● Go to any musical in the West End and I reckon at least two-thirds of the audience are women. It’s interesting, then, that a survey conducted by The Stage, theatreland’s weekly “bible”, shows that, in the past decade, 90% of musicals had a book (namely, the words or lyrics) written entirely by men. Only four of the 118 musicals had a female composer solely responsible for the score —these include Kinky Boots and Shrek the Musical — and only one, Bad Girls: The Musical, was composed by a British woman, Kath Gotts.
Even The Girls, based on the film Calendar Girls and very much women’s subject matter, was written and composed by two chaps, whereas at least the original movie was co-written by a woman.
● Compare and contrast The Stage’s dismal stats with the rise and rise of female British playwrights such as Lucy Prebble, Lucy Kirkwood, Nina Raine, Polly Stenham and Helen Edmundson, whose Queen Anne has just opened at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. (See review in this section.) I simply wonder whether women find it easier writing on their own, hence the higher number of female playwrights, whereas the team nature of a musical is more blokey and competitive.
● I went the other evening to Jez Butterworth’s magnificent and magical play The Ferryman (see interview in this section), which has been running in the West End for three weeks after its sellout stint at the Royal Court, and has extended into the new year. At the end of the three hours and 20 minutes, the entire 1,000-strong audience in the auditorium rose to their feet to applaud.
This happens regularly at big first nights, where I often suspect the audience is clapping itself for being there, and in musicals, where patrons are often well revved (and tanked) up. Yet the acclaim for The Ferryman was universally instantaneous and not led, as per usual, by a few folk, with others feeling obliged to follow.
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● Finishing today is the fortnight-long Shubbak, a biennial multidisciplinary festival of Arab culture held in London at locations including the British Museum, the Barbican and the Arcola theatre, as well as more edgy venues. One such was a disused bunker in Dalston, which featured an art installation of video testimonies from locals, including one old Jewish boy who recalled the fight against the Fascists in the 1930s. This has been the fourth Shubbak, and this one had more coherence thanks to its overall artistic director, Eckhard Thiemann.
Standout events included a performance at Sadler’s Wells by an exiled Syrian choreographer and dancer, Mithkal Alzghair, and a one-man play, And Here I Am, based on the true story of the actor Ahmed Tobasi, a former jihadist who, during imprisonment, realised that the theatre was more powerful than guns. The play tours this week in Edinburgh, Oxford and Halesworth, in Suffolk, as did a couple of other events last week. It would be good for the next festival to get out of the capital more. Even so, Shubbak has opened the door that bit more to Arab culture, and countered some of the negativity towards that world.