With Broadway theatres afraid to mention child-killers, politics, Aids or 9/11, radical playwrights from the US are flocking to Soho, Battersea and Edinburgh
When the New York Times critic saw Peter Morris's play The Age of Consent at the Bush Theatre in London in 2002, he proclaimed him the voice of a new generation of angry young men in British theatre. It was a great write-up; the only problem is that Morris is from Philadelphia, USA.
That was, in fact, the first time that Morris's home country had shown the slightest interest in his work. With its controversial portrayal of a child-killer, The Age of Consent brought him to the attention of the public; since then, Morris has built a reputation as one of America's most exciting political playwrights. But the United States doesn't want to stage his plays.
"I really don't have any choice but to continue working in London because the kind of stuff I want to write won't be produced in the US," says Morris, whose play Guardians, based on allegations of torture at Abu Ghraib, was a word-of-mouth hit at last year's Edinburgh Festival. He started writing plays in 1998; all have premièred in Britain and only one has made it to New York. It is a situation in which an increasing number of his contemporaries find themselves.
Just ask Christopher Shinn, whose post-9/11 work Where Do We Live confirmed that he is one of the most talented playwrights to emerge in the past decade from New York, where he still lives. His plays, which examine the fragmentation of society, are set almost exclusively in urban America; yet five out of seven, including his most recent, Dying City, have opened in the UK.
For two years Shinn's plays were rejected by theatres all over America. As a last resort, he bought a cheap flight to the UK and spent two days distributing copies to every theatre he could. "I would have stopped writing had I not been discovered by the Royal Court," he says. "I had two plays I knew were better than 98 per cent of the plays produced over here and nobody wanted them. I can only wonder how many other American playwrights just stop."
Shinn, who teaches playwriting at the re nowned New School for Drama in New York, encourages his students to send their work to British theatres. "But I often feel very hopeless for them. Because not every American playwright is going to get their work put on at the Soho or the Bush or the Royal Court."
A brief glance at Broadway confirms that the American market for political theatre is at an all-time low. Domestic dramas dominate; the Tony Awards are bypassing the middleman and going straight to British practitioners. And although no one seriously expects commercial theatres - which are sponsored by large corporations - to champion provocative writing ("Everybody knows you don't bite the hand that feeds you," says Shinn), the subscription theatres, the not-for-profit venues which are the breeding ground for new work, seem to be losing their nerve.
It is the subscription system itself which, the playwrights argue, is causing the problem. Without serious arts funding, theatres survive by selling advance "subscription" tickets to an entire season of plays. Unwilling to risk ticket sales, theatres play safe with their programming. "If you've done nothing but whimsical, touching family sagas and one year you decide to do, say, Shopping and F***ing, and it terrifies and alienates people, then you find yourself with a reduced budget of 20 per cent," says Morris. "The system has essentially homogenised Broadway and it has meant that politics is something that theatres avoid."
"They feel that their wealthy subscribers want a nice evening," agrees Gina Gionfriddo, who won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for female playwrights in 2002 but is now working in television. "They become reluctant to put something in front of them that's really going to challenge their belief system." Gionfriddo has become frustrated by the time it takes to get a play staged in the US, where theatres routinely programme a couple of years in advance. When After Ashley, her satire on the media traffic in tragedy, was staged last year, critics complained that it was out of date. "In television, there is the opportunity to address the immediate crisis at hand," she says.
The critics are another problem. Almost without exception, US reviews of Shinn's plays have chosen to ignore their exploration of social forces and treated them as purely psychological dramas. Shinn believes that theatre critics and practitioners alike are lacking a political vocabulary. "If you're American and you don't think capitalism affects you, then you won't think it affects characters in a play. In America we prefer to talk about the play in a psychological language, and not even a very vigorous one."
American society has bred a theatrical tradition that prefers its characters self-governing. "It really does come down to ideology," says Shinn. "In America we focus on the individual as an autonomous unit." The cultural effect is best seen in the film and TV fantasy narratives that loom large in American storytelling, in which superheroes and ordinary men succeed against all odds, relying on nothing but personal motivation. As Shinn puts it: "The last thing film and TV want is a political exploration of social forces."
Peter Morris believes that the American playwriting tradition has yet to pull itself out of that narrow focus. "It's a crude generalisation," he says, "but European theatre asks, 'What's wrong with society? What's wrong with the world?' And American theatre asks, 'What's wrong with my family?'" Even Arthur Miller had to hide his excoriating political messages inside domestic dramas such as Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge. American audiences, it seems, aren't ready to engage with the external forces that shape their lives.
While Tony Kushner and Naomi Wallace have managed to make their names despite the general climate, they, too, had to begin in the UK. People in the US have been quick to forget that Angels in America, the long-running Broadway hit about Aids, got a gig in New York only after transferring from the National Theatre in London. Ironically, black playwrights are the only group finding real freedom to pursue political and social issues in the US theatrical arena.
"A black person in America knows that to be black affects your life, so that's part of the discussion," says Shinn. "Race is less invisible than the effects of capitalism and the free market." But Morris warns that even black writers are trammelled into narrow areas. "It's very interesting - and puzzling - that there are no white characters in August Wilson's plays."
As James Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, proved with his "postponement" of My Name Is Rachel Corrie back in February, even the most progressive of venues is beginning to get cold feet when it comes to politics. The Lincoln Centre and the Manhattan Theatre Club are just two of the venues to have turned down Morris's comedy Pro Bono Publico, in which a wealthy corporate lawyer finds he has misgivings about representing a pharmaceutical company. The grounds are that it is "too hard a sell for a New York audience".
"From theatres and from agents, I have this immense interest," laughs Morris. "They think that when I calm down and start writing pleasant, whimsical family dramas I'll be harnessing my talent for real purposes." Until then, Morris is continuing his exile in Britain and Shinn will continue to prepare his students for the worst.
Stage invasion
This country's experimental theatres don't just attract American playwrights, they provide Broadway with some of its best productions:
Look Back in Anger John Osborne - 1958
One of the first British exports to the American stage. Audiences gasped at the sight of a solitary ironing board, the epitome of British working-class banality.
Noises Off Michael Frayn - 1983, 2001
Broadway loved this thoroughly English romp, complete with slamming doors, secret trysts and a host of "endearingly eccentric" theatrical characters.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane Martin McDonagh - 1998
This ex-Royal Court production, set in a drab village in Connemara and concerning mother/daughter feuds over lumpy porridge, won ecstatic reviews.
Sweeney Todd Stephen Sondheim - 2005
The Watermill Theatre's revival of the macabre musical scooped two Tony awards after transferring to Broadway from the West End.
The History Boys Alan Bennett - 2006
This tale of a teacher's wandering hands was the surprise star of this year's Tonys: it won six overall and has had its Broadway run extended.
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