|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Articles
|
||
|
Articles |
Bollocks, Mr O'TooleDateline: 3rd April, 2005Dear Peter O'Toole, You've never been one to mince words. Good for you! People need to be shocked out of their complacency every now and then, and you are very good at that. But sometimes, to use an Irish idiom, you can be a real gobshite, as with your sweeping condemnation of contemporary theatre in Britain. I suspect you're having a good laugh at our expense. I can see the thought that must have gone through your mind when you gave that interview - "I'll really wind the bastards up!" The trouble is: you got it wrong. It's fine winding people up over something they need to be wound up about but is the state of British theatre so bad that it deserves the tongue-lashing you gave it? Is it hell! Modern theatre, you say is "badly done shit" so you tell your children to go into cinema and TV. TV? T bloody V? Come on! If theatre is full of badly done shit, TV is a shit factory, working at full speed and maximum capacity. In the "badly done shit" stakes, theatre is trailing way, way behind. As for the RSC and the National: they are, you say, places where "a third-rate biddable arsehole (can) do 39 productions of As You Like It upside down with red noses." I must have missed those. I do remember someone doing Dream on trapezes - but that was your generation, wasn't it? The RSC and RNT were, you tell us, places "where the best actors did their best work." Hmm. Simon Russell Beale, Judi Dench, Corin Redgrave, Greg Hicks, Richard Griffiths... no change there, then. "Do you feel," you ask, "you can hop on a bus to the West End to see the likes of Paul Scofield, Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier?" Indeed I do (except I don't think I'd take a London bus). There's the five mentioned above, plus actors like Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Michael Pennington, Ian McKellen, Anton Lesser, Kenneth Branagh, Harriet Walter, Mark Rylance... the list goes on. Ah! Just a moment! I see... Burton was your generation; Scofield and Olivier were older. Aye, things were much better when I were a lad, too. Times were 'ard and us lived in paper bag in t'middle of t'road, but us overcame it all. Aye. It's a sure sign of age (and perhaps of insecurity?) when you start rubbishing the current generation and comparing it unfavourably to your own, seeing nothing good in it. I'm a just under a decade younger than you but I make this plea to everyone who knows me: the moment I start saying how much better actors and directors were in my day and how modern theatre is shit, please gag me and stuff me in a home somewhere and make me watch daytime TV soaps and Hollywood movies. I'll deserve it! Yours, The British Theatre Guide
|
|
|
|