Not udder my watch

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The Udderbelly is straining its inflatable teets into the Big Smoke this year, according to The Stage and, as far as I’m concerned, its migration marks another nail in the Edinburgh Fringe coffin.

The Udderbelly is the inflatable performing arts venue in the shape of an udder that has graced Bristo Square in Edinburgh for the last few Fringes. For me, a lowly Edinburgh resident and passionate Fringe attendee, its purple prongs have become synonymous with the festival.

But this year the cow has been poached by the Southbank Centre for an eight-week season running from the end of May into the middle of July. The line-up will even include Fringe acts like The Terrible Infants that performed in the Udderbelly last year.

The problem with the south bank’s new arrival is that it dismantles another unique aspect of the Fringe: by bringing the Udderbelly to London, the skyline and the line-up of the Scottish festival becomes less unique, less appetising.

Given the Fringe’s massive ticketing problems last year, combined with this year’s recession and an increasingly lacklustre attitude towards the Fringe, it seems that this final move towards duplication might be the final straw for travellers. . why travel 400 extra miles if you can see everything in London?

And this is not the only move toward duplication: more and more shows are previewing in London or coming afterwards and London-based Fringe festivals, like the Camden Fringe, are keeping more acts down south.

The result can only be a smaller pool of performers and audiences. And now there are 400 extra seats on the South Bank in which to pack them.

Credit Crunch Theatre

I always know when there is a Chelsea match on. No, I am not an avid, blue-scarfed fan: I couldn’t name a single player on the team and, as far as I’m concerned, “midfielder” might be an agricultural term. I know because of the packed tube on my route home around once a week. Football is, after all, our national pastime. 

But, hey, change is here. The Credit Crunch blizzard has blown in and, according to research conducted by the Association of British Orchestras, Joe Public would rather by a ticket to a live arts performance than to live sport. The Stage, which picked up the story on Monday, noted that the research also showed that 53% of people believed the arts should be supported during the current economic climate. All pretty cheering, if you’re a theatre nut.

Although theatre-types will be thrilled to hear that the public are still willing to fork out cold hard cash for live performances, the government have a new scheme that is geared to easing the pocket-strain of just such a treat. “A Night Less Ordinary” offers under 26-year olds across the country the chance to see theatre for nothing. 

The scheme is being run by Arts Council England in association with your favourite early-morning-read Metro. There are tickets for shows across the country and the companies include the likes of the Old Vic and the RSC. It’s an impressive scheme to have launched in the middle of a credit crunch (the scheme began last month) and I just hope people try it. It’s not often a government gift horse like this wheels into town. For, credit crunch or no, live performance is an enlivening experience and we should protect and enjoy it in both hard times and good. 

Expect a review of my Night Less Ordinary Experience soon.

Frosty response to Nixon

There was only one shock announcement at the Oscars at the weekend: that Mickey Rourke was snubbed in the Best Actor category despite winning a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for his role in The Wrestler.

But it was not for him that I raised the cry of “Robbed!” first thing on Monday morning. For Frank Langella’s quiet, poetic performance in Frost/Nixon had also been snubbed. This was the performance that left me reeling for days after as if I could still see the pride trickling out the eyes of the man Langella elevated to the status of a Shakespearean tragic hero.

The film was one of the few occasions that I believed the transfer from stage to screen had almost been entirely successful. The camera picked up the ticks in Michael Sheen’s Frost, etching out both the presenter’s nerves and his temper with a fine nib. However, if the film had been made up of Langella’s close-ups alone, it would have held its emotional resonance. How an actor paints America’s fascination with money and power and a great man’s cannibalisation of himself whilst nominally trying to withhold information is beyond me, but he did it.

The Donmar Warehouse’s production of Frost/Nixon recently began a U.S tour. It has a new cast. May they live up to their predecessors, and bring some gongs home back from over the pond.

Derek Jacobi and the joy of celebrity casting

The Donmar Warehouse’s star-studded residency at Wyndham’s Theatre offers a rare chance to see celluloid stars such as Dame Judi Dench and Jude Law up close under the West End lights.

