Don’t make me angry, boys. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

It’s come to my attention that contemporary televised cuisine is blatantly pulping, juicing and bottling the limelight from our old pal, theatre’s backyard. Jamie Oliver is muscling in on the social vigilance that’s traditionally been the stomping ground of the playwright. Gordon Ramsay’s verbatim performances barely convince (no chef in real life could speak to his KPs like that without receiving a ginger grater to the goolies). And Heston Blumenthal, with his fancypants ‘Ooh, let’s make food entertaining! Look, an ejaculating Roman soufflé!’. Food isn’t meant to be entertaining. Theatre is. Chop us some slack, lads, it’s a recession, and those particular green shoots are not for nibbling.

I jest, of course. But there is an opening in the market here, one still flourishing in North America: Dinner Theatre. In fact, during one production of Arsenic & Old Lace circa 1982, my mother found herself tussling over the last bread roll with the gigantic hand of Lou Ferrigno, aka The Incredible Hulk (see, that opening line wasn’t entirely arbitrary). If only she’d let him have that bread roll. I might have ended up with a new stepfather, a Hollywood childhood and fabulous green skin. O, wondrous thought.

Now, I’ll be honest: I’m a sensory glutton. I smoke a pipe with the paper. I Rubik’s Cube at the cinema. I listen to my ‘Learn Romanian Super Quick Fast!’ CD in the bubble bath. This epicurean overload isn’t for everyone. But there’s something deliciously decadent about dinner theatre’s concept: starter, first act, main course, second act, desserts and coffee with the finale. Yum.

This hankering to feed the belly as well as the mind led me to this week’s venue. Our show will be advertised, like all good dinner parties, via word of mouth; a discreet meeting point set in deepest darkest Bermondsey. From there a jaunt around the cobblestones works up your appetite, and you pass an old mission house with the ambiguous command FEED MY LAMBS carved into it. Finally you emerge at the dilapidated remains of a blubber factory, hidden between a disused leather market and the structural ghosts of vinegar plants. The old industrial heart of London, and, our venue. Several tables are splayed out for dinner, though you won’t choose who you sit next to. A chef broils and glowers and dices in a corner. Waiters shuffle and twinkle and deliver notes from other diners. And as dinner progresses, so does the plot. Though, you’re never quite sure who’s acting and who’s watching.

It probably wouldn’t suit Seneca’s Thyestes — we don’t want them to suspect they’re eating last night’s audience. What we’d need is a metamorphic play that uses each course as a sensory rocket launcher into the next. Culminating, of course, in the skulking possibility of a massive, madcap food fight.

And then at the meal’s end the Incredible Hulk bustles round tables, handing out wet wipes and making witty banter.

Cheque, please.

–>

To my closest friends it’s a piece of vertiginous tomfoolery. To me it’s an affair of towering gravitas. I refer, of course, to my jealously-guarded hopes of becoming a free-running champion.

For those of you unacquainted with the modern marvels of free running, Parkour enthusiasts are those nimble will-o-wisps that bound through our cityscapes, clambering water-towers, conquering construction sites, pin-balling off cement-marooned trees to hang from mezzanines and generally encouraging your significant other to say things like ‘Oooh, hasn’t he got ripply arms?! I’d love to go out with someone like that. You know, someone with actual muscle definition. Actually, you know what would be nice, darling: if you started exercising above your fingertips, beyond the personal gym that is your MacBook.’ But I digress.

The natural habitat of these fine athletes has of late been the South Bank. The other day I was admiring their foot and handiwork —hoping their master would note my potential, beckon enigmatically, and invite me over to work on my decidedly un-ripply arms— when I noticed a group of unruly Lambeth youths mimicking them. They were hauling themselves up the electrician’s ladder on Waterloo bridge, vaulting over the fraying tightrope of a low-wire clown, offering to toss themselves into the Thames for the bargain price of a pound.

Somebody, I magnanimously concluded, should say something. I stood up, assumed my socio-conscious playwright face, and walked straight past them to write this blog. Never say I don’t contribute to the welfare of my community.

So. If the mantra of free runners is to treat the city as a playground, why shouldn’t we encourage more of this in our theatres? They may not be called playhouses anymore but a few of them retain the noble intentions of amusement. What if we found an off-west end theatre that did have enough space to allow these dizzying displays of neo-Olympian athleticism? What if we had a Rooftop Theatre?

