the sunshine. We have an Old Etonian prime minister in waiting, an Old Etonian Mayor of London — and suddenly a whole bunch of Old Etonian theatre critics.

What’s going on? Time for a new class war, methinks: very few post-war theatre critics went to public school, let alone Eton — Tynan, Brien, Wardle, the top guys, certainly didn’t — and it’s partly because the new post-war theatre was always adversarial to the status quo, in conflict with the Establishment, libertarian and intellectually radical.

So were the critics, on the whole, or the most interesting ones. Theatre was about changing the world, not sucking up to it.

These days, everyone seems to be on the same side, and everyone’s generally disapproving of excess and formal experimentalism in the theatre. Hence the slew of sniffy, closed ranks reviews for the two most interesting shows in town, Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition at the Young Vic and Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colours at the Royal Court.

You certainly know where critics are “at” these days, but you don’t really know where they’re coming from, or why. Theatre has to be about everyday norms of humanity and family values, or it stinks, apparently. ‘Twas never thus. 

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If you’re down Lavender Hill way over the Bank Holiday weekend you could do worse than pop into the BAC and take a sampling of the wild and wacky Burst festival that is in full flow in every nook and cranny of the place.

You might hear fringe veteran David Gale telling you something you didn’t know in a starched blue suit, like some less frightening version of Gilbert or George, or you might let Adrian Howells wash your feet– balm for the sole, he calls it –or you could be led through a white muslin labyrinth  by an invisible guide holding your hand.

Actually, wherever you are you’re almost certain to find yourself in or near a festival of some kind, whether you want to or not, which is why I’m taking the precaution next week of going to Serbia to discuss the festival phenomenon at a safe distance.

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Last night Whatsonstage.com theatregoers enjoyed a memorable evening of theatre at the Vaudeville Theatre with stunning performances by Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman in Tom Kempinski’s deeply moving Duet for One.

Juliet Stevenson is mesmerising as Stephanie Anderson, a concert violinist who develops multiple scelrosis, and is wonderfully supported by Henry Goodman who portrays her psychatrist Dr Feldman. Having seen this pair’s amazing on stage chemistry it was wonderful to have them both join us, along with director Matthew Lloyd, for the post show Q&A. (more…)

Two years ago, Toby Stephens opened at the Donmar Warehouse in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal just as his first child was born. So he celebrated the arrival of his second by opening there again last night in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

His wife Anna-Louise Plowman gave birth just three weeks ago but that didn’t stop her sitting in the stalls with her mother-in-law, Dame Maggie Smith, to see Toby roll around on the floor with Gillian Anderson in Zinnie Harris’s Edwardian update.

Anna-Louise is a striking six-foot New Zealand blonde with curly hair, lately seen to advantage in Holby City on the box. She looked absolutely stunning, and I couldn’t stop myself congratulating her on regaining her figure so soon after the baby arrived.

Dame Maggie shot me an odd look and said, “Where have you been?” “The toilet and the bar, ” I replied truthfully as this was now the interval. “No, don’t be stupid, why do you look so well?”     

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Some sort of minor rejoicing seems to have broken out over Jade Ewen coming fifth in the Eurovision Song Contest with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s song “It’s My Time.”

This is like the England soccer team claiming to have done brilliantly by reaching the quarter finals of a World or European Cup. It’s a bit sad, really, especially as Lloyd Webber was a brand name international artist and almost everyone else wasn’t.

The one thing we always did have at Eurovision was Terry Wogan’s witty, resigned but always informed commentary.

This year we had Graham Norton, who had never heard of the great French singer Patricia Kaas, and said so, and mixed his halting repertoire of cracks and sneers with plain bad judgement: obviously the Estonian song, which sent him to sleep, he said, was one of the best. 

I didn’t think Jade sang her song — by no means a classic — all that well, either. Her voice, unlovely to start with, showed the strain and wobbled a lot, and whatever stage routine Arlene Phillips had devised for her was decimated by the zapping camera work.

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I’ve rarely experienced such contrasting theatre events, both admirable in their own ways, as I did yesterday at the Unicorn in the afternoon and the Young Vic in the evening.

The first was a stripped down, but fully alive, production of Twelfth Night for a young audience, with one actor playing Viola and Sebastian, to very good effect, for the sole sacrifice of the big laugh on Olivia’s “most wonderful” exclamation.

The second was the astonishing production by Daniel Kramer, designed by Richard Hudson, of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, the first time this musical piece has ever been staged as either dance or theatre or, as in this instance, both.

If music is the food of love in the Shakespeare play, it’s the stuff of nightmares in the Young Vic event, where that great climactic, pealing rendition of the Gates of Kiev becomes a work-out for miserable sexual athletes slapping each other about and Mussorgsky’s alcoholic sexual duality is represented by a hermaphrodite with a vodka bottle for a penis.

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There was a delightful lunch held for Peter Brook and his actress wife Natasha Parry at the National Theatre yesterday. The hosts were the Critics Circle, honouring the director for his distinguished service to the arts.

And Brook repaid them with some good stories. He spoke of the old-fashioned florid actor who was singled out for attack by one reviewer. The company assembled the next day, knowing that he would have seen this terrible notice and might be destroyed by it.

The actor missed the half and arrived in the theatre at the very last minute. He told his colleagues that he had been in church, and had said to God, “Please forgive that filthy bastard.” The show went on.

Brook also recalled his days of dining regularly with Milton Shulman, saying that he was the only critic he knew who was not afraid to give a good notice to his friends.

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It was an odd feeling returning to the Old Cock in Kilburn High Road, lured thither by the second play in the new wave of climate change theatre started at the Bush with Steve Waters’ impressive double-header, The Contingency Plan, and continuing next week with When the Rain Stops Falling at the Almeida (presumably written by Steve’s brother, Muddy?).

It’s a ramshackle old Irish pub, one of many between Maida Vale and Cricklewood, but not one I’d penetrated for quite some time. “Have you been here before?” enquired the Amazonian Viking press officer — six foot tall, long blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes – of the new improvised play Impossible Storms…

Yes, I had to reply, turning into a character in a J B Priestley play. But not for well over three decades. I was living in the area at the time and a new pre-punk group, big on the pub rock circuit, were the resident wailers, imaginatively called Kilburn and the High Roads. The lead singer was a strange little crippled guy called Ian Dury.

They were sensational, but they folded soon afterwards before re-launching towards the end of the 1970s as Ian Dury and the Blockheads. I wonder what happened to them?

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