 

Until 7 March Derek Jacobi stars as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, the self-important butler who is tricked, locked up as a lunatic and ends the play by the stomping off stage. Not the usual happy-clappy ending of a Shakespearean comedy. As such, the role of Malvolio demands that an actor negotiates a delicate path between the audience’s sense of farce and its sense of pathos.

 

The Donmar production has received rave reviews – five stars from the Independent, the Telegraph, Metro and the Mail on Sunday – and many of them have singled out Jacobi as the jewel in the crown. But the trend for celebrity casting (David Tennant in the RSC’s Hamlet last year, Helen Mirren in Phedre at the National this summer and, of course, Law and Dench) made me fearful about the “hook” of Michael Grandage’s production. Who are the audience going to see: Jacobi or Malvolio?

 

By 30 minutes in, nobody’s motives mattered. Jacobi delivered a spectacular performance, eking out the audience’s laughter with his pomposity and yellow stockings, before drawing the audience’s tears from his underground prison as he was taunted. The curtain call was bittersweet because his story was not yet concluded, his happiness not confirmed.

 

For your average West End casting director, there must be some kind of deliberation between talent and public interest but it seems that in this case, one happily coalesces with the other. I can only hope that I’ll be able to say the same of Jude Law’s Hamlet. . . not that I’ll be able to get tickets. 

Edinburgh Fringe Rapped on the Wrist

Scottish accountants Scott-Moncrieff have levelled the blame for the chaos at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe squarely on the shoulders of the society that runs the event.

 

According to The Stage, the society’s lack of strategy and fuzzy decision-making procedures have been named as the main reasons for the 2008 chaos.

 

The Fringe’s response? A promise for change. And plenty of it.

 

The society says its behind-the-scenes transformation “will ensure that the incoming chief executive inherits an organisation that can reinforce the fringe’s position as the biggest and best arts festival in the world, with a box office system to match.”

 

Problem is, it might be too late.

 

I was at the Fringe last year. I saw the queue of red-faced theatre-goers snake down the Royal Mile from the Fringe shop; I was calling for tickets the day they stopped answering their phones; I heard the whispers that last year was the damp squib that threatened to end the Fringe’s half-century-long parade.

 

The Fringe must fight to preserve its reputation as the biggest and the best, not just offer better booking systems. As the cost of venue hire and ticket prices continue to swell year-on-year and the likes of the Camden Fringe pull southern folk away from the Athens of the North, the Edinburgh team will be hard tasked to ensure that the experimentation and vivacity of the Fringe, which has kept it at the forefront of the cultural calendar, punches its way into 2009.

 

We can only hope that the trauma caused by the box office mayhem does not become an excuse for companies and audiences to stick safe in the Big Smoke.

To Be, or Not To Be Cheap

Proving Hamlet still has something to offer both sides of the Atlantic: Hamlet at high speed in Brooklyn

Five years ago the RSC announced that it was going to sell £5 tickets to (presumably be-hooded) youths aged between 16 and 25.

 

The company wanted to lure in young audiences put off by top-tier prices and charged the young hip crowd less than the cinema around the corner. Definitely cheaper if around the corner is Leicester Square. But would it work: wouldn’t we rather be punched in the stomach by Quentin Tarantino rather than lulled into the riddled sonnet of Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost?

 

The National Theatre and the Donmar also offer many of their tickets for £10. These are by no means the only tickets for the skint student, but show the high-quality of drama on offer by big-name brands.

 

My experience says no.

 

I found myself walking down the strand at 8am in the pouring rain with nought but a desire to see David Tennant, Patrick Stewart and, of course, more famous than either actor, Hamlet.

 

The RSC offer 25 tickets on the day. I was amazed to find about 30 nubile colleagues already there. Some had seen Edward Bennett in the role, others had travelled from Dorset, there were a fair few Americans who had planned their Grand Tour around the evening.

 

Breathtaking is the only word for the damp scene. It proved categorically that there is still a market for good theatre and for good Shakespeare. With black market tickets on offer “for as little as £275” for the show, it was refreshing to see that the RSC had kept its promise despite Tennant’s success and hung on to some tickets for the poor and needy. Me. 

So, to those out there with no money but a hankering for good theatre, I ask for advice on the cheapest seats in the house, the best shows to spend my non-existent pennies and all things down Drury Lane. 

Over to you.