Race riots turn up the heat
Two very different plays, one American, one British, are dealing this week with racial tensions in the community. The two-hander The Mountaintop, at the Trafalgar Studios, about the last night of Martin Luther King in his Memphis hotel, is powerful, informative and above all highly theatrical.
The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi at the National, which charts the agitation among young British Muslims leading to a book burning similar to that in Bradford in 1989, when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses had brought him a fatwa, in effect a death sentence, is, by contrast, trite, unengaging and theatrically banal.
The chemistry of good theatre is a remarkable thing, never predictable, impossible to define. You just know when it happens.
Both pieces at least demonstrate how theatre at the moment is buzzing with contemporary application and what is sometimes called, alas, relevance. But how Kureishi and his director Jatinder Verma have contrived to come up with such a dud of a show from so rich and rollicking a novel is almost beyond comprehension.
I tried not to speak to anyone in the interval but got sucked into conversation with Baz Bamigboye of the Mail and Alan Yentob, BBC arts czar, on the fringes of the first night hubbub. They are both great admirers of Kureishi, indeed Yentob’s a friend, but none of us could think of anything enthusiastic to say about the show so far.
It’s always good, anyway, not to discuss the show in the interval in any circumstances, but these were so dire that after a little restrained head-shaking we moved on to other matters.
And I stayed on other matters when I headed with Baz to the tube station afterwards. No-one at the Mail is telling Baz that he should give up his taxi account, but he’s using public transport much more these days to comply with the current mood of severe belt-tightening.
Most critics travelling out of town these days either drive back after the show or stay overnight with friends. Or don’t go at all. Hooray for The Times, then, which appears to be treating Benedict Nightingale in the manner to which he’s accustomed.
At Bristol the other night, he told me he was billeted in a hotel. Congratulations, I cried, which one? The Novotel.
Can you imagine? Has it come to this? Times critic stays in cheap hotel shock horror.
Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume…as Horace wrote about the fleeting of time. Even as a third stringer on the Financial Times in the early 1970s I was given first class rail travel and five star hotels the minute I went north of Watford.
Mind you, arts page budgets were slashed everywhere by the 1990s and in that decade The Observer would just about stretch to a B&B in Stratford-upon-Avon and would have infinitely preferred you anyway to find a park bench somewhere for the night.
Still, we mustn’t grumble.Everyone’s in the same boat nowadays, or rather the same coracle. One bright spot yesterday afternoon was to discover the revamped and refurbished bar and restaurant at the British Film Institute, formerly the National Film Theatre, on the river.
It really is a brilliant re-design and you can now sit out on a covered terrace whatever the weather — which was distinctly unfriendly yesterday afternoon.
Still, the place was packed at tea-time and jumping by 5pm, as I prosecuted an interview with the young filmmaker and festival organiser Jacqueline Genie, and noted the Donmar Warehouse education team drawing up future plans over their chocolate-splattered lattes. The only curse is the piped music, not too intrusive but intrusive enough.