So it’s a Saturday in the summer of 1972 and you’re looking to see a show in London’s West End. Here are your options, as long as you’re carrying a fair few pounds in your pocket.
Top of the list is the acclaimed National Theatre Company production of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers at The Old Vic in Waterloo Road. Tonight is the very last night of the play’s lengthy and popular run, so seats are likely to be hard to come by. (The most expensive tickets have a face value of £2.10, but ticket agencies and touts – if touts there were – are unlikely to be so generous.) But then, a production of this wry and witty alt-world Stoppard comedy with a cast headed by Diana Rigg, as Dorothy, and Michael Hordern, as George, is hardly one to let close without a final round of applause. By most reports, it would be worth spending an extra pound or two on the final show of this West End season.
In Covent Garden, a then-still unreconstructed and marvelously rundown area, the Royal Opera House is hosting the Royal Ballet’s production of Swan Lake. And even though its cast of dancers no longer includes, as earlier in the year, the legendary likes of Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, the production retains the respect of Them That Know. Today’s performance is a matinee. Hopes for tickets, I read, rely on standing tickets available on the day, a substantial donation on the secondhand market, or an intimate friendship with a person of some considerable and pertinent social standing.
The fantastical nature of so much of ballet often gets ignored, or just plain forgotten, by many devotees of sci-fi, fantasy and horror. But Swan Lake is, of course, the tale, in part, of a malevolent sorcerer and a cruelly transformative curse. It’s clearly part of popular as well as high culture.
Finally, at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Celia Bannerman as Miranda, Michael Denison as Prospero and Wayne Sleep as Ariel, begins at 7.45pm. Tonight’s weather is billed as warm and dry, so Shakespeare in the park may well make for a pleasant summer’s night play-watching. (J. C. Trewin, drama critic of the Birmingham Post, was present a few weeks before when the “windy and uncommonly cold night” left him, by his own admission, somewhat peevish.) Brian Dougan, in The Westminster and Pimlico News of the 16th of June, called the production “competent, no nonsense, traditional” before recording a distinctly unconventional moment in the performance he’d seen:
“The most memorable part of the set, though, was when the set caught fire. The struggles of the stagehands to get the fire extinguishers to work was the stuff of true drama!”
The Almanac Of The Fantastical will return tomorrow.
The Almanac Of The Fantastical 