Likewise, you could see why Andrew Lloyd Webber was so keen to get his latest musical, Cinderella, open, even vowing he’d risk jail by flouting social distancing to do so. Some have sniped that the composer’s campaign throughout the pandemic to get theatreland back was all calculation and self-promotion. But on the evidence of the frolicsome and tuneful result – Emerald Fennell’s script satirising airbrushed ideas of female acceptability, with Carrie Hope Fletcher as a lovably refusenik Cinderella – he wants as many people as possible to have as good a time as possible.
That impulse – mainly seized by the commercial sector – is worth cheering. And those subsidised theatres that responded to our craving for the carnival-esque warranted their Culture Recovery Fund dosh. Chichester delivered a slick, satisfying revival of South Pacific. The Kiln, in Kilburn, ended the year with Zadie Smith’s bawdily outspoken rewrite of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath. Even the RSC, too slow to make work happen during the crisis, redeemed itself with an ebullient Comedy of Errors.
To be frank, those venues that displayed self-righteous tendencies or a touch of reprimand in their programming didn’t win my vote. They misjudged the moment, and probably alienated existing, inquiring theatre-goers rather than wooing new ones. Moira Buffini, usually a fine writer, became a lightning-rod for frustration with her lamentable state-of-the-nation play Manor at the National in November. It felt lagging politically, concentrating on the perceived rise of fascism in the UK. It sounded lumpen in its eco-speechifying (“We’re the virus and the Earth is the host”). And it flagged up a worrying trend in new writing, with characterisation that just looks hollow, as if no one on stage has any real backstory.
