On the Aisle

If the Laurence Olivier Awards are handed out and no one is around to hear them, do they make a noise? That thought kept occurring to me during the 34th annual gong-giving knees-up March 8, a great evening that will remain the largely exclusive preserve of those who were there. Some of those involved were perfectly happy not to have the inevitable tension inbuilt at such occasions broadcast for all to see. “It doesn’t feel like a televised event,” Steven Hoggett, the somewhat surprising winner of best theater choreographer for the night’s big winner, Black Watch, told me in the Great Room of the Grosvenor House, immediately following the ceremony, “so it has its own integrity. As [best actor winner] Derek Jacobi put it, it only happens in this room: we were here; we saw it.”

And that is so. Whereas the Oliviers were once televised to BBC audiences who numbered in the vicinity of seven million, that long ago ceased to be the case, London’s nearest equivalent to the Tonys looking on as the show was alternately truncated, delayed for transmission until a later slot (or even a subsequent night), and, eventually, dropped altogether, viewership by that point having slipped below the psychologically crucial threshold of one million. (more…)

It was the National Theatre’s inestimable artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, who quite rightly advised theater critics several years ago to get out more, by which he meant, Go to the opera and ballet, see films and listen to music, since all these activities inform our weekly immersion in the theater. How right he is. But there’s another imperative, less frequently heeded, that, I think, makes a difference, as well: taking a chance on the new generation of practitioners who with luck will become the subjects of professional critical scrutiny and analysis over time. By that, I don’t mean forays into amateur dramatics (or, as the British call it, AmDram) — though I have had fun cheering on my great friend Helena in numerous endeavours, from Noel Coward to Shakespeare to panto, courtesy her enterprising local theatre troupe in the Hampshire town of West Meon. (We’ll pass politely over the version of The Elephant Man that I was once dragged to somewhere in the wilds of north London, in which a work colleague at the time was playing the title role.)

But it was with a view towards seeing tomorrow’s exciting theatrical prospects today that I seized the opportunity the other week to spend four days as one of that same number of adjudicators (three American, one British, London impresario and Durham Univ. graduate Giles Ramsay) at the 34th Durham Drama Festival in the ceaselessly stunning northern English cathedral town. Well, that and the prospect to relive however briefly my own university days, since Yale itself utilises the very system of residential colleges found at Durham and, well before that, at Oxford and Cambridge, the scholastic elder statesmen that pioneered this particular collegiate model. (more…)

I’m the first to nod in agreement when women directors chafe at articles that inevitably lump them all together. We are directors who happen to be women, they are quick to reply, not Women Directors (capital letters mine). And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that gender makes a discernible difference – and thrillingly so – as regards the newly opened Old Vic revival of Brian Friel’s luminous Dancing At Lughnasa, which is directed by a woman, Anna Mackmin, whereas Tony winner Patrick Mason directed the play the first time around.

Telling of five spinster sisters inhabiting the same tumultuous Ballybeg, Co. Donegal, household in 1936, Lughnasa indeed benefits from the careful attention afforded it from Mackmin, who is quietly growing into one of Britain’s most confident and compassionate directors: her West End incarnation last year of David Eldridge’s Under the Blue Sky was one of the glories of 2008, its absence from the year-end handing out of gongs puzzling to this day. (more…)