So it wasn’t
Cinderella but
Hamlet who was first out of the post-lockdown starting blocks – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much trumpeted musical premiere being foiled by a ping at the weekend.
Instead the historic first curtain-up was 20 miles up the River Thames in Windsor, on a Shakespeare production that itself has been disrupted over and over during the past 16 months – possibly with even more urgent, unspoken worries, as the star is Ian McKellen, who was 80 when rehearsal began, and Covid began devastating the older generation, and is now 82.
Pingless so far, Sean Mathias’s production, on a plain scaffolding set with clumps of masked audience members seated under it, looks rather like a Meccano set that’s been thrown onto the table for you to try to connect the bits and the concept. It is the perfect representation of this dislocating, interrogatory era.