by Sophie Duncan Dancing girls, confetti and pyrotechnics: Spamalot is the rising star of Big Theatre, dwarfed only by the all-singing, all-dancing, unassailable barricades of Les Miserables. Grown-up actors scramble for the roles created by Tim Curry and David Hyde-Pierce: grown up audiences cheer and stamp six nights a week at The Palace Theatre. Further up the Thames, though, some younger thespians curl their downy lips.
Big Theatre is monied, spectactular and (by definition) successful: all the things student theatre cannot rely on being. Moreover, we often hear that without the social evil that is the sequin (symbol, apparently, of the unfashionable suggestion that theatre should sometimes be enjoyable), the dramatic world would be a better, more serious place. The West End, for instance, would have more room for Oxonian thesps when they emerge as Exciting New Voices/Breakthrough Talent/Very Special Snowflakes in two or three years’ time. This intellectual snobbery is fortunately not absolute. Musicals of Oxford put on top-class productions and the best piece of Oxford theatre I’ve ever seen was Seb Cameron’s production of Company in Hilary last year. Here, then, is the case for Big Theatre in the professional world, and why its detractors should grow up.
Firstly, even geniuses have to eat. West End musicals employ more performers, technicians and musicals than any other UK theatrical form. ‘Performers’ is a loaded term, implying singers and dancers as well as actors. Actors often look down on singers and dancers as not intellectual or serious enough about their ‘art’: this is amusing, since actors often can’t sing or dance. A trainee lawyer or doctor understands the need to be professionally flexible and update his or her skills: trainee actors must do the same. The relative stability of a long West End contract may well one day appeal. Work with even the most prestigious touring company can mean uprooting partners or children, or miserable separation – and this is an inevitability, since London doesn’t guarantee work and turning down all non-London job offers is career suicide. In a career in classical theatre, there comes a time when they should stop offering you Horatio and start offering you Hamlet. If it never comes, you will be climbing over the backs of your best friends for the kind of job you now despise. Most real actors, jobbing actors, take the best jobs they can get, in a range of media, from children’s programming to more adult pursuits. (I’m not advocating porn. Well, I am advocating porn. But only in moderation, and after Finals).
One of the reasons I – and, I hope, others– want to act is to entertain others as well as to provoke. If you look at the faces of theatregoers after a big show, they’re uplifted. Spectacular shows restore a sense of wonder in the audience’s lives, providing a service of escapism and – in Spamalot – a determined message of diversity and inclusion. Meanwhile, London’s most beautiful theatres, many of which now exist solely to show musicals, stay open, and hundreds of people from dressers to dancers go on paying the mortgage.
Where the work of new voices and artists is stifled, Big Theatre is not the culprit. Experimental groups such as DV8, Frantic Assembly and Told By An Idiot are feeling the pinch. After 20 years of peaceful coexistence with the darlings of Shaftesbury Avenue, Howard Barker’s The Wrestling School has been denied the funding it needs to tour.
I like musicals because I like music, going to the theatre and because my heart has yet to harden into a swinging brick. And finally, all those snowflakes should bear in mind that Thelma Holt Productions shares a roof with Avenue Q. So. Happy November, and good luck with those applications.Sophie Duncan has seen Spamalot three times. Her favourite bit is the gay wedding.
