The drama of Andy Murray’s Wimbledon campaign has threaded through the week in irresistible fashion. “Anyone for tennis?” cried the BBC, and over ten milion people watched the saga of his four-hour battle with Stanislas Wawrinka.

Yesterday’s quarter-final contest with the classy Juan Carlos Ferrero, the French Open champion six years ago, was more straightforward, and conveniently timed to finish at 5pm so I could not miss a single rally before setting off for the National Theatre.

There, I took issue with Henry Hitchings, new critic on the Evening Standard, over his slighting comments in the paper about John McEnroe’s commentary skills.

I loved Mac’s bolshiness as a player, and I love the way he cuts through the bland remarks of former British Number One Tim Henman while also giving ace insights into shifts in the players’ tactics. He talks like he played, with a swagger, and an appetite for argument. 

Henry defended himself stoutly, stating that whereas he was hardly yet qualified to pronounce on the theatre, he was more than able to do so on tennis.

Tennis is his sporting passion, closely followed by cricket and then football. As a Spurs supporter I was crestfallen to discover  that he supports the Arsenal, but then the cultural gap between us is unbridgeable; the fellow went to Eton, after all.

Cricket, we know, is Sam Mendes’s passion, too, but he materialised on the Centre Court yesterday afternoon alongside his wife Kate Winslet for the Murray match.

I’m still not sure about Sam’s beard; it suited the more dressed down look at Chichester the previous evening, where Heidi Thomas’s sweet but dull play about the Romanovs, The House of Purpose, opened in Howard Davies’s typically well orchstrated production. The play is a commission by Mendes’s Neal Street Productions.

Other showbiz notables spotted in the Centre Court crowd this week have included Tim Rice, Ewan McGregor, Cliff Richard, Ian Hislop and his novel-writing wife Victoria, Mr and Mrs Charlie Brooks (Mrs Brooks is Sun editor Rebekah Wade) and newsreader Trevor MacDonald, who seems to be a permanent fixture.

The House of Purpose was no great shakes, but considerably better than most of the plays presented by Anthony Clark during his seven-year stretch as artistic director at Hampstead Theatre.

Tony’s a good, decent, intelligent man, but he’s been the victim of fishing in the same theatre pool as everyone else, and he’s always going to be third or fourth in line behind the National, Royal Court and probably now the Bush when it comes to new plays.

My understanding — a misunderstanding, it turns out — was that he sought to renew his contract for another five years but the board put him out of his misery. I’m assured by Tony himself that he took the decision to stand down at the end of the fiftieth anniversary season earlier this year.

Hampstead needs a serious shake-up and shake-out. It hasn’t maintained its profile in the commercial sphere and it’s failed to translate the exciting work in its youth theatre programme into main stage energy, in the way that Dominic Cooke has so notably done at the Royal Court. 

The place seems smug and sleepy, too. So who should the board think of appointing? Gemma Bodinetz might want a break from the treadmill of running the two Liverpool theatres. Chris Luscombe would be a lively idea.

Or why not lure Dominic Dromgoole away from the Globe? He’s done a great job there and he’s the only new work director I can think of who might really challenge the all-too-familiar new play policies in the subsidised theatre. It’s high time for heterodoxy.

My only worry is that the Hampstead Theatre board is so undistinguished they might not even consider such possibilities. Hampstead needs a summer musical, a Christmas season, a maverick mind in commissioning, a few star names and a new notion or two about how to present the classics. And it needs to improve front of house and overhaul its entire staff.

Tony Clark’s one suggestion this week was that the name of the theatre should be changed because it’s not really in Hampstead and some customers were getting off at the wrong tube station.

Oh dear, what a pathetic thing to say. The theatre is in Hampstead and we don’t want it rebranded as the Swiss Cottage Centre or the Finchley Road Classic. If they went around banging the drum locally a bit more, folk would soon rediscover the place. The new £17m theatre is taking an awful long time to start punching its proper weight. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 8:06 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.