1999 and older

TheatreMania

Friday December 1, 2000

Britain’s Top 50  (an excerpt)

Mark Shenton hails Britain’s most influential theater practitioners this season—on stage, back stage, and scribbling in the dark.

by Mark Shenton

In a year in which the London theater has regularly made the news thanks to celebrity sightings that have ranged from Kathleen Turner and Jerry Hall to Daryl Hannah, Macaulay Culkin and Jessica Lange, homegrown theater practitioners have variously made their marks more quietly. TheaterMania salutes them all as it offers a personal guide to the Top 50 in their respective fields.

ACTORS

1. Simon Russell Beale

2. Michael Gambon

3. Bill Nighy

4. Roger Allam

5. Stephen Dillane proved just how compelling a performer he is in the the Donmar Warehouse production of The Real Thing that was revived in the West End at the beginning of the year before going to Broadway.

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

September 2000

spotlight BRITAIN  (an excerpt)

What The British Are Good At  (Issue No 22)

AWARDS

Britain won nine out of 21 Tony Awards in New York in June 2000.  These included:

Independent

Monday August 14, 2000

State of play

Never mind television and cinema and the internet. Theatre is once again Britain's most vital and challenging art form, argues our new drama critic Kate Bassett

I think I actually skipped along the Aldwych and into the Strand. It was 1979 and I was 12. I'd just seen Love's Labour's Lost directed, I believe, by John Barton for the RSC and I was, manifestly, ecstatic. Looking back, I suspect this was a formative experience. Reader, I became a drama critic.

So, now I can go to the theatre nightly and call it work. To be honest, I don't hop and jump about a great deal these days. But I do vividly recall and value the life-enhancing kick I got from that production: the sense of both intellectual illumination and sheer festive joy.

I would say that, at root, it's an eye-opening and thrilling experience of that calibre that I am always hoping to find when I enter an auditorium. And mercifully, every now and then one is fully rewarded.

I was certainly happy as Larry at the National Theatre's earthily workmanlike and exquisite recent revival of Tony Harrison's Mysteries, where God stood aloft, foreman-like on a forklift truck, with us lot milling around his feet, and where the heavens were a hundred light bulbs charmingly winking inside an array of ironmonger's wares – dangling cheese-graters, dustbins and miners' lamps.

Other high points have included all performances by Judi Dench; by the subtly brilliant Stephen Dillane; by Simon Russell Beale and Victoria Hamilton (both key members in Trevor Nunn's recent excellent ensemble at the National).

Also unforgettable was Shared Experience theatre company's touring adaptation of The Mill On The Floss, characteristically marrying insight and fierce emotion, a classic text and inspired physical expressionism.

However, reporting individual delights like these does not stop pundits regularly announcing that theatre is an art form heading for oblivion. And that is alarming.

In the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher's regime was certainly financially crippling for the theatre, and some closed for ever. With core funding on standstill thereafter, regional venues have notably found themselves in continuing difficulties. For instance, just a few months back, Bolton's cash-strapped Octagon Theatre was nearly turned into a receiving rather than an active producing house, and it was only saved by staff and locals rallying round.

During the early Nineties, when I started reviewing, headlines also appeared warning that the West End was swiftly going to the dogs, with many theatres dark or merely hosting shoddy bio-musicals. There were widespread anxieties within the profession about playwrighting being a dying craft too. Right now, as we enter the high-tech 21st century, it's obviously tempting to ask if the stage is out-of-date and to highlight the challenges it faces from contemporary entertainments and leisure activities – most obviously TV, the movies and the internet.

Nevertheless, countering all that pessimism, the current state of play in the theatre is actually decidedly encouraging on many fronts.

I would hazard a guess that the recent drive towards cheap TV programming and its dumbing down have driven ranks of citizens out of their living rooms in search of better arts and entertainment in public venues. I'm also not convinced the net is going to produce future generations of stay-at-home IT and virtual-reality addicts.

In any case, if you want film projection or indeed e-mail conversations, these have been incorporated into experimental stage sets and scripts with wit and style – in the National's production of Patrick Marber's Closer, in the Royal Court's staging, last month, of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, and elsewhere.