Moving to London, the idea first occurred to me via the scientifically dubious medium of a dream. This involved myself and childhood friends (RAF navigator, marine biologist, semi-professional dog-napper) inheriting an old sausage factory in the midst of derelict Wapping and transforming it into a (ceiling) cracking venue.

Well, there may not be an old sausage factory waiting for us out there. But there is a fantastic jigsaw of pub roofs in Farringdon. There’s an unused swathe of station roof by Waterloo. There’s a lovely little nook above a 99p store in Clapham. And what play to better demonstrate the versatility of our giddy venture than an actobatic, contemporary reworking of Henry V, with plummeting channels between France and England for the battle scenes. ‘Once more into the breach’ and all that. Especially if the breach in question happened to be a thirty foot drop to the streets below. 

Okay, so it’s a recipe for apoplectic insurers. But perhaps we could draft in a few unruly Lambeth youths willing to shake some spears and waive their Equity pensions.

–>

I’m beginning to think my drama school might have diddled me. One (unofficial) lesson involved strolling along tube platforms pretending there was a bomb in our rucksack. We’d discreetly monitor the other passengers and deduce who might notice the casual disposal of an incendiary device. Pretty twisted, when you think about it. That said, this was 1999 — the tube seemed a less threatening place. Not a London Lite in sight.

It was Laurence Olivier who first suggested sitting on the Circle Line and just observing. Following his lead, I witnessed this couplet of brief encounters:

A man bustles his elderly parents along the platform. They’re clearly moving at a pace he regards as sub-evolutionary. He bounds onto the carriage, motioning incredulously for them to hurry up, and starts shouting at them as the doors close. He is whisked away. His parents chuckle as if this had been the plan all along.

A young couple appear, clearly furious with one another. Although they do not speak to nor look at each other, their hands clasp fervently. Suddenly the boy turns and whispers

‘Milwaukee shadow puppets.’

They slowly smile, she laughs, and they kiss.

I don’t know why more plays aren’t set in tube stations. The best dalliances happen there: illicit trysts, drug deals, espionage, or all three at once. The problem is that no production can afford a stream of carriages rattling past every four minutes (delays pending). Right?

Wrong. Peer through the window whilst zipping between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn and you’ll see a station where no passenger has alighted since 1932 — the ‘British Museum’ stop. There are forty of these abandoned or relocated ‘ghost’ stations on the Underground. Try using your Oyster card there, Boris.

So here’s this week’s wooing of a potential new venue — the ghost station. From the strange brick tower of ‘City Street’ to the low white construct of ‘Bull & Bush’ station, they’re just begging to be commandeered for artistic mischiefery. Or at least for The Ghost Train by Arthur Ridley. ‘Down Street’, with its ox-blood red bricks, wasn’t even included in the original 1932 prototype. Winston Churchill and his cabinet used it as a secret base during the war. Churchill said Down Street was ‘one of the only places where it was possible to sleep without the sounds and worries of the bombing above’ (interesting how that never made it into anthologies of bravado-riffic quotes).

My boundless attention to detail has just flagged up that there has been a precedent to this idea: a production of Still Life in ‘Aldwych’ station, which failed to rock the reviewers’ carriages. Well, that was then and this is now. If these stations really are lying vacant, it’s time to descend on them like swarms of script-gnawing track-rats. Even if they’re still being put to clandestine political use. Accidentally bursting in on Gordon Brown getting a bit of peace and quiet from the latest Labour scandal could surely only add to the drama.

–>

1999. Third term of drama school. I am on my final warning before an ignoble eviction from the premises. And not with the renegade flair in which Russell Brand and Tom Hardy departed. Nope, it’s my sheer lack of frivolity. I mulch through the ballet room dejectedly, and bang my head off the bar. Our principal pops his head in —a terrifying figure, with the eyes of a Tiger Shark and a tongue full of godlike rhetoric— and with typically baffling benevolence, says:

‘Darling, it’s called a play.’

Indeed it is. It’s worth remembering that, especially on the Off-West-End where we all work for nothing and the audiences expect West End values without the cliché.

And London theatre is very much like a playground. As such, there’s a gaping gulf between the flash West End and the frumpy Independents. The former have their designer trainers (sets), pocket money (wages), giggling admirers (audiences) and their behind-the-bike-sheds spin-the-bottle extravaganzas (opening night parties). The Off-West-End competes against this with the inspiration of necessity, low-fi edginess and end-of-run parties where glamour means a slice of pizza and a spanner to dismantle the stage.

