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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
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I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
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London,
Unique space: Peter Hall's new theatre is worth the visit - but does it have staying power?
After the grand opening of the Rose in Kingston a month ago, I went back to have a look at the theatre itself. I'm all in favour of legroom but this was ridiculous. The pit in front of the stage where "groundlings" pay £5 to sit on cushions was so sparsely occupied I could have lain down in it and even rolled around a bit.
The stalls benches, admirably widely spaced, were also occupied by only a scattering of theatregoers, but it was the pit I noticed. With fewer than 10 people sat in the yawning space between seats and stage it made the theatre seem - well, empty.
The Rose is not beautiful - its vaguely corporate exterior hints at its conception as part of a 1980s riverside apartment development - but it is very user-friendly. There are lots of roomy bars, lots of loos, lots of natural light.
The interiors are pleasingly unfinished, which chimes neatly with these austere times, as well as matching the unpretentiously bare auditorium and stage. But naked space becomes a negative rather than a positive attribute when a theatre can't attract enough friendly users to make an impression on, let alone fill, its 900 seats.
There were good arguments for finishing the Rose. The shell was there. Its lozenge-shaped stage and horseshoe auditorium make it a unique space. It only cost £6 million (compared, as Hall pointed out to me, to the £100 million for the new RSC theatres in Stratford). It has a potentially big local audience. Yet it will still need funding, or a miracle, to survive.
Cameron Mackintosh also believes there are good commercial reasons for building the studio-sized Sondheim Theatre between the Queens and the Gielgud on Shaftesbury Avenue, arguing that it plugs a West End gap, enabling smaller productions to transfer from the Donmar or Almeida. Fair enough. But after that, might I suggest a moratorium on new theatres in London?
The West End playhouses are falling down. Several new or rebuilt theatres - Soho, Hampstead - have struggled before finding an audience and an identity. The Cockpit and the Cochrane have been returned to educational use augmented by private hire. We are in a halcyon period of theatre, but the amount of good work around, and the London audience prepared to pay to see it, is not infinite.
Nor is the funding necessary to keep our culture vibrant, as the recent threat to the Bush Theatre showed. It's time we thought about how best to conserve or creatively use our existing stock of theatres, rather than further adding to it.
• Blonde Bombshells of 1943 opens tonight at the Rose (0871 230 1552, www.rosetheatrekingston. org) and runs for three nights. The Tempest opens on 25 February.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
As a local resident, contributor and audience member of The Rose Theatre in Kingston I believe the reason why there are so many empty seats in the auditorium is a simple one: It is almost impossible to actually buy tickets. Last week I tried for over an hour to book tickets online for the upcoming production of Blackbird before giving up after the umpteenth infuriating error message appeared at the final stage of the booking process. Undeterred, I turned my attention to the 24-hour booking hotline the theatre advertises. At half-past ten in the evening I felt sure they would not be swamped by other callers. They were not, but sadly only because there was no-one to answer any of the calls in the first place. I gave up after half an hour of redialling and being cut off. By the time the next morning arrived I was concerned that, given the fuss around the new theatre and the high regard in which this play is held, I would not be able to get tickets at all, that they would be sold out. So I feverishly set about the calling the booking line again and, after four attempts I finally got through, only to be kept on hold for fifteen minutes. When I finally managed to speak to a member of staff I asked tentatively if there were any seats at all available for any performances. The tone of the reply suggested I had asked a ridiculously stupid question - of course there were tickets available in all price bands in all sections for all scheduled performances - and they wonder why.
- Chris Jennings, Walton-on-Thames, UK