Across the UK, it's estimated that live arts sell more tickets than Premier League football matches and that playhouses may get as many as 31 million bums on seats every year. The West End has been doing well, too. The average number of venues open there during 1999 (totting up to 44) was higher than in previous years, looking at computations dating back to 1986. Those venues' incoming productions (totalling 265 last year) likewise were record breaking, and their gross box office revenue rose to over £266,500,000 (it was little over £112,000,000 in 1986). A sizeable chunk of that money of course feeds back, via taxation, into the state's coffers. The Wyndham Report – which surveyed the West End theatre industry – declared the business was a mainstay of the new British economy.

Artistically, the West End was revitalised in the mid-to-late Nineties. An unexpected wave of young dramatists suddenly emerged and the Royal Court Theatre, which nurtures new plays, moved into town while its Sloane Square base was being rebuilt with Lottery funding. It duly presented works by a clutch of bold and talented writers including Conor McPherson who penned The Weir, a long-running hit which transferred to Broadway.

The Almeida Theatre Company, though based in Islington, also migrated to WC2 for a time and they've been substantially responsible for the increasing international pulling-power that the London stage has acquired, attracting seriously talented Hollywood stars like Kevin Spacey with classic plays and premières.

Spacey is now campaigning to secure the future of the beleaguered Old Vic in Waterloo while Sam Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty, has returned to run the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, turning down film deals en route. The British theatre is patently the place to be.

The excellent news this summer, in terms of funding, has been that Gordon Brown's new spending review has promised the Arts Council of England a very welcome budget increase of £100 million and £40 million has been tagged for new regional theatre productions. That said, no institution can afford to rest on its laurels. The money won't be coming through till 2002; some will have a tough time eking out their current cash reserves.

There may be some other disappointments ahead, too. As a theatre-goer, it's hard to get excited about the National's forthcoming unadventurous programming of Michael Frayn's well-thumbed farce, Noises Off. And with the Royal Court now back in Chelsea, the heart of Theatreland doesn't feel so electric.

Meanwhile, some of the new Lottery-funded theatre buildings around the country may find it hard to attract crowds in towns where there's no tradition of play-going.

As for new writing, numbers of fledgling playwrights are now being nurtured in diverse theatres, including regional centres like Manchester's Royal Exchange and Birmingham Rep. Great in theory, but whether there are really enough excellent scripts to go round and to merit public productions remains to be seen. Moreover, some of the new writers of 2000 are showing a tendency to turn out psychologically shallow sitcom-style or soapy scripts. One might wonder if the links and deals some theatres have with TV and film companies encourage this.

The Age Company  (Australia)    

Thursday June 29, 2000

Touching up Tolstoy

by Brian Courtis

Has Tolstoy lost his sense of humor? It might surprise anyone with a passion for the tragic romance of Anna Karenina but actor Stephen Dillane, who plays the author's least amusing character in a new TV version of the masterpiece, believes the author's funny side has gone missing.

Dillane plays Anna's cuckolded husband, the funereal, self-righteous and pedantic bureaucrat Karenin, in the ABC's four-part adaptation of the classic.

Although he believes writer Allan Cubitt's brisk, modernistic script for this British Channel Four production was "extraordinarily well done and covered the ground in an incredibly compact, economical way", he is not so sure about the way the book is interpreted.

"Anyone who has read Anna Karenina knows it has a wonderful, wry, humorous commentary running through it which I'm not sure we've got," Dillane tells me from New York. "The one thing I felt was missing - and it may be down to the acting rather than the writing - was Tolstoy's sense of humor.

"In a way it's become part of the received knowledge about this book that it's a kind of melodrama - that it's just the story of Anna and falling under a train. And really that's not what it is all about. It's not just about Anna; it's about marriage, it's about family."

This Anna Karenina series, though conventionally set among the indulgences of pre-revolutionary, aristocratic Russia, is a younger, contemporary take. There is much panting and heaving, soft-focus sex, and a peppering of the sort of idiomatic English lines you might find in This Life.

There are, of course, the two big romances. While Anna (Helen McCrory) leaves Karenin and her son to dash off with Count Vronsky (Kevin McKidd), thoughtful Levin (Douglas Henshall) works to win the love of Kitty. It allows a splendidly soapy contrast of reckless passion and the joys of family life.

