The playwright’s still the thing
|
Version 0 of 1. Something remarkable has happened in British theatre. For the first time in at least a century, new work has overtaken revivals of old plays in the repertoire. In the broadest ever survey of professional productions presented in British theatres, new work constituted 59% of all productions, 64% of all performances, 63% of all seats sold and 66% of all box office income. For my generation of playwrights, starting out in the early 70s, this news is particularly sweet. Many of us began working with small, experimental companies. Wanting to hold up a mirror to contemporary British society, we sought to break on to large stages, but confronted a theatre culture still dominated by revivals of Shakespeare and the classical repertoire. Credit must go to Peter Hall at the National Theatre and Trevor Nunn at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who opened their stages to new plays – including David Hare’s Plenty, Howard Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness and my Destiny. But overall the proportion remained stubbornly low. In 2005 a group of young playwrights – including Richard Bean, David Eldridge and Moira Buffini – founded the Monsterists, to campaign for productions of their plays on large stages. As they, and others, eventually saw their plays on the National’s largest stage, the Monsterists were a success. But playwrights became increasingly concerned that the kind of experimental company they’d learned their craft with was no longer using playwrights to write shows but devising them from scratch themselves. Having battled, as we saw it, for new work against old, we sensed the drawing of a new fault line, between a dusty, out-of-date text-based drama (everything from Electra to Educating Rita) and a vibrant, innovative theatre based on devising and physically-based performance. In 2005, Guardian critic Lyn Gardner’s article celebrating the Edinburgh fringe programme was headlined “Playwrights? They’re so last year”. By 2007, Arts Council England had dropped its previous emphasis on new writing in favour of “experimental practice and interdisciplinary practice, circus and street arts”. Why would you want to give emphasis to a theatre form that was yesterday’s news? Except that it wasn’t. In 2009 the British Theatre Consortium (of which I’m a member) surveyed 65 subsidised theatres to find that the proportion of new work in the repertoire had risen from 20% to over 40%. Our study, due out next month, covers 273 subsidised and commercial auditoriums and shows that new work constitutes the majority of productions, performances, attendances and income. Even in the largest auditoriums – 500+ seats – over half of play attendances were for new writing. So to put it mildly, the death of the British playwright has been greatly exaggerated: 2013 brought Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica, Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, and Rachel De-lahay’s Routes. A fortnight ago Lyn Gardner celebrated “playwriting in all its rich variety”. However, there are two clouds on the horizon. The most immediate is the prospects for theatre repertoire as a result of swingeing cuts in subsidy. In 2013, playwright Fin Kennedy produced In Battalions, a report which showed how theatres were cutting back on commissioning and developing plays. Work presented in 2013 was commissioned before the cuts fully kicked in. It is perfectly possible that 2013 may prove a peak in new work production, and that from now on it’s back downhill. The second cloud is this. Playwrights’ concerns about work devised by performers is not just about protecting the presence of their craft within the industry (although it would be interesting to see the response of directors or designers to the idea that their jobs could be done collectively). It’s that, for at least a generation, there has been an orthodoxy in university theatre departments that playwriting is an inherently hierarchical practice, promoting a false and reactionary view of the world. The root of this was the ambition of university drama departments founded in the 60s and 70s to distinguish themselves from English departments by paying attention to performance. But performance became ideologised by poststructuralist theory, which, hostile to the claims of theatre to represent the real, dismissed the playwriterly skills of characterisation and narrative, and thus created – as Birmingham University’s Liz Tomlin puts it – an “ideological alignment of text-based work as ‘reactionary’ and non-text-based work as ‘radical’”. Hence a concentration on a small number of performance companies – like Sheffield’s Forced Entertainment and New York’s Wooster Group – and playtexts conducive to analysis by critical theory. As a consequence, the range of study has not expanded but contracted.By 2007, academics like Steve Bottoms of Manchester were noting how this new orthodoxy was detaching the academy further and further from mainstream theatre. In a 2013 edition of a leading academic theatre journal, tutors in three major universities revealed that they discourage young playwrights from linear, dramatised narrative, inventing convincing characters or developing a personal vision or voice. Behind this is the presumption that the individually authored text is politically reactionary (for one scholar, “xenophobic”), because the very process produces work that is naturalistic, linear and imprisoned behind the fourth wall. Why does this matter? Well, because these ideas spread into the industry, contributing to a climate in which, by the mid-2000s, two of the leading progressive venues in London could proudly declare themselves script-free zones. The notion of new writing, often clamped by warning quote marks, was narrowed down to particular kinds of small-cast naturalistic play, exploring social issues in contemporary urban settings. In reality, the divide between performance and text-based theatre was and is being breached by playwrights like Bryony Lavery, Abi Morgan, Dan Rebellato and David Greig, who have worked and are working with performance companies like Frantic Assembly, Lightwork and Suspect Culture. Plays at the Domnar take the form of seminars, and at the Royal Court lectures. And the idea that the individual writer is trapped within linear narrative and picture-frame settings is belied by the work of Simon Stephens, Martin Crimp and Caryl Churchill. The fact that playwrights are finding new ways of working creates an opportunity to concentrate on what they can do rather on what, allegedly, they can’t. The revival of all of the late Sarah Kane’s plays at Sheffield, a season that starts next Wednesday, is an opportunity to revisit work which has spread across the world, demonstrating Kane’s extraordinary structural and dialogic skills as well as reinventing what constitutes a play. Now that new work is predominant, it’s time to dismantle narrow ideological prejudices and to acknowledge the different skills that go to make up a collaborative art form which has so successfully shown society to itself. That’s not all that theatre does, or should do, but it’s one of the things British theatre does best. • David Edgar is curating a series of events about playwriting at Oxford next week. The interim report, British Theatre Repertoire 2013, is available here. |