The benefit of being the playground underdogs, of course, is inclusiveness. The West End hang out together off Leicester Square like juves on a garage forecourt, but they don’t really like each other. I mean, come on. When the Playhouse was ailing you didn’t see the Drury Lane bailing them out with the acumen of The Producers. At the very least the Fortune could have stopped hogging The Woman In Black and passed it around for a bit. The Off-West-End, on the other hand, band together because they have to. Sort of like The Goonies. But without the annoying accents.

This camaraderie suffers, perhaps, from the discrepancies of geography. Where exactly is the Off-West-End? From Hampton Wick to Highbury and Islington, from the Young Vic to the Hen & Chickens, so sweeps the ruddy realm of underdog theatre. There’s no snobbery here: unlike the snoots of Broadway, we have no Off-Off-West-End. And so we shouldn’t.

With the original ‘Theatre’ —Shakespeare’s first playground— being unearthed and resurrected in Shoreditch, and cinemas, boardrooms, amphitheatres and rooftops being reinvented as places of performance, I’m kick-starting a campaign to discover the best of brand spanking new venues in the Off-West-End. And I’m inviting you to help me. We’re looking for the next wunderkind to join the theatre playground: a venue that’s malleable and accessible and phantasmagorical enough to embody everything that’s best about the Off-West-End. Those of you acquainted with this blog may be concerned that my frenetic nature and infatuation with insurmountable challenge may take me too far, and that perhaps I’ll end up championing a theatre on a floating island in the middle of the Thames. And you’d be right. That’s just the kind of thinking we need. In fact we could kick off with a production of The Admirable Crichton.

See, we’re working well together already. On you go.

–>

‘Tell you what mate, I got a brilliant idea for a sitcom, you should get it made…’

Most of us are familiar with the long, uncomfortable taxi ride, but there’s many more varieties than the casually racist, conspicuously homophobic and drop-me-off-here-I’ll-walk-the-rest banter. Actors tend to have gravitational pull on those colourful, spittle-jowled personalities who faithfully entrust their life stories. Or, in the case of the cabbie above, to realise their innovative idea for a sitcom about a taxi service. And no amount of pointing out that it’s been done twice before will placate them. No, they will not rest until you have pulled out a Moleskine notebook, adjusted your spectacles, and laid out a tape recorder like a sacrificial offering to the Nordic gods of elaboration.’

And yet, without the people willing to snitch on themselves, to animate the skeletons of their closets and choreograph them into award-winning off-west end musicals, we would be nowhere. Actors would never develop character. Writers would just write about writing, which is almost as dull as a painting of paint or a song about singing (although I do recall that one ‘in the rain’ did quite well).’

One of the chief benefits of extending the whole hilarious struggling actor routine is that you can, after several years of inextinguishable enthusiasm, devolve into cliché. This is a tender rite of passage. Essentially it means that by the time you’ve racked up twenty plays and a couple of tellies, you can officially begin drinking in the weekdays before midday. I call it The Esteemed Order Of Withnail (the ‘order’ generally being three pints of Guiness and a lager-top for the fellow with an afternoon casting). ‘

And it was post-audition of a honeyed afternoon that a few fellow unemployees and myself sank a game of pool, meeting an intriguing autosnitch who took my attention for a rumba with the following facts:’

Spitalfields Market used to employ children as rat-hunters. From the age of nine he was picked up at 4am, air-rifle in hand, enjoying free toast and a hallowed quid per rat.’

Bats can be completely disorientated by throwing sand at them. Once the little creatures crash-landed, he and his friends painted upon them swastikas and spitfire logos. Soon recovered, they took to the air, and hey presto: a miniature Battle of Britain.’

c)He has always regarded cheese as a fruit.’

I’m dubious about this last fact, if only because I’ve never seen a Mozzarella Smoothie. And yet…what brilliantly, colossally tall tales.’

