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Oh Dear! The British Public....Dateline: 26th October, 2003In a week in which our East Anglia reviewer Jill Sharp could write of Puppetry of the Penis, "Compared to what's readily available on our screens every night of the week, this is a show suitable for all the family: no sex, no violence - just daft, original fun", it was a bit worrying, to read in the Evening Standard that theatergoers in Southend were "outraged" that, in the touring production of The Graduate, Glynis Barber did not follow in the footsteps of Kathleen Turner, Jerry Hall et al, and take her clothes off onstage. According to Charles Mumford, the general manager of Southend's Cliff's Pavilion, the reason for poor audiences - only 200 seats sold in the 1,600-seater for the first night, we are told - was because Miss Barber refused to strip. Now I saw and reviewed the show at Newcastle's Theatre Royal on 8th September and I knew well in advance that she wouldn't be removing her clothes - and it didn't make any difference to me, or to the size of the audience there. The show did good business - better business than it deserved, but that's opinion, not fact! Now you may well think that Mr Mumford is just looking for an excuse for his poor audience figures , but earlier this month he had threatened to cancel the show because "what is good enough for London is good enough for Southend" and Southend wasn't getting what London had had, a nude Mrs Robinson. Glynis Barber's reaction? "Focusing on my nudity could only happen in this country. There's something dreadfully puerile about people's interest in seeing nudity on stage," she told the Standard. She is so right! Why are we in the UK so obsessed with stage nudity? Or with nudity in general, for that matter? Witness that pecularly British combination of puritanism and salaciousness in the tabloid press: howls of outrage on page one when a star or "personality" has an affair, a nude girl on page three. Look at their coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe: a play which examines in depth some moral, ethical, social or political problem is ignored, but let a performer take of his or her clothes and it's a major new story. Are the people of Southend so obsessed with sex or so curious as to what a pair of breasts and a bit of pubic hair look like that that was the only reason they would go to see The Graduate? Or had they perhaps decided that a play whose only appeal was to nostalgia for a film of more than thirty years ago was not particularly worth the effort and expense of going to see? I prefer to think it was the latter, because I do believe that the British public is not comprised of the sad, sex-obsessed morons that the tabloids - and, sadly, Mr Mumford - seem to imagine it is. Articles Indices:
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