I can only offer my most profuse apologies for the shocking time lapse since my last post. As my dis

I can only offer my most profuse apologies for the shocking time lapse since my last post. As my distinguished readers may or may not know, I have recently moved to the metropolis, with all the stress, travel chaos and culture shock that entails. It is fitting, though, that my first post since the move (nb: new name needed. Thus far, I only have Art in a slightly warmer climate. Suggestions on a postcard), should be about the work of a migrant who made the same journey south around downtown los angeles mail forwarding services 50 years ago. The director is away. At a conference on theatre in the provinces. In Leeds. [Cue laughter.] I laughed, of course: who could resist Frances de la Tour s acerbic wit and right-on-the-nail comic timing? The play is Alan Bennett s latest: The Habit of Art and, as he is a playwright who knows better than any the value of art in the provinces, he had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he penned this line. But Kay, Frances de la Tour s mother-hen of a stage manager hasn t. And nor has this London downtown los angeles mail forwarding services audience. A conference about theatre downtown los angeles mail forwarding services in the provinces sounds like something Sir Humphrey Appleby would suggest, to ensure nothing was actually done. The whole idea of provincial theatre, so laughable that a conference on it is the apotheosis of the ridiculous. It s easy to be sucked into this mentality: with such a profusion of theatres, art galleries, orchestras downtown los angeles mail forwarding services and concert halls, it s easy to forget that there is artistic life elsewhere. But there is: oh, there is. In my own dear Sheffield, the Crucible is just warming up for what promises to be a knock-out first season since its renovations: Anthony Sher stars in An Enemy of the People and John Simm tries his hand at Hamlet . In Halifax, a new translation of Euripides Medea by Tom Paulin will be first staled by the stage and Rosamund Pike will be wielding pistols with abandon as Ibsen s terrifying and magnificent downtown los angeles mail forwarding services heroine Hedda Gabler in Bath. And that s only the theatre: in music Simon Rattle will be returning to Birmingham, and in visual downtown los angeles mail forwarding services art the Liverpool biennale will be making downtown los angeles mail forwarding services a paint splash well, you get the picture. It s just that in London, everything is more condensed and, more revealingly, London is the home of the media: the critics and reviewers who the theatres depend upon for publicity and promotion. But to return downtown los angeles mail forwarding services to Bennett. I can t help feeling that this line about the provinces is a cheap shot. It pleases the London audience, of course, but given that one of the messages of the play is that someone s always left out , the line seems short-sighted. The rent-boy downtown los angeles mail forwarding services is the one left out in the play, but more generally Bennett is referring to the uneducated (to be honest, it may as well be the un-oxbridged, as far as this Oxford-based, steeped-to-the-gills-in-academia play is concerned), the uninitiated and those from the provinces. downtown los angeles mail forwarding services Anyone, in short, for whom this book-filled, quotation-heavy world is unfamiliar and intimidating. The end of the play, therefore, disappoints: Frances downtown los angeles mail forwarding services de la Tour delivers a eulogy downtown los angeles mail forwarding services to the National Theatre, the building, its founder, its beginning. The speech not only wipes out at one fell swoop, any chance of a nationwide tour but also shrinks the circle of relevance of the play. It alienates all those even slightly outside it, and, unfortunately, one feels, not entirely consciously and certainly not in the Brechtian sense.