The President's Holiday at Hampstead Theatre has had bad reviews. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
With a few exceptions, theatre critics are a kind-hearted bunch who bend over backwards to give encouragement to theatres that put on new writing, particularly at a time when Arts Council funding is at risk. So the latest critical drubbing for the Hampstead Theatre should set a few alarm bells ringing.
Penny Gold's play about Mikhail Gorbachev, The President's Holiday, was described as "turgid" by the Guardian's own Lyn Gardner, who noted a complete absence of tension, unbearably stilted dialogue, contrived parallels and thin characterisations. "Gorbachev resembles a headmaster at a minor English public school attempting to quell a tuck shop rebellion," she wrote. For Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph, the writing showed "plodding ineptitude", while Fiona Mountford in the Evening Standard described it as "soapy old twaddle".
I went to see the play before the critics got their teeth into it and I have to say I agree with them. As the author of a biography of Boris Yeltsin I was curious to see how the August 1991 Moscow coup, during which Gorbachev and his family were held incommunicado at their Black Sea state dacha, would work on stage. Unfortunately, this play is a five-star turkey and I hope for Gorbachev's sake that nobody drags him to Hampstead to see it. Its grasp of Russian politics is shaky and its nostalgia for Soviet-style "socialism" leaves me with a nasty taste in the mouth. But the real problem is a total absence of drama. Frankly, I would rather go back to reading Gorbachev's interminable speeches.
What is it about the Hampstead Theatre? It's a wonderful new building with a great tradition (it staged the first production of Abigail's Party) and a loyal audience, but under its artistic director Anthony Clark it seems to have a complete tin ear for new writing. It is advertising for a new literary director, and I have to say it's not before time. I've seen five new plays there in the past 18 months, and four of them have been complete duds, which I suspect would have been instantly rejected by the National or the Royal Court. The only exception was a bold but flawed Oxford Stage Company production directed by Rupert Goold, which reworked Marlowe's Faustus. From 2006 I remember a limp adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated and another inept play on a Holocaust theme, The Glass Room. More recently I saw The Giant, Sir Antony Sher's over-researched and undercooked play about Michelangelo, originally commissioned by the RSC, which wisely chose not to put it on. Perhaps I've been missing some triumphs, but I can't think of any Hampstead play in the past couple of years that has earned a West End transfer like the Bush Theatre's excellent comedy Whipping It Up.
Lyn Gardner's question about The President's Holiday seems spot on: "Did anyone at Hampstead even bother to read this play before staging it?" The Evening Standard questions whether the theatre, if its choice of plays is so poor, should continue to merit such generous Arts Council funding - £665,000 in the current year. This puts it in the same bracket as the Tricycle, the Soho, the Lyric Hammersmith and the Theatre Royal Stratford East, all of which get between half a million and a million a year. I hate to suggest that any theatre doesn't deserve its funding, but I find it incomprehensible that the Arts Council seems to be more generous to the glossy Hampstead than the scruffy Bush, which despite its cramped over-the-pub setting at least seems to understand the difference between a good play and a bad one.
