State of play (on postwar British theatre)

When I was three and three-quarters, my parents first took me to the theatre. The play was Beauty and the Beast by Nicholas Stuart Grey, and at the first entrance ofthe masked and fearsome creature, I screamed the place down. Eventually, my behaviour became so disruptive that I had to be removed from the auditorium, and as, conveniently, my aunt was administrator of the theatre, I was escorted backstage to meet the now maskless beast in his dressing room, to shake his hand, to watch him put his mask on again, to shake his hand a second time, and to be taken back into

the auditorium. Thus reassured, on his next entrance, I screamed the place down.

I have had good experiences in the theatre since, but none quite like that. A year later I went to the same playhouse to see the same author's Tinder Box - a play full of sinister witches and huge dogs. But this time I was wise. I'd realised it was illusion. And I'd realised also that there was nothing in world I wanted to do more than helping to make those illusions. From the day the magic died - or more accurately, the day I realised that it was magic - I wanted to be up there with the magicians.

Between the ages of 13 and 19, however, I found my ambitions somewhat narrowed. Following a disastrous school performance as Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest - personally I blame the shoes - my mother concluded "well, it's not going to be acting, is it, dear". In subsequent years I realised - or was informed - that it was unlikely to be designing, directing nor stage management either. I came to writing therefore by process of elimination, it being - among other advantages, like being indoor work with no heavy lifting - the only theatrical craft which didn't involve daily interaction with other people.

There is a third defining date in my history. I was 20, and thus in my second year at university, in 1968, the year of the uprisings in Paris, the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. My experience of the world wide student revolt of the late 1960s gave me a mission for my work and indeed my life which has continued, through various processes of revision, up to the present day.

I want to talk about why that was and in my view remains a good decision. Why commentators - and some playwrights - who say that new writing is in decline are wrong. Why, over the last 60 years, the great questions of British society have been more consistently, rigorously and durably confronted in theatre than anywhere else. Of course, there have been peaks and troughs, periods in which film or television drama or the novel appeared to speak more prominently for the times. There have been short periods when new theatre writing and its social and political mission seemed to be stalled, when the energy moved into productions ofthe classics or experimental work.

But for all this, I still believe that, since the late 1950s, through at least five waves of new writing, British new plays have been at the cutting edge, rather than productions of Greek tragedies or Shakespeare or Chekhov. The late 1960s were a particularly fertile period for three reasons:

First, in addition to everything else, 1968 saw the abolition of stage censorship in the UK. Censorship had been instituted in the early 18th century to stop the political satires of Henry Fielding, and, in the 1960s, still prevented British playwrights from showing two men in bed together, mentioning venereal disease, criticising the Royal Family, insulting friendly foreign powers, or representing God. The government's powers over theatre were abolished in August 1968, enabling work of an overt sexual [and political) character, but also work that was topical or indeed improvised.

As a result of its abolition, there was a great expansion of state subsidy to small-scale theatre in the late 1960s, and an explosion of alternative theatre spaces - often in nonbuildings, in clubs and pubs and basement and attics. These new spaces had a huge appetite for new plays. It was rumoured that, in the early 1970s, it was possible to write a two-to-three hander [i.e. with two or three actors) lasting under an hour so terrible that no-one would put it on, but it was pretty hard. I never managed it. Finally, as a result of this, the directors of mainstream theatres began to programme more new work, often in small, studio theatres, rather than revivals of the classics.

The most important mainstream theatre for new writing was the Royal Court in London, which staged John Osborne's groundbreaking play Look Back in Anger in 1956. This play was in conscious opposition to a contemporary theatre defined by the drawing room comedy and the country house whodunnit. Look Back in Anger was defiantly set in the kitchen of a lower middle-class home in the Midlands, thereby naming both a genre (Kitchen Sink drama) and a protagonist (the Angry Young Man). Between them they represented a new class in Britain, seeking to escape from the narrow petit-bourgeois culture into which they had been born, something which wartime education and welfare legislation gave them the chance to do. So, for the first wave, Osborne, Arnold Wesker and in his way Harold Pinter, the big question was this: what would be the ultimate effect on British culture of the democratisation that had taken both the writers and their audiences out of the working and lower-middle-class and into the new intelligentsia?