So here’s to the gabblers, the yarners, the factual darners; the folk that bore, disgust and inspire our ears off. Long may they waffle.’ –>

What’s that? What’s really getting my goat this week? What’s not only ‘getting’ my goat, but getting it, skinning it, and offering it up in an over-priced bap? Well, I’ll tell you, thanks for asking:

People who say they’ll try anything once. ‘I’ll try anything once!’ they arf, normally on some ankle-brow reality TV show with a gormless thumbs-up prescriptive of meat-headedness. Really. Really will you? Would you, erm, I don’t know, try bungee-jumping off a motorway bridge into a procession of open-top trucks transporting porcupines? How about trying to play a vigorous concerto in petroleum refinery with a fiddle made of flint and tinder? Hm. Whilst you’re at it, try eating your own fist. Just once, mind.

Call me a party-pooper, but, no, there are some things that you shouldn’t try trying, not even once.

But then there is acting, and a metropolis of grey areas. We all say we’ll never do the dog-food commercials. Until the agent whispers the unholy sum of five figures, and bam, there you are in a poodle-suit. I was stupid/stubborn (stubbid?) enough to stick to my guns on two occasions: turning down Family Affairs (‘Ken Branagh,’ I loftily opined ‘never had to appear in that sort of dross, and neither shall I’ — twit) and, secondly, letting my agents turn down the RSC — because they didn’t want me ‘out of the picture’. I spent that year very much in the picture, if the picture in question was of me sitting by a silent phone, forlornly cradling my copy of Coriolanus.

Then there is understudying.

Understudying was the original induction for young actors plying their trade. With the rocketing success of the British film industry, however, our bright young things began getting snapped up for fantasy trilogies long before they’d learnt the term ‘play as cast’ — and a sense of shame began to accompany any lengthy spell as an understudy. The recent Hamlet cast-rejig showed that even the starriest of leading men can make way for his underexposed counterpart, should the appropriate discs slip. But no actor would argue that months of isolation in the dressing-room was good for the esteem. The understudy ends up less than understudied. They become invisible. And yet…

Given the opportunity, I’d try it. Once. Arf.

Understudying is practically unheard of in the fringe, and as such, please take this as legal notification of my patenting www.dial-an-understudy.com, for your every laryngitis/diarrhoea/stage-fright-induced emergency — a crack team of versatile actors that not only can hit the giddy highs and stumpy lows of a multitude of characters, but who can also learn an entire part in one morning. Or your money back.

Of course, the reason that smaller theatres don’t have understudies is because they don’t have the money in the first place. Which defies the point of setting up a business to make money from them. Hm. Perhaps we can operate under a charitable status scheme.

Ah. There’s nothing like an actor for a wacky, hair-brained scheme.

–>

As former Woolworths employees stump for unpaid work-experience and even the adorable profession of Lollipop-Person is contended between pinch-thin retirees and debt-mired students, it seems morally defunct to bemoan the actor’s monthly struggles with rejection. But, if there’s anything I do well, it’s indulgence.

Some actors get several auditions a week. This affords practice to make perfect, or, if not perfect, then at least to remember the casting director’s name and/or star sign. Most are lucky to get one audition a fortnight. Bearing in mind that acting jobs generally last between a day and two months, this leads to severe hikes in anxiety-to-audition ratio. Which goes a long way to explaining why actors behave as they do (flesh-ravenous Cro-Magnons). We are society’s mayflies, frantically beating around any and everybody’s bush before the pointless and desperate mechanism of our biological clocks creak to a standstill. Harsh, but fair.

Clearly, I reek of disenfranchisement. In fact, I’m toasting to my CV coming to an abrupt halt with pink cava on a train back to London, careening from a super-salad health-regime and 5k morning-runs to discount bubbly and a packet of novelty Walkers. The line between professional virility and Withnail & I territory is wafer-thin. Or should I say Onion Bhaji crisp-thin

So here’s a toast to the actors out there (88% last time I checked) who aren’t working. And a thought for those still desperately bashing your heads against call-centre handsets or fishmonger iceboxes:

There has to be more to resting than staring at the mobile and willing your agency’s name to appear whilst a jaunty ring-tone jostles your bed-sit. Unemployment must be tackled as vigorously as the work itself, even if that’s just ping-ponging idiotic ideas amongst your friends, enemies, or even your cats (actually, cats often provide the silent mockery essential to re-ignition).

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost met working in a Mexican restaurant. Stephen Spielberg fooled security at a Hollywood studio just so he could come in every day and feel like a director. Even Daniel Day-Lewis took up Italian cobbling when he lost his creative oomph. Whatever you do, don’t give in to atrophy. It’s not just a difficult word to spell. It’s a difficult world to escape.