Dillane, a Karenin in his early 40s, was once described by a leading British writer-director as "the thinking woman's crumpet", but he's clearly no Britpack hunk or pretty boy. He takes his material and work seriously. Shakespeare's Hamlet, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, the movie Welcome to Sarajevo, and the Australian TV series Kings in Grass Castles head his credits...Hollywood is still far from home.

The actor says he enjoyed reading Anna Karenina in the past and, when offered the role, took the opportunity to appreciate it again.

"I'm not sure it actually helps," he says. "From my point of view, for example, I'm completely miscast as Karenin. He is supposed to be 60 and his physical characteristics and things like that are given. Even if you were to get those things right, an attempt to try to bring the words alive is not necessarily helped by having a deep background knowledge of what Tolstoy might have been trying to achieve.

"Sometimes it's better just to come at it with what you feel at the moment and trust it's somewhere in the vicinity."

The son of a surgeon, Stephen Dillane read history and politics at Exeter University and started his career in journalism in the south of England. He hated it. "Sometimes have nightmares about those days," he says.

So, desperate to escape and take up something in which he was interested, he studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School with teacher Rudi Shelly, whose former pupils also include Miranda Richardson and Daniel Day-Lewis.

He's still to see the completed Anna series. Dillane has been in America ... and was recently awarded Broadway's actor of the year Tony for his performances in the New York revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing.

When I suggest he appears to have given Karenin more dignity than we might recall, say, from Eric Porter on TV or James Fox in the cinema version, he is mildly surprised, a little defensive.

"I suppose if he's sympathetic then it's only because you try to find who the person really is," he says. "And Tolstoy made reference to why Karenin was the way he was. He's not a one-dimensional figure in the book.

"It seemed also important for the status of the love affair between Vronsky and Anna that the marriage between Karenin and Anna wasn't necessarily on the rocks before she met Vronsky. So you elevate the role of that kind of sexual passion into something beyond near escapism from an intolerable situation. To do that, Karenin had to be, I think, somebody she could have stuck with.

"But really I felt I was playing somebody pretty intolerable from the beginning; somebody who was aloof, distant, arrogant, closed-off, certainly not sexually attractive..."

The Anna Karenina shoot was not easy. It was filmed mainly in Poland. There, Channel Four, unhappy with the rushes, replaced the original director, Harry Bradbeer, with David Blair, who directed Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes.

"There were dips and lifts in morale," Dillane says. "It's never happened to me before, that situation. I'd only really just done one day's shooting with Harry before the changeover happened, so I wasn't as affected as some were. But certainly some people were shocked. Certainly there was a change in atmosphere."

Now it all seems a long way away for Dillane... The Real Thing closes in August and then he will be delving into new scripts - stage, cinema or television, he doesn't mind. And, he says, it doesn't need to be Hollywood fame and fortune. He would like to return to Australia.

"I'm always looking out for jobs in Australia," he says. "I love it there... It's just a matter of finding those scripts and the right projects."

The Times  (London)

Sunday June 11, 2000

The soul searcher

Shelagh Stephenson's latest play reveals a shocking depth of insight into the mind of a violent abuser, says SIMON FANSHAWE

Last year definitely wasn't one of the West End's best. But although there was a stream of mediocrity, the peaks were fantastic - career-best performances from Stephen Dillane, Henry Goodman and Simon Russell Beale, and a playwright, Shelagh Stephenson, who stamped her original, disarmingly frank and beautifully rhythmic wit on London theatre. She emerged in her first stage play, the Olivier-winning The Memory of Water, at "fortyish", as potentially Britain's most commercially successful female playwright since Dodie Smith in the 1930s.

Stephenson has always been a writer, ever since she was small. "I did always know that there was something sensuous about words," she says. But, the middle sister of five, she came from "a very unliterary lower-middle-class family on Tyneside, though they always told me I was a writer at school". However, when she went off to Manchester University she thought: "What do they know? I just thought they were un-sophisticated people." So she spent 10 years of hell being an actress. Eventually she wrote a radio play. "I won't tell you what it's called because it was dreadful." But it started her off, and then she branched out to the stage because Terry Johnson, who wrote Dead Funny and has been a friend of hers for years, said if she didn't, he'd kill her. Since then, he has directed all her plays.

