British Theatre Guide Blog

It’s started - the usual moral outrage about something at the Edinburgh Fringe, and it doesn’t officially open till the weekend!

There is an e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website, calling upon the Prime Minister to “condemn this tasteless portrayal of terrorism and its victims” in the form of the show Jihad the Musical.  Quite how the mover of the petition knows that it is tasteless is not clear but the show’s producers have been quick to defend themselves: “We have no intention of causing offence or insult with this show,” said producer James Lawler.

Why not?  The only way to avoid giving offence to someone is to produce theatre that is so bland that it says nothing - but you’ll then offend others - especially me! - by making theatre boring.

As Nick Hytner said some months ago - no one has the right not to be offended.

But the searching for offence brigade find rich pickings at the Fringe.  One show, Prodigal Daughter at C Chambers Street, has fallen foul of the censor morons, as D H Laurence called them, because of its poster.  Shockingly the poster shows a cartoonish pencil drawing of a naked woman (coloured a rather unbecoming and very unnatural pink)!  I’ve seen it and was horrified to realise that you can actually see a small scribble which represents pubic hair!  I mean, I didn’t realise such things existed!

And who is protesting?  Well, director Asa Gim Palomera says some of the shops have refused to take the poster but the main ban has come from - wait for it! - C Chambers Street.  That’s right: the venue at which the play is being performed.

They do children’s shows, you see, so they think the poster is “inappropriate”.  I’ve spent many an hour in C and I can tell you that their walls are so plastered with posters that you have to really focus to make one out from another - and I’ve never seen any children looking at them: they’re far to busy doing childreny things.

If the Edinburgh Fringe is to have any value, it has to have artistic freedom at its heart, and that means in its advertising materials as well as its performances.  OK, any advertising much comply with the law, I understand that, but when a central part of the Fringe starts setting itself up as a guardian of morality, that’s a political correction too far!

I was saddened today to hear of the death of John Normington.  He was one of those numerous British actors whose name and face you know but often can’t put the two together.  You hear his name and think, “Ah yes!  He’s good!” but can’t put a face to the name, or you see him in something on TV and think, “Who is that?  I know the face.  He’s really good.”

 There are so many like him, actors who are constantly working and turning in fine performances but who have never, for whatever reason - and it has nothing to do with talent for he (and they) are very talented - never quite made it to the top of the tree.  But they are the foundation stones of British theatre: the actors who year after year produce the goods, whether in small parts or large, turning up on stage in a huge variety of theatres, from the RSC and the National to regional theatres to fringe theatres, or on TV or in films.

Without them British theatre would not be the envy of the world, for the big names are all very well - and we all enjoy seeing the Ian McKellens and the Judi Denches and the like - but without the support they get from people like John Normington, they (and I’m sure they would be the first to admit this) would not reach the heights they do.

He will be sadly missed, but we are fortunate that we do have strength in depth in the acting talent of this country and there are others who will carry on in the same tradition, the backbone of British theatre.

The Scotsman online gives its readers the opportunity to respond the news stories by uploading their comments.  It’s just been carrying the story of Fringe venue managers Understairs Arts and the effect its liquidation has had on the companies booked into the venues.  Among the comments are two by people who could well be in the running for the title Right Pillock of the Year.

One said:

Who does this really affect?

Some rich, work-shy Oxford and Cambridge students on a summer jolly to Edinburgh.

They really don’t deserve any sympathy.

This will give them the opportunity to do some real work this summer for a change - but I suspect that they’ll just spend August in mummy and daddy’s Tuscan villa!

There will be plenty of other crappy shows on offer for all the tourists who have somehow been duped into believing that there are some Fringe shows that are actually worth seeing!

I merely point this out: it isn’t worth commenting upon.

However there is another comment - “good.. stop wasting money on fringe… do some goodthings with that” - on which I will comment, for it reveals a monumental ignorance which should not be ignored.

The last I heard, Edinburgh City Council gives £60,000 to the Fringe.  In return, last year the Fringe sold over one million tickets.  At an estimated average price of £7, this brings in £7m, much of which will go straight into the local economy.