My generation, the one that followed, was enabled by the abolition of censorship and the expansion of alternative theatre to create a theatre of outrage and rebellion, often outside theatre buildings - indeed, sometimes out of buildings altogether - often in collaboration with a new theatre form which came out of the art colleges and was then called performance art.

The spirit of that period was brought home to me most vividly by a particular event. I lived in the late 60s and early 70s in the northern wool town of Bradford, which had won the north of England franchise of the hippy counterculture, and which played host to a veritable garden of exotic theatrical flowers during the two immensely successful Bradford Festivals of l970 and l97l. (So successful were they, by the by, with so many people having such an obviously wonderful time, that the City authorities refused to finance a third, on the grounds that giving so many people so much unambiguous pleasure was clearly a gross abuse of public funds). Here, you would find performance artists careering around the city on pink bicycles ridden in aeronautic display formation; there, my friend Howard Brenton's play about Scott of the Antarctic was being performed in the ice rink, with myself playing the small but nonetheless significant role of the Almighty; while, somewhere else, the Welfare State performance troupe was enacting a pagan child's naming ceremony - with fire-eaters and real goats - in the Wool Exchange, and the Art College Group were staging a full-scale mock-up of an American Presidential election, with live elephant, in the streets of the city. And, somewhere else again, in clubs and pubs, small touring theatre groups were performing agit-prop plays and joining the general call for the overthrow of almost everything.

And I have to say that I believe that almost everything that has been good about British theatre in the years that followed - its boldness, its imagination, its commitment, its collective methods, its populism and accessibility - was exemplified in those festivals.

However, as the 1970s continued, this fragile unity between political theatre and performance art, between the verbal and the visual, the university and the art college, the theatre of thought and the theatre of imagination, began to splinter, as [first of all) the performance artists split off from political theatre makers to form their own performance circuits with their own devotees. Then there was the division within the playwrights themselves, as some remained committed to seeking a working-class audience outside theatre buildings, while others sought to make a career in the mainstream theatre, moving away from the streets and on to the stages of the great institutional theatres in London: the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, where many of us were welcomed.

If the so-called "State of England" plays that arose out of this process had a manifesto, it was to write big plays about public life set in contemporary England. Plays like David Hare's Plenty, about the class-bound nature of the diplomatic service, Howard Brenton's The Churchill Play, about the legacy of the wartime leader, and my Destiny, about the rise of a neofascist party in 1970s Britain, fitted this description. They also shared a model of postwar Britain and its story. Britain had been on the right side in the war against Hitler, but had squandered its moral capital afterwards. There'd been a chance after the war to create a genuine egalitarian, emancipatory socialism, but it was implemented too half-heartedly by the 1945-51 Labour government and the opportunity was lost. The country then held a kind of party in the 1950s and 1960s, squandering its post-imperial riches, and in the 1970s had gone into freefall political, economic, social and moral decline, at the end of which, it was assumed, final collapse would occur and an undefined socialist utopia would emerge phoenix-like from the ashes. And something new did indeed emerge at the end of the 1970s, but it sure as hell wasn't social utopia, but the resurgent conservatism of Margaret Thatcher. In theatre this had two results. In the state-funded theatre, reductions of subsidy led to the closure of a number of small companies, and more conservative programming. In the commercial theatre, the rise of a new form of the high-tech, through-composed contemporary musical [by Andrew Lloyd Webber and others) was massively successful in London's West End, New York's Broadway and around the world. In succession, musicals from this school - Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables - became the longest-running musicals ever. Like new playwriting, these musicals often had big subjects [revolution, dictatorship, war). But as they became less new, they changed the theatrical experience from cheap regular playgoing to an occasional slam-bang treat.

Obscured by all this, something profound was happening in the world of new plays. In the 1970s, playwriting was overwhelmingly male. In the 1980s, suddenly, it stopped being compulsory for British playwrights to be called Howard, David or John. In 1979, there were two currently-writing, nationally-known women writers in Britain [Pam Gems and Caryl Churchill). A decade later there were two or three dozen, writing plays which both took on male readings of history but also challenged the idea that women were inactive in the public world, and that politics stops at the front door.

Thus, by the early 90s, it was possible to argue that new writing was no longer the dominant theatre form, and might indeed be on the way out. The future - if theatre had a future - seemed to lie in allegedly experimental productions of the classics, big musicals, or shows constructed by performance groups, without any written text at all.