The Memory of Water, the story of three sisters returning home for their mother's funeral, moved both men and women to tears and laughter, and testified to Stephenson's ability to hit universal nerves. The play has become her banker, and this weekend you could see it in Brussels, Tokyo or Tel Aviv. Or you could give yourself a shock and go to the Lyric Hammersmith in London and see her latest play, a reworking of her Writers' Guild award-winning radio script from 1996, Five Kinds of Silence.

As a writer Stephenson is normally very funny, although never cosy. However, Five Kinds of Silence is not in the least amusing. It is a treatment of the horrific real-life case of Tommy Thompson, who terrorised and abused his family and repeatedly raped one of his two daughters for almost 30 years until, in 1988, the daughters shot him. In a benchmark judgment, each received only a two-year suspended sentence.

"I didn't want to do it at first," she says now of the radio play, "but Jeremy Mortimer, my producer, took me out to lunch and gave me two huge glasses of wine and I said, 'I'll only do it if it's Greek.' You know what I mean? Bigger, more poetic than just miserable people in Lancashire f***ing each other." It's a characteristically flip masking of the intensity of her commitment to writing, which Mortimer describes as her having "found a means of expression which totally occupies her all the time. She's got her own skewed world. There's a kind of Joe Orton sound in there". And he adds, toying with an explanation as to why she has never written for telly: "You can't imagine Orton writing Steptoe, can you?"

What is so brilliantly shocking about this play is not that she has made incest and violent abuse the defining circumstances, but that she has explored the protest of the mother and two sisters against it. The terror for the audience does not come from the catalogue of violence: the repeated head butts, the vicious regime where toast had to be buttered in the right direction, ornaments had to be three inches apart ("Not two, but three"), the announcement of tomorrow's rape of his own daughter in advance to enable the mother to go to the shop to buy condoms. None of that is as terrifying as the challenge of exposing the daughter's reaction to being her father's lover. It delivers a sickening blow to the stomach. "I'm enjoying it," says Susan. "You touch me. I want you to." And later: "I'm not your daughter, I'm your lover. Except I'm lying now because I know I'm your daughter, and that's what makes it so special, so secret."

What makes the play so daringly contemporary is that she has used the entrapment of these women as a way of dramatising their ambivalence to their persecution. Stephenson says: "We gave the script to several psychotherapists because I made the part up where she says she enjoyed it. It just felt like it had an internal logic to it. But I wanted to know whether it was complete psychological balls or not. And they said, 'The awful thing is that incest, abuse, doesn't just steal your sexuality, it steals your pleasure. But you can never admit that. You're the victim and it has to be hideous.' And of course it is, but it has to be more complicated than that."

In conversation, Stephenson says many extraordinary things under the cover of saying something very ordinary. This is partly because she's birdlike and sparkles in a sharp sort of way and warns you off expecting depth. But the most remarkable thing is the way she just takes it for granted that "you can actually understand anything if you put your mind to it. You think, 'Yeah, fair enough, I understand why you did that, even though it's monstrous.' Once you get inside their head, you think, 'I can see the relentless logic in this.' "

Hollywood.com

Thursday June 8, 2000

BUZZ/SAW: Listen Up, Broadway!  (an excerpt)

by Doris Toumarkine

And here's a little Broadway postscript. Geographically-challenged fans who are fond of great acting but can't get to Broadway's "The Real Thing" to see just-crowned Tony winner Stephen Dillane should be able to strike gold at their video store. Dillane delivered a brilliant performance in Miramax's underrated "Welcome to Sarajevo," in which he plays a British TV journalist of immense sensitivity and passion covering the violent fighting in the war-torn town in 1992. Trust us.The Miramax Home Entertainment release is proof that, when it comes to acting, Dillane is "the real thing."

Matinee Magazine

June 2000

Tony Awards 2000: A Look at This Year's Tony Nominees  (an excerpt)

by Jason Clark, Co-Creator and Theater Editor

What Pleased Me:

Three stunning performances, Stephen Dillane (The Real Thing) and Hoffman and Reilly (True West) are all competing against each other in the best category of the night, Best Leading Actor...

