Suddenly the West End is being invaded by plays about the
theatre. Our correspondent wanders backstage
Call it a coincidental invasion. The various producers involved
could never have foreseen their plans overlapping on such a grand
scale, but on three of the next four nights theatre critics will be in
the West End to review depictions of British and American actors
at work, rest and play. Tonight it’s Noël Coward’s backstage
comedy Star Quality; tomorrow the cast of Kiss Me, Kate launch
into their musical version of The Taming of the Shrew; and on
Thursday Judi Dench heads The Royal Family, George S.
Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s Broadway comedy about an acting
dynasty. Those with insatiable appetites for shows-within-shows
can also revisit Over the Moon, with Joan Collins caught up in a
chaotic production of Private Lives, or Noises Off, whose
hapless thesps reduce themselves, the imaginary farce they’re
staging and their audience to a state of hysterical collapse.
Take these portraits as a fair reflection of today’s Equity membership and you will go home convinced that the average cast includes incompetents (Star Quality, Noises Off), adulterers and serial seducers (Over the Moon, The Royal Family) and dipsomaniacs (Noises Off, Over the Moon), most of them capable of breathtaking vanity and bitchiness (all five shows).
Granted, none of the current offerings pushes mockery of the profession to the pompous heights attained by Nigel Planer’s marvellous creation, Nicholas Craig, in his book, television series and one-man show, I, An Actor, but there’s still a danger that audiences arriving at this week’s productions equipped with negative stereotypes about temperamental luvvies will simply have their prejudices (entertainingly) reinforced. But these works can fulfil a more serious function, by highlighting the less enviable aspects of an actor’s life, and documenting the development of Broadway and the West End, from the 1920s onwards.
“I don’t think the theatre is terribly good at depicting itself, any more than Hollywood is,” suggests Peter Hall, director of The Royal Family. “But I think this is one of the relatively rare occasions when the theatre does honour to itself.”
In a play set and first seen in New York in 1927, Kaufman and Ferber poke fun at three generations of the Cavendish family, inspired by the Barrymores (Ethel, Lionel and John), and led in Hall’s revival by Dench as the imperious septuagenarian, Fanny. Yet the comedy is underpinned with hard truths about the personal sacrifices that still offset the rewards of a successful stage career.
For example, Fanny’s 19-year-old actress granddaughter, Gwen, has a stockbroker boyfriend with deep reservations about their prospective married life. “You’ll be at the theatre every night. Your work will just begin when mine is all over,” he complains, reminding us why non-actors must struggle to stay married to actors. The Cavendish clan’s behaviour in response to this and other occupational hazards, says Hall, “is painful and ridiculous, but also quite accurate. It’s easy to dismiss the play as ‘commercial Broadway’, but it has much more resonance than that term suggests.”
Part of that resonance is historical, because The Royal Family dramatises a pivotal moment, just before the advent of cinema sound, when American stage actors could still turn their noses up at the grand gestures required by silent movies (“You can’t call pictures acting,” sniffs Fanny’s brother, Herbert). A few years later, hundreds of Broadway actors would be rushing to Hollywood to appear in talkies.
Another transitional phase in theatre history, this time on our side of the Atlantic, provides the background to Star Quality, adapted and directed by Christopher Luscombe from two Coward sources, a 1951 short story and an unproduced play script from 1967. The play, set in 1951, conjures up the West End shortly before the revolution ignited by Look Back in Anger.
Coward’s focus is the power struggle between a young playwright, Bryan Snow, the author of a melodrama, Dark Heritage, its director, Ray Malcolm, and its manipulative, capricious star, Lorraine Barrie (played by Penelope Keith). They inhabit a world in which stars could still routinely expect successful West End plays to run for a year or two (producers would give anything for that kind of certainty today), and directors would not be thought unprofessional if they turned up at the first rehearsal without having previously met several members of the cast, let alone auditioned them.
“In the early 1950s, the balance of power was beginning to shift from actor-managers and stars to the emerging, university-educated directors such as Peter Brook, Peter Hall and John Dexter,” says Luscombe. “I think that in the play script, Coward made Ray Malcolm an amalgam of all those directors — young, tough, intellectual.”
He adds that Star Quality contains “quite a serious portrayal of the business of putting on a play”, and while you couldn’t place it in the same “work drama” category as, say, Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen, it does supply a telescoped version of a tried-and-trusted process: casting, read-through at first rehearsal, rewrites, technical dress rehearsal and opening night. “A lot of actors who saw our production on tour were really surprised by how realistic the process looked,” says Luscombe. “While people who aren’t in the business told me: ‘I always wondered what you do on the first day of rehearsal.’ ”
The question now is whether the simultaneous presence of three stars, Dench, Keith and Collins, in comparable fare may harm their productions’ commercial prospects. The same theatregoers who might have bought tickets for The Royal Family and Star Quality and Over the Moon if they had been staged over the space of a year or 18 months might only see one or two this autumn.
Who knows, if the overcrowding leads to poor attendance or premature closures, West End dressing rooms could echo to the venting of professional jealousy even more venomous than that expressed on stage.
Thanks to Mary Lynn Travers for sending this photo from the article which appeared in The Times (UK) on Monday, October 29, 2001. And another thanks to Mike Kennedy who sent the article.