Morning:
8°c
I am an addict; this week I give up my 17-and-a-half-year habit. I know I will suffer severe withdrawal symptoms. My addiction is not simply play-going. No. For all these years my addiction has been the regular surrender to first night sensations.
There is nothing quite like it - the wary, expectant sense of excitement that pervades each opening night. You are there to watch theatre people risking almost all.
I stand now Janus-like, looking back at the London theatre world I am poised to leave and ahead to the future. Our theatres, especially the West End playhouses, have struggled to survive in changing times. Access to video, DVD and multi-channel TV has meant more people entertain themselves at home.
Faced with the fiercely rising costs of producing plays and musicals, producers have understandably preferred to gamble on the escapist lure of musicals. It has become so difficult to make money on West End straight plays which run for short, limited seasons. The musical is vital to the London scene, a source of infinite pleasure for mass audiences. I'm not altogether immune to the charms of the genre. Nicholas Hytner's production of Carousel and Richard Eyre's of Guys and Dolls were high points of my theatre-going life.
A balance, though, has not been properly struck. The new play in the West End has remained an endangered species all through the Nineties and Noughties. The subsidised theatre has set the theatrical tone by dreaming of worlds less angry, selfish and material. My benchmark plays, both at the National, have been Stephen Daldry's extraordinary resuscitation of JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls, with its Edwardian villa literally collapsing, and the recent Pitmen Painters, a troop of 1930s miners who realised culture did not have to be for a monied elite.
I was never close to money or an elite but one club at my school encouraged theatre-going. I saw the RSC making its London debut with Peggy Ashcroft's Duchess of Malfi giving me my first, overwhelming experience of Jacobean drama. Weeks later she and John Gielgud took part in a play and dramatist of which I had only heard - The Cherry Orchard. I was transfixed by them - brother and sister giving a goodbye to their estate and the old life. I was smitten by theatre.
The theatre world that I came to as a critic in 1991 was already feeling chill economic winds. Stars, with eyes cocked on the next film opportunity, do not now want to stay long in the underpaid theatre world. From the 1930s until the late 1960s, stars of the lost, great Olivier-Gielgud-Richardson-Edith Evans-Peggy Ashcroft generation enjoyed great box-office pulling power in the commercial West End - as long as they were appearing in classics or admired new plays. Since the Nineties, though, there have been far fewer big-theatre stars.
Increasingly these dazzlers have been reluctant to play for long periods either in the not-very-well-paid West End or at the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where far more money goes on sets than on actors. Only the stars of musicals have managed to make serious money in the West End. Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Ian McKellen may well prove to be the last generation of actors with box-office pulling power.
There is no easy, immediate answer. Many artistic directors, producers and actors survive through the stimulus of intermittent crisis. I believe it will continue to be so. There seems to be no other way. Some changes would help. The Arts Council, that conduit for millions of government money to theatre, looks ripe for dissolution if the Tories return to power.
Better that government takes direct responsibility for funding decisions than leaves the decisions to a coterie of unelected bureaucrats. A new government ought also to ensure that the West End playhouses are protected from redevelopers and their interiors saved from further decay. In the not-too-distant future, no new plays will be premiered in the West End unless central government decides to help fund commercial drama, by setting up an investment fund, sharing in any profits made.
For new theatre writing and new theatre forms matter most. The Nineties were blooded with a resurgence of plays rich in the British theatre's traditional menu of horror and violence, spiced up with a fresh infusion of sex ever since the end of theatre censorship in 1968. The critic Aleks Sierz coined the nice phrase In-Yer-Face theatre and it reminds me what a hot time it was to be first-nighting in the Nineties: young playwrights resorted to shock tactics to remind us of the violent times in which we lived.
It was primarily, though not exclusively, at the Royal Court under Stephen Daldry's brief regime that first nights became freighted once more with the shock of the new. I remember the amazement that greeted Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, whose title reflected the driving aspirations of that less-than-lovely decade. Its masochistic rentboy was a perfect anti-hero for the time.
I missed the first night of Sarah Kane's Blasted, whose Jacobean cocktail of sex, violence and horror induced queasy stomachs. When I saw the play later I thought it had all the quality of a timeless nightmare - a Leeds hotel turned into a battle-zone.
At the end of 1995, I wrote: "This was the year in which the theatre caught up with increasingly violent, alienated Britain ... No theatre should flinch from presenting serious plays which may incite revulsion and dismay."
There has been no flinching and plenty of inciting ever since. Philip Ridley, one of the best and earliest of the In-Yer-Facers, made me, for the first time in my theatre-going life, feel sick when I saw his Mercury Fur at the Chocolate Factory. Writers, directors and designers of this generation have taken daring, welcome leaps away from the confines of realism and into the spectacular worlds of expressionism.
This drive for change has been a seductive aesthetic choice of the period. You notice the transformation in the work of the best directors. Rupert Goold's astounding version of Macbeth, which restored its lost supernatural elements and the sheer sense of terror, is a prime example. So too is Katie Mitchell's glorious re-imagining of ancient Greek classics. Her Trojan Women and Iphigenia at Aulis at the National were possessed by the barbarities of contemporary warfare.
I cling now to one simple conviction: that the best hope for the theatrical future in London lies in encouraging the state-subsidised and commercial theatre worlds to work together and to help each other.
By ending their destructive rivalry and competitive urges, the theatres of London could become more exciting and rewarding places. My revels now are ended. I have loved them.
Reader views (3)
My addiction IS play-going, as you call it. I live in Germany, but I have been to a different play in London, mostly off-West End, I admit, on average every month for the past twelve years, by coming over for three days at a time four times a year. It is a question of priority mostly. I know that appreciation for the theatre can't be instilled, but I do wish there were more crazy (or idealistic, you name it) people to keep the theatres alive, both on stage and in the audience. Bring on the men in white coats!
- Tania Danilenko, Cologne, Germany, 22/04/2009 13:19
Report abuse
What planet are you on Mr De Jongh? West End theatre is 90% musical trash and 10% unwatchable agitprop modernist grunge. Prices are sky high and people go only out of a sense of cultural duty to, and respect for, the past - yet all this signifies theatre is in a healthy state, does it? Send for the men in white coats, you need 'em Nicholas!
- James Murphy, Petersfield, 17/04/2009 14:40
Report abuse
Live theatre is too expensive.
- Bloke, London, 17/04/2009 11:24
Report abuse
