Another nail in the coffin of celebrity casting

Matthew Perry is just the latest in a long line to get lukewarm reviews and look the wrong age

I wonder if this week was a seminal one in the brief and unedifying history of celebrity casting. If so, then it is Sir Cameron Mackintosh who can claim the credit. The theatre producer pulled no punches when he looked back on the casting of the EastEnders actress Martine McCutcheon in My Fair Lady. He told an interviewer: "We never knew whether she was going to turn up," adding that if he had known then what he knows now, he wouldn't have had her in the show.

I raised my eyebrows when I read this (though possibly not as high as Miss McCutcheon raised hers). No one of Sir Cameron's stature has publicly criticised a celebrity "castee" before. He should be applauded for coming clean. I'd be interested to hear whether Sir Trevor Nunn, who was also responsible for the casting for that National Theatre production, agrees with him. Sir Trevor directed the show which Sir Cameron helped to finance.

The National Theatre's line at the time was that a new audience would be brought in as a result of Miss McCutcheon's presence, and that this new audience would come again to see other National Theatre productions. There is no evidence that this happened. Nor, indeed, is there any evidence that celebrity casting elsewhere brings in a new audience. When I recently watched another EastEnders actress in the current West End show Mum's The Word burst into giggles on the first night and come out of character to muse about her ill luck that it happened in front of the critics, I wondered yet again why producers aren't bold enough to trust the mass of genuine stage talent that is around.

With the exceptions of Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room and Glenn Close in A Streetcar named Desire, Hollywood has also usually failed to provide any great acting on the British stage. Matthew Perry, from the sitcom Friends, last week became the latest in a long line of actors to receive lukewarm reviews and to look the wrong age for his character in a West End play.

Will people rush to see him in the hope of finding he looks, talks and acts the same as his television character? I doubt it. But box office returns show that audiences are rushing to see two of the most stimulating productions of the year, Henry V at the National Theatre and Pirandello's Absolutely! (perhaps) in the West End. And guess what, the casts are made up of home-grown talent. Interestingly, in Absolutely! (perhaps), the enterprising producer Sonia Friedman, a supporter of my Lister Experiment for cheaper theatre tickets, tells me she is offering seats on the stage (don't ask!), literally the best seats in the house, for £10. That, combined with the first-class production, is much more likely to bring in a new, young audience than the chance to see a face from the telly.

Sir Cameron has done us all a favour in speaking plainly. The casting of performers from Hollywood, American television and British soaps is a fad that has had its day. The home-grown talent now on show in productions in London and the exciting and popular work being undertaken elsewhere by companies such as Bristol's Tobacco Factory show just how unnecessary is the frenzy to import stars. RIP celebrity casting. It was never all that it was cracked up to be.

¿ World music has never been so popular; and the interest in it is enriching CD buying and radio listening. But there is one country whose indigenous traditional music tends to be neglected: Britain. British folk music, usually pretty unfashionable, has a shortage of outlets.

Sometimes, it has to be said, that's not a huge worry. Yet sometimes a record with its roots in that genre comes along that deserves a wide audience. I have been listening to a new CD by Maddy Prior, formerly the singer with the veteran electric-folk group Steeleye Span. Her compelling album, Lionhearts, is set at the time of the Crusades and the songs, newly written but with a traditional feel, are told from the perspective of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the wife of Henry II and mother of kings Richard and John. It's got to be the only album released this week with the lyric: "Lacklustre Lackland, you treacherous cur."

¿ I wrote not long ago that I feared that we might never see a work by the likes of Chekhov and Ibsen on television again, such is the antipathy of TV executives towards classic plays. I'm pleased to say that Jana Bennett, the director of television at the BBC, has proved me wrong. As part of her strategy for improving the corporation's arts output, she has approved the transfer to the small screen of the current West End version of Chekhov's Three Sisters, starring Kristin Scott Thomas. Six out of 10 for Ms Bennett. She gets the full 10 marks when she screens it on BBC2 rather than the little-watched BBC4. Come to that, she could even screen a classic drama on BBC1. Now that would be radical.

d.lister@independent.co.uk