Critical Comment: Role models
The question came out of the blue. “Why,” I was suddenly asked by the editor of the Observer on the first night of The Entertainer at the Old Vic, “are there so many old plays around?” He cited not just the fantastic John Osborne play but Peter Shaffer’s Equus and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Off the top of my head, I said it’s because they all offer juicy star parts in a way few modern plays do. While last month in this column I urged that we pay more attention to supporting actors, there’s no denying that audiences love seeing charismatic performers in star parts.
And not just audiences. Actors too feel they have to measure themselves against the top roles in the canon. GH Lewes, a celebrated Victorian critic, said that “he is greatest who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art”. And just as every actor who aspires to acclaim has, at some stage, to play Hamlet or Lear, so every actress has to essay Hedda Gabler or Cleopatra. But these are classics. The intriguing question is why there are so few comparable star parts in modern drama.
The obvious answer is that we live in an anti-heroic age. We are suspicious of the cult of individualism. We nominally espouse egalitarianism. We believe our lives are controlled by economic forces rather than exceptional leaders. While that may be true, it didn’t stop Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist debunker of heroism, creating a stream of lead roles. If a handful of Brecht’s plays are constantly revived, it is because Galileo, Mother Courage, Arturo Ui and the peasant Grusha in The Caucasian Chalk Circle are a test for any performer.
Where are Brecht’s successors? Osborne proved that even anti-heroes could acquire heroic status. Jimmy Porter, Archie Rice and Bill Maitland (in Inadmissible Evidence) may be sad, shabby or seedy failures, but they achieve a kind of grandeur through suffering. While it’s fashionable these days to knock Shaffer, his plays go on being done partly because they offer rich opportunities for actors. No-one who saw him can ever forget Robert Stephens as the Inca-king in The Royal Hunt of the Sun. I share the enthusiasm for Daniel Radcliffe in the latest Equus, but some credit must go to Shaffer for creating a damaged boy-hero aching to unburden himself of his guilt.
Osborne and Shaffer are not alone. John Arden in Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance created a complex hero who intrigues and repels in equal measure. Pinter’s Max in The Homecoming - a role the author has himself recently played on radio - has attracted actors as various as Paul Rogers, Warren Mitchell and Ian Holm. And Edward Bond’s Lear, David Hare’s Plenty and Amy’s View, Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers and Travesties are all plays that will survive in the repertory because they offer rich challenges to actors.
As you will have noticed by now, all these plays belong to a certain epoch. If you scan the past decade, it is harder to think of succulent star-parts that will attract future generations of actors. This is partly, I guess, because writers like Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and their successors are more interested in the dynamics of the group than the temperament of solo protagonists. Drama is also these days often driven by a desire to examine issues, and the results can be outstanding as in Roy Williams’ Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, with its focus on football-driven chauvinism and the racism that persists at every social level.
I am the last person to attack issue-led drama. But I don’t see a political perspective as incompatible with writing great roles. Brecht did it. So did Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman, which achieves classic status because Willy Loman epitomises the disastrous consequences of a culture dominated by false ideas of success.
What I’m saying is relatively simple. People go to the theatre for any number of reasons: to be entertained, uplifted, transported to new realms of experience. But one of the most basic reasons is to watch magnetic performers. They may not even be lead players - anyone who has seen Pam Ferris’ magnificent gin-fuddled Phoebe and John Normington’s romantically nostalgic Billy in The Entertainer will know that supposedly supporting roles can be invested with emotional depth. But, in the end, part of Osborne’s genius was to encapsulate the muddle and decline of the 1950s in the character of Archie Rice whom Robert Lindsay currently plays with superb, seedy elan.
Are there no dramatists today who can create characters who sum up the zeitgeist in the way that Archie Rice and Willy Loman once did? Is the art of writing great roles for actors and actresses slowly disappearing? We have a formidable array of performers. We also have a host of talented young dramatists. But when will the latter learn that, if plays have an after-life, it is for one basic reason? They offer meaty roles into which ravenous players will always want to sink their teeth. “Unhappy is the land in need of heroes,” said Brecht. Equally unhappy is a theatre shorn of great heroic roles.
