After the rain, the wind. When I got up and looked out of the bathroom window, the birches in our neighbours' field and the bamboo in our back garden were bent over and thrashing wildly, a symphony of agitated yellow leaves and stems. Trying to garden in that much wind tends to be a mistake. It is thoroughly uncomfortable, and things get spilt, spoiled and smashed as you get flustered and make mistakes, or your bucket of prunings blows into the nearest border.
Instead I thought I would tell you about the forthcoming season at Colchester's Mercury Theatre, since I picked up the new brochure yesterday when I was in town. Details are now up on their website, whereas they weren't the last time I checked, so it may yet be that a brochure is in the post and on its way to me, but since they dropped us off their mailing list a year ago for some reason I thought I'd grab one while I was there.
The Mercury has a new Artistic Director, and is trying a new marketing approach. They are publicising their own company productions for a year ahead, instead of six months, and offering large savings if you sign up to eleven shows, or fairly large savings if you book six. The savings are so large partly because if you only want to go to a couple of things then ticket prices have gone up. Eleven Mercury performances in twelve months sounds like a lot. I'm not sure the Systems Administrator is that keen on theatre. I'm not sure I am. Six might be doable, and of course I could hunt around among my friends and acquaintances for volunteers to accompany me to one or two of them. Except that all tickets have to be booked at the same time. Getting a firm commitment to a particular date nearly a year ahead and writing it on the hall calendar is just about manageable when you are negotiating with your partner. Trying to bring friends into the equation as well begins to feel like hard work, all those e-mails flying about, and everyone being held up by the one person who always takes ages to reply to anything, or isn't sure when they are going on holiday, or when their daughter is getting married.
The first offering is about mid-life crisis. I should say that mid-life crisis was a stage the average audience member at the Mercury had passed a while back, but they can always look back in fond reminiscence, if not anger. Four middle-aged, middle-class misfits try to spark a punk revival in a funny, touching and distinctly loud new play. Contains strong language and very loud music! says the brochure. I don't have a problem with strong language, but I don't do loud. It hurts my ears. And this production is in the studio theatre, which I have never been to, but a friend who has warned me that the seats were very uncomfortable. The SA doesn't do uncomfortable seats, so that seems to rule out Garage Band on two counts.
Next up we have Ayckbourn, not just one but four plays taken from a linked cycle of eight. We like Ayckbourn. Social comedy with an extremely sharp edge. The Colchester audience likes Ayckbourn too, hence you can only count one Ayckbourn play towards your total of six performances if you are going for a Silver season ticket, though if you buy one you can then top up on Ayckbourns at a concessionary rate. We might manage an Ayckbourn or two. I'm not sure I want four in as many months.
Then comes a musical, The Hired Man by Melvyn Bragg and Howard Goodall, about struggling life on a Cumbrian hill farm. This is a revival of a touring production from 2008 which reviewed well at the time, and is in the proper theatre with the comfy seats. I could probably cope with The Hired Man. That is followed by The History Boys, which I would happily go to see per se, being an admirer of Alan Bennett. Unfortunately it isn't very long since we watched the film version, which rather diminishes my desire to see it again. Why couldn't the Mercury have chosen an Alan Bennett that hasn't been made into a hit film with Richard Griffiths in it? The History Boys is followed by a stage version of Quadrophenia. I saw the film when I was a student (at a meeting of the Keble College film society, I think), but the SA, amazingly, hasn't. If you have never seen Quadrophenia then surely the film is the place to start, rather than a stage version by a company of the region's most talented young performers. Though the play will be directed by Tony Casement, who did a very good version of Journey's End.
My hopes of finding six plays that I wanted to see were diminishing by this stage, since I was up to one definite, one possible, and three thank-you-but-I'd-rather-nots. The next offering in the brochure didn't help, since it is The Butterfly Lion based on a book by Michael Morpurgo. It concerns a boy who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a white lion cub he rescues one day from the African Veldt, then the action somehow moves on to the bleeding heart of war-torn France. Suitable for adults and families with children aged 7+ years. I don't think we'll be going to see The Butterfly Lion.
I would like to go to The Good Person of Sichuan, as I like Bertold Brecht, or at least I like the Threepenny Opera and the Seven Deadly Sins (avoid opera singers with trained voices for that, go for the Marianne Faithfull recording). The SA does not like Brecht, so I'll be looking for a companion for the evening. Then we could see Man to Man by Manfred Karge, translated by Anthony Vivis, which is billed as an uncompromising contemporary counterpoint to Brecht's masterpiece. It is a one-woman play about a young widow who assumes her husband's identity to survive under the Nazis, which catapulted Tidla Swinton to public attention at the Royal Court in the late 1980s. I don't think we're going to get Tilda Swinton in the Mercury version. Man to Man is in the studio theatre on the hard seats.
Last in the brochure before the pantomime is The Opinion Makers, a brand new musical comedy about incompetent 1960s market researchers. Think Mad Men meets Carry On, says the brochure. The SA did, and didn't like the idea. I wasn't hugely enthused. The pantomime is Sleeping Beauty, and is not included in the season ticket offers.
We won't be buying Gold season tickets, or Silver. There isn't enough there that appeals. The Gold ticket would be worth buying at £132 if you were sure you wanted to go to all four Ayckbourns plus a no more than a couple of other plays, since that gives you the best seats available, including on Saturdays, early booking so you should get good seats, and programmes. You could afford to give more than half the performances a miss and still end up marginally ahead financially. The Mercury gets a known amount of money early in the season, which is handy for them, though it could be demoralising for the performers at the less popular shows if the season ticket holders simply don't show up. The Silver ticket gives you six productions for less than the price of four, but only one Ayckbourn, and there aren't five other productions that I want to watch, let alone five that I could drag the SA to.
The best seats on Monday and Tuesday evenings are now £19, compared to (as far as I can remember) around £13.50 when we started going to the Mercury in 2008, or £22 on Wednesdays and Thursdays, up from £17.50 for Arsenic and Old Lace on a Wednesday last month. Given the squeeze on public funding to the arts it's only to be expected that ticket prices have gone up, and we can still enjoy an evening at our local theatre for less than the price of the train fare just to get to London's West End or the National Theatre. It's a pity that in the coming year there isn't more that we want to watch.
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