I don’t think I’ve seen a more electrifying male double act on the stage since Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in the Old Vic Speed-the-Plow than in the contest joined between Andrew Scott and Ben Whishaw in Cock in the Theatre Upstairs.

Their speed and rapport as they deal with Ben’s character’s sudden lurch into heterosexuality is truly breathtaking. And funny and touching at the same time.

Andrew’s neat and precise in speech and mopvement, Ben shaggier, though painfully pencil-thin, with his bushy mop of tangled hair.

That hair’s like a proud busby that’s been left out in the rain, and it’s on temporary loan to anyone called John: John in the Mike Bartlett play at the Court, John Keats in Jane Campion’s studiously beautiful film Bright Star.

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There once used to be plays and players. Now there are names and naming, with Alan Bennett swelling  the lists of dramatists writing fiction about real people.

But in Bennett’s case, there’s nothing all that sudden about this: his gallery of past characters includes Kafka, Proust, King George III, Guy Burgess, Coral Browne and the lady in the van in his front garden.

The joke, of course, is that his characters don’t really resemble their own characters at all. When Richard Griffiths pulls on a prosthetic face mask in The Habit of Art he’s said to look more like Marlon Brando.

And when Bennett’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, launches into his Douglas Byng drag act, he’s less like the real Humphrey than a wonderful idea of how Bennett would like Humphrey to have been.  

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Busy designer Tim Meacock opened two productions over the weekend: Salad Days at Riverside and The Making of Moo at the Orange Tree.

Both shows, in different ways, are 1950s classics, but there’s nothing remotely retro about Tim, who is like a modern beatnik, shabby and bright and long-haired and devoted to his wheelchair-bound partner Andrew who works for the Arts Council.

He’s turned the Riverside into a big expanse of green parkland where Varsity graduates, tramps, civil servants and policemen all cavort nuttily to the insidiously charming music of a magic piano, and he’s surrounded it (and them) with giant yellow drapes. 

It’s all a delight — I’ve loved the show ever since I choreographed my Oxford college production — but it felt a bit slow, though Tim told me at the Orange Tree (he’d just arrived from the Saturday matinee) that the pace has picked up prodigiously.
 

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Our first Opera Outing and what a first it was! With over 100 theatregoers in the bustling and beautiful London Coliseum foyer I can’t deny that I was a little apprehensive! Would they enjoy it? Would our first Opera Outing be the first of many or the last? Opera guides in hand the seasoned opera goers and the opera virgins alike took their programmes and their seats and settled in for an evening not soon forgotten, the ENO’s Turandot.

Everyone has said the same, this production got us talking. Rupert Goold’s very modern re-inventing of Puccinni’s final opera includes Elvises, Marilyn Mansons, nuns, and I believe, a few members of the Village people! Set in a Chinese resturant a writer (Rupert Goold’s own addition to this opera), having eaten some strange chicken or possibly a magical mushroom, writes or sees, you’re not sure which, the story of an ice queen who can only be won by the man who answers all her riddles correctly. We come to understand that no man has ever managed and thus beaheadings are a frequent event in this Chinese restuarant. The hero of our tale however falls for Turandot and answers all three riddle correctly. Yet she will not love him and so he sets his own task, know my name by sunrise and you will be free, otherwise love me. (more…)

Am I the first to spot Jim Haynes’s television adverts for After Eight dinner mints?

The founding father of the fringe in Britain, and the Traverse in Edinburgh, is seen mingling with his guests at one of his famous bohemian Paris soirees when, with hilarious incongruity, the little square sweets in brown paper bags are passed round.

It’s as though a royal banquet at Buckingham Palace had ended with a lucky dip of fruit lollies and mini Mars bars.

In Jim’s case, you really can say he’s doing these ads for the money.

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I stood outside the house I spent my first five years in and marvelled this morning. 110 Jubilee Street looks a bit beyond my price range now.

On one side, Millers’, the old Jewish grocery — where my brother and I were treated to broken biscuits from a big jar — is now an undertakers. On the other, Dempsey Street school is a block of luxury apartments with twenty-five penthouses. 
  
I was on my way to speak to a classroom of fifteen year-old Muslim girls in Mulberry School, a few blocks away on the Commercial Road, about What Fatima Did at Hampstead Theatre. What she did was wear a hijab. So did all the girls in Mulberry.

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Now the Evening Standard has announced its short list of contenders for the awards on 23 November, the guessing games can begin.

What is odd about all this spurious suspense is that the outright winners have long been decided, even before the long list was announced, so manouevres are already under way to make sure the right people turn up at the Royal Opera House on the day.

While it is always the case that the right people often win awards for the wrong reasons, I’m pretty confident about what will make the cut and take the palm.

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The launch of the National Theatre of Wales is the final judgement on the National Theatre of Scotland: the blueprint works.

So there’s no home base, and a policy of topographical inclusion and community based projects. Michael Sheen leading his home town’s Passion Play in Port Talbot sounds juicy but one rather shudders at the thought of John Osborne’s “lost” first play; unless it turns out to be half as good as Martin McDonagh’s belatedly produced first play, The Pillowman, of course.

And how ironic is it that the NTW’s artistic director is called John McGrath? The late, great playwright of the same name was in effect a founding father of the Scottish national theatre with his 7:84 touring company in the 1970s.

The previous bidders for running, or indeed forming, the NTW, Michael Bogdanov and Terry Hands, have taken to the hills and we don’t know whether either or both of them will take part.  

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The news that Ambassador Theatre Group, run by Howard Panter and his wife Rosemary Squire, has acquired ownership of Live Nation’s British theatres for £90m is surely a mixed blessing.

In the Times, producer David Pugh declares that power corrupts — and that monopolies tend to dictate mean-minded deals to touring companies — while Benedict Nightingale feebly says that it’s hard to see the acquisition as anything but good news.

But judging by the upkeep in some of its West End theatres, ATG is struggling to maintain a decent service in the theatres it runs at the moment, let alone any future operations.

The Trafalgar Studios is the most uncomfortable auditorium in London, the Duke of York’s is badly run down, the Comedy seriously unwelcoming. And there’s a scandalous one-size-fits-all glass of wine policy at £6.40 a gulp.

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The new president of the Critics’ Circle, Charles Spencer, pours scorn from a low height on the idea that critics should welcome new ideas or practices in the theatre, or that they should respect the dignity of artists.

I suppose coming from someone who thought that Trevor Nunn deserved a good kicking — such witty intemperateness! — or whose heart sinks at the very mention of the name of Katie Mitchell we should not be surprised.

And I’m half in sympathy with his dislike of the suggestion that critics are either part of the theatre commmunity, or should even sign up to a manifesto pledging support to the art form.

But, really, have you ever heard of a football writer who was not totally dedicated to his subject, or a political writer who was not interested in new ideas of political theory, or a gardening correspondent who closed his eyes to the advances in new rose breeding techniques or the untold possibilites of ericaceous compost?”

It’s not a critic’s job to be nice,” harrumphs Spencer in his Telegraph column today, and no-one’s going to disagree with him there, however brave and independent-minded he thinks he sounds. (more…)