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.”

At the root of my displeasure at the National’s production is the argument that Racine is virtually impossible to render in English. Ted Hughes’s translation is a very good text, but it’s not Racine, not even close.

Surprisingly, Diana Rigg was far more successful in the title role ten years ago when this Hughes version was first used. I say surprisingly because I was really expecting Helen Mirren to boil over magnificently as the dying queen, but she treads a measured step towards her own calamity that barely raises the temperature, let alone the roof. 

The best British Phedre in my experience was Glenda Jackson at the Old Vic in a production by Philip Prowse of high baroque opulence which used a translation by Robert David MacDonald that corresponded to Racine’s extended rhyming metres and challenged Robert Lowell’s view — Lowell did a fine tranlation of his own — that Racine’s alexandrines are untranslateable.

I like to think such remarks are more interesting for blog-readers than bitchy misrepresentations of other people’s reviews.

Mark’s usually on safer ground when he blogs in The Stage on manners and peripheral goings-on in the theatre, though I simply don’t recall the apparently troublesome woman I sat next to at the first night of Arcadia. If she was an intrusive fidget she was obviously worrying me a good deal less than she was Mark who was sitting behind us. 
       
And if I was moving about a bit in  my seat, it was more likely because I was trying to focus more closely on the play, which demands concentration, than on getting away from a woman I didn’t know and her (to me) imperceptible intrusions.

I tend to think people should behave how they damned well please in a theatre, anyway, though my patience was sorely tried by about two dozen well dined guests at Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens the other night marching disruptively into the theatre almost twenty minutes after the show was supposed to begin.

I’m more irritated by bad manners in the cinema, where the endless chatter, consulting of mobile phones and consumption of huge tubs of popcorn is a constant challenge to my social equilibrium.

I like to see all the adverts, and especially all the trailers, too, but the sound is invariably submerged in the customers’ own gossip and conversation. And you will have noticed that it always those with little to say who insist on everyone else hearing them. And I could identify a few of those in the front stalls and on the aisle, too.
 

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 10:46 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.