Perhaps enough attention has been paid
for a while to provocative remarks about theatre critics. I said
last issue that, this time around, I expected to address A.A. Gill’s
remarks in The Sunday Times of June 24 (available online at
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article1961473.ece), but I’m
not sure there’s that much to say. It is an article that berates
critics for ill serving their subject, written by a man who
consistently foregrounds himself in his own writings, and indeed on
this occasion got the front cover picture of the paper’s Culture
section; that wants us to be more like critics the most recent of whom
(Harold Hobson) died 15 years ago and stopped writing regularly 15
years before that, a lifetime ago in journalistic terms. It
exhorts us, in effect, to care less about content and more about
style. This is no way to stem the tendency in mainstream cultural
journalism – and, indeed, culture – towards precisely such
superficiality. But the real core of the policy is that the ideal
is to be more like Adrian Gill himself. Well, as Jack Nicholson
remarked in a movie whose name unfortunately escapes me, “I’d rather
stick red-hot needles in my eyes.” Gill is a professional gadfly
rather than a critic, so in many ways the perfect response to his
yapping is to ignore it. Alas, I’m not that well
disciplined. Still, one firm slap on the gadfly and let that be.
Bourgie-baiting
I am worried that I may have suffered a major sense-of-humour failure
over
The Pain And The Itch.
The obvious assumption would be that I identify too much with the
liberals being baited. However, on the contrary, I couldn’t for a
moment find anything in these gross caricatures to give me any insight
into any actual group or type or tendency of people. For me, it
failed as satire because its target was not remotely identifiable
enough in real-world terms. On that score, the most prominent
instance of Dominic Cooke’s professed new Royal Court policy of
bourgie-baiting scores lower than any of its smaller-scale predecessors
this season, whatever Quentin Letts’ fantasies to the contrary.
As regards fantasies, I think all too many of us were imagining that
really was Boris Johnson up on stage in
Angels In America; Mark Emerson’s
unkempt blonde mop lent him a disturbing resemblance to everyone’s
favourite gaffe-prone Tory front-bencher. But, well, we needed
something to keep us amused. I think I’m prepared to venture an
overview of Daniel Kramer’s directorial tendencies now, as
follows. He takes a strong position against repressive tolerance:
of youth counterculture in
Hair,
of gay people in the sixty years since the era portrayed in
Bent, and even the bare decade and
a half since
Angels In America was
fully premièred. The mainstream believes itself tolerant
of such groups, and so pays little attention or makes little effort to
interrogating the at-best-patchy reality behind such smug
self-congratulation. Society needs to be woken up, needs to be
made to confront such groups in graphic and vocal manifestations.
Unfortunately, in practice, Kramer seems all too often to equate this
with turning characters into screaming queens, regardless of sexuality:
Kirsty Bushell’s Harper in
Angels,
for instance, is a gibbering cartoon more or less from beginning to
end.
In any case, Kramer’s limited tonal range (one high-pitched note) here
coincides with a pair of plays that have not aged at all well once one
steps beyond the, for want of a better word, euphoria of their arrival
in the theatrical and cultural grey of the early 1990s. Now, it
would be very easy to dismiss such criticism as resulting from
homophobia, whether conscious or not. But what’s interesting is
that the review which most forthrightly pins the shortcomings of play
and production alike is by Simon Edge, who spent several years as an
editor in the (now, alas, effectively defunct) serious gay press.
There is no homophobia, no “self-hatred”, no insincerity to meet reader
profiles, no anything of any such kind in Simon’s review. He’s
just calling a turkey a turkey. Interesting, too, that the
Scottish reviews at the beginning of the collection, from the
production’s run at the Citizens in Glasgow, remain much more positive
about the plays.
Artistic
integrity
The final day covered by this issue was the day on which regulations
came into force banning smoking in enclosed public places in
England. I’m immensely relieved that, as I had hoped, an
exemption is provided “Where the artistic integrity of a performance
makes it appropriate for a person who is taking part in that
performance to smoke”. This has the potential to turn local
authorities into artistic arbiters, having to rule on “artistic
integrity”. More likely they will simply presume against
permission to smoke. Neither option is helpful. I suggest a
simple, obvious criterion: if smoking is explicitly included in a
script, it is by definition integral to the author’s artistic
vision. End of problem. Certainly, I’m glad to say that I
have seen no problems arise so far; I record only one instance of
frustration at the smoking of a foul-smelling coltsfoot herbal cig
onstage instead. Fair enough, actors may have reservations, but
really, especially when the artistic-integrity exemption is being
invoked, the least you could do is observe that integrity in its
olfactory aspect as well.
There were various points during
The
Lord Of The Rings during which a number of us wondered whether
we had been passively smoking an altogether different mixture. My
review is reprinted later in the issue; I merely note here that at one
point, as the cheery little hobbits gambolled across the stage in their
flesh-coloured shoes with tufts of hair affixed to the tops, I couldn’t
help recalling
This Is Spinal Tap:
“And oh, ’ow they danced, the little people of Stone’enge…!”