Billington blows the bugle
Like everyone else, I’ve been dipping into Michael Billington’s magisterial new book State of the Nation about British theatre since 1945, although how you write such a book without mentioning Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Prowse, Antony Sher, Richard Jones, Jesus Christ Superstar and Michael Codron, to name but a few, is simply and utterly beyond me.
Mostly, the book retreads what we already know the great critic already thinks, and the history is mainly to do with fitting the movements and events into a fairly fixed and unyielding political prescription.
I revere Billybong, but I laughed out loud when I read: “Les Mis…represented a degradation of standards and a vulgarisation of taste that seemed neatly to encapsulate the philistine spirit of the Eighties.”
Oh no it didn’t. It represented the climax of the Trevor Nunn RSC company style as evolved through Nicholas Nickleby with a genuine popular appeal as developed in parallel by Nunn with his designer John Napier on Cats and Starlight Express.
I disagree with Ballyboos’ fundamental objection to adaptation as a reduction of another art form. Does he feel that this week about Janacek and Jenufa at the Arcola? Does he think it about Verdi’s Othello?
I never felt anything, miraculously, had really been left out of either Nick Nick or Les Mis — I re-read both tomes, naturally, before reviewing them — but I wouldn’t have much minded if I had felt that; reading a book is different from watching a show.
Bollybinge is very good indeed on where you would expect him to be, the National and the RSC. Re the latter, he can’t resist telling us that that silly old fool, the late Lord Alexander of Weedon, incoming chair of the RSC during the disastrous Adrian (ig)Noble era, invited the cricket-loving scribbler into his box at Lord’s during a Test Match: “In that nod-and-wink manner so typical of British life, the amiable Bob Alexander told me that the RSC was going to concentrate in future on “solus” productions.”
It is from that scandalous stupidity that the RSC is now trying to recover. But “Bob” and his fellow governors were never hauled over the coals, nor justly vilified, nor censured by the Arts Council, nor by anyone, not even the idealistic Billingsgate; not enough fish wife in your make-up, Michael!
But these are quibbles. The book’s a classic, really, and no-one else could have done it so well, let alone done it at all.