Critical Comment: Past perfect
Sunday, October 1st, 2006David Hare is not only one of our best dramatists. He is also an acute analyst of theatre. In a talk called “Why Fabulate?”- published in a recent collection of lectures - he raises fascinating questions about storytelling. Hare claims we are surrounded in all media by stale fictions and bankrupt formulae. The job of the artist, he concludes, is to restore our sense of wonder in the infinite variety of life.
How does Hare’s argument apply to theatre? Though less prone to deadly repetition than film and television, it too relies on exhausted forms. In the 1950s it was the West End drawing-room comedy which declined into snobbish platitude. And today? Well, you can take your pick. For me, the black box study of urban angst, the scissors-and-paste literary adaptation and the rock anthology which simply raids the back-catalogue are all prime examples of tired genres. Critics are often told that their duty is to judge whether a show is good of its kind. But sometimes you also have to ask if a particular category hasn’t been flogged to death.