I spent quite a lot of last year in the dark. Watching more than 70 plays from the front stalls over 12 months is an experience that might be calculated to put you off theatre for the rest of your life. But it didn’t.
I now know for sure that there are good plays out there, and not only in the well-known places. As a judge on the Olivier Awards theatre and musicals panel, I found an extended tour of the West End turned upside down my assumption, drawn from endless doom-laden commentary, that London theatre is in terminal danger.
It isn’t. British drama is in very fine shape and taking many different shapes. Some London theatres are in danger — but that is a quite different thing. Several West End theatres deserve to be in danger for the simple reason that the buildings are poky, uncomfortable and dingy and their catering arrangements would disgrace Her Majesty’s Prisons. I could go on.
I will. Here are a few myths regularly spun about the theatre which deserve to be unspun.
Myth No 1: “Audiences desert theatreland” (The Sunday Times, December 2004).
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No they don’t. Close to 12 million people went to the theatre in London last year: 32,000 people a night. That figure wasn’t down on the previous year, but up. More people go to the theatre in London than in New York; no other city in the world comes close to those twin capitals of the English-speaking play. Nor is there a crisis in the drama itself, of inventiveness, risk-taking or in the generation of new material. Of those 72 plays I watched, 31 were new, almost all of them being done for the first time anywhere.
Plays fail and close, but that is not a decline: it is the normal order of business in a naturally precarious market. The commercial theatres of the West End are under constant pressure because many theatergoers prefer the subsidised theatres. Naturally, the quangocrats make invidious, and perhaps wrong, judgments and allocations. No arts quango has ever been invented that can make nimble judgments about the volatile cocktail of taste, invention and money which is theatre production. Both the commercial and subsidised theatres need to complain that they need more money to survive. Hence the ceaseless chorus about “decline”.
Myth No 2: The West End is British theatre.
The West End is not even all of London theatre, let alone a cipher for the rest of the country. Drama keeps escaping from the theatres built to hold it. There was an Agamemnon on the waterfront steps by Tower Bridge last year and notable productions in new theatres such as the Menier Chocolate Factory, the Arcola in Dalston and the Union in Southwark. The National Theatre even lent its support to a production, Tropicana, by the Shunt company in the vaults underneath London Bridge station. The production, alas, was terrible.
Myth No 3: It’s all vapid musicals and no political bite.
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Last spring, angry articles denounced the absence of plays about Iraq. These writers had failed to notice that a lot of Iraq stuff was about to happen. Some, like Guantanamo and Stuff Happens, tackled the war direct; others, like Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender, were about modern war but not about Iraq. Others dealt with the timeless themes of violence and statecraft. Indeed, the older the war play, the better it was. Journey’s End , although almost impossible to detach from its First World War context, has hit a nerve with a new generation. Both Iphigenia at Aulis and Hecuba were done in productions to remind us of modern agonies, but resounded at a much deeper level, well beyond the present.
Myth No 4: Big names pull in punters
Only up to a point. Christian Slater may be making One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a hit and Kevin Spacey’s dedication to the Old Vic keeps everybody curious, but those two are megastars. The lesser lights struggled. As most critics said, Holly Hunter didn’t master an Irish accent in By the Bog of Cats, but fewer among them pointed out that the play itself was a turkey. The stage version of When Harry Met Sally was a fiasco. That foolishness was capped only by the eccentric decision to cast a very American comedy, The Solid Gold Cadillac, entirely with English actors whose New York accents were no better than Holly Hunter’s oirish. Also of note: the year brought many sparkling roles for ladies of mature years. Annette Crosbie in The Night Season, Judi Dench in All’s Well That Ends Well, Kate Fahy in The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, Barbara Jefford acting Peter Bowles and Edward Fox off the stage in Old Masters . . .
During my long march through the West End foyers, I read the diaries of Richard Eyre, the director of the National Theatre in the 1990s. He is haunted throughout the book by the vast size of the auditoriums he has to fill. And I came to find that while shows like The Producers and the dramatised His Dark Materials need big theatres, the more intimate places like the Donmar, the Almeida and the Royal Court connected more immediately with their audiences. The Donmar even managed the extraordinary feat of pulling off a thrilling musical, Grand Hotel, in its very confined space.
Lastly, a piece of advice to anyone who still thinks that theatre needs rescuing from imminent disaster. Somebody should create an award for Best New Audience. A few times last year I went into a theatre and just knew that most of the people there were doing something they didn’t usually do. The National Theatre mounted a two-play version of Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, now back in the repertory. The audience was almost as exciting as the plays: the vast cavern of the Olivier Theatre filled to the edges with bubbling teenagers.
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At the other end of the scale, the small Arts Theatre staged Hurricane, a compelling one-man show about Alex Higgins, the wild boy of snooker. That audience drank beer, answered their mobile phones and went out for a pee when they felt like it. The play felt more like a nightclub. That audience was watching drama as fine as anything you can find. And they hardly knew they were at a play in a theatre.
The author is Saturday Editor of The Times and was a member of the Olivier Awards theatre and musicals panel. These are personal views