Theatre. I hate it. Not all of it – just most of it.
I can already hear the screams from the stalls and the boiling fury of all the playwrights who have bored me senseless throughout the decades.
But you have. There. I’ve said it.
My dear friend and the late Jack Tinker, adored theatre with a passion I have never witnessed in any critic in any genre. When he died in 1996, I lost a dear friend, but the world lost a heart that beat with what it was born to love: the seductive rhythm of live theatre.
It was never for me. I’m a TV person and, I’m afraid, prefer to sit on my fat backside with a curry and a bottle of wine watching Murder, She Wrote, in an environment in which I can press pause, go to the loo, put the kettle on, make a phone call etc.
I’ve been a TV critic since 1988 when I started at the Evening Standard, and I’ve been doing it – and loving it – ever since.
To me, the theatre is very stressful. I don’t like the queues. Going in. Getting out. Queues for the bars. Queues for the toilets.
Then there are the seats. I am just five feet tall, and yet always manage to get the theatregoers’ equivalent of Lurch sitting in front me.
And the sweet eaters, wrestling with boiled sweet wrappers, syncopating their movements in an attempt to appear inconspicuous but sounding as if they’re bombing Russia.
But here’s the biggie. The talkers. Just shut it, people!
I once went to see Scrooge in Bristol’s Old Vic and had the misfortune to sit next to child of about seven with her mother.
Every time someone walked on stage, she enquired ‘Is that a ghost?’ On and on and on. ‘Is that a ghost?’ ‘Is that a ghost?’ ‘Is that a ghost?’
I couldn’t take it. ‘Look, there are only three effing ghosts and I’ll tell you when they come on, okay?’
I was hastily moved to a box. By myself.
I recall William Wycherly’s The Country Wife in Bath’s Theatre Royal, where two old ladies sat in the front row, rustling their goddamned sweet papers, awaiting what the production which, according to the programme’s picture, appeared to be about to deliver green fields, flowers, nice people.
The writer or director had decided to add a monologue, delivered by the lead, a black actor. He entered the stage with great presence, delivered his speech and, at the end, the ladies said, very loudly, in unison, boiled sweets poised at the ready . . . ‘OH, NO.’
I have no idea how that actor ever made it back for the rest of the play.
When you combine all these stresses with the tedium of what invariably occurs on stage when you’re trapped in the middle of a row with no means of escape, it’s hell. Don’t even get me started on the tedium that was Tom Stoppard’s award-winning play Liebfraumilch or whatever it was called. It’s the kind of play that makes you want to escape to Alcatraz.
I’m not such a Philistine that I hate all theatre. I saw Mark Rylance in Much Ado About Nothing when the Globe reopened, and I knew I was in the presence of greatness. Likewise, when I saw Joss Ackland play Falstaff in Henry IV Part One (my favourite Shakespeare play). Never have I seen that part played with such a heartbreaking sense of abandonment when Hal, soon to be king, casts Falstaff out as a bit of frivolity who has no place in his future life. This was 1982, when Joss’s eldest son had just died of a heroin overdose, and I am sure the pain of loss was at the heart of that performance.
I happen to quite partial to a bit of musical theatre, too, probably in no small part to my having been a member of the first National Youth Theatre of Wales in 1976. We performed Oh! What a Lovely War and I sang I’ll Make a Man of Any One of You. It clearly worked, because every man in my life subsequently disappeared to pastures new. Make a wimp of them, if you want to keep them, that’s what I say.
The score of Something Rotten is pure genius, although I’ve never managed to catch it anywhere.
Jesus Christ Superstar is another particular favourite. Although brought up Christian (and I was once a lay preacher), I have zero beliefs now. I am fine with Christ being an historical figure, albeit a bit of a weirdo, but as for the Son of God, crap . . . well, there is no God, so I don’t have to think about that one (I recommend you watch Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying as a brilliant indicator of how this nonsense came about).
Recently, in Plovdiv’s amphitheatre in Bulgaria, I saw a production that was as visually spectacular as it was emotionally uplifting. In the open air, on a beautiful summer’s night, I was often moved to tears – for once, of the good sort. It was the greatest theatre going experience of my life.
But even this genre has been spoiled for me by fellow theatre goers.
I happen to love the musical Blood Brothers, which I saw in London’s Phoenix Theatre. That was ruined by a coach party from Newport, sitting in front of me. Just at the crucial emotional moment (*spoiler alert* here), when a gun is raised, the woman in front of me, Welsh accent at full barrels also, cries out: ‘Oooh, bloody ’ell nawwwww! ’E’s gonna shoot ’im!’
So, it’s very easy for me to eschew theatre in favour of television – not least because it’s better value for money. With theatre seats often running into hundreds of pounds, isn’t a standard Netflix subscription at £4.99 a month the better option?
The Lincoln Lawyer, Monsters: the Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Wednesday, The Crown – that’s just a handful of the brilliant shows you can currently watch.
And the BBC Licence fee at £169.50 still works out way cheaper than a night out at most theatres, especially when you take into account the obscene price of drinks these establishments now charge. EastEnders alone (in sublime form, as it has been for some time under Executive Producer Chris Clenshaw) is worth the price.
Shortly before my mum died in 2019, she fell out with her carers because they kept bring her dinner when Emmerdale was on. Before the programme was not convenient for her, as she had to watch Tipping Point, The Chase and Home and Away; after Emmerdale was no good because she had EastEnders and Coronation Street. My Auntie Dyllis died in her armchair watching a Wimbledon final on TV.
A love of TV clearly runs in the family. I’d certainly rather go watching Emmerdale than be found dead in the theatre.
These days, though, you won’t find me dead in the theatre. Metaphorically speaking, let alone literally.
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When I was a kid my mother took me to see Glenda Jackson in A Long Day's Journey Into Night. It was very long and would have costituted child abuse did it not come under the exception bylaw 4b “middle class improvement of a child”.