Television
There's no business like show business
Published 19 June 2006
A Pop Idol for playwrights is short on ideas, long on naked ambition, writes Andrew Billen
The Play's the Thing
Channel 4
There is no show-business story - perhaps no story - as potent as that of the sensation discovered overnight: so long, that is, as the term "overnight" is used sufficiently elastically. Even in today's accelerated culture, where talent sometimes is irrelevant, there remains a gestation period. Some of the contestants on the current, stomach-churning Big Brother (Channel 4) have suffered as many as 48 months in the stand-by lounge of fame before making it through to the final selection. (A canned-food firm used to claim, "It's the fish that John West rejects that makes John West the best." Presumably Endemol works to the same, but inverted, principle.)
The wavering-voiced tenants of the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford have been given 12 weeks by the conductor Ivor Setterfield on Channel 5's The Singing Estate (Sundays, 8pm) to get themselves to a pitch fit for the Royal Albert Hall. Even the four lost souls who have volunteered for The Convent (Wednesdays, 9pm, BBC2) get 40 days "and 40 nights" to see if chastity and obedience are for them.
The latest of these upmarket talent competitions is The Play's the Thing, for which the theatre producer Sonia Friedman has been persuaded to open, in the West End, a new play by a previously unproduced playwright. The winning play, it is already clear, will be the product more of perspiration than inspiration. We joined the process in May 2005 as Sonia and her two co-judges whittled down some 3,500 submissions, first to 30 and then to ten possibilities. The plug for the next programme, the second of four, had Friedman complaining of a depressing Christmas with not one of the chosen ten, after months of work, looking producible. And if it was a long slog for Friedman, I fear it is going to be a long one for us viewers, too.
The judges frequently praised the sense of location in the manuscripts they read, but then complained of their weak narrative drive and "lack of event". These are exactly my complaints about the programme. You get a strong feeling for the precious, histrionic world of theatre but are left with almost no interest in discovering the outcome. The Play's the Thing looked more am dram than West End, consisting of judging sessions in dim rooms, contestants outlining plots on blackboards, and cheaply made video diaries. (Compare it to the lovingly filmed Apprentice, or even the exploitative but highly focused X Factor.)
That said, a clear impression has emerged of just how annoying showfolk are. Friedman is torn between wanting to fall in love with a script and not wanting to go belly-up in Shaftesbury Avenue by overrating the IQ of West End audiences, and it is difficult to decide which is more irritating: her sentimentality or her cynicism. Then there is her co-judge Mel Kenyon, a literary agent who represented Sarah Kane and the still living Mark Ravenhill. She says creepy things such as "I don't know what this gorgeous thing is" and sanctimonious things such as "I don't believe in giving people third-rate shit." Having established herself as the Simon Cowell of the panel - "I don't want to end up in an adult fucking fairy tale," she screams at one point, thus doing herself out of the role of wicked witch - she later turns into Sharon Osbourne and tears up at having discovered "a real playwright". This, apparently, is the variety of nuts that plays in showland.
The contestants are all distinguished, so far as we can tell, by a meagreness of ideas and the grandiosity of their ambitions. Kate Betts, who left school with two O-levels and is now a university professor, wants to transform a theatre into a planetarium, under which her players can exchange the following cliché-studded dialogue: She: "You are on the run from the law, you murdered your parents in cold blood, and now you are going to stab me to death." He: "No, I'm Jesus." Friedman wants to "get lost" in her world: Friedman's fellow judge, the actor Neil Pearson - the programme's voice of sanity - says he wants Betts's world "to get lost". The front-runner is a Manchester supermarket stacker, Steve Gardner, whose play, Father's Day, is about an absentee dad. I trust that Fathers 4 Justice is preparing a "surprise" for opening night.
The show's associated website has somehow managed to attract hundreds of submissions to its discussion forum. Only after reading a few of the postings did I realise that they came from the 2,000 or so playwrights manqué who had not made it to the TV leg of the contest. (Eighty-one of their plays, we were told, had Jesus in their title, 198 made terrorism a theme, and 335 were based in gyms or fat clubs.) It was Pearson who noted that, judging by the scripts, few showed any sign of actually going to the theatre. If it is not careful, contemporary theatre, like modern poetry, will become an art with more practitioners than audiences. To be fair to the show, this is a fate The Play's the Thing is attempting to thwart. Sadly, it is also generating some very good reasons for honest citizens to give the West End a wide berth.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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