‘Dad, it’s three hours long,’ says Boy, worriedly.
‘Yeah. And whose bloody fault is it we’re going?’ I want to reply but don’t because I know, as a dad, you’re not supposed to say discouraging things when your child has asked you to take him to see his first ever Shakespeare play at the RSC.
Still, I can’t pretend I’m happy with the arrangement. Partly it’s the cost of the tickets: £50-plus each, with no student discount for Boy because the show has long since sold out and you don’t get special deals on last-minute returns. Partly it’s just that, well, it’s the theatre and I’m not that keen on going to the theatre.
The killer for me were the years I spent first as a showbiz diarist for Daily Telegraph. Sometimes you’d be doing as many as three first nights a week, at least two and three quarters of them guaranteed to be toe-curlingly awful.
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