Stages of history

No critic is better placed than Michael Billington to look back at Britain's postwar history through its theatre. Billington reviewed at the Times from 1965 and has been at the Guardian since 1971. This book is written from the experience of 8,000 nights out and with the conviction that the truculent, lone playwright is the key creative figure in the collaborative business of theatre.

Billington kicks off in typically crisp style by demolishing the idea that modern theatre started in May 1956 with John Osborne's Look Back In Anger. Instead he goes back to the Attlee years, claiming it was JB Priestley who first put a stethoscope to the wheezing chest of the nation. His method is to pick on specific plays—sketching in salient events, electoral swings, political shifts, cultural trends, jokes and even cricket scores—to support his central idea that you cannot separate the play from the zeitgeist.

As Peter Hall said, it is critics' prejudices that make them interesting, and Billington isn't short of these. Noël Coward gets badly duffed up early on. A minor play, Peace in Our Time (1946), is massacred for its right-wing awfulness and "bilious antipathy to modern Britain." Reading this, one can almost hear an unperturbed Coward calling Billington a "cunt," his preferred word for left-wing critics.

Billington's judgement is not infallible. Of Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (1946), in which a boy is expelled from naval college falsely condemned for stealing a postal order, he argues that it is the characters' political alliances that resonate. Far more interesting, surely, is the crime itself, which unconsciously represents the author's sexuality and is locked away inside a slightly dull wheels-of-justice national drama.

It is not just living writers who comment on the new Britain. Peter Hall's production of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays and Richard III, shown in Stratford in 1963, became a thundering metaphor for the cynical power politics of the cold war and the backstabbing that followed Harold Macmillan's resignation. Billington characterises 1960s theatre as being in permanent opposition to whoever was in power. Edward Bond was "a born disturber of the peace," Trevor Griffiths the hard-left class warrior. It is intriguing that Peter Nichols, Pinter, Osborne and Beckett were all united by their love of music hall, their experience of work outside the theatre and, for most, national service. And there is a wide vein of reactionary nostalgia for an Edwardian heyday in John Osborne, the house dramatist of the Royal Court's angry brigade. He was, sums up Billington, "an emotional aristocrat who had the misfortune to be born in Fulham."

The heroic efforts of Olivier and his curious relationship with Kenneth Tynan ("the ultimate starfucker") are woven into the story. It's fascinating to learn about the tentacles of the HM Tennent theatre empire, controlled by the tax-dodging Binkie Beaumont. By the 1970s, Billington has dozens of "anatomist" plays to choose from. He's keen on David Hare's Plenty, but even keener on Caryl Churchill's lesser-known Light Shining In Buckinghamshire (about the Putney debates of 1647), a key text in the failure of the revolutionary dream of the 1970s.

But at times you want to shout in protest at the book's precious tone. Who but Billington could allude to Schopenhauer's theory of the "tyranny of the weak" in a discussion of Ayckbourn's smash hit Bedroom Farce? And it baffles me how, in writing about the 1970s, he fails to make even passing mention of the one figure who theatricalised pop culture—David Bowie.

In the chapter on the 1980s, the book becomes increasingly strident. Billington writes about the free-market Thatcher years with a clothes peg on his nose. Almost as criminal as the sinking of the Belgrano was the lady's admiration for Andrew Lloyd Webber. Les Misérables ("a witless cartoon") is derided and Cats patronised. It is surely petty not to recognise the pleasure these shows have brought to millions—tourists are still people—or to fail to salute the triumph of
the British musical, which toppled Broadway's historic pre-eminence.

With his passion for democratic socialism, one wonders what propelled Billington into the glittery arms of showbiz to begin with. We hear a little about the Billington family sitting around at home, bolshily refusing to watch the coronation. There are tantalising snippets, too, about his education—the working class boy at Warwick public school and the braying hoorays at Oxford who left him feeling an outsider. But where is the chap who wrote the delightful Guinness Book of Theatre Facts & Feats (1982) and a fine book about Ken Dodd? The Diddymen are conspicuously absent. Ray Cooney is nowhere. Where is the populist theatre that cocks a snook at all political power? What about the whodunnits? Isn't Sleuth in its own way a brilliant play about class hatred?

The chapters on the Blair years—a sharp analysis of the Royal Court and of Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane and the other members of the "in-yer-face" school—bring us up to date. But they conclude with the platitudinous idea that the theatre survives because it is "a rambling mansion with many rooms," full of diversity. One could equally argue that British theatre today is parochially metropolitan, that regional theatre is nearly dead, that the RSC subsidy is pointless and that the national lottery has created a row of white elephants. Isn't it rather worrying that most of the writers who can fill large theatres today are the ageing heroes of the 1960s? And Billington says nothing of his own craft of theatre criticism. The hastening death of the expert on newspaper arts pages is an odd omission from the man who has spent his adult life as a specialist.

But for all that, this is a thoughtful, authoritative and provocative book that will be indispensable to anyone with an interest in the British theatre of living memory.