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.
Unlike Yale, Durham rather surprisingly doesn’t offer any proper study in drama, which makes the activities of its theater-minded students even more a labor of love. Hearing about campus productions of Company and The Pillowman reminded me very much of my years in New Haven, when the likes of Pal Joey, Fiddler On the Roof, Equus, and Waiting For Godot would be mounted, often for three or four nights only, the casts at the time including such eventual Tony winners as Victoria Clark, Michael Cerveris, and David Hyde Pierce, to name but a few. Pierce’s fellow tramp in a Trumbull College staging of Godot was none other than a then-unknown Bronson Pinchot.
It’s invidious and unfair to guess which of a first-rate assemblage of Durham actors, most of them age 20 give or take a year, will end up going the distance, though one of them, an actor-singer named Matt Johnson, already has a place studying music in London once he finishes his Durham degree. (Johnson is also writing a thesis on Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, which he will be directing this summer.) But on the basis of the eleven shows I caught during my visit, the talent exists in spades. A 30-year-old PhD candidate from the Irish city of Cork, Donnchadh O’ Conaill, wrote the play that we judged to be the best of the lot, a witty and affecting solo piece wonderfully titled Interior Designer of My Own Downfall – clearly the contemporary theater’s equivalent, in the nomenclature sweepstakes, to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Its gratifyingly unself-conscious cast of one, Ben Salter, was named best actor at the event, having reportedly won the same award last year, as well: a third win next year and Salter will have pulled off a hat trick not even accomplished by Tom Hanks at the Oscars.
There was much else to praise, as well, starting with O’Conaill’s deadpan gifts as performer during an afternoon of comedy and a delicious improvised musical on the closing night entitled The Chair, The Dog, and The Monkey Named Harry that easily bested such recent London lulus as Imagine This and Marguerite – though that, I realize, is faint praise indeed for a show that was effortlessly smart and fresh. Through it all, Festival Director Oscar Blustin made his gracious, seemingly imperturbable way, on the final night receiving a standing ovation from a packed-out university theater whose thirst for drama was evident across any and all conversations, no matter how late into the night. And not just drama: the dining hall of my elegant Durham Castle digs within minutes of the town’s surpassingly beautiful 11th-century Cathedral was mounting a buzzed-about production of Bizet’s Carmen.
I very much liked a play called Orange Peel (though cut the coda!) by a 19-year-old, James Morton, and found myself casting company member Tessa Coates as Honey in a purely hypothetical Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the same student play’s leading lady, Stevie Martin, could well make a formidable Martha. Will such events come to pass? Who can say, though budding professional director Blustin is preparing a summer tour of Twelfth Night, auditions for which had some of the group in an amiable tizz. The pleasure in Durham lay in watching so much embryonic passion for the theater come to the fore, and why not? A life in the theater, to coopt the title of a David Mamet play, is a good one in no matter what capacity, and it is with great pleasure that I welcome these students to it.
Tags: London Theatre Reviews