British Theatre Guide Blog

That’s “call” in both senses of the word -  as in “to telephone” and “to say bad things about”.

I live more than 300 miles from London, so when I go to the theatre there, I go as an ordinary audience member, not as a critic.  I pay the same ticket prices as anyone else and book in the same way as anyone else.

Today I have been trying to book tickets for Speed-the- Plow at the Old Vic.  It was almost a day-long job.  I’ve started trying at 11.00 this morning and it’s now 3.10 and I have just got through.

 First I thought, “Book online.  As the editor of an internet theatre site, you should use online facilities.”  So I tried Ticketmaster - well, you have to support your advertisers, don’t you?.  Tickets not available for the performances I want.  Indeed, it looked like tickets weren’t available, full-stop.

So I phoned the 0870 box office number.  Engaged.  OK, use ring-back.  After half an hour, still no response, so I rang again.  Engaged.  For the next hour I tried every ten minutes.  Always engaged.

So I thought, “Use the Ticketmaster phone number.”  I got straight through - well, after listening to countless options for pop concerts.  A very helpful lady told me that they have only a very limited ticket allocation for the Old Vic and it has been sold, so I should try the box office.  I explained my predicament.  “Have you tried the 020 number?” she asks.  I didn’t know there was one, so she gave me it.

Wonderful!  Perhaps this might be better.

Unfortunately it rang once, then started indicating it was engaged, and then it hung up.

So, back to the 0870 number.  On about the tenth try, I got through!  Well, I got through to a recording which told me I was being placed in a queue.  After a while, a nice pre-recorded gentleman came on to apologise for my being kept waiting but I will be spoken to as quickly as possible.  After all, they are, as he said, committed to answering calls as quickly as possible.  Well, I waited for ten minutes but it was between 10am and 1pm, which, the voice said, is their busiest time, so I would call back later, as they advised.

I tried -  at 1.15, 1.30. 1.45, 2.00 - but no luck: it was engaged.  Tried the 020 number - ring once, engaged tone, hang up.  Did that at least half a dozen times.

Tried the 0870 at 2.30 - engaged.

Tried at 2.45 - engaged.

Tried at 2.55.  Got through!  Sat listening to how important my call is and how committed they are to answering my call as quickly as possible for just over ten minutes and finally - finally! - spoke to a real person.  Booked my tickets - at £90 for two, plus a transaction fee, plus something else that I’m not sure of because by then I was so tired that I wan’t listening properly and if I’d asked her to repeat, that would have delayed some other poor bugger who’d been trying for hours to get through.

I’ve booked by phone or on the Net for shows at many West End theatres, the National, the RSC and London fringe venues, and have always found it pretty painless, fast and efficient - except at the Old Vic.  Always - without fail - the Old Vic takes longer than anywhere else - hours instead of minutes - and I always say I’ll never go there again, but I never remember until I’m actually in the process of trying to make the booking.

I’m going to see The Sea at the Haymarket and booked via Ticketmaster.  It took less than five minutes and I downloaded my tickets there and then.  Why can’t the Old Vic be as efficient?  If they can’t afford the staff to service the number of calls they get, then they should turn over all their ticket sales to a specialist ticketing company.  You don’t do your theatre any good by alienating customers by making them wait hours and spend loadsamoney on phone calls.

Come on, Kevin Spacey: you’ve got a damned good programme - now sort out your box office!

Last week I received a review of the National Youth Theatre’s White Boy at the Soho from our reviewer Rachel Sheridan.  In her accompanying email, she pointed out - horror of horrors! - that they actually call it the soho theatre.  No capitalisation!

Now I know this is the modern way - playwright debbie tucker green, for example, wants to be called just that, without any capitalisation - and I also know that, in most editions of his work, the poet E. E, Cummings  is known as e. e. cummings (although, according to Wikipedia, he did say that he he preferred the capitalized version), but I am a proud pedant and insist upon capitalisation (notice the “s” there, unlike the American “z” in the quote for Wikipedia).

Does that sound petty?  I suppose it does and, if I restricted myself to so minor a pedantry, it would be, but (notice the Oxford comma!) I really do think language and the way we write it matter.  We live in a visually very sophisticated society, which is a good thing because it means that we have become skilled at reading visual messages, but, at the same time, we seem to be in danger of becoming desensitised to language, and that is dangerous.

