Curtains for Curtain Calls

It happened last night at In Celebration and last week at Saint Joan. Here were the two latest examples of the British theatre's unique capacity for selling itself short when it comes to the curtain call, that closing theatrical gesture uniting audience and actor alike in a moment of release. What difference does it make, I can hear sceptics grumbling, how long the curtain call lasts? Surely the luvvies deserve a quick clap or two and then off to the pub. But such an attitude misunderstands how essential the bows are as a shared act of closure. Don't believe me? Ask anyone who saw the Neil LaBute play The Shape of Things some years back during the Almeida's King's Cross season: that staging deliberately denied its cast any curtain call at all, resulting in a distinctly queasy feeling as the audience made its way home.
More recent curtain calls have merely tended towards the frustrating. It's surely unfair to the labours of a cast, not least on press night, for them to come out for a third call amidst darkness, as was the case last night at In Celebration until someone somewhere was generous enough to illuminate the stage. At the opening night of Marianne Elliott's blistering production of Saint Joan, a rapt audience was clearly ready to prolong applause that seemed curtailed - the British tendency towards self-denial, perhaps, extending itself to such theatrical niceties.This isn't a problem elsewhere. Broadway has never been shy about bowing as long as is necessary to get the audience on its feet, though the Continent can be just as showy. Last month, I looked on astonished in Prague as a Czech-language staging of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll got a good half dozen or more bows following a matinee performance whose leading man, I regret to say, wasn't a patch on London's own Rufus Sewell. Some years ago, I saw a production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus in Paris which starred Roman Polanski as Mozart; the bows that evening threatened to exceed the length of the play itself, as was to be expected, I suppose, from a rare live theatrical outing from a cinematic master.