Of course this was all wrong.

In the mid-1990s there was a sudden explosion of new writing by young playwrights for whom the formative experience was not the student revolt or the feminist movement, but the long years of Margaret Thatcher, the AIDS crisis, social/industrial conflict, drug abuse and the growth of a dispossessed underclass. The playwrights speaking for this generation became known, variously, as the Bratpack, in-yer-face theatre, the New Brutalism, NeoJacobinism and, in continental Europe, New European Drama, and they had a transformative effect on British theatre. This work was characterised by being about young people, having a cool and sheeny style, and containing explicit sex, drug-use and violence. These writers also shared a subject. Both within and beyond the work of these writers, the mid-to-late-90s theatre addressed masculinity and its discontents as demonstrably as the plays of the early 1960s addressed class and those of the 1970s the failures of social democracy.

These plays spread through Europe. By the end of the century there was hardly a major German theatre which had not performed Sarah Kane's Blasted - set in a Leeds hotel room transformed into a Balkan war zone - or Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, the first but not the last play to use that word in its title, to the embarrassment of ticket sales staff across the continent. British theatre became unexpectedly fashionable, listed with pop, fashion, fine art and food among components of the new, supposedly "Cool Britannia". There was an increase in the number of new plays performed, up to between 15% and 20% of the repertoire. At the same time, playwrights from previous generations continued to write about the contemporary world. A number of us, excited by the changes in Eastern Europe, wrote plays set there (at one point, there was a rumour that Bucharest Airport had opened a dedicated British Playwrights' lounge). I wrote three such plays, and am now writing a fourth.

Critics of this positive reading of 1990s theatre pointed to what happened to in-yer-face theatre after the symbolic moment of Sarah Kane's tragic suicide in February 1999. Round about the turn of the century, it seemed that new writing had biodegraded into a succession of plays about young people shooting up and sounding off in south

London flats. But in the early years of the 21st century, theatre got a new subject and a new form. The 9/1 1 bombings and the rise of Islamist militancy and terrorism, followed by western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, led to a fifth wave of new writing. But confusion about what to think about these events led people away from fictional drama to plays based on fact.

The most notable form of this was dubbed "verbatim theatre" - for example, a series of edited dramatizations of significant trials and tribunals at the Tricycle Theatre in north London. Then there were factual plays like Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's Tricycle play Guantanamo: Honour bound to defend Freedom, based on edited interviews with prisoners, their relatives and lawyers, and the public record of statements by politicians. Other interview-based plays include Robin Soans' Arab-Israeli Cookbook and Life after Scandal. Further along the fact-fiction spectrum lies David Hare's Stuff Happens, which joined up the dots of the events from the 9/1 1 attacks through to the Iraq invasion.

Many of these plays had considerable, and proper impact. Campaigns were mounted against them by The Times, which suggested that theatres should be obliged to present the same kind of balance between different points of view required of the BBC. There was particular concern about treatments of the conflict in Israel/Palestine.

But although powerful journalistically, verbatim drama is, theatrically, strangely bloodless. Certainly, fact-based theatre calls attention to, and thus questions, the validity and credibility of the evidence on which we base our view of the world. By its nature, verbatim drama constantly reminds you that it is based on the evidence of inevitably partial individuals. Unlike naturalistic drama, which invites us to suspend disbelief, verbatim drama wears its sources on its sleeve. Unlike journalism, testimony theatre can be simultaneously reliant on and suspicious of its raw materials. But you could argue that its deliberate antitheatricality - often the big question at a verbatim play is,

"will the actors be sitting on stools or chairs?" - allows their makers off the hook. The point about writing fiction (even about the great issues of the day) is that you can present a thesis unencumbered by factual specifics. One advantage of verbatim theatre is that you can present factual specifics unencumbered by a thesis.

So I was relieved when, as the 2000s developed, playwrights moved away from strict verbatim and towards more fictionalised treatments of the great issues of the age. David Hare charts his own progression along this trajectory, from the strictly verbatim Permanent Way (an interview play about the decline of Britain's railways) via Stuff Happens (in which what can be verified is, but fiction starts with the closure of the door) to Gethsemane, a fictionalised version of the then Labour government, in which the leader is like but not Tony Blair. The biggest hit of 2015 was Mike Bartlett's play Charles III, which although about the real Royal Family is set in the future, after the Queen dies, and thus entirely fictional. A number of women writers - Lucy Prebble, Laura Wade and Lucy Kirkwood among them -have been writing the kind of big, public, polemical play which used to be exclusively associated with men.