Then there’s the money spent by companies, audiences, promoters and journalists in the hotels, guest houses, bed and breakfasts, restaurants, cafes, pubs, shops, buses, taxis and so on and so on and so on.  That will run into millions.  Let’s say that altogether the Fringe brings in £10m to the Edinburgh economy.  Not a bad return for a £60,000 investment.  I wish I could find an investment which would give me that sort of return in just four weeks!

It is very tempting to those of us who are determined to defend freedom of speech to blame the pastor and members of the Apostolic Church, who withdrew from their agreement with Understairs Arts, for the demise of the new Fringe venue management company.  After all, it was their actions (including their desire to censor what was shown at the venue) which, according to Understairs, led directly to the company going into liquidation.

It’s very tempting but it would be very wrong.  I am, as I have forcefully said on many occasions, totally opposed to censorship in theatre, but here we have a situation in which a church has decided that something should not be shown in its building.  We might disagree with their reasoning (and, to be honest, it is weak) but it is their building and they have the absolute right to decide what can and cannot be performed there.

From what one can gather, Upstairs had agreed that they could have sight of scripts in advance, which to me - and, I suspect, to most people - meant that they had de facto script approval.  Either Understairs should not have agreed to this (which would probably have meant they wouldn’t have had the use of the building in the first place) or they should have agreed to the church’s demands and, perhaps, swapped the show in question with another, less contentious one from one of their other two venues. It would have been awkward, perhaps even embarrassing in their dealings with the theatre company, but it was the only way out.

In any case, they brought the problems on themselves and cannot blame the church.  We may think that the church was being very narrow minded - after all, from what we know of the play, what the church objected to was shown as being wrong anyway - but it has a perfect right both in law and morally to decide to what use its premises can be put.

I never thought that I would find myself defending censorship but here we have a case of two rights conflicting and we must apppy the principle that your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins.  If the church had withdrawn because of something Upstairs was presenting in one of the other venues, that would have been censorship and deserving of condemnation, but when it claims the right to decide what happens on premises it owns, then we must defend that right.  Who knows? we might want to claim the same right at some time!

Eddie Fung wants to open a new Chinese restaurant in Durham.  It will be his second: he already has one in Belfast which is doing very nicely, thank you.  But he’s hit a problem in Durham: the city council doesn’t like the restaurant’s name.  It, like its Belfast sister, is to be called Fat Buddha but the city council won’t allow that.

Why?  Because, according to a letter sent to Mr Fung by the head of the city’s cultural services department, Tracey Ingle, “To use the name of a major religion’s deity in your restaurant brand runs contrary to this city’s reputation as a place of equality and respect for others’ views and religious beliefs.”

Hang on! Buddha isn’t a deity.  Not only that, Mr Fung is actually a Buddhist.

Ms Ingle then says the restaurant “does not offer vegetarian cuisine solely, not does it refer to Buddhist belief systems in either its operation or offer” - whatever “offer” means in this context!

The name, she says, is “provocative”.

A few moments’ research throws up the fact that, in the well-known statues of the Fat Buddha, “his fat stomach, which protrudes from the robes he wears, symbolises the largeness of his soul. It is also a symbol of happiness, luck and generosity.”

Apart from the fact that the city council’s objections to the name are clearly a knee-jerk reaction based on ignorance - and is, therefore, far more insulting to Buddhists - I find it frightening that a local authority should attempt to  censor - for that is what they are doing - the name of a restaurant.

What’s next?  Are they going to tell the local papers what stories they can print? Or bookshops what books they can sell? Or the theatre what plays it can put on?

They (Durham City Council) have already banned smoking in the open air in a number of locations in the city, so perhaps now they’ll turn their attention to the way people dress.  Perhaps you won’t be able to go into Durham wearing hoodies.  Or perhaps they’ll introduce a system of rationing in the pubs so people don’t drink more than is good for them.  Perhaps they are even now looking for ways of making their citizens stop using saturated fats or forcing them to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day. (Like many councils, they’re already doing that with school meals, with the predictable reaction that the kids are voting with their feet and heading off to the nearest chippy or Macdonalds at lunchtime.)

It really is scary.  And the horrifying thing is that this council is run by the Liberal Democrats.  Perhaps they should change their name to the Liberal Fascists!

The announcement of the National Theatre of Scotland’s autumn season, almost eighteen months after it was launched, provides a good opportunity to look back on a brave experiment.  To have a national theatre which is not building-based but is essentially a commissioning body was a daring thing to attempt.  Has it worked?