Why is it dangerous?  Because the less complex the language we can use, the less complex the concepts and thoughts we can process.

You don’t believe that?  Someone told me the other day that he is distinterested in… well, the subject doesn’t matter.  He actually meant that he is not interested in it, that he is uninterested.  It appears that now those two very distinct and useful words, uniterested and disinterested, have lost their very distinct meanings and have become synonyms.  Thus we have lost a very useful word.  How soon before the concept of disinterestedness is lost?  Come to think of it, there are some who will say it already has been, with people looking first and foremost at “what’s in it for me?”

Now I am not advocating the return to the florid language of times past, nor to the obfuscations of legalese (or any other jargon, for that matter), but sloppy language leads to slopping thinking and slopping thinking leads to errors and confusion.

I probably go too far in the opposite direction - even when texting I will use capitals and proper punctuation: God forbis that I should ever write “c u 2nite”! - and I often delay (sometimes for hours) getting one of my own reviews online because I am searching for exactly the right word.

And it is so easy to lose the appreciation for beautiful language.  When Shakespeare sounds like a foreign language and the reaction to passages from the King James Bible is “eh?”, then we are in deep linguistic trouble.  Of course language must change and develop, and its natural direction is towards greater simplicity - the loss of inflection being a prime example - but far too many changes in modern English are the result of ignorance.  Witness the “grocer’s apostrophe”, where an apostrophe is added to every plural - potato’s , apple’s and so on - as inflection is so far in the past that people do not recognise that ’s is a replacement for the old genitive.

But I am wandering too far!  I simply insist that a little pedantry is a good thing!

Yes, it’s that time of year, the time when the Inland Revenue starts nagging that you have until 31st January to complete your tax  return online (and pay what you owe) or they’ll send the boys round with baseball bats to squash vital and delicate parts of your anatomy.

(In fact, what they actually say is you’ll have to pay loadsamoney extra but, when you get to my age, that’s almost as painful as having those vital and delicate parts squashed.)

 We all hate paying taxes but we all also want government to spend money on what we think is important and, as the old song goes, you can’t have one without the other.  So really I ought not to complain but pay up with a cheerful smile on my face and a song in my heart, knowing I’m doing my bit to keep good old Britain rolling along.  Who knows?  My little contribution might be just the bit that helps fund an earth-shatteringly brilliant piece of new theatre or buys a hundredth of a square  inch of a new lane of an already overcrowded motorway.  Or perhaps it might pay a tiny fraction of MP Boris Johnson’s salary.  (Would that we could stipulate that our money is not used for such wasteful purposes!  But I suppose medieval kings used tax money to pay their court jesters, so…)

Actually, what annoys me about taxation is not having to pay taxes (alright, it does annoy me, but I accept they’re necessary) but the condescension of government ministers when they tell us that they are giving an extra £Xm to the NHS or £Ym to education, as if they are putting their hands into their own pockets.  They’re not.  They’re putting them into ours, deciding what they want to do with our money and then expecting us to be grateful.

Oh well.  Rant over.  Do I feel better for it?  ‘Course not: I still have to fill in all those bloody forms!

A guid new year tae ane and a’ and mony may ye see.

When you get to my age (and I shall become what used to be called an old age pensioner - now more kindly referred to as a senior citizen - in April), there is a tendency to look back rather than forward at this time of year and, of course, we’ve been doing that on the BTG with our Reviews of the Year from various parts of the UK, so I am going to try to avoid that trap and look forward.

One thing I am sure of - well, as sure as you can be of anything: perhaps one should add deo volente - is that the BTG will continue to grow. At the moment we have over 9,300 pages online and that number increases by 30 or 40 a week.  We also have around forty reviewers/correspondents, although inevitably some are more active than others. 

I have to admit that certain sections of the site have been neglected of late and so my first New Year resolution is to revive or revitalise those sections which have not been maintained as well as they should have been.

I also resolve to update this blog more often: why have it if you don’t use it?  There’s no way it can be a daily thing - there are, after all, a limited number of hours in the day - but resolution no. 2 is to make an entry once a week.

