Choreographer Arlene Phillips may be about to be dropped as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, replaced by a younger, less knowledgeable model, but she was in no mood to be vengeful or vindictive on Desert Island Discs yesterday.

“It’s the BBC’s programme,” she said, “and they can do what they like with it.” She explained that she was sometimes hard on the contestants because she was always hard on herself.

We learned a lot about Arlene on the BBC Radio 4 programme, not just that she was determined to succeed from the moment she got the dancing bug, and not least that she got her big break while baby-sitting for film director Ridley Scott, then making television commercials, who asked her to choreograph an ad for Lyon’s Maid ice-cream.

We always think of 1956 as the watershed year for modern British theatre, with Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court and the visit of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble to the Palace Theatre in the year of his death.

But another world famous company, the Bolshoi, also paid their first, eye-opening  visit to Britain in 1956, and astounded the audiences in the Royal Opera House — and at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, where a teenaged Arlene fell in love with Galina Ulanova.

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The most elegant, and most senior, of the Calendar Girls, Sian Phillips CBE, was standing at the bus stop on Friday night waiting for the Number Nineteen to take her home to Islington.

She looked, as she always does, absolutely immaculate, in a beautiful coat and scarf, hair perfectly cut, deportment incomparable. In many ways she’s the embodiment of what an actress should be: glamorous, mysterious, unassailable. And she goes home on the bus.

She said what a happy time Calendar Girls had been and that the phenomenon of the show on the road was like nothing she had ever experienced in her whole career — and that goes back over fifty years, when she first played Hedda Gabler at a charity matinee in the Duke of York’s followed by Saint Joan at the new Belgrade, Coventry. 

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The only proper way of taking time off is to go away, but I took time out yesterday to mark the summer solstice with a special lunch, a shopping expedition and one of the best summer parties of the year.

My lunch was with my friend Petroc Trelawny, the BBC music presenter, on the terrace of the Savile Club; my shopping was for suits in Jermyn Street; and the party was with the Times Literary Supplement in Knightsbridge.

Going out for lunch ruins the rest of the day, but I had no theatre opening to attend, so I felt free to enjoy myself. So did Petroc, to a certain extent, as he was due in Broadcasting House by 4pm, so we were only truly bacchanalian in spirit.

Petroc’s recently been presenting the Cardiff Singer of the Year concerts on television, and he thinks that the Russian singer who won was certainly worthy of the prize but perhaps a little too far along her career path to justify it over some of the other unknown contestants.

We usually go shopping for clothes together after these lunches, but I had to make my own way to Jermyn Street and buy a couple of new suits for my son’s forthcoming wedding in Liverpool.   

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Tom Stoppard’s 1993 modern classic, Arcadia had Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers thinking last night as we enjoyed this thoroughly entertaining comedy of ideas at the Duke of York’s theatre.

Two writers search out the history of the Croom country house; meanwhile the history plays itself out before us in real time. And so the actual story and the history of that story begin to twine before our eyes. Asking questions about the way we understand the world from mathematical therom to poetry and the substance of history this play not only asked us to think but made us laugh aswell. The very impressive cast including Samantha Bond, Neil Pearson and Ed Stoppard are expertly directed by David Leveaux and sustain the pace of this witty, wordy and downright clever play. (more…)

Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, was quoted the other day as saying there were far more programmes on the arts these days than ever before, though you’d hardly have noticed.

A new series of Alan Yentob’s Imagine started on BBC1 last night and was well down to the usual standard of soft soap, piety and dull interrogation in a predictably roseate look at a bunch of untrained seniors putting together a dance show for Sadler’s Wells.

The most interesting thing here was that one of the “dancers” was an extremely well known actress, Eve Pearce, just turned eighty, and suffering from peripheral neuropathy, which means she can’t feel her feet, poor thing.

Why anyone would want to pay good money to go and see their show of game shuffling about was never a question on Yentob’s clipboard. Instead, the choreographer Richard Alston made the rather dodgy point that because Fonteyn and Nureyev both danced well past their sell-by dates, they became curiously more affecting because of their ageing process.

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There was a fascinating forum at the Young Vic on Friday afternoon when eight young directors who participated in a Master School in St Petersburg with Lev Dodin of the Maly Theatre reported back to an audience of even younger, less experienced directors.

They were joined on the platform by Young Vic artistic director David Lan and Cheek by Jowl directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, all of whom know Dodin well and understand the nature of his autocratically-run ensemble.

What does a director do? Is he a mere filter between the work and the audience, as one over-sensitive actor once complained to Ken Campbell? “Nah,” replied Campbell, bunching his fist in the thesp’s back and propelling him brutally across the stage: “Go, on , get in there, you bugger…that’s what a director does.”

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I was in conversation with one of the Showstoppers improvisers, Adam Meggido, the other day, and he said something interesting about Stephen Sondheim, which in itself is quite unusual.

He loves and admires A Little Night Music as much as the next Sondheimite, but he found the production at the Garrick “sparkless.”

By which he meant somehow drained of life, preserved in aspic and sealed under glass. He adumbrated further: “Theatre is live and should always feel dangerous and spontaneous. This didn’t.”

There was no room for such critical heresy at the Young Vic last night, where Che Walker’s Been So Long, with a soul/blues/funk score by Arthur Darvill, tore up the musical theatre rule book and delighted a predominantly young and mixed-race audience.

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Possibly the most extraordinary show currently playing in London is For the Best at the Unicorn, a stunning mixture of art work, installation, backstage tour and promenade performance, devised by professionals working with children on dialysis.

You sit in the foyer and a white curtain is drawn across by a small child. Progressing through white corridors and dressing rooms,  you are assailed by temperamental outbursts, the sight of a withdrawn girl cringing in a laundrette, a fraught mother baking cakes, a disturbed boy kicking a cabbage along a corridor.

That boy is given respite on dialysis in a hospital ward where the nurse climbs a rope then walks round the upper walls in a harness. Art house theatre has got under the skin of a disruptive illness and shown its terrible beauty.

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The Queen’s birthday honours always contain a few suprises, and the MBE for James Bolam, a marvellous actor whose career has never quite matched his early promise, is one of them.

He featured in David Storey’s In Celebration at the Royal Court and in Jeremy Sams’s Wild Oats at the National, but he’s more associated with The Likely Lads and Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Tapes on television.

Here’s what I never understand: are these awards given because the recipient has added to the sum of the general good and happiness, or because there’s an imprortant element of public service involved? Are indeed the two things the same?

The only notable showbiz knighthood goes to Christopher Lee, again something of a surprise, given that he’s only really well known for being Dracula and Harriet Walter’s uncle, not the same thing at all. 
 
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I was once accused  by the late Ned Sherrin of getting a production hopelessy wrong. I replied, pleased with myself, that I was paid to be interesting, not to be right.

Oh dear, a failure on two counts, Ned shot back.

So, like any critic, I’m perfectly capable of getting it wrong without any help from anyone else, though my old friend Mark Shenton seems to be policing our copy to point out its flaws when he might be better occupied trying to improve his own critical writing and judgements.

He seems to think there’s a general consensus of approval for Helen Mirren’s Phedre at the National, when there isn’t, and that because I disagreee with him I must have somehow seen a different show, which I didn’t.

The idea anyway that there’s a “right” or “wrong” opinion of anything in the theatre is palpably absurd. It’s nearly as absurd as supposing that because a few critics agree with each other that they are therefore in some way “right.”

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