The Sunday matinee opening of The Shawshank Redemption at Wyndham’s threw up one really suprising new revelation: there is, after all, a group of people more scruffily dressed than the critics: the comics.

Half of Britain’s alternative comedians turned out to support the adaptation of Stephen King’s story by their fellow stand-ups Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns, but none of them — with the luminous and enchanting exception of Hattie Heyridge — had gone to much trouble to brush up.

Yes, it was Sunday afternoon, but Wyndham’s is possibly the most beautiful Victorian theatre in London and not an outpost of the scuzzy Jongleurs or the Comedy Store. Have we lost all sense of public propriety in the dress code stakes?

Genius longhair Ross Noble was tripping over his own frayed jeans in the back of the stalls, while the enormous Phil Jupitus looked as though he’d smuggled his own family in under his tent-like overcoat.

Paul Merton cast genially about him with his shirt hanging lower over his trousers than his jacket hem, and Alan Davies held forth merrily in the bar with his curly mop just about bouncing along in time with his vocal clackety-clack. He, too, had forgotten to tuck his shirt in and had presumably mislaid his jacket on the bus up from darkest Essex.

The touching thing about all this, though, was that they had bothered to turn up at all. Playwrights rarely attend en masse the opening of a fellow writer’s new play, preferring to stay at home and pray for some bad reviews.

And I imagine lighting designers rarely have the time, let alone the inclination, to go along and check out each other’s plots and special effects.

A whole gang of them were on hand to applaud each other later yesterday evening in Earls Court, where the Italian-based lights company Clay Paky sponsored the second annual Knight of Illumination Awards.

The Association of Lighting Designers was heavily represented among a 350-strong throng of electricians, industry suppliers, technical directors, production managers and business executives and were treated to a splendid dinnner in, suprisingly enough, the Hotel Ibis near the Earls Court exhibition centre.

Designers and technicians in television, rock music and theatre were honoured with a huge sword and a scroll, while lighting systems designer Mark White received the lifetime recognition award.

In the theatre section, the judges chaired by Rick Fisher — David Benedict of Variety, Louise Levine of the Sunday Telegraph. Fiona Maddocks of the Observer, Ash Khandekar of Opera Now and myself — came up with awards for Michael Hulls’s work on the Russell Oliphant/Robert Lepage epic Eonnagata; Adam Silverman’s lighting for ENO’s Peter Grimes; Jon Clark’s wonderful lighting for Three Days of Rain starring James McEvoy;and Kevin Adams’s light bulb and neon strip extravaganza for the musical Spring Awakening, just pipping to the post Neil Austin’s work on Piaf and Natasha Katz’s on Sister Act.

Most of the lighting boys had donned suits for the occasion but, funnily enough, had contrived in so doing not to look any more kempt than the rumpled stand-up comedians.

I guess it’s pointless to expect any crowd of nay-sayers — and lighting designers in my admittedly limited experience of them are no more affable and no less argumentative than most critics or comedians — to conform to the accepted standards of behaviour either intellectually or sartorially. So, good luck to the lot of them. I’ll eat my suits.
  

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 8:57 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.