The Royal Academy of Music’s Sir Jack Lyons Theatre is closing, whether for refurbishment or to make way for something more ambitious I don’t know. It’s a place where I have spent many great evenings, with immense amounts of young vocal talent – most of it never heard of again – under the batons of Colin Davis, Jane Glover and other superb conductors. Next year’s productions will be in Hackney, Shoreditch and in the underground hangar across the Marylebone Road.
To bring the curtain down on the old theatre, the RAM chose two comic English one-acters, of a certain vintage, the 1950s – that abused decade. The first was Walton’s The Bear, from Chekhov. The main trouble with it is that it isn’t at all funny, though there were a couple of conscientious guffawers in the audience trying to persuade the rest of us that it is.
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