Amy in the Press bar
There was an interesting convocation of non Press people in the Press bar at The Little Dog Laughed last night: Angus Deayton, Mamma Mia! producer Judy Craymer and film publicist Jonathan Rutter.
Which made a nice change from the rest of us cramped together in disharmony and fighting for the freebies. By the time one reached the cubby hole dispensing the grog, it was time to go back for the second act.
At least this pleasant crush didn’t lead to the sort of pantomime fracas involving the aptly named Amy Winehouse over the holiday season when she pulled the hair of a theatre manager who wouldn’t top her up with vodka and coke.
Amy was convicted yesterday on charges of common assault and public order offence, given a conditional discharge and fined £185 in costs and compensation.
A small price to pay, you might think, for not having to see any more pantomimes at Milton Keynes, but a little excessive, don’t you think?
After all, panto is the art of audience participation and no-one participated more fully or fulsomely than Amy at Cinderella, as she raised her voice throughout the first act, was moved to a box in the interval and tried to high-jack the bar on her way to the loo in the second act.
I’m all for this kind of interaction in the theatre, which is why mobile phones going off is such a good idea. It gets the actors and customers talking to each other when the play is disrupted and tempers are frayed.
Sometimes we get really lucky and an actor like Ian Hart will actually leap off the stage and address some personal remarks to a selected punter.
Perhaps next year a management can arrange for Ian Hart to play Baron Hardup and Amy Winehouse the Good Fairy — from the back of the stalls.
A more poignant intervention was made by Anthony Head at the end of Six Degrees of Separation on Tuesday night when he stepped forward at the curtain call and asked us all to fill the buckets in the foyer for the Haiti earthquake catastrophe.
The only problem here was that he had just finished playing a snobby New York art dealer who wouldn’t cross the street in his own neighbourhood to help out anyone less well off than himself.
But I suppose the principleat work is a good one: you earn money playing a selfish prat and give it away to make yourself feel better about it.
And as we’d been complicit in that for ninety minutes, it was a great relief to be able to throw a couple of coins in the bucket on exiting and assuage the feelings of nausea racing through one’s blood stream.
Boy, had some of the Old Vic glitterati got it bad: I saw at least two guys throwing fistfuls of folded money into those recepticles. I just hope the windfall gets to the right people in time.
And maybe the magistrate should have told Amy to send along a few bob, too. We’d all drink to that, even the MK theatre staff, though they might have wanted to send Amy as well.