Critical Comment: Past perfect
David 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.
So where should artists seek inspiration? Obviously, in the world around them - in science, religion and politics but also, I believe, in history, ancient and modern. History not only offers a fund of good stories, it also becomes a way of examining our own society. I’ve been struck recently by the number of good plays I’ve seen that escape the clichés of life in a Cricklewood bed-sit to explore the realities of worlds other than our own. At a time when memories are becoming foreshortened and we all seem to exist in a continuous present, it is ever more important for dramatists to open up the past.
If you want a supreme example of a young dramatist’s exploitation of history, you only have to look to Shakespeare. One of the great experiences in our theatre right now is Michael Boyd’s RSC revival of the three parts of Henry V1 at Stratford-upn-Avon’s Courtyard. Not only does Boyd’s production make nonsense of the academic argument, propagated by cultural critic Harold Bloom, that these plays are worthless juvenilia, it shows exactly how the young Shakespeare, growing up in turbulent times, used the past as a vibrant metaphor, a means of examining power, monarchy, religious factionalism and social unrest in Elizabethan England.
I also had a good time at Howard Brenton’s In Extremis at Shakespeare’s Globe. In the past, I’ve often been sceptical about the Globe - it’s a theatre where the audience all too often dictates terms leading to a self-conscious heartiness reminiscent of the Last Night of the Proms. But the Brenton play, dealing with the ill-fated love story of Abelard and Héloise, actually made the audience listen intently to 12th-century debates about the nature of faith. What’s more, in the contest between Aristotelian logic (Abelard) and divine revelation (Bernard of Clairvaux), we seemed to get a whiff of the conflict between reason and fundamentalism in the modern world.
Our own, more recent British history is also the stuff of drama. Recently I went to the excellent Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court to see a play called Eden’s Empire. Here was a young dramatist, James Graham, writing about the Suez fiasco of 1956 with real intelligence and wit. As someone who was 16 years old at the time, I remember vividly the fierce passions aroused by our attack, in collusion with France and Israel, on Colonel Nasser’s Egypt for its nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Graham recreated the whole story, including Anthony Eden’s mental flakiness and Harold Macmillan’s suave duplicity, with great skill.
But Eden’s Empire was also stuffed with present-day parallels. Others have noted the similarities between Suez and Iraq: both legally dubious incursions that made Britain a global pariah and destroyed a sitting prime minister. Graham’s play went on to remind us of the danger of keeping an heir-apparent indefinitely waiting - Churchill reneged on a handover deal with Eden in the same way that Tony Blair allegedly did with Gordon Brown. Like all good history plays, Eden’s Empire was as much about now as then.
Graham’s last play, Albert’s Boy, was about Einstein. His current one is about Eden. For his next one, he told me, he is thinking of Margaret Thatcher. Aside from Hare’s The Secret Rapture, astonishingly we’ve never had a serious play about Thatcher. Graham’s fascination with recent history is both encouraging in a young writer and a significant portent. You only have to look at the runaway success of Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon at the Donmar to realise that audiences are clearly hungry for works about the recent past.
I’m not saying dramatists should forswear imagination. But one answer to Hare’s point about the staleness and repetition of so much fictional drama is to look to reality. So, while I shall continue to applaud dramatists who create their own world on stage, I also admire those who ransack the remote or recent past. How to write a good play? Become, I suggest, one of Alan Bennet’s history boys.
