National crisis

Published 16 September 2002

Visiting celebrities and directors' mounting egos have brought London theatre to an all-time low, writes Sheridan Morley, our new theatre critic

Taking over the New Statesman theatre column, which in its time has had such distinguished occupants as Benedict Nightingale and Ronald Bryden, is for me a kind of homecoming. My father, Robert, despite looking like a staunchly Conservative old buffer on stage and screen, was, in fact, a lifelong Fabian socialist and NS reader. He believed Bernard Shaw to have been the only saint he ever met, and took considerable delight in later years, when asked to speak at ladies' luncheon clubs and the like, in announcing that Thatcher was the greatest evil to have befallen Britain during his long lifetime.

In general, London theatre reviewing seems to me as good if not better now than at any time in my working life of nearly four decades. True, I have twice had the irritating misfortune (once at the old Punch and once more recently at the Spectator), of being replaced by writers of breathtaking inexperience and consequent unreadability, but they happily were the exceptions. Our problem is not, in fact, the messengers but the writers and producers of the message.

The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer has complained in The Stage that current hits such as Vincent in Brixton and the Tom Stoppard trilogy at the National Theatre have been far too overpraised, and that this may well reflect the low standard of London theatre writing today.

As Trevor Nunn moves into his last six months at the National before handing over to Nicholas Hytner, arts pages will start to fill with tributes to his six-year management, and while I would be the last to grudge him those, it is also important, and not only for Hytner, to look back at those areas where he has failed.

The Stoppard sequence, at nine hours, is clearly about three hours too long, and a director less in love with marathon evenings in the theatre would have done the cycle a considerable service by cutting it back - even the good Nunn productions could always do with some severe pruning.

Trevor Nunn has allowed the musicals policy to become a shambles: the original idea of the Cameron Mackintosh Foundation grant was, as I understood it, to give us at the National great scores which for one reason or another could not be afforded by the West End. The other prime function was to give us radical new looks at shows we thought we knew, and certainly some of the earlier choices, the Sondheims and Carousel, and Lady in the Dark (albeit horrendously miscast), fitted that bill.

But Nunn's stagings of Oklahoma and South Pacific and My Fair Lady have no place in the National repertoire and should always have been produced where most of them ended up, in the West End or on Broadway.

There are those actors within Nunn's towering achievement at the National, the ensemble company of 1999/2000, who maintain that with rather better forward planning, it could have been maintained instead of falling embarrassingly apart in its second year. The problem with Nunn, and it is one I hope Hytner will somehow avoid, was that at times he was too eager to run the National as if it were a commercial management, hence the fiasco of Martine McCutcheon's non-appearances in My Fair Lady. He would claim, and has, that the National has to reach out to a new and younger audience, but all you achieve in overstretching a soap opera star is disappointing her telly fans, none of whom are likely to see another National show anyway. Like Madonna in the West End, it was a gimmick that backfired. You can't turn teenage TV fans into a theatre audience overnight; by trying to attract them, you risk deterring loyal theatregoers.

This summer's costly and temporary rebuild of the Lyttle- ton into two smaller spaces (all of which now has, equally expensively, to be torn down for the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Glenn Close), has not really produced major works except possibly Matthew Bourne's balletic Play Without Words. Any or all of the other plays would have fitted easily into the Cottesloe, a third stage built precisely to encourage such studio-type work.

Running a whole batch of new plays (several of which had no place anywhere near a National Theatre), for an average of only ten or twenty performances overcrowded the schedule, confused theatregoers and made it almost impossible to catch even those plays you might have wanted to see. Another idea for Hytner to avoid repeating at all costs.

So, on a broader scale, what else do we need to do?

Answer: get Blair away from his obsession with the movies, at which we are fundamentally crap, and persuade him to honour at least some of his promises to pour money into what we do best, which is still as it always has been: the theatre. On stage, we are what Bordeaux is to the world wine industry.

We need to give young dramatists the chance and the courage to face up to the present regime and start to write again about the way we live now, instead of living in terror that no subsidised company will rock the Blair boat with a few home truths.