But the main feature of the last 15 years has been the sheer volume and variety of new writing. At the turn of the century, new work represented about 20% of the repertoire of the British theatre. By 2008 it had more than doubled to 42%. The latest research shows that it's well over 50%. For the first time since records were kept, new plays have overtaken revivals. If you go to the theatre in England you are more likely than not to see a piece of new writing -whether a new play, a new adaptation or a new translation, than a new play.

Why? The reasons include those I listed earlier, including the commitment of directors to the new. In addition, there has been consistent pressure from arts funding bodies on theatres to encourage theatres to do new work. This has now paid off, and is a great success story for public subsidy. Then there is the rise of playwriting studies as a university subject. I founded the first full-time postgraduate playwriting course in 1989. Such courses have now mushroomed; there are well over 100 courses devoted either to playwriting or screenwriting or both, as well as creative writing courses offering stage writing as an option. This phenomenon led to the development of a language for talking about play structure, and an increase in the number and the influence of literary managers in theatres, encouraging new work.

There are however some clouds on the horizon. There have been huge cut-backs in state funding of theatre in the last years, and even more in prospect for the next. Thus far, theatre has survived austerity remarkably well - successful initatives include the live streaming of popular National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company shows to cinemas. But there may come a tipping point when the cuts seriously impact on the amount and quality of work.

For playwrights, there has been an academic fashion, growing for twenty years or so, to dismiss the individually-written text - whether old or new - in favour of work devised by actors. This hostility to writing has a critical dimension [the post-modern ambition to dethrone the author) and an artistic dimension [work devised by actors being seen as more avant-garde) but also a political aspect: the written text is seen as authoritarian and undemocratic, and thus inherently reactionary. There has been a considerable backlash against these arguments - much of it from me - but theatre students continue to emerge from universities having been told that the text is old hat, and thus having read and understood very little of the dramatic tradition.

For now, as I said, the newly-written play is in the ascendant. Nonetheless, as cuts bite, playwrights face the traditional threat from cheaper and more sure-fire classical revivals, and now from work devised by actors and directors. As you'd expect, I think that would impoverish theatre.

How to sum up all of this? There have been five waves of playwrights: first, the angry young men of the late 1950s; second, a group of young playwrights radicalised by the 1960s who analysed what they - we - saw as the decline of postwar Britain and posed a drastic solution. Then, third, a cohort of young women writers emerged, who put the concerns of feminism centre-stage, looking at contemporary Britain and history through female eyes. Fourth, an energetic and angry school of playwrights who'd grown up under Margaret Thatcher presented an excoriating picture of the society she'd produced. Fifth and finally, there were a series of responses to 9/11 and the war on terror, increasing confident of a dynamic relationship between fact and fiction.

Between them, these waves for writing led to a redefinition of British theatre: no longer predominantly a museum of the great works of the past, but a place where contemporary writing addresses the great issues of the time. I think my decision to enter and remain in this business was a good one.

About twenty years ago, the National Theatre presented Keith Dewhurst's blistering adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakhov's satirical novel Black Snow (Театраьный роман), which contains a scene in which a young Russian playwright visits the great director Stanislavksi to discuss his script. The elderly maestro is joined by his even more elderly aunt who proceeds to inquire as to the purpose of the meeting. "Leonti Sergeyevich has brought me a play", the director announces. "Whose play?" enquires the aunt. "Leonti Sergeyevich has written the play himself" says the director. "But why?" demands the aunt. "Aren't there enough plays already? There are so many good plays in the world, it would twenty years to act them all. Why put yourself to all the trouble writing of a new one"? "Ah", says the Director, "but Leonti Sergeyevich has written a modern play". To which his aunt responds: "But we have nothing against the government".

British playwrights have been characterised above all by their political, cultural, religious and ethnic diversity. But all of them have in common that when they wrote them their plays were new, modern, and had something against the government. Long may it so remain.

State of Play

David Edgar

Playwright, Great Britain

Положение драмы

Дэвид Эдгар,

Драматург, Великобритания