There was not much in the way of theatre in the Alicante region these past few sunny days in Spain, though an upcoming production of “Phedra – the Ballet” looked distinctly promising.

But two pieces of shocking news filtered through the heat haze: the death, supposedly by suicide, of Matt Lucas’s former civic partner Kevin McGee, and the adoption of free sheet status by the Evening Standard starting next Monday.

In comparison, the announcement that Michael Gambon has withdrawn, after minor illness, from the new Alan Bennett play at the National, though regrettable, seems footling.

Although he was magnificent in the recent revival of No Man’s Land, Gambon seems to have lost interest in the stage. His greatest performance remains Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge, over twenty years ago, at the National. His Falstaff was a huge disappointment, and it seems an age since his massive RSC King Lear or his unforgettable Galileo.

Richard Griffiths will, I’m sure, be an adequate substitute as the actor playing W H Auden in The Habit of Art, but his face won’t have the right Audenesque look of a corrugated field, or a cake that someone left out in the rain.

At the opening of Prick Up Your Ears, I sat behind someone I took to be Kevin McGee, sitting with Boy George. He seemed to be in buoyantly high spirits and he and George were the first on their feet to applaud Matt Lucas and Chris New at the end of the show.
 
I didn’t much like their performances myself, but the eeriness of the Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton saga takes a fresh new twist in the light of this tragedy. I just hope Matt Lucas gets back on stage as soon as possible to deal with the crisis in the best way possible — honouring his friend by carrying on and finding joy in his memories as well as in Orton’s legacy.

The demise of the Evening Standard is another hammer blow, though not as deadly, we hope, as that administered by Halliwell to Orton in their Islington flat.

Presumably the redoubled distribution will attract more advertising to cover the costs and move the paper back towards a profit. But it’s a sad day indeed when a monopoly local paper in the greatest city in the world has to give up the commercial ghost as an onsale commodity.

Anyone who remembers the old news vendor’s cry of “Star, News, Standard,” will know that we once had three thriving evening papers.

The Standard’s prestige was unassailable, not least in theatreland, where the drama awards were the best and most coveted (they’re not, any longer) and Sydney Edwards’s “Friday People” double spread each week, later continued by his colleague Michael Owen, was the top showbusiness column in the land.

I don’t think the Standard has any connection these days with commuters from Essex or the Home Counties coming into Liverpool Street or Charing Cross. Neither the last editor, Veronica Wadley, nor the present incumbent, Geordie Greig, had or has the common touch, and both have been guilty of a shameless sucking up to the celebrity culture and metropolitan gastromania that is of no interest whatsoever to ordinary people doing ordinary jobs and living in ordinary places.

The failure of the Standard to exploit its monopoly status has been truly appalling, and although its cause has not been helped by the distribution of free sheets and the general downturn in the newspaper buying habit, its woes have been largely self-inflicted.

Does anyone these days know or care who is the paper’s film critic, for instance? This thought came to me when I saw that the egregious, oafish Roger Lewis, who’s lately published a short book of bile and bullshit, was “thrilled” when Alexander Walker, the Standard’s greatest film critic, died…

And while people who follow football might occasionally like to know the views of Matthew Norman or David Mellor on the subject, they would doubtless prefer, as in the arts, to read opinion by professional experts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 9:31 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.