theatre darling

I'm in London.... I like going to the theatre. I like the people who go to the theatre.

This week I went to a musical in the west End. On Shaftesbury Avenue. At The ApolloTheatre. 
The Apollo is one of a string of theatres that line that road that cuts diagonally through Soho from Piccadilly to  Cambridge Circus.

The Apollo Theatre, shaftesbury Avenue.

The West End Theatres are museum worthy buildings. Red carpets in the foyers. Staircases lifting either side to the Royal Circle and the Balconies. The auditorium is shaped like a horseshoe with the various circles curving around above you. The seats are various shades of velvet. The Haymarket is green. The Coliseum is Blue.  The Apollo is red. There are beautiful bars for your interval drinks, there are baroque painted ceilings. There are thick velvet curtains separating you from the stage as you sit and murmur before the start of a show. There is a safety curtain which has to be lowered once during the evening to show the audience they care about your safety.
From the Trafalgar to the Chocolate Factory, from the Apollo to the Almeida, from the Olivier to the Orange Tree; the audiences are an informed bunch. All ages. All types.
When I went on New Years Eve to Matthew Bourne's " Swan lake" at the Piccadilly some fifteen years ago, there were ballet teachers and favorite pupils and there were men in drag.
What I like about London theatre audiences is they don't wait for success to go and see a play. They just go.

The national

The Royal Court

The Hampstead theatre Club

The National again

They
come from
their offices to meet their wives from the Guildford train. They watch a racy bit of something that doesn't really work and they go back on the last train and have a cup of horlicks before bed.

My friends R & G, have a diary of the plays they have booked for. The National, the Donmar, the Old Vic. R Likes musicals so he will slip away on his own and watch Titanic under Charing Cross Arches. 
My friend, Angela has booked for an all day Chekov at the National.
" It'll be lovely. We'll see Ivanov at 11. have a spot of lunch. see the Seagull at 2.30. Have a light supper. see Platonov at 7.30."  

People went to eight hours of Nicholas Nickleby. I did.
I also went to five hours of Strange Interlude.by Eugene O'Neill
I lived in a city where a theatre performance started at 5.15 of an evening.
I lived in a country where at Stratford they put on the History Plays of Shakespeare. Where you would lurch through all of those complicated Henrys with just a cucumber sandwich to keep you going.

The book shop at the national Just plays upon plays upon plays.

The show at the Apollo was not good. Not the fault of the actors or the director or the script.
It was a musical adaptation of L.M. Hartley's novel about class, the same one that Joe Losey had made into a brilliant film decades before.

When we went into the stalls with our complimentary tickets you could tell the sound was wrong.  You could hear the handbags snap and the cough drops being sucked. There were not enough people. 
The show wasn't great. it shouldn't have been in one of these gloriously baroque theatre but in some odd modern space, where the man on the piano and the painted plastic chairs would have felt at home.
I laughed louder than I needed. I made appreciative sounds at the act changes, I nudged R to applaud at the end. Clap loud, I said. Clap Louder.. 
Those actors up there, they knew it wasn't working. They wanted on this Monday night to know that it had landed somewhere.
As we left, the people in the row in front of us who had paid a lot of money for their seats, turned to me... 
"What did you think?"
" I thought it was really good." I said. Of course I did.
"We've seen him do it all," they said." Phantom, Barnum and now this."
A lot of the people in the auditoriums are coming out on a Monday or a Thursday or a weekend to see what you do.
" We saw a nice play in Waterloo. At the Young Vic. " They might say over Shredded Wheat and the pot of Darjeeling." It was in a plastic box . And I think she had a baby, but then it disappeared. and it was a real baby, But it didn't seem to mind being in an box on a stage. And I really wanted the ending to be different.. But you don't get to do that in theatre, do you?"

Interval drinks

Life going on beside the theatre

I lived in London because of Theatre. 
I went to tap classes in-between matinee and evening performances. I cleaned houses so I could go to plays in the evening.  I worked in a pub in Blackfriars with my friend JJ.  And the both of us were wenches at this Shakespeare Tavern in Blackfriars. Where we would wear mob caps and low cut blouses and sing inane songs to earn a couple of pounds that would allow us to go to a matinee of Evita or whatever.....
I went to see my friends. Went to see friends of friends.  I went to see my friends sell programmes  and get slipped in for the second half. I got to see shows that lasted a couple of weeks,  where the theme tune of the Crusaders was   "Onward to Jerusalem..via Narbonne," I can't sing it for you, but , believe me, it was very bad.

Jonathan Miller, a director I respected immensely, said, " If football and opera were reversed, we would have a better society."

He meant that we had it turned upside down. 

row L. Seat 20. Second act. 

Theatre, in London, is part of the package. You shop at Waitrose  You have an Oyster Card. You catch the exhibition at the national Portrait Gallery in  your lunch-hour, you see 'Platonov' before you get the 10.30 home on the Northern Line.

Just slotting right in...that's all I want say....something in the waters... the genetics.... the theatre of the normal life . the life of toast and butter.  
And there is always marmite. But don't get me started.