The answer has to be an emphatic “yes”.  When we look back to the work it has funded, from that first (also brave) experiment of having ten separate launch events throughout Scotland, through tours to tiny venues which rarely, if ever, saw theatre before, to major productions such as the critically acclaimed (and it is not often that epithet can be so appropriately applied) Black Watch, NTS has made a major impact on the Scottish theatre scene.

And not just on the Scottish scene either: tours outside of Scotland of productions as diverse as children’s show The Wolves in the Walls and the amazingly powerful Aalst have shown audiences elsewhere in the UK just what Scottish theatre is capable of producing.

There has been considerable criticism of the Scottish Parliament and MSPs (much of it justified - the Parliament building at Holyrood, for example) but the NTS is certainly something they got right!

Spamalot is the latest West End musical to cast via a reality TV show.  When Hannah Waddingham leaves the show, her replacement as the Lady of the Lake is to be found through a new reality show, West End Story - on Swedish TV!

No, that isn’t a mistake.  The producers are to find a new Lady of the Lake through a Swedish TV show.

According to the Official London Theatre Guide website, “Around 700,000 visitors from the musical theatre-loving nation of Sweden visit London every year. According to the press information, West End Story ‘not only seeks to uncover new talent but also to reflect the undeniable appeal of the West End as a global brand.’”

The news comes at the same time as ITV announced that Grease Is the Word was a ratings flop and they will not be doing anything similar in the near future, although they do not rule out returning to the format at some time.  The BBC has also announced that it is looking for another musical to provide the successor to the much more successful Any Dream Will Do search for a Joseph.

Two thoughts occur.  Clearly these shows have audience appeal, the Grease flop notwithstanding, and they also appeal to show producers because of the massive publicity they generate which will, they believe, translate into ticket sales The other thing, of course, is a re-affirmation - if it is needed! - that the big West End musicals have much more to do with tourism than with theatre.

As to whether they do theatre any good is a moot point.  My own feeling is that, in the long run in spite of the increase in ticket sales, they don’t.  I’ve rehearsed the arguments here before and others have responded with a different point of view, but I remain convinced that the appeal which enables an performer to win a TV talent show is not necessarily what is needed for someone who is to perform in a long-running musical.  There will be exceptions, of course, but there will be disasters.  No disaster has happened yet, but it’s early days…

And I still find it obnoxious that the private sense of unhappiness or even humiliation at failing an audition should be turned into mass entertainment.

I suppose it’s inevitable: we’ve just got a new Prime Minister so the opposition parties will grab any stick to beat him with they can find, and this week it’s been the turn of theatre to play that stick. 

On Wednesday it was the Liberal Democrats, who sent out a press release telling us that:

The number of people from ethnic minorities visiting arts events has dropped by a quarter of a million since 2003, despite James Purnell’s recent claim that the battle for greater inclusion has been ‘won’.

Liberal Democrat research shows that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has failed on virtually every one of its targets for greater inclusion in the arts.

And they tell us that Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Don Foster MP said, “A flawed and failed target system is not the way to involve wider sections of society in the arts. A well-funded arts sector would, at least, help. That is why Liberal Democrats oppose the raid of more than £500m - to fill the Olympic Budget black hole - on lottery funds supporting culture, arts and heritage.”

Then today the shadow culture minister Ed Vaizey has tabled a series of Parliamentary questions to newly appointed Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families Ed Balls, asking him to address the concerns raised by Stagecoach about the “seriously flawed” child licensing legislation, which we reported on 21st June.

I wish I could believe that these concerns arose from a sincere and deeply felt concern for the state of theatre but I can’t: I believe rather that they arose from a sincere and deeply felt need to beat the government with any convenient stick they can lay their hands on.

Both of these matters are of genuine concern to theatre.  Target setting has caused major chaos everywhere it has been introduced - not just in theatre but in education and the NHS - and the way in which child licensing is treated is, as Ed Vaizey said, very much a “post code lottery”, and that is not good for the children who could miss out on the wonderful and enriching experience of appearing on the professional stage, but I worry that, if theatre is to be a political football, the only people to benefit will be the politicians.

