Jubilee Jubilation

My diamond jubilee weekend started early yesterday with two parties, a surprise dinner and the small matter of a grim reminder of how power politics can go disastrously wrong in a fine new production of Sophocles’ Antigone at the National Theatre.

Antigone in the Olivier is the first in the new season of Travelex £12 Tickets (never as catchy a promotion title as when it was a ten pound bargain), the tenth anniversary of the scheme, which comes with an annnouncement of a further three years of sponsorship.

It is the only sponsorship scheme in the arts that gets regularly mentioned in critics’ reviews. Usually, critics just about get round to sometimes mentioning the lighting designer or the fight director, and most programme slips asking for a sponsors’ plug in the review are disdainfully discarded.

But Travelex is something else, and there’s nobody in arts journalism who doesn’t think it’s been a fantastic innovation; apart from me, of course, who thinks it’s exactly how all tickets should be priced at a theatre as lavishly subsidised as the National. All tickets for all shows at the NT and the RSC should be priced at £10, or £15 maximum, and budgets and staff salaries worked out from that basis. But this is no place to rehearse the old argument of what subsidy is for (oh, all right: subsidy is for the audience, not the theatre industry, end of story).     

Anyway, the critics and other odd bods were invited along for a drink by Lloyd Dorfman, Travelex boss, and NT artistic director Nicholas Hytner, before last night’s Antigone opening. And what an eye-opener that proved: all the best facilities are reserved for donors and sponsors and patrons who assemble for champers overlooking the river from a spot – it’s called “The Deck” – which must surely be the best place in London from which to watch the royal regatta on Sunday. 
  
Just how powerful the sponsors are can be measured by a phrase Lloyd Dorfman let slip in his welcome speech: he thanked the National Theatre, “who could not have been more collaborative.” Surely that’s the  wrong way round; he’s the one doing the collaborating, not the NT. No wonder Collaborators has been such a successful component of the Travelex sponsorship.

There have been 46 Travelex productions in all, 1.2m tickets have been sold in ten years, the shows playing to 90% capacity and attracting 35% first-time NT customers to the building. Four years ago, Dorfman joined the NT board and he’s heavily involved in the re-building project, for which he will be rewarded with the Cottesloe being re-named in his honour.

And the £10 ticket scheme has, he proudly says, “rippled round the world.” The very first Travelex production was Hytner’s modern warfare version of Henry V, and Adrian Lester, who played the king, was on hand to take a bow, alongside other Travelex notables including Lesley Manville, Deborah Findlay, Alecky Blythe (London Road will be a Travelex production in the Lyttelton at the end of July) and Howard Brenton. Hytner was also chuffed that 60,000 people will see the Travelex Timon of Athens, which is probably 59,000 more than would have done so otherwise out of choice. He didn’t say that, exactly, but it’s clear Travelex sweetens the pill at those prices.

And so it should. Antigone proved an excellent choice of Travelex production: a great play about the inhumanity of politics on the world stage, with Christopher Eccleston in the title role looking something like a suited amalgam of the Coalition government leaders, or perhaps Brendan Rodgers, the new manager elect at Liverpoool FC, I can’t quite decide.
 
Eccleston has a serious football background, so I reckon he’s morphing into Rodgers, but without the padding; I see him running on Hampstead Heath, and he’s a fearsome sight in his black sports kit, I can promise you. Thankfully, I’m usually jogging slowly in the opposite direction, my default mode.

After Antigone, I headed down Tottenham Court Road way with my friend Emma Style, the leading casting agent, to a jubilee party thrown by Bare Films in their mews offices. The place was decked out in patriotic bunting and swarming with hot shot young film makers and advertising personnel. The drinks were served by a posse of ridiculously handsome young men wearing nothing but white aprons that tied round the back but didn’t cover the backside, if you know what I mean… cheeky, or what?

Many of the party guests were having their photos taken with the waiters, and other guests were seeking other favours altogether. Not feeling in the mood for a Roman orgy, I made my excuses to the fully clothed Bare Films boss Helen Hadfield and whisked Emma away for dinner.

Easier said than done. We had parked outside Sardo’s, hoping to slip into that marvellous place at just before 10pm. But guess what? The kitchen was chiuso’d. Mamma mia, a Sardinian restaurant closing before 10pm? Most of them are just opening at that hour. So we drifted along to Pescatori in nearby Charlotte Street, where the fish is always reliably delicious and the ambience perfect for winding down at the dusky end of a scorching day.