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In comparison, the announcement that Michael Gambon has withdrawn, after minor illness, from the new Alan Bennett play at the National, though regrettable, seems footling.

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A delightful  little theatre book has just come my way about a place I’ve never visited but which has thrived on the shores of Derwentwater in the Lake District these past ten years.

It’s called Encore! and it’s a history of the Theatre by the Lake written by David Ward, formerly a Guardian arts correspondent and even more formerly my head boy at a Catholic grammar school in North London.

So it would be quite nice to take revenge on his authoritarian ascendancy over me and say that the book stinks. But it doesn’t. It smells lovely.

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It was all very civilised and low-key at the RSC’s update and “plans for next year” bash in the Hospital Club today.

The club is a media haven in Endell Street, Covent Garden, which must have cost a small fortune to hire, especially as we assembled in the Forest Room, which looked like Bill Dudley’s next “virtual” design of As You Like It, all photographic wrap-around trees and yellow lighting.

In the stated avalanche of information and good intentions, one felt too overwhelmed to wonder, yet again, what the hell is going on.

Michael Boyd and his associate David Farr wore their shirts outside their trousers, not a good sign, and Farr– who walked out on commitments to  the Bristol Old Vic and the Lyric, Hammersmith in order, finally, to join the RSC – confirmed his “adaptability” with obsequious remarks in Boyd’s direction.  (more…)

Gore Vidal made his London stage debut at the National Theatre on Friday night as the announcer of the scene headings in Mother Courage.

And he sat at the back of the stalls in a wheelchair while he delivered them live through a microphone, attended by stage-management.

Or at least that’s how it sounded; his recorded voice will be heard at future performances.

His wry crackle of an almost live voice was dead right for the play, and the headings, and he took a prolonged round of applause when his close friend Fiona Shaw brought him - one of the truly great men of American letters in the last century - to the stage at the end.

There was obviously nothing planned, but he called for a microphone and, struggling gamely to his feet, with much assistance, declared “And the war goes on…” (more…)

The RSC, formerly known as the Royal Shakespeare Company, launched its four-year Russian project yesterday with a pair of new plays that were a lot better than I’d feared, though not as good as I’d hoped.

I was longing for an announcer to take the stage before The Drunks to say that the show would start half an hour late because the actors were still in the pub.

Alas, no such luck: instead the stage filled with actors in greatcoats swilling vodka, though how on earth they researched this scene I’ve no idea as there is a warped Stalinist working hours ban on alcohol throughout the company, onstage and off.

The second play, The Grain Store, started with the unsavoury sight of members of the paying public filling their faces onstage with the actors in Ukrainian peasant costumes.

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One of the refreshing things about Nicholas Hytner is that he never beats about the bush or ducks a question. At yesterday’s Press gathering to launch the National’s annual report, he offered no excuses for the delayed opening of Mother Courage.

“It took longer to get ready than it should have, and that’s bad and it’s wrong,” he said of Deborah Warner’s troubled production, which finally opens to the critics on Friday night.

Why did it fail to make its first preview, one wonders, when Deborah is so experienced at working in the Olivier? “She didn’t work quickly enough,” said Hytner, with chilling precision. “But in the end we bear the responsibility.”

He also confirmed that he had won the battle of the titles with Alan Bennett, who wanted to call his new play about W H Auden and Benjamin Britten (and a rent boy), which Hytner is directing, Caliban’s Day.

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There’s a good wheeze I’d not heard of before organised by a group of young actors calling themselves “In the Same Boat” which offers an evening with a playwright of your choice: interview, performed extracts, readings, poems…
 
They roped me in last night to interview Philip Ridley whose terrific second play The Fastest Clock in the Universe (the one that launched Jude Law) opens at the Hampstead Theatre this week.

The evening took place in the dank, crypt-like confines of the Southwark Playhouse, rather suitable for Ridley’s trademark East End Gothic, and was very well attended by students, other actors and oddball theatre goers.

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How grimly appropriate it was that La Fura dels Baus, the great head-banging Catalan theatre company, should open their remarkable production of Le Grand Macabre at the ENO on the day of two funerals and a major memorial in the arts world.
 
The moral of the Ligeti opera, which is loosely based on a long forgotten play of the Flemish  dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, is that we should eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.

That was certainly a suitable epitaph for writers Keith Waterhouse and Mike Stott, whose funerals yesterday in London and Rochdale marked the passing of two great lovers of life and humanity in all its shapes and sizes.

Waterhouse’s virtues as both writer and drinker have been gloriously celebrated in print and Soho bars since the day he died, but Mike Stott has slipped away with too little notice.

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The news that Griff Rhys Jones will take over as Fagin in Oliver! in time for Christmas at Drury Lane raises an interesting question. Do you have to be Jewish to play the role, as Ron Moody was, or is Jewishness a state of mind?

I only ask because I was sitting in a hospital A&E department yesterday morning (my wife was unlucky enough to be stung, very badly, on the eyelid by a vicious little wasp, no relation) when an orthodox Jew crossed the room and asked me if I was Jewish.

Rendered briefly speechless I recovered to ask, why do you ask? And he said: “Because you look Jewish.”

I got the feeling that if my reply had been positive he would have either suggested I join his synagogue or audition for Cameron Mackintosh.

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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.

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