I hope I’m wrong  and that good will come of it, but when something becomes a political football, attutudes tend to become entrenched, reason and reasonableness fly out of the window and the real problems tend to get lost as insults are hurled across the floor of the House.  So let’s not get too excited about theatre being brought into the political arena.  Let’s wait and see what they do with it first.

The news that the Theatre Royal Haymarket is to become a producing house has already started people talking about a revival of drama in the West End.  In Theatreland, says the chat, straight plays are swamped by musicals, so perhaps this is a sign that drama is making a comeback and will take its rightful place as, if you like, the top of the West End.

Well, no.  It’s not going to happen. Leaving aside the fact that one of the three productions announced yesterday is a musical (Marguerite), the West End lives by the tourist trade and most of the tourists who flock there want to see musicals, preferably musicals they know.  Yes, they will go to see straight plays - although only if they have a star name in them - but it’s musicals which are the big draw.

And that’s hardly surprising.  The average tourist (not the theatre tourist, a totally different animal!) wants to be entertained first and foremost, and a musical - preferably with a large cast, a known plot, brilliant production values and (best of all) a star name - will, they believe, entertain them superbly.

And who is to say that they’re wrong?

When I go to London, I’m a theatre tourist.  I want to see great drama, of the sort that I can’t, generally, see at home, so I’ll see a play in the West End, or I’ll go to the National or the Globe or the Barbican.  I’m just as likely to go to a non-West End venue - the Arcola, the Riverside Studios, Southwark Playhouse, the Lyric Hammersmith are among those I’ve been to in recent years.  Because that’s what I like.  I’ll also, occasionally, see a musical too, because I like musicals.  But I go to London for the theatre: I’ll take in a few exhibitions, probably, and sample the sort of food that I can’t get at home, but I don’t do the touristy things (except for the classical buskers at Covent Garden!), because that’s not what I’m there for.

But I can well understand those who do, and who want a relaxed and undemanding night’s entertainment.  If they’re Abba fans, they’ll go to see Mamma Mia! and Queen fans will see We Will Rock You.  If they don’t have a particular preference, then they’ll see Chicago or Les Mis or Phantom or one of the other super-musicals.  And there’s probably at least twenty of them to every one of me (at least!).

So no, let’s not imagine the Haymarket’s new venture is to be the saviour of West End drama, welcome though it undoubtedly is.  I wish them the best of luck and hope the new venture proves very successful - and with Jonathan Kent at the helm, it has pretty good chance of succeeding.  But let’s not delude ourselves by believing drama will take over the West End.  It ain’t going to happen!

The new Culture Secretary James Purnell has set out his vision for the arts today and there is no doubt he is making all the right noises, but what is particularly encouraging is his appointment of Brian McMaster to advise the DCMS on its relationship with the arts community.  There is no one better placed than McMaster to do the job. Not only is he a council member of ACE and a very successful director of the Edinburgh International Festival, he is also very well respected in the arts world.

For the minister to say that he wants “the frank opinion of experts” is also encouraging, for there are very many - Nick Hytner springs to mind - who have strong opinions and the experience to back them up and who will be, no doubt, more than happy to share those opinions and experience with him.  One hopes that the minister will not restrict his seeking for “frank opinions” just to Brian McMaster but will take advice from a wide range of people - something that, qute frankly, his predecessor was not famous for.

What encourages me most, however, is that the new minister not only has an genuine interest in the arts but is also one of the up-and-coming members of the government.  He will be hungry for success in his new post as it will stand him in good stead as he climbs the parliamentary ladder. 

It is good, too, to see the departure of David Lammy who, quite frankly, was more interested in pushing government dogma than fighting the corner for the arts.  We haven’t had a real, genuine arts enthusiast at the DCMS since Chris Smith.

It is also a good thing that the 2012 Olympics will not be the kind of major distraction for Purnell that it was for Tessa Jowell, who seemed willing to sacrifice the arts and heritage (and even groundroots sport) before the Olympic flame.  Now she is in a non-cabinet Olympics ministerial post, she will not be in a position to have a major effect on arts spending.

We know - if course we know: how could we not? - that the forthcoming delayed Comprehensive Spending Review will be, in Purnell’s word, “tough”, but I for one feel happier that we have someone at the DCMS who seems to have more interest in the arts than treating it as just another job.  Let’s hope that he will be a more fierce fighter for the arts than she who has departed!