Tynan on Stoppard, P*ddington The Musical, and the exploding world of audio
Will we ever adjectivise a playwright's surname again? Oh no, they loved it, didn't they? Which Harry Potter star did a baby voice to me on Zoom? All that and more in this week's Shouts and Murmurs.
Hello, and welcome to Shouts and Murmurs, a weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more from The Crush Bar, written by Fergus Morgan.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
Shakespearean. Beckettian. Pinteresque. Only truly great playwrights get their surnames turned into adjectives.
The late Tom Stoppard, who died on Saturday at the age of 88, was a playwright of that stature. Stoppardian, in my understanding at least, means something that is intellectually virtuosic, structurally playful, fizzingly witty, and, despite what many of his early critics claimed, emotionally potent. Productions of Stoppard’s plays, most notably Patrick Marber’s staging of Travesties at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2016, are among my favourite ever theatrical experiences. Like everyone, I mourn him and look forward to the spate of revivals his passing will precipitate. First up: Indian Ink at the Hampstead Theatre, then Arcadia starring Giles Terera at the Old Vic.
Quite rightly, papers and publications across the world have been full of obituaries, analyses and anecdotes about Stoppard since Saturday, raking over his life, ranking his works, exploring his complex politics, and pontificating about his love of cricket. Here is Michael Coveney’s obituary. Here is Michael Billington on six decades of shows. Here is Rufus Sewell, Toby Jones, Harriet Walter and more remembering him. And that is just in The Guardian. There, too, you will find this intimate and insightful tribute by Marber, who also staged Stoppard’s final play Leopoldstadt…
“This is the thing: it does Tom a disservice if his generosity of spirit, his kindness, his charm are the only story. In truth, he could be tough as an old boot.”
It is also worth listening to Tom Hollander, star of that staging of Travesties, movingly struggle to sum up Stoppard’s greatness on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. Also available on BBC Sounds: Alex Jennings reading an abridged version of Hermione Lee’s definitive biography. Lee appeared on last night’s episode of Front Row with Billington and Marber, too. And it is worth hearing from the man himself, of course: his Desert Island Discs, broadcast in 1995, is available here. On YouTube, you can find him talking to Benedict Nightingale on Thames TV in 1976, a tangle of hair, a dapper jacket, and a cigarette. If you have the time, though, the best thing to read is Kenneth Tynan’s 25000-word profile of him for The New Yorker in 1977, which laid the groundwork for how Stoppard has been thought about ever since, and which contains a wildly entertaining story about him playing for Harold Pinter’s cricket team…
“The game is all but lost when Stoppard ambles in to bat, with the score at sixty and only two men to follow him. Within ten minutes, in classic style, he has driven three balls to the boundary ropes for four runs apiece. Six more graceful swipes bring his personal total to twenty, thereby making him the top scorer and winning the game for his side. He is welcomed back to the pavilion with cheers.”
Will we be able to adjectivise a playwright’s surname ever again? Perhaps not. It seems like the kind of thing that belongs to another era, when leading playwrights were major, mythologised figures in the national conversation. And, in any case, to earn that kind of status a playwright has to build a reputation for a certain style of play over several decades, and opportunities to have new plays produced are far rarer than they once were, as a major report compiled by playwrights Dan Rebellato and David Edgar and published last week reveals. There are a lot of interesting stats in the report, some surprising, some not, some encouraging, some not. Neither surprising nor encouraging is the fact that there were nearly 30 per-cent fewer new plays produced in 2023 compared to 2019. In The Guardian, Brian Logan blames “commercial conservatism”, points to the fact that new plays that are put on now actually run for longer and earn more than they did pre-pandemic, and argues that…
"The production of new plays slump over that 2019-23 period isn’t just shameful, it’s shortsighted. A healthy culture is one that doesn’t just regurgitate old stories, but tells itself new ones, lots of them – and makes space for new storytellers too. But as this report demonstrates, we shouldn’t be staging new plays for some abstract common good – we should (contrary to received wisdom) be doing it for our bottom lines, too. If you’re a theatre producer heaving yet another Arthur snore Miller or Anton zzzzz Chekhov (just kidding!) on to the stage, because that’s all your audience will accept – well, you’re not doing your job properly.”
Hear, hear. And, to finish a thought, I am struggling to think of a major contemporary playwright with a established and distinctive style whose surname is easily adjectivise-able. James Graham, with his corpus of dynamic political plays, is the obvious candidate, but Grahamsian? Grahamesque? Doesn’t work. The best I have come up with is Thornian, to signify something thematically gritty yet theatrically delicate, and Bakerian, to signify something that goes beyond naturalism into the uncanny. Who else might work? Bartlettian? Sounds okay, but what does it signify? Wadian? Likewise. Zeldinian? Now we are talking. This is fun! Suggestions on a postcard!
I will finish this top bit with another clunky segue towards my ongoing discount: it might have escaped your notice this week that, as of January, The Stage, the august publication that has chronicled the theatre industry’s ups and downs since 1880, will be shifting from a weekly newspaper into a monthly magazine. There seem to be some very good reasons for this, as outlined by editor Alistair Smith here. The question on everyone’s lips, though: what does this mean for Fergus Morgan?
To be honest, I am not sure. I am freelance, but The Stage is my main source of income: I cover everything in Scotland, fill a weekly interview slot, contribute other features, and do various bits and bobs, like The Speakies, throughout the year. That, at least, is how it has worked since I took over the duties of Scotland correspondent from Thom Dibdin in late 2022. Come January, though, that is going to change. My weekly interview slot is becoming monthly and there will be fewer feature slots to fill in general, so that side of things will take a hit. There is talk of making that up with some other stuff, but nothing is confirmed, although I am to blame for that as much as anyone. All I can really say is that there are choppy waters ahead for the good ship Morgan’s Weird Career, and that now would be a perfect time to chuck him a few quid - 20 per-cent off until Friday! - to build a safe harbour here on Substack.
In other news: Stage Directors UK has appointed its first general secretary; Kris Bryce is leaving Pitlochry Festival Theatre; Stanley Tucci will direct at Hampstead Theatre next year; The Standard Theatre Awards nominees include The Crush Bar interviewees Ebenezer Bamgboye and Katherine Moar; ATG asked staff to volunteer their time to decorate the Apollo Victoria, then backed down; Milo Rau will stage a “guerrilla” theatre festival in Belgrade after being blocked from BITEF; the NT is interested in dynamic pricing; Pearl Chanda and Eli Gelb will star in Broken Glass at the Young Vic; Summerhall has announced three Fringe awards; Arts Council England has launched a new fund for “ethnically diverse theatremakers” in the north.