Do something stupid with your unemployment. Propose an opera for crows. Write a melodrama for cartoon superheroes. Choreograph an impromptu tango in your local supermarket. Do anything, the first thing that comes into your mind, rather than mollycoddling your email and wondering if perhaps your agent has confused you with Christian Bale and thinks that you’re doing incredibly well.

And then tell me all about it, so that I and any other Boo-Hoo-ters can feel better about ourselves. 

Acting, above all else, is waking up to think ‘today’s the day.’

It’s that or quaffing imitation champers from a paper cup till you can’t tell the booze from the tears. You have been warned.

–>

It could be snow-fever. It might be the full moon. It’s probably just a case of the grumps. But seeing as it’s Darwin 200th birthday, I’m responding to an enigmatic link I’ve been sent concerning acting and…religion. Here goes.

First of all the author strikes a curious analogy between the playwright as God The Creator, and the actor being God As Man. So far, so weird.

“For the Christian, acting is a vocation.”

For all those Atheist, Muslim and Jedi actors out there, it must just be whimsy.

“Performance is an act of obedience.”

After ten years in theatre I can safely say that there is nothing less interesting than an obedient performance.

“Their art is a matter of submission and denial of the self rather than self-aggrandizement.”

Submission and denial of the self? Oh, that’s right, that’s why A Doll’s House set 19th century Norway alight with scandal. And why we love to hate that humble, unambitious Richard III. I can’t think what the actor’s process is about if not about celebration, and, yes, exploitation of the self. As the blushing legend Eleanora Duse said: ‘All I have to offer is the revelation of my soul’.

“The Christian actor is more likely to seek out plays with moral and philosophical impact.”

Moral I can believe. But philosophical?  Take it from an ancient Greek, Philosophy has been roasting on pyres ever since Religion clubbed Ethics and dragged it back to its cave.

“Christian actors avoid plays fostering anti-Christian purposes…plays intended to foster hatred (including anti-semitism)…”

I like the way he puts including anti-semitism, as if this can occasionally be written off as a half-hearted attempt at hatred. Obviously he’s talking about cartoon villains —Barabas, Shylock— but I doubt anyone’s ever joined the BNP after a galvanizing matinee in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

“…Or plays that advocate reprehensible behaviour…easily summarized by the traditional seven deadlies: pride, covetousness, wrath, lechery, gluttony, envy and sloth.”

Oh, my. What is the deal with ‘seven deadlies’? They sound like a litter of adorable, kitten-eating puppies. Moreover, these seven deadlies are all so gut-wrenchingly, beautifully human. I don’t think I want to see a piece of theatre where they don’t come into play: Willy Loman wants to make money, Juliet lusts after Romeo: brilliant! We can identify with that.

Concluding:

“Just as Jesus seems aware simultaneously of his divine and human identities, so these actors are conscious of being themselves and at the same time of ‘being’ their characters.”

Invert that for a moment and suppose that perhaps the borderline confusion that actors experience is something innate in Man, a frolic between the shadows of fantasy and reality, play that could easily be mistaken for say, ooh, I don’t know: believing you posses a direct hotline to a divine creator. Poor old Joan of Arc. 

Theatre is what it is. And nobody can take credit for its majesty except theatre itself.

Ah. Even if you don’t want to be a heretic, at least indulge in a little heretickling.

–>

Sheer, rollicking bliss! The evening performance has been exorcized. With each scintillating pigment of emotion ejected, we shed our costumes like scabietic snakes and scrape translucent powder from our cheeks.

And then that seductive voice crackles onto the tannoy:

‘Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Once changed could you please make your way down to the auditorium for the audience Q&A.‘

Deviously, she adds:

‘Your free drink awaits you on stage.’

The way to an actor’s heart? Through their liver.

So we muster downstairs and sheepishly amble across the stage, laying claim to our complimentary manna. Examining the audience for tear-stains and laughter-crinks, we prepare to be barraged with the old corkers. Such as:

‘How do you remember your lines?’

‘Oh, (insert name of cast scapegoat) doesn’t bother. We try to work around him.’

(everybody laughs)

‘In the thirties everybody had turn-ups. I noticed none of you did. Why?’

‘We’re pretending! It’s a theatre, not a time machine.’

(everybody laughs)

‘How did you perfect the American accent?’

