The suspense is unbearable…long may it continue
A second fantastically exciting Test Match is unfolding at Lord’s, where the Australians could strike a historic victory today by winning from a seemingly impossible position and posting the highest ever match-winning second innings.
And if England take the last five wickets, they will beat the Aussies at Lord’s for the first time since 1934. Either way, the outcome will be truly historic, to quote Michael Winner.
We need a fairytale after the crushing disappointment of Tom Watson falling at the last fence in the Open golf championship at Turnberry. The 59 year-old with an artificial hip messed up his last hole putting then faded in the play-off.
As if that wasn’t enough, I caught the irresistible all-male production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Union on Friday night and lost count of the people around me who said quite simply they wanted to come right back and see it again.
The show is a wonderful display of good falsetto singing, funny, but non-queeny dancing by the boys as Mabel’s sisters, none of whom wear unsuitable wigs, and all of whom can sing properly. It’s as radical an approach to G&S as Matthew Bourne’s to Swan Lake, and just as enjoyable. I’ve got a hunch that it could become the cult hit show of the summer. It certainly deserves to.
My other weekend theatre destination was the Soho in Soho, where Max Stafford-Clark’s production of his girlfriend Stella Feehily’s Dreams of Violence hasn’t quite hit its stride yet and seems a little over contrived and mechanical.
But the Soho, like the Union, was buzzing in a way that other theatres rarely do. I used to think it mattered that fringe theatres only played to tiny audiences of elite insiders or fellow travellers.
I don’t think that any more. At a time when the mainstream culture has become more homogenised than ever and even the most imaginatively run “big boys” on the theatre circuit — the National under Hytner, the Donmar under Grandage, the RSC under Boyd — are beginning to look frayed round the edges, and desperate for ideas, the fringe has a new job of stirring it up and leading the way.
It wasn’t always like that. For a long period in the 1980s, the fringe was an over-subsidised, self-indulgent melee of
artistic timidity and aesthetic dullness.
That’s all changed, and you look to the Union, the Orange Tree and the Young Vic, the Menier and the Arcola, to discover the new energy, the new will to succeed, that will eventually flood the mainstream and rejuvenate our theatre.
You can’t give up on the establishment altogether, though. The programme for the Proms looks better than ever this year and once I’d stopped diverting myself from desk work and garden chores by following the Open golf on the television and the Test Match on the radio, I could switch channels to hear Handel’s Partenope last night, another great treat in a weekend of high excitement.