Snodgrass Photography Blog

Ghost, heading to Broadway in the spring, proves that the West End can still be a seedbed for shows that go on to further lives elsewhere. But the West End has all but given up the creative ghost in every other way apart from the occasional, usually film-based, musical, like Ghost, The Wizard of Oz (a hit for Andrew Lloyd Webber, who augmented the film score with his own new songs, and presided over the casting of Dorothy by public television vote) or Betty Blue Eyes (a flop for Cameron Mackintosh, failing to line his silk purse out of its sow’s ear).

But the year’s best two musicals in fact also came from beyond the West End - Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly’s Matilda transferred triumphantly from its RSC Stratford premiere last Christmas to the Cambridge, while at the National, London Road was a remarkably innovative piece of music theatre that married verbatim dialogue, assembled by Alecky Blythe, to music by Adam Cork. In both cases, the RSC and National did the creative legwork, introducing the collaborators to each other and then following through on workshopping what they created to fruition.

That’s exactly the kind of creative development that subsidy is for, and it also (in the case of the RSC), will allow the venue to help itself in the future. The National, partly protected by the revenue it is now earning from the West End and Broadway success of War Horse and this year following it with One Man, Two Guvnors that is in the West End en route to Broadway as well, has been well-placed to weather this year’s storm of standstill government funding.

As Britain tightened its economic belts, the arts world braced itself for cuts earlier this year, although in the end they were not as severe as was feared. Yet there were significant losers, including Kilburn’s Tricycle where Nicolas Kent, who has served as its artistic director for the last 28 years, attributed cuts of almost £350,000 that the venue is going to suffer in the next financial year for his reason to stand down from the job, saying: “Maintaining the quality of work for which we’ve become known is a hugely difficult task and probably more suited for newer hands.”

Meanwhile, as riots engulfed cities around the UK across four nights in August, the divide between the haves and the have-nots in our society was exposed as some of the disenfranchised decided they could help themselves instead. It is revealing that it was the Tricycle that, less than four months later, offered the most vivid theatrical response yet in Gillian Slovo’s The Riots, another of its verbatim plays that Kent has pioneered there.

And in one particularly telling anecdote, MP Diane Abbott says: “The funny thing was that it was all kind of coordinated and done with texts and instant messenger, and one thing that [was] flying around in Hackney on Monday afternoon was, ‘Don’t touch the Empire, don’t touch the Empire’.”

And one of the reasons, she reckons, is that the venue has done a lot of work with young black people.

“So although they were outside of the Hackney Empire for many hours in the afternoon, because there was a JD Sports two doors up and a betting shop almost across the road, they didn’t touch the Empire. Which shows that if you can give these young people some sort of ownership and some sort of point of engagement with society, you will begin to find a solution,” she adds.

So the power of theatre goes beyond providing entertainment, but can also be the glue that holds society together. And the people that hold the theatres together are its creative personnel and staff. There are, once again, big shifts ahead in the tectonic plates of who is managing some of our leading companies - as well as Kent departing the Trike (where he is being replaced by Indhu Rubasingham), Michael Grandage is leaving the Donmar after nearly ten years at the helm, to be replaced by Josie Rourke, who in turn leaves the Bush to Madani Younis. She also leaves the Bush having establishing it in its new home, after 40 years in a room above a pub in Shepherd’s Bush (where its first full-length, new play was a real winner, The Kitchen Sink), while at the Donmar she will inherit a venue that Grandage has ensured is now owned by the company, with premises for it also to own offices and rehearsal space also secured.

Theatre is about more than bricks and mortar, but it helps to give stability to a company. Michael Boyd and Vikki Heywood, artistic and executive directors respectively of the RSC, are also bowing out next year, but not before they presided over the massive refurbishment of its main Stratford-upon-Avon theatre, which was completed on time and on budget, at a cost of nearly £113 million. But the company has still not solved the problem of establishing a permanent London home to replace the Barbican that it gave up under Adrian Noble.

The Royal Court, under Dominic Cooke, meanwhile, remains the London theatre of the year for new plays, though another of the year’s best didn’t happen in a theatre at all but a site-specific location in Canning Town, where Roadkill offered a truly shocking, visceral experience of the horrors of sex trafficking.