The Sunday Telegraph

Sunday May 14, 2000

All fuzz and no frisson  (an excerpt)

by John Preston

Television

The main problem with Channel 4's new four-part adaptation of Anna Karenina (Tuesday) was one of temperature. The whitened wastes outside looked authentic enough, but the atmosphere inside was hardly any warmer. Where was our old friend sexual chemistry? Nowhere to be seen. Anna and Vronsky tore away at each other's costumes and dutifully moaned with desire, but always they seemed to have one ear cocked for the director's instructions: move into the bodice, tweak those epaulettes.

You couldn't really blame the actors; they were going at it eagerly enough. You could, however, blame some infuriatingly tricksy camerawork. If you want to crank up any kind of frisson between two people on screen it helps to have plenty of eye-contact between them. Here, though, Anna and Vronsky were invariably seen not just in profile, but behind some blurry object in the foreground. And they weren't the only ones; almost everybody else was partially obscured by fuzzy things dotted around the edges of the screen. If there's any thinking at all behind this then it's hopelessly flawed. Far from adding zip to the narrative, the effect is to make the viewer feel like a stalker hiding in a bush, craning about to see what the hell's going on.

There was a good deal written beforehand about how this was a very modern version of Anna Karenina. It didn't seem that modern to me, apart from being rather shallow and having the inevitable simulated sex scenes. But perhaps they meant the casting of Anna herself. Helen McCrory is not a natural Anna, being less glamorous than usual, as well as more matronly looking. She made a creditable stab at the role in difficult circumstances, not helped by having an unusually wooden Vronsky - nor by a flattened-down hairdo that gave her an unfortunate resemblance to Anna Ryder Richardson in Changing Rooms.

Time Magazine

Monday May 1, 2000

'The Real Thing'

by Richard Zoglin

In the first scene of this 1984 play, enjoying a somewhat premature Broadway revival, a man confronts his wife with evidence of her affair.  In the second scene we learn that the two were acting in a play -- yet something very similar is going on in their own lives.  The nice thing about The Real Thing is that Stoppard's penchant for trickery doesn't register as mere virtuosity but is integral to his probing exploration of betrayal and trust among married couples.  Stephen Dillane heads a flawless, starless cast that has brought over David Leveaux's sharp production from London's Donmar Warehouse and it's a winner.

Matinee Magazine

Monday May 1, 2000

'The Real Thing'

by Jason Clark

It has been far too long since New York has seen a Stoppard play adorning Broadway, and after a season of soggy, overwritten debacles, one is happy to embrace anything that has already been tested, and just might deliver. The Donmar Warehouse production of The Real Thing, with its luminous London cast intact, proves to be the great reminder of the verve and wit plays once had. Best known for being a powerhouse '80s vehicle for Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, this revival has a brand-new vibrancy and is so accomplished, you'd think that nobody else ever embodied these splendid roles. This is one of Stoppard's greatest achievements, if his much-lauded Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love had half of the resonance this does, it might stack up against this and his magnificent Arcadia, but to my mind, it wouldn't even come close.

Thing is a familiar tale (adults courting with infidelity, writers coping with the ever-changing world), but the rhythm is altered a bit, giving the work a contemporary feel no matter when it is set, since people still wrestle with these problems constantly. Henry (Stephen Dillane) is a playwright with an undercurrent of disdain for mediocrity, and not the greatest husband in the world when the play begins. Charlotte (Sarah Woodward) is his patient actress wife, who throws an impromptu lunch party together when couple Max (Nigel Lindsay) and Annie (Jennifer Ehle), also actors, arrive. But what Charlotte doesn't know is that Henry and Annie are already in love with each other, and Annie, the more aggressive of the two, opts to spill the beans while a bemused Henry wishes to keep it secretive. Their spouses do find out, and the bulk of the play centers around Henry and Annie and the consequences of their lustfulness, including her involvement in a lackluster play written by an ex-con she helped some time ago, and their rocky path as their personalities collide.

