Curtain up: Support your local thespians

DEAR diary. This week I went to the theatre to see the actor Ralph Fiennes in a very short play. My luvvy friends say you have to call him “Rafe” because he’s quite posh, even though he was born in Ipswich.

The play, called Beat The Devil, was at the Bridge Theatre, which like all theatres that have plays with no songs or dances in them, is also quite posh.

It was written by David Hare and was about him catching Covid before the lockdown and what happened next.

They said it would last 50 minutes but it was over in 45, which either means Rafe forgot a bit or was talking too fast. Anyway, it was good fun, although David Hare was quite rude about Boris Johnson.

“A spirited expression of…righteous anger,” the Guardian said. I knew David slightly at what young people now call “Uni”. He was also quite posh and actually quite righteous but not yet very angry. But that was long before he caught the bug.

The seats cost £30 pounds each, which is about 66p a minute. But can you put a price on art? You can’t really value a play or a concert as you would, say, a burger and chips, which is probably why that nice Mr Sunak opted to halve the price of the latter.

That’s all over now of course and many restaurants and cafes are once again empty from Monday to Wednesday. Although maybe that’s just because the bargain-hunting gourmands have finally gone back to work.

Another posh actor, Vanessa Redgrave, who’s also often righteous and sometimes angry, says private businesses should help restore theatre and the arts to what they were before the pandemic.

“We have to save everybody!” la Redgrave implored. “We have to save the arts for everybody.”

Let’s hope that they at least save The Bridge, not least because it’s local, near the south side of Tower Bridge.

It only opened in 2017 and would seat 900 in pre-social distancing days. For the time being they’ve cleared out most of the seats and only 250 can attend a performance, which meant that at this week’s matinée the sea of white hair that usually occupies the stalls was sparser than usual.

Compulsory masks also meant the usual pre-curtain braying was reduced to a muffled hum and there was no crackle of Ferrero Rocher wrappers or sucking of Werthers Originals once the play began.

I’m not trying to say the London theatre always attracts the same sort, or demographic as they now call it, but let’s just say it’s less mixed than in the old playgoing days for which south London was famous.

The Globe and The Rose were just up the road in Shakespeare’s day and they let in all sorts, from the hoi polloi in the open-air pit to the toffs in the gallery.

During the 1606 season the Globe and all other London theatres were closed because of the plague. The crisis spelled the end of Shakespeare’s companies of boy actors and started a trend towards winter seasons held indoors, once theatres re-opened. That gave scope for more intimate Shakespearean scenes and more discriminating, and perhaps less rowdy audiences.

Vanessa’s probably right when she says the arts should be for everybody. Add that to your post-pandemic resolutions.

One of the treats at school was when they regularly took us little south London oiks to the Old Vic, also local. We’d sit up in the gods and giggle through Hamlet or Macbeth or something similar.

And it cost just half-a crown. For younger readers, that was one-eighth of a pound, the equivalent in those days to the price of a pint of beer or a packet of 20 cigarettes.

These days, one expensive minute at The Bridge costs the same as a single cigarette. Don’t smoke then, I hear you cry. But how, in that case, would you manage without the more than £10 billion a year in tobacco taxes?

If you’ve been wondering who has kept the economy going during the lockdown, it wasn’t Rishi Sunak – it was me!