Topical political theatre, devastated for some reason by the Thatcher years, is still nowhere near back to its Sixties and Seventies best, despite the lonely efforts of David Hare and one or two others, and where it can be found, if at all, is usually now on the very fringes of the fringe, or way outside the capital.

We live in a directors' theatre, and while I am not suggesting that it is always worse than the actors' theatre in which I grew up, I do think this pre-eminence has become unhealthy. Directors barely existed in the British theatre until the Second World War: "Sit down, dear boy," my father once told a young Peter Brook in rehearsal, "and we'll find you something to do in a minute."

Now, directors call all the shots as in movies, and they are usually as desperate as actors to become stars. Why else would Priestley's An Inspector Calls have been relocated to a nuclear beach, if not because a director knows that she is unlikely to make a name with a conventional revival? Indeed, large numbers of mid- 20th-century British dramatists are today neglected simply because they fail to provide (or their estates decline to authorise) a radical make-over.

We no longer have a definable "Royal Court" school of writers, which may be no great loss, but the problem for young dramatists is that before they can get an audience they have to find a director, and more often than not that director wishes to be the dominant star in the rehearsal room. The idea of letting the author speak uninterrupted by any "concept" from the director is now largely unknown. Just as Olivier and Wolfit overbalanced a lot of good writing by making sure their parts mattered more than the whole, so we are now in danger of allowing the director too much control. Sometimes even the designer becomes the dominant star, and you have only to look at the current shambles of the Coliseum and Covent Garden to see the dangers lying along that route.

We need to return to a playwrights' and perhaps even an actors' theatre, one in which a dramatist no longer has to send his or her play in to a theatre where it will probably not get read for a year, and even then only staged if it suits the current mood of the administration. A theatre does not need an agenda: it just needs to stage the best plays, new or old, that it can lay its hands on.

Virtually every major producing house in the country (the National, RSC, Chichester, Almeida, Hampstead, Donmar Warehouse, Glasgow Citz, West Yorkshire Playhouse and that's just for starters) is currently undergoing some kind of delayed millennial change, but the new men and women there are inheriting chalices as often as not poisoned, or at least severely tainted. The Arts Council, more concerned with saving itself than any of its clients, stood around impotently while Adrian Noble, like a mad Roman emperor, was allowed to pull down the RSC. While the Society of London Theatre, that most impotent of trade associations, has to be among the worst. Because its membership consists entirely of rival impresarios, who, by all accounts, spend meetings bickering among themselves or shoring up their own positions, it is worse than useless as a lobby group.

As things stand, no actor (as I know to my cost, having turned director five years ago) really wants to work in the West End. Parking problems, backstage conditions, low salaries all make it attractive only to visiting American movie stars and those who cannot find alternative employment in the vastly easier and more comfortable conditions of film or television - even radio offers better roles and happier surroundings.

Far too many of these visiting Americans have learnt the studio-stage trick: between movies, announce that you are graciously going to appear live on a small London stage, preferably the Donmar or the Almeida. Your name alone sells enough tickets in advance to ensure a sell-out six-week season. If you are talented, or the play is any good, you then move to a larger London theatre, and after that to Broadway itself. If you are a flop, you can still return to Hollywood truthfully announcing that you have played a sold-out season in the West End. Either way, your price for the next movie goes up by about $1m. This month, Equity finally found the courage to ask Trevor Nunn if Glenn Close was really a sensible way to spend taxpayers' money. As usual, it was a question they should have been asking five or ten years ago.

Anything else? Well, yes. All theatres should open on Sundays and close on Mondays, as they have in America these past 60 years; all plays should start at 8pm with matinees at 3pm on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Having every theatre invent its own starting times and matinee days, and then change them without notice from show to show, is yet one more reason why most people avoid going to the theatre.

As for me, I still believe what Kenneth Tynan taught me as an admiring undergraduate: critics are not supposed to be professors of drama. We are traffic police, sent out to report on what is happening in certain theatres on certain nights. What was the result? Who got hurt? Who survived and how did they manage it?

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