Of Closing Nights & Opening Nights

The foyer of Theatr Clwyd Cymru was seething on Saturday. By some cunning programming a new Ayckbourn was receiving its British premiere. That siphoned off a proportion of the audience which still left a full house for "Arden of Faversham" which had a truly joyous cast of twelve. Click here to read how good.

As for this week's opening I'd recommend any creative person who is downcast to have a look at a little book called "No Turn Unstoned." Its price on the main book sites is sixty-six pence. Its subtitle is "the Worst Theatrical Reviews Ever" & it includes the calamity of the opening of "the Homecoming" in Cardiff forty-five years ago. As someone who has received a truly devastating review it is refreshing to be reminded how fallible can be the spot judgments of the time. (The review in my case concluded that humanity would best be served by my never subjecting an audience again to anything I had ever written. Happily, the newspaper in question does not maintain an open archive so that it has mercifully passed, fingers crossed, into cyber-oblivion.)

But this week a view of the show should not be mistaken for a view of the company. A company is what theorists call an emergent design. By that they mean it only becomes what it is to be by doing. Only with an audience does that start. Any view before the first eight or ten productions are over would be premature and irrelevant. Kids in Derbyn are not expected to sparkle in inductive reasoning- it's a question of patience. It's known technically as the primacy error and given that the originators were given a Nobel Prize for it in 2002 it makes sense.