On a more personal level - although it does affect the BTG - my third resolution is to organise my time better.  I’m pretty certain I am not the only person in the world making that particular resolution!  One of the most difficult aspects of freelance life to come to terms with is dealing with the totally unstructured nature of one’s day.  When you’re working for someone else, you have set hours and a set amount of work to get through in that time, but when you’re freelancing and your own boss, it is so easy to slip into a kind of mañana attitude.  The trouble is, when mañana comes, it gets pretty hectic!

And the fourth resolution?  To try and keep the other three, which , if I succeed, will probably be a first!

Anyway, a very happy and healthy New Year to you all.

So far this year I’ve reviewed productions of Jack and the Beanstalk, Sleeping Beauty and Aladdin, I’ve written and directed a touring production of Aladdin, I’ve written two articles on panto for a BBC magazine (Who Do You Think You Are?)  and for a local paper (Newcastle Journal Culture Magazine), and talked about panto on BBC Radio Manchester.  I’ve also edited ten panto reviews from other BTG reviewers and I have no doubt that there will be more to come.

I am all panto-ed out!

Seriously, I do really enjoy panto - although I can no longer work myself up to joining in the Oh yes you wills etc - but “as a surfeit of the sweetest things / The deepest loathing to the stomach brings” so it can all get too much, although I have to say that I have not - this year - experienced  that “deepest loathing” which only comes when I see panto done really badly.  However I have to admit that I am getting close to the “surfeit”!

I don’t have any more to review myself but I will have to take a look at Aladdin on tour a couple more times, if only to keep the cast up to the mark!  No, that’s not fair: they’re actually doing it very well, to judge by all the comments that are coming back to me.

Actually there is one comment that I would love to use on posters for future tours but, alas, it isn’t possible for a family show.  One (female) member of the audience at one venue commented to our Widow Twankey and Wishee Washee, “You’s two are as funny as f**k”!

No, the interesting thing about catching one of the performances is to see how much of the script I laboured over so carefully actually survives.  That’s the great thing about panto: the script is just the starting point and it (shall we say?) develops throughout the run.  What doesn’t work is lost (PDQ actually) and what does tends to expand.

And I wonder: do they put in those comments about the awful quality of the jokes when I’m not there?

Actually one of the funniest things to happen this year was right at the end of the show when Wishee Washee laments that Aladdin gets the Princess, Widow Twankey gets Abanazar but he gets no one.  The cast, of course, all comfort him by telling him “But you’ve got all the boys and girls in your gang” but on this cocasion one of the mothers in the audience yelled at the top of her voice, “You can have me, pet!”  It was all the rest of the cast could do to keep him on the stage!

And of course that’s what makes it possible for a cast to continue enjoying doing the show, even if it’s the third performance that day and you’ve been running for three weeks.  No, I’m not talking about pulling a member of the audience but the unpredictable nature of the audience response.  They’ll always laugh at places you don’t expect (usually at my jokes, and no one ever expects that) or come up with hilarious comments.

I love panto, but thank goodness it’s only once a year!

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!

In spite of expectations, Northern Ireland Health Minister Michael McGimpsey has decided not to allow smoking on stage, leaving (in the UK) only England sensible enough to realise that you can’t change a whole body of drama by legislation.  The arguments in favour of making stage performances an exception have been rehearsed so often they are not worth repeating here but one comment is worth making.

Michael Diskin, executive director of Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, told The Stage, “I’m perfectly happy with a smoking ban but the health lobby treated this as a moral rather than a health issue and I don’t understand why the established precedent of herbal cigarettes wasn’t considered as a viable option.”

And that’s it in a nutshell: the whole tenor of anti-smoking propaganda has changed from “protecting the nation’s health” to making the whole thing a matter of morality and, in the process, demonising smokers. And what an odd kind of morality it is!  We can show, as Owen McCafferty said, all kinds of debauchery on stage - think Blasted with oral sex, rape, urination, cannibalism - in every part of the UK, but in Ireland, Scotland and Wales we can’t show people smoking.

