Copyright: Ballistik Coffee Boy through Creative Commons
Yet I can guarantee that wasn’t the phrase on the lips of Friday and Saturday nights’ audiences who were presented with the understudy of Mrs Brown, Queen Elizabeth I and Iris Murdoch rather than the old girl herself.
Given David Tennant’s crippling back problems that prevented him performing on the West End earlier for a part of the Hamlet run in December last year, it seems that the past few months have not been kind to celebrity-spotters-turned-theatre-goers.
But the question is, what should theatres do when they find themselves in this predicament? How can they handle disgruntled patrons without admitting that the celebrity star is the only reason they have come, leaving them open to calls for refunds?
The poor understudy left holding the show also has an unenviable task: half of the audience has probably made its mind up at the outset they don’t like you and have either not bothered to show up (the only reason I saw David Tennant in Hamlet was because the word had not spread yet that he was back on and no one else seemed that bothered about the Bennett chap) or glower from the stalls, muttering.
In this light, celebrity casting does little for other actors: it may get more bums on seats but it risks alienating part of the audience from the rest of the production if the “star” is absent, preventing it from seeing each actor as a cog in a much larger machine.
However, for all of you who have tickets to Madame de Sade (I couldn’t get one), I hope Judi returns shortly. And to Marjorie Hayward, the (un)lucky understudy – bonne chance!
I was reading an article recently about opera understudies, and one of them commented that in some respects it was good – the audience expects to be disappointed, so you can hardly fail. Plus, a pro for the audience, the celeb may be resting on their laurels, whereas any understudy is in a position where they have a sudden chance to prove their worth, and will be giving it their absolute all.
That said, I feel very much for anyone understudying Dame Judy… those are quite some shoes to fill…