Change of heart

When I started writing this column in 2001 I didn’t have much time for the theatre. As a child of the Thatcherite Eighties, I regarded state funding of the arts as a ruse cooked up by the liberal intelligentsia to obtain cheap tickets, and thought of theatre people as effete intellectual snobs who spent their time congratulating each other on being so much more cultured and intelligent than the rest of us. Whenever Jonathan Miller appeared on television, I turned it off.

Four years later, I’ve had such a complete change of heart that I felt like one of the luckiest men alive as I sat in an abandoned factory in Southwark watching a production of Sunday in the Park With George, a Stephen Sondheim musical that even Sondheim aficionados regard as difficult. The smile didn’t even leave my face when, during a song called ‘Putting It Together’, the cast started repeating the words ‘art isn’t easy’, a phrase which seemed to function both as a self-aggrandising explanation on Sondheim’s part for the fact that nearly every musical he writes these days is a commercial flop and a wet kiss to all those diehard fans who’ve been willing to make the intellectual effort that Sondheim clearly believes is necessary to appreciate his ‘art’.