Roundheads and Cavaliers again
It was both bracing and salutary to read David Hare’s review of Peter Gill’s book Apprenticeship in the Guardian because it so clearly restated ancient antipathies in our subsidised theatre that are perhaps outmoded but nonetheless fundamental.
Basically, the Royal Court (the spiritual home of both Gill and Hare) was always opposed to the RSC, suspect of its proprietorial approach to verse-speaking, resistant to its empire building, scornful of Les Miserables.
As Hare puts it, Gill regards that globally cloned musical as disastrously influential — as influential, in its way, as Look Back in Anger — and leading to a “cash-based populism” that threatens the glories of the subsidised theatre.
As Les Miserables is itself a product of the subisidised theatre, not a symptom, you can see where the fault lines in this argument are developing. Ironically, the Royal Court has undoubtedly prospered because of Peter Hall’s initiative in founding the RSC, even though its vintage era personnel — directors William Gaskill and John Dexter, playwrights John Osborne and Peter Shaffer — were in the Olivier camp of the new National Theatre rather than the Hall-driven RSC.
This is why Gill’s book is so interesting, focussing on the rehearsal period (he was an actor in the cast) of Gaskill’s rare and ill-fated RSC production of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Aldwych in 1962. Gaskill was sacked by Hall,suggests Hare, for pursuing an experimental, investigative process of rehearsals rather than conforming to “brochure” theatre prerogatives.
Hare’s argument,like Gill’s beautifully written book, reeks of long dead prejudices. But the battle lines were well and truly drawn in those days and I’m not at all sure that we’re better off without them.
Ironically, one of Hare’s most trusted collaborators these days is Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry, yet it was Daldry who drove the Royal Court into its new sponsored by Jerwood era, taking money wherever it fell, de-radicalising the Court while making it once more trendily au courant, a clever post-Thatcherite sleight of hand in the new climate of economic realism.
Gill, on the other hand, is an artistic Luddite, and all the more valuable for being so. He exemplifies the old school of puritanical Royal Court Roundheads (which is odd, as he’s a Welsh Catholic working class lad, au fond) while Daldry veered towards the showbusiness Cavalier style of the RSC in the Trevor Nunn era.
The upshot these days is identity confusion all round. And no such thing as team loyalty, or gang warfare. The Royal Court artistic director Dominic Cooke also works for the RSC. He has just directed (not very well) Tarrel Alvin McCraney’s drag queen fiesta, Wig Out!, a far cry from John Osborne’s A Patriot For Me and the sort of text that would not have got past the first stage of the reading process in the old days in Sloane Square.
It’s impossible to know now what exactly are the literary or aesthetic priorities of the Royal Court. Like the RSC, they now seem to think that shape-shifting the auditorium (upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber) constitutes artistic policy.
Similarly, the RSC spends a fortune on reconfiguring Wilton’s Music Hall to present the sloppily unfinished play of Adriano Shaplin, The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes. Shaplin, like McCraney, is an American dramatist with no apparent links with either Shakespeare or the RSC culture, such as it is, and yet both writers are now “embedded” with the company in an official capacity. Why? They may as well be at the National, or the Royal Court, or the Bush, and you’d still be none the wiser.
Meanwhile, Gill’s book is a reminder of far off days when people picked their theatres like football teams, and stayed with them through thick and thin despite the waving of cheque books and the taunts from the terraces. And when working in theatre was an almost religious vocation, not a job opportunity or a dream of sharing a stage with Elton John.
That said, Peter Gill surprisingly directed Penelope Keith in The Importance of Being Earnest earlier this year — what was all that about, then? — and David Hare accepted a knighthood from Tony Blair. So perhaps we’re all not as pure and unsullied as we like to think we are after all.