My closest actor friend gave me the DVD of the 1973 Theatre of Blood film last Christmas. Since it's one of the worst films ever made and since it features an actor gruesomely killing in turn every critic who failed to give him the Critics' Circle award, I was unsure how to react, until he reassured me that he wanted me to enjoy (as I did) the episode at the start in which Michael Hordern, as the FT critic, complains that a sub-editor has cut his best line.
The new stage production of Theatre of Blood -a collaboration between the National and Improbable Theatres — is better than that, but only a little; and it is considerably longer. At first, the pleasure is that Lee Simpson and Phelim McDermott, who have turned the film into this play, have set almost all of it in a single derelict theatre; and McDermott's direction and Rae Smith's designs make the theatre itself a place of wonders at first. Simpson and McDermott can be among the most imaginative people in British theatre today, and the most enamoured of old-style theatricality. Who could not love the old proscenium arch Smith has designed?
Eventually, however, that's mere periphery. The basic story here is crummy: the critics are bad, but the actor is worse. It might be better if he was good in an old-fashioned way — the Edith Evans or John Gielgud style. But as it is, we have to listen to long reams of cobbled-together Shakespeare spoken in a generalised bad-on-purpose way by Jim Broadbent. Bad Shakespeare can be great entertainment if it's well pointed: I take ever-growing pleasure from the Romeo and Juliet pastiche in the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby because it is an anthology of every bad verse-speaking mannerism. But Broadbent is a bore, the dialogue is slow, there is too much padding, and our time is wasted.
