All’s Fair…

As a former would-be community theatre revolutionary it was almost a badge of honour to hate the Royal National Theatre. For a start I’m a staunch republican so the royal bit does nothing for me and I could never see how it was a national institution for the whole nation when as far as I could make out it was a predominantly white middle-class crowd who were its most loyal and regular patrons.

But over the years I have grown at least to respect if not love the National and recognise it does important work in terms of reviving old classics, supporting new writing, touring nationally and internationally and with theatre-in-education. In fact I would now probably defend the National and argue for its subsidy against many other theatres whose output is much more in line with my own thinking and ideals.

So I was gutted to go see Southwark Fair by Samuel Adamson over the weekend and see the National put on a really poor play. The basic premise of the modern-day South Bank-based comedy is that a now-mature man meets up with another man who shagged him when the former was 14 and the latter was 20. And from this comes a story about chance meetings, potential relationships and exorcising ghosts from the past.

It’s got some good lines and the basic premise sounds promising… But it’s got no real heart, the acting’s pretty poor and the script’s not really saying anything you couldn’t find in a Patience Strong poem. To be fair it’s the first really poor thing I’ve seen at the National in more than 20 years of attending but it was so bad I was actually speechless on exiting the Cottesloe.

Bizarrely it got a great write-up in The Observer but so did the Korean martials arts play Jump and the French film Hidden and I saw both these recently and found them pretty dreadful. And if Juliette Binoche and something on Korean martial arts can’t keep my attention then they must be pretty bad.

Good Night, And Good Luck saved the weekend’s cultural side, though. It’s a genuinely thoughtful, intelligent and well-crafted story about CBS during the McCarthy era witch-hunts. God bless America. Well, George Clooney at least...