I recently compiled a web archive of the pieces I have written as a drama critic. It forced me to step back for a moment and wonder what it was all about. There they are, at www.shutters.org.uk, around 1,500 reviews, the sum total of my professional relationship to British theatre. What does the "collected works" of my criticism amount to? A public resource? A gesture of vanity? Or perhaps an act of desperation on the part of a critic trying to remember what it was that he once loved about the theatre, or thought was important about it? It is not unusual for a critic to go through a mid-career crisis about the value of his subject, but all criticism is a measuring of personal against public experience and I was losing faith that there was a public experience to be measured at all.
It is an odd time to be losing my religion. In many ways, British theatre has begun the 21st century more hopeful than it has been for a generation. There may be no new dramatic writing to match the Ravenhill and Kane succ?s de scandale of the late 1990s, but new writing is now fostered on all levels, helped by the reopening of London's Royal Court in 2000. The National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company have optimistic new leaders. "Off-west end," the creative heart of London theatre, is flourishing. Early 2003 saw the Hampstead Theatre move out of its old prefab into new premises; Michael Attenborough has reopened the Almeida Theatre; while the Donmar Warehouse still thrives as Sam Mendes hands over to Michael Grandage, who continues to run the Sheffield Crucible, one of the most compelling regional venues. Regional theatre as a whole is partially revitalised, with the main centres-Manchester, Bristol, Leeds-supported by a tier of smaller, but adventurous venues, such as the Colchester Mercury and the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick.
Box-office business is solid. Despite a short-term "9/11 effect," the Society of London Theatres' provisional figures put theatre attendance in the first 11 months of 2002 up 3.8 per cent on the same period in 2001, a year which saw total attendance in London top 11.7m and gross box office takings totalling nearly ?300m. West end musicals admittedly account for a large proportion of these figures, but the market research company BMRB says that the proportion of playgoing British adults has remained constant at about 25 per cent over the last 20 years.
Furthermore, the government has allocated plenty of new public money for subsidised theatre redressing the attrition of the Thatcher years and their aftermath. Following Gordon Brown's 2000 pledge to increase arts funding by ?100m, the Arts Council of England in 2001 announced an extra ?25m for theatres-taking the annual sum to about ?70m (excluding the national institutions). Some regional theatres saw their annual grants increase by 400 per cent. The extent to which that funding originates from the public purse or the lottery remains murky, but in our gratitude we overlook that. The money is now available as "core" funding for companies and institutions, which means it is being directed not just at buildings-as was often the case in the first phase of lottery funding-but at drama itself.
So who am I to fret? It seems almost churlish to look for more. And, in any case, it is hard to describe what the "more" should be-a "direction," a clearer "place" in society? The origins of formal theatre lie in a communal event 2,500 years old which was both religious and civic: the festival of the Dionysia at Athens, the purpose of which was to involve the audience in a collective exaltation of the gods and of the earthly mirror of their rule, the Athenian state, and thereby to affirm their common identity and values as citizens. We cannot go back 2,500 years, but we can-and I do-feel uneasy that British theatre often seems not to be part of public life at all.
As a reviewer one naturally goes through cycles of enthusiasm and revulsion. The danger is not so much hitting a phase where I loathe drama (indeed, hatred has its own particular energy). The problem arises when productions seem quite serviceable by their own standards, but which have no compelling reason for existing in the first place. When that sense of pointlessness spreads from individual plays to theatre as a whole, matters reach a crisis point. The modern belief in theatre lies in its social rather than religious value, but if we are to avoid a shrill "political" reductionism, we need to be clearer what that value is.
A sense of cultural place and purpose for live theatre has dissipated. Over the last century, cinema, radio and television (in that order) have leached audiences away from various forms of live entertainment-vaudeville, music hall, weekly repertory theatre-which have consequently expired. The deaths of those other forms of live popular culture left theatre as the last "high culture" relic of live entertainment, where it has since been marginalised. "High culture" came to mean "high and off to one side."
This is especially true of what is often called "director's theatre": high-concept, intellectual productions that seem to exist in order to serve a circuit (such as Britain's growing international theatre circuit) rather than the actual plays or audiences. We consider ourselves privileged to have seen the work of Peter Sellars, Patrice Ch?reau, Calixto Bieito, or whomever, and it scarcely matters that some of this work is, in fact, quite impenetrable. We go to such events, as Ken Campbell, the theatrical maverick once put it, not to see them but to have seen them.
Of course, theatre is not all as rarefied as this. There are, for example, musicals. But in the last 20 years, they have become almost as distinct a form as opera, with their own grammar of assumptions and focus on spectacle over substance (although Stephen Sondheim is, as ever, gloriously sui generis in this respect). Audiences flock to musicals in part because they don't think of them as "theatre."
