Enough already. Photograph: PA
Last week I was ready to give up on theatre. I had just been to the press view of The Postman Always Rings Twice and been thoroughly underwhelmed by Val Kilmer's performance.
A couple of weeks previously I'd gone along to the National to see Henry IV Part I. Again I'd been pretty much unmoved. Not because the play was bad, or the acting poor or the set terrible. I'd just failed to be engaged by it. By the end, all I saw in the young prince Hal was the kind of kid you'd slap an ASBO on and be done with it; he's no Hamlet. There's none of that introspection, none of the wrestling with inner demons and big questions. He's just an irresolute rich kid playing around with his privileged position until he's forced to grow up a bit and become serious.
So there I was, ready to give up theatre. I tried thinking back to all the times I'd actually been moved by what I saw on stage. Not just entertained or diverted for a couple of hours (with a cheap glass of red wine at the interval), but genuinely moved.
Hmm. I remember a superb Hamlet in Birmingham where you genuinely feared for Ophelia's mental health when she started handing out the forget-me-nots. The set was bare and built simply from bars of light, a metaphor for Hamlet's encased mind - the old nutshell/king of infinite space thing.
Others? Well, I saw a LaBute play at the Almeida which was kinda shocking (there was a baby thrown over a wall, but you knew it was only one of those newfangled plastic things that cries), and another one, The Mercy Seat, which circled the September 11 attacks with a sort of hollow morality. Interested? Yes. But not moved.
I saw a terrible Macbeth, a dreadful Beckett with Dougray Scott, and some plays with Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench which were predictably slick. But still short on movement.
There was Festen which is now deservedly transferring to Broadway. But, it wasn't enough to restore my faith in theatre. What does it do? What is it for?
Take, for example, the Postman Always Rings Twice. On stage we had the dense lacklustre performance of Kilmer, in the audience there was Tracey Emin trying to start a standing ovation and Terry Wogan looking on. Is this what theatre has become? Celebrity Luvve Island? Ewan McGregor in Guys and Dolls, Ross Geller in Some Girl(s) - oops, sorry it's David Schwimmer isn't it, and Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic. Then there's the audience which is equally star-studded. It's as if success can only be measured by your sleb count and the length of your ovation depends on the number of stars studding the cast not the quality of the performance.
Watching Postman I felt a bit like one of those jurors in the Jackson trial, only with the dilemma in reverse. I knew that deep down the play was probably quite good or had the potential to be, but all I had to go on was the evidence presented to me.
So, to the point: Last night my faith was restored. I had front row seats (not in themselves a good thing as you sit pressed to the edge of the stage staring up the nostrils of the cast) for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It was superb. Head and shoulders above anything I've seen in the theatre for years. Brian Dennehy was Willy Loman; I couldn't believe he was acting. That weak self-deluding smile somewhere between a grin and a grimace was spot on and everything else was equally astounding; truly moving stuff.
That is what theatre is for, this is what it can do. The run has been extended to November now - if you can get a ticket, go. And there wasn't a celebrity in sight.
