New Theatre

Being much too young to remember the Fifties from the first time around, I only discovered Kenneth Tynan, the great theatre critic, when a new collection of his work was published this year. It deserves to be rediscovered, for he wrote shrewdly and beautifully, and because his peak spanned a fascinating time in theatre and society.

Here was a young, intellectual Marxist writing on theatre in the Fifties, a cultured, inquisitive man who reviewed a stage dominated by stale, safe conventionality. He was in the right place on the brink of a revolution, and, through championing this new kind of theatre, one he became bound up with. Like the young playwrights that the era would soon be remembered for, the critic revolted against the twee, archaic ‘Loamshire’ farces - Wodehouse without the wit, character or charm - and pushed the new, young writers whose attitudes and ideas reflected their own, post-war generation.

Tynan, not unreasonably, thought that it wasn’t good enough to produce lame facsimiles of plays from decades ago, that reflect the prejudices and ideals of previous, half-dead generations, rather than their own. He wrote:

“If you seek a tombstone, look about you; survey the peculiar nullity of our drama’s present genre, the Loamshire play. Its setting is a country house in what used to be called Loamshire, but is now, as a heroic tribute to realism, sometimes called Berkshire. Except when someone must sneeze, or be murdered, the sun invariably shines. The inhabitants belong to a social class derived partly from romantic novels and partly from the playwright’s vision of the leisured life he will lead after the play is a success - this being the only effort of imagination he is called on to make. Joys and sorrows are giggles and whimpers: the crash of denunciation dwindles into ‘Oh, stuff, Mummy!’ and ‘Oh, really, Daddy!’ And so grim is the continuity of these things that the foregoing paragraph might have been written at any time during the last thirty years.”

Naturally, these didn’t make up all of what was staged in Fifties London, just what was most depressing and objectionable, and most deserving of a kicking. It must have been deeply irritating to have to go into a new play, know exactly what you are going to see, and know you’re going to hate it. It’s even worse when you know that the audience will be made up of thoughtless people who know nothing about theatre, but know what they like. And so long as it conforms to their template of what ‘a play should be’, they’ll be happy. They’ll keep going back, to see the next copy of this template play, and so long as they do, lazy artistic directors have little reason to change.

We are living through recognisably similar times, particularly for connoisseurs of political theatre. Loamshire is dead, but its spirit of conformity lives on. And sadly, it is Tynan’s generation who are responsible. Starting with the great critic himself, who accepted the chiefdom of the National from Lawrence Olivier - ‘anything to get you off the Observer’ - the angry young men of the Fifties grew older, more established, more influential and more widespread. It is Tynan’s generation, and the ones that dutifully followed, who now run the theatre, and it is their beliefs that any new writing must reflect. Last year, Nicolas Hytner expressed a wish to see a “really good, mischievous right-wing play” at the National. After so long without any, it would seem an utter freak.

Today, any play with a political edge is as predictable, tedious and infuriating as Fifties Loamshire. Substitute little more than ‘an international courtroom’ for ‘a drawing room’, ‘Iraq’ for ‘Berkshire’, and invert the characteristics so that no one smiles and everything is a denunciation, and Tynan’s caustic outline describes perfectly our contemporary theatre.

Go to you any play that touches on the concerns of the ‘68ers, and you can be confident that it will have the subtlety of a hand grenade, the even-handedness of Captain Hook, and all the tedious predictability of a floppy, foot-shaped Christmas present from great aunt Betty. It will denounce capitalism, celebrate the peasant, beatify the Third World, rage against the West, insult Americans, condemn war - except those conducted against the West - and in short, conform to all the prejudices of its audience; who are mostly middle-aged fools who like to think they’ll never grow up. And it has been thus for, ooh, about thirty years.

Theatre like this is not remotely daring. Those playwrights who like to think of themselves as radicals; brave young underdogs fighting a wicked Establishment, are nothing of the sort. Caryl Churchill is a child of the Thirties, and still spouts the half-baked socialism of Parsnip and Pimpernel. Most of the other major playwrights are younger, and spout the half-baked socialism of 1968. They appeal to generations who think nothing of left-wing radicalism, having grown up with and often dabbled in it themselves. Watching a ‘radical’ play is an exercise in nostalgia for our Establishment, not a challenge.

For these generations are now the Establishment, a fact that is both obvious and ignored. Political theatre is no longer speaking truth to power, but tickling the underbelly of the ruling class. They challenge their audience just enough to make them feel good, to feel invigorated and a little rebellious, but not enough to ever make them change their minds. In their own way, they are as unambitious as a Loamshire playwright, trotting out stale clichés and recycling bits of their last play, or their circle’s repertoire, and claiming it as new, dangerous and biting. It is nothing of the sort.

It is not original to stamp out play after play declaring Tony Blair to be a war criminal, a cretin, or a lapdog of the White House. It was worth doing once or twice, for the sake of provocation and debate. But after four years of repetitive, tedious, mind-numbing denunciation, which finds a ready audience in those who dislike having their prejudices challenged, it starts to become obvious that theatre, and culture more broadly, needs to be shaken out of its smug complacency. Just as the comatose, insufferably bad theatre of the Fifties needed a rocket to be placed strategically, and lit.

The stage has long been the place for the stirrings of change. A movement that first begins to surge in the theatre is likely to soon dominate the mainstream. A century after his death, most people consider Oscar Wilde a writer who slots into our image of the Edwardians; more a man of the swinging ‘20s than a stuffy old Victorian. In our minds, he walks far more easily amongst Waugh, Coward and Woolf than with Kipling or Stevenson. But Wilde was a man who had written most of his plays by 1895, and was dead by 1900.

One could argue the Sixties started in 1954, with Osborne’s Look Back In Anger. Yet on the night of its first performance, Churchill was still Prime Minister, theatre was still censored, Suez was yet to kill the Empire and John Lennon was fourteen. When the theatre first started rebelling, it took a full decade for it to become widespread.

The converse of this is also true. When the theatre starts to seem tired and lazy, and in need of a good kicking, the first whiffs of a new mood are on their way. We are now at this point. The cultural cycle will doubtless take a decade or two to swing into a new mode, and no one quite knows what it is coming. But as it stands, the arts establishment is finished, with nothing new to say and no fresh ways of saying it. It is dead on its feet, and just needs a good push for everyone to notice.

Its replacement will not be, as some fogies hope, a retreading of something that’s already been. When the next great cultural movement comes, it will be an avant-garde one, not just a return to the values and manners of the past. Theatre can still be the great, experimental venue for new ideas and styles, even though it is now slumbering. Not all of the new generation is content to adopt the postures of fifty years ago, and some still have the talent and the drive to create something astonishing.

It needs a handful of brilliant people who keep Tynan’s instincts alive, rather than just his politics, to do something new and interesting. It’ll be fascinating to see what they do, but whatever it is, it can’t come too soon.