Ghost, heading to Broadway in the spring, proves that the West End can still be a seedbed for shows that go on to further lives elsewhere. But the West End has all but given up the creative ghost in every other way apart from the occasional, usually film-based, musical, like Ghost, The Wizard of Oz (a hit for Andrew Lloyd Webber, who augmented the film score with his own new songs, and presided over the casting of Dorothy by public television vote) or Betty Blue Eyes (a flop for Cameron Mackintosh, failing to line his silk purse out of its sow’s ear).

But the year’s best two musicals in fact also came from beyond the West End - Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly’s Matilda transferred triumphantly from its RSC Stratford premiere last Christmas to the Cambridge, while at the National, London Road was a remarkably innovative piece of music theatre that married verbatim dialogue, assembled by Alecky Blythe, to music by Adam Cork. In both cases, the RSC and National did the creative legwork, introducing the collaborators to each other and then following through on workshopping what they created to fruition.

That’s exactly the kind of creative development that subsidy is for, and it also (in the case of the RSC), will allow the venue to help itself in the future. The National, partly protected by the revenue it is now earning from the West End and Broadway success of War Horse and this year following it with One Man, Two Guvnors that is in the West End en route to Broadway as well, has been well-placed to weather this year’s storm of standstill government funding.

As Britain tightened its economic belts, the arts world braced itself for cuts earlier this year, although in the end they were not as severe as was feared. Yet there were significant losers, including Kilburn’s Tricycle where Nicolas Kent, who has served as its artistic director for the last 28 years, attributed cuts of almost £350,000 that the venue is going to suffer in the next financial year for his reason to stand down from the job, saying: “Maintaining the quality of work for which we’ve become known is a hugely difficult task and probably more suited for newer hands.”

Meanwhile, as riots engulfed cities around the UK across four nights in August, the divide between the haves and the have-nots in our society was exposed as some of the disenfranchised decided they could help themselves instead. It is revealing that it was the Tricycle that, less than four months later, offered the most vivid theatrical response yet in Gillian Slovo’s The Riots, another of its verbatim plays that Kent has pioneered there.

And in one particularly telling anecdote, MP Diane Abbott says: “The funny thing was that it was all kind of coordinated and done with texts and instant messenger, and one thing that [was] flying around in Hackney on Monday afternoon was, ‘Don’t touch the Empire, don’t touch the Empire’.”

And one of the reasons, she reckons, is that the venue has done a lot of work with young black people.

“So although they were outside of the Hackney Empire for many hours in the afternoon, because there was a JD Sports two doors up and a betting shop almost across the road, they didn’t touch the Empire. Which shows that if you can give these young people some sort of ownership and some sort of point of engagement with society, you will begin to find a solution,” she adds.

So the power of theatre goes beyond providing entertainment, but can also be the glue that holds society together. And the people that hold the theatres together are its creative personnel and staff. There are, once again, big shifts ahead in the tectonic plates of who is managing some of our leading companies - as well as Kent departing the Trike (where he is being replaced by Indhu Rubasingham), Michael Grandage is leaving the Donmar after nearly ten years at the helm, to be replaced by Josie Rourke, who in turn leaves the Bush to Madani Younis. She also leaves the Bush having establishing it in its new home, after 40 years in a room above a pub in Shepherd’s Bush (where its first full-length, new play was a real winner, The Kitchen Sink), while at the Donmar she will inherit a venue that Grandage has ensured is now owned by the company, with premises for it also to own offices and rehearsal space also secured.

Theatre is about more than bricks and mortar, but it helps to give stability to a company. Michael Boyd and Vikki Heywood, artistic and executive directors respectively of the RSC, are also bowing out next year, but not before they presided over the massive refurbishment of its main Stratford-upon-Avon theatre, which was completed on time and on budget, at a cost of nearly £113 million. But the company has still not solved the problem of establishing a permanent London home to replace the Barbican that it gave up under Adrian Noble.

The Royal Court, under Dominic Cooke, meanwhile, remains the London theatre of the year for new plays, though another of the year’s best didn’t happen in a theatre at all but a site-specific location in Canning Town, where Roadkill offered a truly shocking, visceral experience of the horrors of sex trafficking.

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