Court in the act
There’s one subject critics never write about: their relationship with individual theatres. Some playhouses, like the St Martin’s and the Fortune, become permanent strangers because they house long-running hits. Other spaces, such as the Donmar and the Almeida, have a short-run policy and so are like constantly visited old friends. But of all the London theatres, the one to which I feel most attached is the Royal Court. The relationship is a bit like a marriage which sometimes blows hot and cold; yet I can’t imagine life without it.
It all dates back to 1956. I was at school when Look Back in Anger was first presented, but became obsessed with it and gave nerdy talks to the sixth-form about Osborne and the young angries. In my first year at Oxford I was in a Coriolanus directed by Anthony Page, who was then an assistant at the Court, which only served to increase my fascination. And when I first came to London in late 1964, I was taken on as a play reader by the literary manager, Tom Osborn. I only realised my services were no longer required when Tom regretfully told me that artistic director George Devine thought my assessments read too much like reviews!
Over the years I’ve enjoyed an up-and-down relationship with the Court; but, even when I’ve attacked it, it’s been from the standpoint of someone who believed in its paramount necessity. The point was driven home in February when I found myself attending the Court three times in seven days. Once was to see Shades, Alia Bano’s play at the theatre Upstairs. I went back on a Saturday night to catch Caryl Churchill’s ten-minute piece, Seven Jewish Children, then 48 hours later I returned for the first night of Marius von Mayenburg’s The Stone, which kicked-off an ambitious season of plays about Germany.
It wasn’t just the frequency of the trips that mattered. What suddenly hit me was that I couldn’t imagine another theatre in London, or possibly the world, that would deal with three more urgent subjects. Bano’s play was about what it was like to be a young Muslim woman living in London today – a remarkable piece about a heroine torn between a rampant secularism and traditional faith. Churchill’s play was a direct response to recent events in Gaza and, in compressed poetic form, showed how historic fears about security had turned to naked aggression. And Mayenburg’s play raised the whole question of how German families are still fed lies and evasions about their forebears’ Nazi past. Within the space of a week, I felt I had been confronted by three plays on big issues all revolving round inheritance.
Other theatres, of course, now challenge the Court on its own turf. Nicolas Kent at the Tricycle has not been shy of tackling global politics and this April launches a major series of 12 half-hour plays about Afghanistan. Lisa Goldman has also turned Soho Theatre into a centre of debate with plays ranging from Hassan Abdulrazzak’s brilliant Baghdad Wedding to Roy Williams’ Joe Guy, which explored the tension between London’s Caribbean and African communities. And Nicholas Hytner has used the National as a lively political forum, with plays such as David Hare’s Stuff Happens and Richard Bean’s equally controversial England People Very Nice.
But the Royal Court, for me, still retains its primacy when it comes to new writing; and I suspect, because it’s been there so long, we take it for granted. In the 1980s, when its very future was under threat from a Thatcherite Arts Council, I found myself at a festival in Kentucky attended by international delegates. Within an hour of news coming through that the Court was under siege, everyone present had signed a petition begging for its retention. My own love affair with the Court was echoed around the world. And, while I retain the freedom to attack its programme and policy, it keeps an unrivalled place in my heart’s affections.