The smoking of one or even more cigarettes on a stage in theatre is not going to put the audience’s health at risk as by the time the smoke reaches even the front row it will have begun to dissipate - or, if some think it may, why not put up the same kind of warning notice that we do when strobe lighting is used?  The risk of a strobe triggering an epileptic fit is far larger than the risk to health of breathing the amount of smoke that will be experienced in most theatres from a cigarette being lit on stage, but we don’t ban strobes. Nor do we ban sudden explosions, even though it could be argued that they could have a serious effect on someone with a heart condition.  No, again we simply give a warning that this will happen during the play and leave it to the individual to decide whether to take the risk.  As we do if there is full or partial nudity, scenes of a sexual nature or scenes of violence in a play or film or TV programme.

Adult should be credited with the good sense to be able to make decisions for themselves. We don’t need protecting every second of our lives: for goodness sakes, we already have warnings on packets of food that when cooked it will be hot!

McCafferty is right, too, about it being a form of censorship.  In their wisdom the NI, Scottish and Welsh governments have decided that smoking is a “bad thing” and we are therefore not to be allowed to see that it exists in a play.  How soon before they start applying the same principle to other things? Opposition to the government, for instance?

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I suppose this is by way of being an apology - and a bit of a moan.  Updating the site during the last week has been a very hit or miss affair.  I’ve had one of those awful stomach upsets that don’t really lay you low (although I did spend one day in bed - feeling very sorry for myself, I may add!) but do prevent you from concentrating on anything for any length of time.

I had it over last weekend to begin with and then it went away on Tuesday, only to return on Thursday with increased ferocity.  Still, it did mean that I was able to get the one review I was doing this week done in comfort and to get through my class on Wednesday.

Fortunately it wasn’t a very busy week in terms of news but it did mean that interesting stories were delayed.  We do like to scoop other theatre sites but there was no chance of that this week, I’m afraid.

Keep your fingers crossed that it has gone this time!

No, nothing to do with the BTG.  I have resigned from my position as a drama tutor with a local authority’s Adult and Community Learning section.  It’s all because of paper.

I was observed this week and comments made on my teaching.  I am running a Drama course for adults with profound learning difficulties and, although it is very demanding, I am enjoying it and feel as though my group are making great progress.  Their carers agree, and both the group and the carers tell me they are enjoying the course.

The observer was enthusiastic about the lesson she saw, the enjoyment of the group, the progress being made and the comments of the carers, but then slammed me for the quality of my paperwork.  My lesson plans and Scheme of Work were not detailed enough and I did not make full use of the ILPs (Individual Learning Plans).

My lesson plans simply outlined what I was going to do in the lesson: I should have included aims and objectives, how much time I will devote to each part of the lesson, how I would assess progress, and so on But I know why I am doing each activity and the amount of time devoted to them depends upon the response of the group.  Why do I need to write this down when I know what I am doing?  What is the point of the lesson plans except to guide me during the lesson?  Nobody wants to see them unless an observer is looking at the lesson.

The Scheme of Work should be detailed, saying what I am going to do in every lesson - all 20 of them! - (together with aims and objectives, of course) but in a different format from the lesson plans.  I point out that my SoW covers everything that is needed (what I am trying to achieve, methodology and so on) - but ah, it isn’t in the correct format.

As for the ILPs, they have to be filled in through discussion with the “learner”.  But only two of these learners can communicate verbally anyway, and only one of them can come close to understanding the questions I am supposed to ask.  And I am completing the tutor’s comments section, only on a separate sheet.  Ah, but it has to be done in the correct format: I can only go onto a separate sheet if there is insufficient space on the form.

So I’m doing a great job in my actual teaching, but I can’t be described as a good teacher because my paperwork isn’t right.

So I have resigned.  I’ll finish this course, naturally, because it will disappoint the group if I don’t, but I won’t work for ACL again.  If creating reams of managerial tick boxes is as important as the actual teaching, I don’t want to know any more.

Well, A Cold Coming is finished.  Artistically and critically it was a great success but please don’t mention the box office!  But there is a possiblity of it transferring elsewhere - watch this space!

It does mean that the BTG will be getting back to normal now.  Little was done this week but from now on I can devote much more time to the site.  It’s actually fortunate that the last couple of weeks were quiet both in terms of news and new productions so you haven’t really be short-changed - honestly!