Punctuated by pop tunes throughout that, to Henry's mind, are sublime because of their unpretentious nature, director David Leveaux has inventively staged the show (with designer Vicki Mortimer), with partitions moving side to side, up and down, left to right, much like the characters in the space. Their lives are a ride, only they don't seem to realize it. And it also a relatively spare production, letting the performers envelop the surroundings with full-bodied characterizations. The sublimely talented Ehle is ideal for Annie, her resemblance to Meryl Streep is apparent not only in her features but in her acting, as she fearlessly crafts a woman whose desire leaps ahead of her heart. It is a tricky role to master, but Ehle miraculously gives us someone with real immediacy and understanding, even if Annie is the furthest thing to a heroine in the eyes of most people.

The real thing here, though, is Stephen Dillane. A thin actor with wiry hair but armed an arresting sense of timing, he fashions one of the most indelible cynics in recent years and manages to be charming, sexy, off-handed and heartbreaking all at the same time. It seems almost impossible to play an emotionally distant, rigid writer and make him sympathetic, but Dillane's majestic performance suggests great depths. There are many scenes, such as his discovery that Annie has lied to him about her travels, where he has to let us know what he's feeling without letting her know. A difficult task, but Dillane's lived-in, resourceful portrayal keeps us in the moment. Whether he's launching metaphors about bad writing or slumped in a chair with a telephone on his lap, Dillane is riveting, and with a simple turn of the head, can suggest the turning point of a scene in entirety. It's a blazing, highly original performance.

Wolf Entertainment Guide

April 2000

The Real Thing

by William Wolf

Super acting by a British cast and Tom Stoppard's clever, brittle and amusing dialogue make "The Real Thing" scintillating theater. If you stop to think about how interesting the characters really are or whether or not you become emotionally involved with them, your enthusiasm may ease off some, but the beauty of this revival, directed by David Leveaux, is that it doesn’t leave you much time for second thoughts while you are watching. The actors and Stoppard take care of that.

The play is about relationships, finding or concealing the truth about them and the sexual interchanges that become part of the equation. Since the key characters are involved in the theater, this gives Stoppard the added means of applying his wit to types he must know well, in addition to skewering the staging of talentless but agitprop works to support a cause.

Stephen Dillane makes a dynamic appearance--clear the decks for new leading man offers--as Henry, a playwright who has great respect for language and craft, and is more at ease with the cerebral than the emotional in his personal life. Deep down, of course, he has intense feelings, but pride and emotional caution complicate his ability to show his love, even to write about love. There is also jealousy at the thought that Annie, the actress he does love, might betray him with a young actor, just a fling for her, but a threat to Henry. Dillane is both talented and likable, and he is the central force in this production, previously staged by the Donmar Warehouse in London. ("The Real Thing" was staged on Broaday in 1984 with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close in the cast.)

We're fortunate to be getting the Donmar cast, thanks to an exchange arrangement between Actor's Equity in the United States and British Equity in England. We're particularly fortunate that Jennifer Ehle is playing Annie. She is a strong match for Dillane's Henry, fiercely defending her social action commitment of wanting to appear in a play written by the Scottish prisoner (Joshua Henderson) who she believes has been unjustly incarcerated. Henry amusingly mocks the play in one of his best speeches. Ehle conveys Annie's streak of independence, her willingness to lie to protect the relationship with Henry, the one she really cares about, and she also projects an earthy, playful sexuality that suggests volatility. The teaming of Dillane and Ehle is enough of attraction, but the rest of the cast is also excellent, including Sarah Woodward, Nigel Lindsay, Charlotte Parry, Oscar Pearce and the aforementioned Henderson. They work together with precision and seeming ease.

Guardian Unlimited

Saturday March 25, 2000

Audio:  Remembrance Day (by Henry Porter)

review by Peter Kingston

Audio abridgements are not kind on thrillers. These miniatures don't permit enough time to be teased or tantalised. Matchstick figures scamper towards a climax that can't do its job.

Con Lindow, an academic, is waiting for Eamonn, the brother he has not seen in years, when the bus bringing Eamonn explodes. Con is arrested as an IRA suspect. Foyle, head of the Met's anti-terrorist branch, thinks Con's clean. Devious MI5 know he is, but to cover up some dirty deeds of their own, want Con to take the rap.

Electronic Telegraph

Thursday February 24, 2000

Comment:  Wisden editor retires fed up

by Michael Henderson *

CRICKET has become so marginal in so many young lives, so unattractive to the wider sporting public, so - in a word - unfashionable, that the game should reflect long and hard on Matthew Engel's decision to relinquish the editor's chair at Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.

