British Equity Supports SAG/AFTRA Strike
British Equity will stand firm with SAG and AFTRA in the unions' action against the producers of television and radio commercials. North American members of British Equity have already been told not to accept work in American commercials and, at press time, the entire membership was due to be circularized.
The gesture of solidarity was expected, since the American unions supported British Equity in its similar dispute with the advertising industry in 1997. According to Equity General Secretary Ian McGarry, "not one American actor" worked in a British commercial while that dispute raged. It eventually petered out, after more than a year, with neither side conceding defeat. A source interviewed by the British trade paper The Stage guessed that the American conflict would be settled more quickly. Actors' unions in Canada and Australia are set to join forces with British colleagues.
Brit Pix Hit Pits
There's nothing the British love more than an underdog. But worship of failure seems to have got out of control where the British film industry is concerned. Recent box-office successes can be counted on the fingers of one hand, while National Lottery money continues to be pumped into movies that-almost literally-nobody wants to see. The figures are scandalous. Almost every week, a new British film opens at one or two screens in London, is savaged by the press, grosses £1,000 or thereabouts, and then disappears.
Scores of films have been shelved for years, unable to find any distribution whatever. All in all, the National Lottery has invested nearly £98 million in the British film industry and recouped just over £6 million. Film critic Alexander Walker, most vociferous critic of Lottery wastage, puts the disaster into perspective thus: "If a public company had made such a bad investment, the shareholders would have kicked out its directors."
The new British Film Council, launched May 2, is a damage-limitation exercise designed to make everyone forget about past mistakes and concentrate on future triumphs. The Council's manifesto is full of rash promises about deals with Hollywood and Europe to produce British blockbusters. "We are interested in films that really can play in cinemas on a Friday night," declares Chief Executive John Woodward.
Unfortunately this presupposes that, alone in the universe, British Film Council members will be able to pick up a script and predict box-office gold. It also implies that British filmmakers suddenly will be blessed with the gift of producing hits. Recent history, flop after flop after flop, suggests the opposite-that Brits have lost the knack of making commercial films, other than by accident, and that we should return to what we do know something about: creating the world's finest television drama.
Nunn the Wiser
Almost halfway through his five-year stint as director of the Royal National Theatre, Trevor Nunn has been sniped at by the sniffier critics for being too populist. Somewhat pathetically, he has been forced into print to defend his eclectic program of classics ancient and modern, musicals, kids' shows, and new work, much of which has been laden with awards.
There was no need. Surely the role of a national theatre is to present not just the time-honored classics that audiences feel they ought to see, but the landmarks of theatre that audiences actually want. If Private Lives, Oklahoma!, and Look Back in Anger-all presented at the National-are not landmarks, then what is? And, plainly, audiences do want to see this kind of work, done to high standards not always attained elsewhere.
The National may spend a lot of money (currently £12 million of Government subsidy), but it packs in the crowds. Or would the critics prefer the National to follow British cinema's lead and produce material of interest to two men and a dog? Probably.
This Year's Derwent Winners
At British Equity's Annual Representative Conference in London, April 16, Roger Allam and Kika Markham won the 1999 Clarence Derwent Awards for best supporting performances on the British stage. Allam, who played Walt Disney in RKO 281, the film about the making of Citizen Kane, won his Derwent for playing a "definitive" (according to the Mail on Sunday) Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, which opened at the National in March 1999. This was one of the most unanimously acclaimed performances of the year. For the Independent on Sunday, "Allam's Ulysses is the engine that powers Nunn's production."
Kika Markham is a former child actress, who has been working almost consistently since the early 1950s. She was honored by Equity for her performance as Hilde Latymer, long-suffering wife of a bisexual writer (played by her real-life husband, Corin Redgrave) in No"l Coward's last play, Song at Twilight, seen first on the Fringe, then last October at the Gielgud. For most of the press, Markham's achievement was to steal the finale of the play from the other Redgrave in the cast-the great Vanessa.
Over Here
Three New York actors-Harry Carnahan, Perry Laylon Ojeda, and the marvellous Pauline Flanagan in a potentially award-winning performance-head the cast of Frank McGuinness' Dolly West's Kitchen, which premiered at the Abbey theatre in Dublin last year and opened May 17 at the Old Vic. A Broadway transfer is in little doubt.
Shopping in New York, producer Peter Dawson found the script of Chazz Palminteri's play Faithful, first seen in Los Angeles in 1991, and gave it a rehearsed reading at north London's Old Red Lion theatre, May 16. The black comedy is a real discovery, which a small theatre like the Bush or the Lyric, Hammersmith, should snap up. No need to re-cast the part of Tony, the Mafia hit man hired to bump off a faithless wife. New York actor John Guerrasio gave it a funny, scary edge.
Pageant, the hilarious beauty-contest satire, which I loved at New York's Blue Angel in 1991, finally opened in London, May 15 (at the King's Head in north London).... Donald Sutherland and John Rubinstein star in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's Enigmatic Variations, translated by Sutherland's son, Roeg, which opens at the Savoy, May 31. Sutherland p're hasn't appeared on the London stage for 36 years.... New York's Wooster Group presents the UK premiere of House/Light, at Glasgow's Tramway theatre, June 7.... A revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons opens at the National, July 6. Miller's latest play, Mr Peters' Connections, opens at the Almeida, north London, July 26, with John Cullum (Holling Vincouer on TV's Northern Exposure) making his London stage debut....The Broadway musical The Secret Garden will be re-vamped for its UK premiere at the end of this year by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Finally...
While Dame Judi Dench was playing Queen Elizabeth I in the movie Shakespeare in Love, she, too, fell in love-with the replica of the Rose theatre, designed by Martin Childs. "It was like a living theatre, not a set," said Dame Judi. At the end of shooting, she paid for the entire construction to be dismantled and put in storage, and then began making plans for it to be re-built and used as a working theatre. They have now come to fruition. The Rose will open in 2002 in Islington, north London, on the site of Collins' music hall, which burned down in 1958.q