Then there are the travelling theatre companies like the late John McGrath's 7:84 and Wildcat, which would tour to any usable space in any accessible community in Scotland, and ensure that the content of those shows was both entertaining and intellectually engaged. McGrath's engagement was with left-wing politics but this was incidental to his central belief that substantial content of whatever kind could be presented in an enlivening manner (music hall-cum-ceilidh, in the case of 7:84's greatest hit, "The Cheviot", "The Stag and The Black, Black Oil") without being compromised. This strategy has had more recent incarnations. In the last five or so years, for instance, Frantic Assembly has built an impressive youthful audience base for its more impressionistic, physically-based work which operates in ways intuitively familiar to a clubbing culture. When I became involved with Ken Campbell and his associates' revival of Neil Oram's 24-hour epic "The Warp" in various locations between 1997 and 2000, it was evident that the play made its most conspicuous audience connections when staged as part of a series of weekend-long raves.
Another of serious theatre's popularising tactics is the draw of the big name. The trouble here is that no theatre name is big enough. Simon Russell Beale was recently described as "the nearest thing we have to a living Olivier," and he is a box-office draw in theatre-savvy circles. But in the world beyond, he means little or nothing. The recent pairing of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith on stage in "The Breath Of Life" was news beyond theatreland not because of their unparalleled theatrical reputations, but because millions more knew them from screen appearances.
The appearance of international screen names on the London stage is a phenomenon which was pioneered by the Almeida when its former artistic directors, Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid, found they had Ralph Fiennes in their cast at the time of his 1997 Oscar nomination and then, by chance, opened the following year with Juliette Binoche. The most recent example was Kenneth Lonergan's Reagan-era play "This Is Our" Youth, which went through four casts of Hollywood bratpackers with a raft of familiar names-Hanks, Culkin, Damon, Affleck-before ending in March.
We might call this the "Kevin Spacey syndrome." Spacey's own commitment clearly runs deep, to the extent of taking on the artistic directorship of the Old Vic next year. But when such involvements are trumpeted as if they were innovative departures, theatre is just rolling over and accepting the usually marginal role assigned it by the arts and media culture.
When I asked the new director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, about this, he agreed: "I would like to get us off the back foot, out of the defensive position that we've found ourselves in for such a long time." But he also knows the game he has to play. When announcing his first season at the National, Hytner portrayed the major-league transfer from the Edinburgh fringe, "Jerry Springer: The Opera", as a move at once radical and populist. On the other hand, when it comes to talking up Northern Irish playwright Owen McCafferty's new work, Hytner uses critic-speak, calling it "Oldmanesque," a reference to the director of the dirty-realist film "Nil By Mouth".
Notwithstanding these attempts to draw in wider audiences, British theatre is almost always portrayed as occupying a subordinate place in the everyday cultural existence of the nation. Part of the problem seems to be that in its very breadth, theatre is running against the grain. In the course of a few weeks or months, any theatre reviewer like me will see plays in national flagship venues, in the west end, in "off-west end" venues, in pub theatres, in regional producing houses or on tour; and in spaces ranging from 50 to over 2,000 seats (or more, in the case of major spectacles). We may see agitprop, farce, mime, clowning, musicals, Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, improvisation, community shows, solo storytelling, adaptations from other media, puppetry, dance, even drumming. And it will all be considered theatre. Perhaps no other medium produces such variety. There isn't a newspaper in the land which would employ, for example, a music reviewer whose job it is to cover everything from JS Bach to Ornette Coleman to Daniel O'Donnell to the White Stripes. That range of texture is standard for a theatre critic.
To think broadly and inclusively about any given art form flies in the face of the way culture has developed in the course of our lifetimes. Even 20 years ago, long after the eclipse of theatre by television, we had enough common ground in our viewing experience to give us cultural security, a single conversation. But the increasing plurality of channels means that the commonality of culture of which television was the last inheritor has now dissipated.
This tendency is fundamentally at odds with the nature of the theatrical event, which is a live, communal experience. Of course, like any form, theatre will also speak differently to each individual-the event is not the same as the message. But when talking about the public nature of theatre, a director like Nicholas Hytner works backwards from that individual experience: "I think, while it explores the individual, theatre always demands a communal response," he says. "It is in the nature of a live event that even when the subject of a play is the anatomy of one person only, the fact that man is a social animal, that the individual as part of a community, is always insisted on."
