When it comes to making a dramatic entrance, you can’t beat JB Priestley’s inspector, Alan Cummings’ cheeky Bacchae and a certain French elephant The unexpected ring at the doorbell is such a well-worked device that, as a theatre-going teenager seeing Waiting for Godot for the first time, I was quite astonished when Godot was a no show. I was so familiar with the notion of the surprise arrival who disrupts the status quo – in everything from Greek drama to Three Sisters to Pinter and Agatha Christie – that I expected characters unlisted in the programme to stroll on to the stage and destroy the hermetically sealed world that had been set up. I was often disappointed when they didn’t. Watching The Boys in the Band at the Park theatre, I was struck by the way that it uses both expected and unexpected arrivals in a way that disrupts and inverts. For a long time it looks as if the birthday boy himself, Harold, is going to shy off, Godot-like, from his own party. When he does arrive, it has a galvanising effect – at least it does in Mark Gatiss’s brilliant entrance – and brings the tension and the drama alive in a play that may now seem old-fashioned but is smartly revived in a production that is going out on a UK tour. Continue reading...
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