Rather shockingly, Charles Spencer has recommended the participatory fringe show You Me Bum Bum Train to anyone “sound in wind, limb or mental health”.
Which effectively rules out almost the entire membership of the Critics Circle, of which he is president.
Those critics who have gone along, however, seem to have liked it, though it’s impossible to tell from their reviews what the hell is going on; they have been asked not to divulge what actually happens, though why anyone should honour such a stricture is beyond me.
My colleague Theo Bosanquet was cleverer than most in conveying on this site the nature of the experience without giving too much away, though he was chastised for allegedly doing just that by one of the creative team.
I’m trying to encourage Theo to elaborate a full spoiler account in retaliation for such ridiculous control freakery.
Just as tantalising as You Me Bum Bum is the new season just announced by the Young Vic, which kicks off its 40th anniversary season in September with an unknown musical by Hair composer Galt MacDermot, The Human Comedy, based on a short story by William Saroyan.
The book and lyrics are by William Dumaresq, a writer who collaborated on almost everything MacDermot wrote for the theatre — apart from Hair.
One of their collaborations, Isabel’s a Jezebel, emptied the Duchess Theatre in 1970 even quicker than the recent revival of The Fantasticks.
“What is all this, anyway?” a cast member — I think it was Carole Hayman, later married to Max Stafford-Clark — was unwise enough to ask, shortly before the interval. I can still recall the corporate reply from the stalls, unprintable on a family website, as the incumbents rose en masse and departed the scene, and the theatre.
Dumaresq was the mildest and most unassuming of men — so reticent, I’m not even sure if he’s still alive — who for a while worked as a night-time sub-editor when I was on staff at the Financial Times.
Needless to say, he knew more about the theatre than the critics paid to write about it, and I shall always treasure his patient, often invaluably practical, advice when it came to asserting this or that about Ibsen or Cole Porter.
He didn’t talk much about his own work, but he did once mention The Human Comedy, which was premiered at the Public Theatre in New York in 1983, and of which he was, in his own quiet way, very proud.
So it will be fascinating to see how the Opera Group production of John Fulljames matches the author’s own estimation.
Equally intriguing is the news that Patrice Chereau, indisputably a great stage and film director — he directed Intimacy, in which Mark Rylance had on-screen penetrative sex with Kerry Fox — will make his first return to these theatrical shores since his gloriously sexy and beautiful production of Marivaux’s La Dispute visited the National Theatre in 1974.
The critical reponse to La Dispute was, I’m afraid to say, shameful, and I know how deeply upset and angry Chereau was about the level of engagement, or lack of it, in the reviews.
Maybe he’ll get a warmer welcome this time when he directs Jon Fosse’s (no relation to Bob) I Am the Wind at the Young Vic next May in a version from the Norwegian by our own Simon Stephens. Fosse, big in Europe, has not fared well on his rare outings to Britain so far, so if there’s a case to be made for him, now is surely the time.
The future looks lively, too, at the National Youth Theatre, who threw a party last night in their splendid new offices in the Peter De Haan Charitable Trust headquarters in Bermondsey Street near London Bridge.
It’s an amazingly expanding organisation, the NYT, with its nationwide projects and creative theatre programmes for young people who have slipped through the various nets of education, training and employment.
After the sips and the speeches, we decamped down the road to the Southwark Playhouse, where two new plays, respectively “mentored” by Tanika Gupta and Philip Osment, were given knockout performances to an exceptionally high standard.
The two scripts, In Care and The Block, are the result of an online script writing competition run by the NYT in partnership with Peter De Haan’s IdeasTap initiative.
So there’s no distinctive colour or tone to the writing, but this is more than compensated for in the realism, passion and tenderness of these scenes of alienation, family fall-out, playground battles and racial tension on a council estate.
I found myself sitting next to a rock concert promoter who had once played a Messenger to Helen Mirren’s 16-year-old Cleopatra in the days when the NYT performed in the old Scala Theatre in Tottenham Street.
We agreed that, were they to be interested — by no means the point of the exercise — one or two of these young actors could enjoy just as prominent a career on the stage.
One whippety white boy, Jacob Beswick, was even more frighteningly good than Jonathan Pryce in the original production of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians.
His energy and rawness exemplified the whole spirit of the evening, and the excitement of young people finding their voices in performance.
I agree with you, Michael; I have always thought that members of the Critics Circle are “sound in wind.” There’s Freudian.
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I agree, Jacob Beswick’s performance was outstanding; provocative, moving and full of energy.
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