You can always rely on theatreland to serve up drama off stage as well as on. Hopefully the spat between Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir David Hare over whether musicals are ‘killing’ theatre will run and run.
Writing in The Spectator last week, Hare moaned: ‘Musicals have become the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything in their path… are dramatists not writing enough good plays which can attract 800 people a night? Will well-known actors not appear in them? Or did producers mislay their balls during lockdown?’ Lloyd Webber bit back in the Times, bringing up Hare’s flop musical The Knife: ‘David Hare is responsible for one of the greatest musical disasters in history… [He] is probably saying this because he mainly wants to bury his own contribution to musical theatre.’
Reading this exchange, I had to laugh – or rather, grimace in pained recognition. It was like seeing two sides of myself having a scrap with each other.
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