‘Watching Little House On The Prairie. Except for (insert cast scapegoat). He got in a muddle and watched Home & Away.’

(everybody laughs)

And then, controversy:

‘I enjoyed the play to a point, but I can’t help but feel —with eight male characters and two female— could we please, perhaps, move into the 21^st century?’

I don’t think actors are used to criticism. Especially criticism they can’t do much about. ‘Quick! Somebody dig up Arthur Miller! He needs to re-title it Death Of A Saleswoman!’

Now I’ve written several all-female pieces, despite bawdier friends suggesting that this has more to do with constructing a Playboy Mansion Of Theatre than championing feminism (and to that may I retort that bunnies they were not). Still, the question seemed unfair. A quietly articulate cast-member hit back with:

‘I cannot surmise the amount of times where somebody at these Q&As has complained that we’re putting on another Shakespeare or not producing a play about this or that social travesty. It frustrates me for the simple reason that we are all here to talk about the production you saw tonight. Any other questions—about the theatre programming or contemporary artistic inclination— are entirely nugatory.’

Whilst the auditorium erupted into applause and brays of ‘here-here!’ I made a mental note to look up the word ‘nugatory’. Turns out it’s an admirably sneaky way of saying somebody’s point is worthless. And whether it was right or wrong for the question to be aired in the first place, the auditorium by now was crackling with drama.     

This, of course, is the closest that genteel theatre will get to Augusto Boal’s innovative Forum Theatre. But later that evening the whole bar was still ear-deep in debate about the nature of luck and fate, of work and dedication, comparing fortune with chaos theory and the interminably slow logic of evolution.

And if that all arises from one contentious question —nugatory or not— then I say keep ‘em coming.

Along with the free drinks.

–>

The public-at-large are not unfamiliar with the carnal misfortune of my unapparelled manhood.

Regular readers will have gagged over their google bars as I described inadvertently flashing a group of amiable Japanese businessmen. And yes, should you have happened to partake in a Massamun Curry on a Hackney side-street in June 2007, that was me bounding along the pavement wearing nothing but a pair of frilly pink knickers and a motley motif of tattoos. Seven takes, that took.

Nope, I’m no prude. However. Here, for your perusal, a parable:

“Once upon a time there were two rising stars, intrepid and talented actors cast in a short film about abortion. Dutifully they attended the eye-wateringly early rehearsals, out beyond the borders of Zone 6; though the director, in his budding professionalism, had neglected to inform their agents of these extra dates, nor were they reimbursed.

The director being Danish —as any aficionado of Lars Von Trier may expect— had a somewhat eccentric approach to rehearsals. Here the telltale whiff of perversion begins to moulder. After a ‘chemistry-homework’ fake-date, they discovered that a film about abortion had suddenly become a film about —in the immortal words of Marvin Gaye— gettin’ it on.

Those pesky, bourgeois details —script, defined characters, discernable plot— had yet to be accounted for. At this point our fledgling Kubrick announced an improvised sex scene (which I think we’d all agree is an unreasonable request even in real life). Telling the girl that her objective was to seduce the boy, he assured her that the boy would be resisting. Dramatic tension, see. But then —ha ha!— he told the boy that his objective was to seduce the girl, and…well, you get the idea. Bravo, sir. Manipulation worthy of Elia Kazan!

At this point he produced his little, ahem, camera.

Thank goodness for safe-words. The actors were savvy enough to spare their promising careers from grainy youtube scandals. The director, in his infinite sensitivity, responded to the walk-out by suggesting the girl’s sexual experience was the problem. Tragically, the real problem was eventually revealed to be the director’s own fornicative inadequacy. Bless.

The actors’ agents, descending like fairy godmothers, plucked their clients from the clammy palms of this peeping con. And they all lived happily ever after.

Except for the director, who received a righteous rollicking from two influential agents who won’t be dealing with him ever again.”

So this is my little paean to the unsung chivalry of theatre, where scenes of a sexual nature, for the most part, are sensitively staged. The collective nature of theatre acts as a safeguard against sweaty voyeurism — not to mention the fact that every stage manager I’ve ever worked with would clout a director for that sort of sleaze.

No, theatre’s much cleverer than that. Last year an actor who received lascivious, extra-marital texts from a well-known director used them to blackmail him into casting her in a big West End production.

Now that’s integrity. Oh, theatre, you canny minx.

–>