In today's Daily Mail, Quentin Letts says that I should sue London's Sadler's Wells for assault after a dancer grabbed my glasses and gobbed on them during Dave St-Pierre's Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde! I'm grateful for his concern but the truth is I had a crappy couple of minutes in a show that I found naff and pretentious, but apart from that, no harm done. I'm certainly not about to sue anyone, and looking at the photos illustrating the Daily Mail piece, it's clear that almost everyone's enjoying the action. The show's nudity and "adult content" were well advertised, and no one was there except by choice.
What I objected to was not that I was subjected to a "provocative action" of the kind that most avant-garde theatregoers are familiar with, but that the gobbing and the sneer had a personal, ad hominem edge. It was clear that I was a critic, and that the performer in question had a score to settle. Immature and unpleasant, but hardly actionable.
Nor does the show present any moral hazard. The nudity isn't an advance on Oh, Calcutta!, and is, in fact, notably sexist in that the men do the hardcore exhibitionistic stuff and the women are confined to half-clad catfighting and pseudo-lesbian action in the aisles. The really dislikable thing about this show, to my (admittedly phlegm-blurred) eyes, is its extreme pomposity of purpose. But if you don't like Dave St Pierre's mixture of bum, bollocks and po-faced conceptualism, you can always stay at home.
• In other news, Telegraph theatre critic Charles Spencer responds to last week's Guardian piece by Deborah Warner, about critics of her play The School for Scandal.