Today, plays that speak most easily to the whole audience are those which speak about public affairs or issues-political plays. The high watermark of such work was relatively brief-from the mid-1950s (with the ascendancy of George Devine at the Royal Court and Joan Littlewood at Stratford East) to the end of the 1970s. And even by the beginning of this phase, the social diversity of the theatre audience was already waning, so that the "us" of the theatre audience was significantly narrower than the "us" of the society being commented on. Now, what we think of as "political theatre" is either historical drama, as with Tom Stoppard's "The Coast Of Utopia" trilogy, or a self-conscious grand projet like David Hare's 1990s trilogy, or just strident, as with the more extreme works of Harold Pinter.
Other forms of engaged political writing do still linger on. One of the most consistently effective political playwrights in Britain is Gary Mitchell. Mitchell's plays depict the complexities and uncertainties of the loyalist/unionist people of north Belfast during the current stuttering peace process. If it is possible to talk about a British "community," available to be addressed by the theatre, Belfast provides a precise example (or two, rather). In 1999, I returned to my native city to see a small but triumphant reinvention of an idea first vainly tried out in the mid-1980s by Andy Tyrie, the then commander of the Ulster Defence Association. The idea was that theatre could generate a dialogue which would create a bond between elements of a split community. The "Wedding Community Play" I saw was a collaboration between a clutch of community theatre companies from east and west Belfast. Meeting in the city centre, the audience was bussed first to a terraced house in the Catholic enclave of the Short Strand to eavesdrop on a fictitious bridegroom's family as they prepared for what is called a "cross-community" marriage. From there we went around the corner and across the "peace line" into the Protestant Templemore Avenue area (where my own mother was brought up) to peek likewise at the bride's family. The ceremony itself took place in a "dissenter" church in the city centre, with us all ending up in a Laganside nightclub for the reception. The stresses of the day brought out familiar sectarian tensions, but the drama released them and reaffirmed the basic humanity lying beneath the differences.
An experience like this would be hard to replicate outside Northern Ireland and, in any case, only offers a very limited account of what is special about the theatre. Following his success at the Royal Court, Gary Mitchell's work is now seen by diverse audiences which are less emotionally involved and therefore more inclined to interpret events in their universal and metaphorical aspects. And that's as it should be. In strictly political theatre, the wider the audience pool, the shallower the message. Occasional, explosive individual works such as Kay Adshead's "The Bogus Woman", a critique of the asylum process seen on the Edinburgh and London fringes in 2000-01, are exceptions that prove the rule. We may admire political theatre, but it works, when at all, as much through the theatrical as the political component.
That, of course, doesn't mean theatre can't consider society broadly and boldly-as well as the more timeless truths of human existence. As I write, nearly a third of the plays in the west end contain a significant social dimension, from the comic-book future dystopia of We Will Rock You to the only slightly tempered agitprop immediacy of "Accidental Death Of An Anarchist". Michael Boyd, the new artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, persists in arguing that theatre can deal with a "crisis of consensus" in Britain and that, indeed, Shakespeare has always done so. "As society has grown and the means of production have got more and more separated off from the public and looked after by experts, there's less and less of a sense of our immediate involvement with it," Boyd says. "One of the most important qualities of the RSC is that our house playwright makes a mockery of that division... he can't help but address the issues that affect everyone in his audience."
In fact, British theatre still has its curiously collective moments. The last of David Edgar's three plays about post-cold war Europe, "The Prisoner's Dilemma", which opened in 2001, was a "debate" play, with a wealth of intellectual nuance to be weighed and considered. And yet, in the middle of the opening night, came a moment I would never have imagined possible: as a peace treaty was painstakingly negotiated on stage, word by word, the audience grew so engaged on a semantic level that they spontaneously applauded a particular choice of word as a dramatic breakthrough. There was a more visceral response to this than to considerations of civil war and ethnic cleansing elsewhere in the play.
So is theatre its own justification after all? That live, collective experience of watching actors speaking words on a stage can still be as uplifting and transformative as anything in our culture. My problem as a critic may be that I lost sight of theatre just getting on with it, like the bumblebee that blessedly hasn't been told it's an aerodynamic absurdity. Maybe I got too close to the theatre to see it clearly.
As he takes the reins of his new job at the National, Nicholas Hytner wants to reclaim the essential meaning of his craft. For much of the past two decades it hasn't been enough that theatres did what theatres do. To attract funding they had to find a unique selling point by engaging in special projects, or accessibility programmes. They had to provide value for money, and to keep getting the money, they put themselves through all kinds of contortions to get through the obstacle courses erected by public and private sectors alike.
"Most of the imagined attacks, and sometimes the actual attacks, that we have been defending ourselves against, have required us to define ourselves in terms which just don't work," says Hytner. "All the stuff that we've been forced to talk about-the contribution we make to the balance of payments, the cornerstone we provide to the tourist industry, more recently the way we regenerate inner cities-none of that is untrue, but it's not why we're here."