Although Engel hinted yesterday that he may return to the job when it seems more attractive or when his juices start to flow again, his abdication, however temporary, should give some pause for thought.

When it is acknowledged that the editorship of Wisden is not a pensionable job and that Engel has a full-time undertaking as a feature writer at the Guardian, his decision puts cricket in the dock. Rather, it puts English cricket there. If a part-time chronicler of events feels so fed up, how are those closer to the game supposed to feel? The answer is: much the same.

Having just returned from three months in South Africa, where England lost the Test series by the flattering margin of 2-1 , against a background of domestic upheaval that has resulted in the loss of one of the game's major sponsors, Cornhill Insurance , it is hard to be optimistic about the state of play. There are too few players of quality, too many bad pitches . . . oh, heavens above, we have heard all this before. The game is in a mess and there is no common agreement as to how matters can be improved.

It cannot help that those charged with assisting the improvement, Lord MacLaurin and Tim Lamb, respectively the chairman and chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, are so reluctant to face the truth, however unpalatable.

Their response to Michael Atherton's recent observations that county cricket is a shambles belonged to the old Politburo rather than a newly constituted sporting body. What Atherton said made absolute sense, it seems, to everybody else .

Now Engel, with inky fingers and furrowed brow, has served his own writ. He is exhausted, he said, with trying to find excuses to account for England's lamentable performance in international cricket, and the loss of self-respect that goes with it. All this will be reflected in the editor's notes when Wisden is published in early April - and the furore will not do the sales any harm. His confession that he can no longer summon the enthusiasm to display his love for cricket to the wider world is to be regretted.

Engel is right to lament the absence of such players as Ian Botham and David Gower. Both were stars in the true sense, men who could light the lights simply by being on stage. There is no comparable figure in the current team, and no amount of window dressing can disguise that. For most people England are a featureless side made up of ordinary Joes.

One lives in hope because one has to. Evidently Engel feels he has drawn too much on his account and can no longer afford to subsidise his interests by writing for the sake of it. Have a year off, old chap, and return to the fray fresher, and more hopeful.

Funnily enough, as he was releasing his statement, I was at the theatre watching a superb revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. After Stephen Dillane delivered the magnificent "cricket bat" speech - about craftmanship, comparing good writing with a sweetly struck ball - members of the audience broke into applause. I am unashamed to report I led the applause. On such a day it seemed a natural response, to come to the aid of a dear friend.

The Times  (London)

Tuesday January 25, 2000

Features

Prententious, moi?  (an excerpt)

It's great. It means that there is a real relationship with the audience and that is kind of thrilling.

Actor Stephen Dillane, after the audience shouted "Speak up!" during a performance of his latest play,

Variety

Monday January 24, 2000

'REAL' AND 'REAL'-ER

(London, England production of 'The Real Thing')

There was drama out front, as well as onstage, at the first West End preview Jan. 13 of the Broadway-bound revival of "The Real Thing," in which the intimate connections of stars Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle proved too much for some spectators -- and not in the way that you might think.

"Speak up," shouted one frustrated patron from the back of the Albery Theater 10 minutes into the second act, his exhortation followed immediately by that of another audience member and then by a general round of applause.

"That's never happened to me, though I'm aware I'm sometimes inaudible," an amused Dillane was saying the next day, mulling over the fundamental dilemma involved in transferring a production acclaimed for its intimacy into an 879-seat venue more than three times the size of the 251-seat Donmar. (The staging's eventual New York home, the Belasco, is some 100-plus seats bigger than the Albery.)

Easing into it

The company, says Dillane, "took a decision to go in and do it very slowly, easy our way into it, expand organically into the space" -- to continue, in other words, within a larger environment the almost forensic exploration of Tom Stoppard's play that has earned the revival such attention (not to mention four Olivier nominations).

When the press were invited in five days later, the piece seemed intriguingly betwixt and between, with some company members booming out the play while others were reining it in. (Making its own statement: Vicki Mortimer's formidably modular set.) Overheard at the interval was a group of elderly American visitors complaining about the matter of hearing, though they at least seemed charitably inclined to lay the problem at the feet of the theater's sizable overhang.