The Sunday Telegraph, I think, was the first broadsheet newspaper to give up having a theatre critic, presumably because gardening, self-help and dieting were more urgent topics on a Sunday morning. But recently the New Statesman has abandoned mention of the theatre altogether. For a magazine whose back half was once its glory, this seems odd. It’s also part of an unsettling trend. On Radio 4 there are countless programmes about literature, but only if it comes in a form you can hold in your hands. Admittedly, television and films have just as often informed my thinking about life as the theatre has done—and sometimes more lastingly. But why do editors today give so little space to the one art form at which the British and Irish have traditionally excelled?
When asked what drew me to becoming a playwright, I always say that my decisive conversion came watching Paul Scofield playing King Lear, with Irene Worth a terrifying Goneril. They were directed by Peter Brook, whose death at the beginning of July was mourned as deeply in France as it was in England. In the 1960s, we all took for granted what was clearly a strong period for classical acting. Vanessa Redgrave was definitive as Rosalind in As You Like It; Ian Holm was Richard III at the climax of Peter Hall’s highly original The Wars of the Roses; David Warner made Hamlet our contemporary; and Maggie Smith—oh my God, Maggie Smith!—played Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer with a cross-dressing dazzle which awed the Old Vic.
The possibilities of political theatre were expanded when Joan Littlewood created Oh! What a Lovely War in 1963. Alongside the BBC series The Great War, it shifted the perspective historians subsequently brought to the catastrophe of 1914. By colliding documentary, a Pierrot show and the bitter lyrics soldiers had improvised over popular songs, Littlewood pioneered a kind of spiky, acute, imaginative -theatre which inspired many who followed. In the bleak years of apartheid, John Kani was magnificent in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead. Everyone who saw the angels crash through the ceiling in Declan Donnellan’s production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America retains the most lasting image of the 1980s Aids crisis. And the second act of Bill Bryden’s premiere of David Mamet’s play about American salesmanship, Glengarry Glen Ross, moved so fast you forgot you were in a theatre altogether.
Look at the current repertory, and it appears as though there weren’t any playwrights between William Shakespeare and Terence Rattigan. If programming had always been this narrow, we would have missed Maggie Smith (again) playing Congreve, Tom Wilkinson playing Ibsen, Judi Dench playing O’Casey, Anna Magnani playing Verga, Jean-Louis Barrault playing Racine, Michael Redgrave playing Chekhov and Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma playing Shaw in 2015. At least John Gielgud would still have been allowed to use Charles Wood’s 1972 play Veterans to display the exquisite self-satire that made him such a perfect comedian.
Early on, when I started writing and directing on an invigorated fringe and touring circuit, I realised that it was sometimes harder for an actor to be great in a small space. The scrutiny was severe. That’s why images remain strong of Linda Bassett movingly aware of impending Alzheimer’s in Barney Norris’s Visitors at the Arcola in 2014, and of Simon Callow unleashing a completely original kind of comic anarchy in Snoo Wilson’s The Soul of the White Ant at the Bush Theatre in 1976. At the Other Space at Stratford in 1985, at close quarters, you could see every detail of Juliet Stevenson’s performance in Christopher Hampton’s version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (Perfect direction by Howard Davies.) It was the same when Patrice Chéreau acted in his own production of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s In the Solitude of Cotton Fields to an audience on benches in a dusty factory outside Paris. In 1980, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory offered just five performances of My Dinner with Andre in the tiny Theatre Upstairs before they turned Shawn’s masterpiece into a film. Those who marvelled at it in the cinema were running along behind.
You can’t blame journalism for the fact that, in an event-driven culture, musicals attract so much more attention than plays. The memories of Julie Covington and Ian Charleson singing with such purity in Richard Eyre’s production of Guys and Dolls, of the overture dance sequence in Nick Hytner’s 1994 revival of Carousel, and of Sharon D Clarke in more or less everything, -resonate even with those of us who prefer our drama spoken. But unexpectedly, the greatest director of my lifetime was a Broadway hoofer. No one could match Peter Brook for his realisation of the Mahabharata, nor Jerzy Grotowski when he directed the Polish concentration camp play Akropolis, nor Robert Icke doing Sophocles, nor Ariane Mnouchkine when she recreated the French revolution, nor Stephen Daldry when he directed Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, nor Sam Mendes when he gave us the entire history of Lehman Brothers in under four hours. But for sheer expertise, Michael Bennett, best known for A Chorus Line, remains pre-eminent. His 1981 production of Dreamgirls articulated a musical stage more excitingly than anyone before or since.
Although I regret the shrinking of thoughtful theatre coverage, only once was I stupid enough to allow a critic to put me off a theatre visit. In 1979, the New York Times dissuaded me from seeing James Mason—can you believe it?—in the premiere of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. All the more annoying, then, that Jonathan Kent’s 2001 revival with Ken Stott, Geraldine James and Ian McDiarmid became one of my all-time great evenings. At least no one could put me off Luc Bondy’s Vienna production of The Seagull—the most complete Chekhov I ever saw. It was best to ignore the bad reviews which occasionally disparaged Howard Brenton, whose free-ranging imagination invariably gives audiences such pleasure, and Trevor Griffiths, who wrote some of the best postwar political rhetoric, in or outside a theatre.
As for actors, Penelope Wilton, of course, in The Deep Blue Sea; Jonathan Pryce in Edward Albee’s The Goat (“Darling, I’m in love with a goat”); Gary Oldman in Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money; Michael Gambon, incomparably, in Brecht’s Life of Galileo; Billie Piper holding a human brain in her hand in Lucy Prebble’s The Effect; Carey Mulligan, once more in The Seagull; Nicol Williamson in John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence; Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh: all these were performances that stood as works of art in their own right. But if anyone fears my lists are driven by nostalgia, let them remember that Anne-Marie Duff riveted by clamping down her anger as a matriarch in Beth Steel’s wild Almeida play The House of Shades this June. Let them book for Julian Clary, who every Christmas sets the Palladium roaring in a way not heard since Frankie Howerd.
Is theatre coverage dwindling because theatre itself is less exciting? I don’t think so. In making a list of highlights from 60 years, I have reminded myself of how glorious my experience in the theatre has been. Any serious theatregoer’s list will differ, but be no less various. Your first images remain longest. On a dusty afternoon in the poky little Duchess Theatre in 1960, in front of a lot of posh ladies, the velvet curtain went up and there was Alan Bates, ready to start playing Mick in Pinter’s The Caretaker. He looked feral in leather jacket and jeans. I’m not sure I’ve since met many people as dangerous or beautiful. The theatre’s given me all this—and in 21st-century England, it’s fighting for space in print. But not in the imagination.