Likewise, at the helm of our other major national institution, Michael Boyd wants to take the RSC back to its core purpose: not just a vehicle for Shakespeare but a defence of theatre itself. "We need to start modestly and address the audience that we do have with a raw and a truthful voice, not accept a role as court entertainers, which is what we've become," he says.
The economics of theatre still matter; you can't reach people if they won't pay high prices. The change in character of the Edinburgh fringe over the last ten years or so is partly due to the ascendancy of comedy-it is cheaper to produce and thus generates more profit. When ticket prices were only ?3 or so more people were prepared to take risks with a show. At ?25 a shot, you make fewer and more conscious choices, and thus are also less likely to make the joyous discovery which fires you in an unexpected way.
Cheap tickets were a principle which guided Lilian Baylis a century ago at the Old Vic, and are now being rediscovered by Hytner at the National, who announced that in his inaugural season at the helm, two thirds of the tickets in the Olivier Theatre would be priced at ?10. In turn, smaller venues such as the Tricycle and Battersea Arts Centre include "pay what you can" nights as a regular part of their schedules. It may be a modest start, but it works for me.
The Tricycle, in Kilburn, is an example of a venue which addresses its local constituency, with black and Irish work past and present, and which elicits a communal response without becoming parochial. It is the Tricycle that has originated the "transcript" plays of the last few years, from "Half The Picture" about the Scott inquiry to "The Colour Of Justice" about the Stephen Lawrence case to re-enactments of the Nuremberg and Srebrenica war crimes trials-all addressing major public issues, and all critical and commercial successes alike. (The Tricycle, incidentally, got a 117 per cent rise in subsidy over two years in the 2001 funding shake-up.)
Similar aims can equally be nurtured amid the pillars of the establishment. Michael Boyd speaks of the small Swan theatre in Stratford as the space which most clearly shows when the relationship between stage and auditorium is meaningful; when experiences are shared and when they are not. This, he says, is what the politics of theatre consists of: "There's just a tiny glimpse in that 450-seat auditorium of what it feels like as a society."
Boyd began his theatrical career in his native Scotland, where, he argues, popular theatre clung on more tenaciously than south of the border to "the sense that theatre had a role to play in society." He trained in Moscow and retains links with directors such as Rimas Tuminas and Eimuntas Nekrosius in Lithuania, giving him a perception of theatre as a means of articulating social and political material, but of doing so (especially in the Soviet era) "through metaphor and symbol, as necessary communicative tools."
It remains to be seen to what extent he can achieve such an end in a company such as the RSC. Both he and Hytner, after all, take over their respective flagship companies from predecessors who had been seen as problematic. Adrian Noble's upheavals at the RSC-shortening performers' contract obligations, planning a "theatre village" in Stratford, abandoning a London base-draw a diplomatic, though somewhat gritted-teeth response from his successor. "I think that the sort of fragmentation of the RSC that Adrian proposed and started to carry out was perhaps unfocused, perhaps not timed right, and perhaps not underpinned philosophically; but there was a certain inevitability about it," Boyd says. "And there's still plenty of fallout around the place that I have to address." Meanwhile, Nicholas Hytner's predecessor, Trevor Nunn, was widely seen as having a propensity for big shows, classics and musicals, and a weak record on new plays which are just as vital an element of the National's brief; last year's "Transformation" season seemed a last-ditch attempt to change this perception.
Boyd speaks with the kind of conviction necessary to make a difference in the theatre. He describes theatre as the DNA for everything else that goes on in a culture. "It contains the start of arguments, of debates, of intellectual inquiry in a way that a book, a monograph, a lecture just cannot," he says. "Within our attempts to tell truth in the best and most expressive way possible should be contained, in a way that we're not even conscious of... the beginnings of the next rational level of inquiry, of the next way forward."
To non-theatrical ears this may sound like over-blown thespian self-importance, and in some ways it is. But it's not a bad thing to have directors of our national institutions with ambitions like this. Nicholas Hytner, too, argues for the theatre's uniquely connecting role: "What we do, and the reason we're here, is to say things which can't be articulated except in the way that we in the theatre articulate them. That sometimes involves the clash of great ideas, sometimes that involves a direct challenge to the way that society is currently constituted; sometimes it involves the rearticulation of eternal truths about human beings which can otherwise be stated only religiously." As for the audience, "they're more aware of those things when together watching them in a theatre than they ever are elsewhere. "
As for me, somewhere along the line of this argument, it became apparent that the exceptions to my gloomy prognosis had attained a critical mass. Within the variety of British theatre, the content and approaches do still connect, do still matter.
