This is my last Critical Comment, so I suppose I should sound a valedictory note – perhaps a nostalgic ramble through the delights of the last two or three years. Instead I’d like to look to the future. What kind of theatre can we expect as economic recession bites? Will people shun the expense of a night out, retreat to their domestic screens and venture forth only for big, spectacular musicals? That’s what many people predict. But all the evidence points the opposite way: what is staggering right now is the palpable hunger for … plays!

I was reminded of this by a colleague who’d skipped a number of first nights and had been going to theatre with parties of American students. What amazed her was that all the theatres they’d been to were packed to the rafters. Alan Bennett’s Enjoy at the Gielgud nightly sends large audiences into a state of delirium. It’s the same story with Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane at Trafalgar Studios. I gather that A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s is an equally hot ticket and that Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa is drawing crowds to the Old Vic. And, at a Sunday-night celebration of the work of Simon Gray, I bumped into an actress friend who is currently in Peter Flannery’s Burnt by the Sun at the National. “How’s it doing?” I nervously asked, knowing that the advance for a play based on a little-known Russian film was not that great. “Ever since the reviews came out,” she said, “we’ve been absolutely packed.” (more…)

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! (more…)

The great comedian Max Miller used to sign off with, “There’ll never be another”. I feel much the same way about the person whose death dominated the news at Christmas – Harold Pinter. Of all the millions of words written and spoken in tribute to Pinter, one phrase haunts me. “Yesterday,” said David Hare in the immediate wake of Pinter’s death, “when you talked about Britain’s greatest living playwright, people knew who you meant. Today they don’t.” Simple but true. Not merely has a throne been vacated. I suspect there may never be another dramatist as effortlessly dominant as Pinter.

I felt much the same way after the death of Laurence Olivier in 1989. He was more than a great actor. He was the spokesman for, and symbol of, the profession, a title earned by his multiple roles as protean performer, National Theatre director and commercial producer. Whatever there was to do in the theatre, Olivier had done it. Today we have countless actors who inspire our affection. But no one individual embodies the art of acting in quite the way Olivier did. (more…)

I find our attitude to David Hare very odd. He writes good plays. He has a loyal public. He addresses contemporary issues. Yet, increasingly, his work seems to attract the wrath of the “commentariat” – not so much the critics as that vast body of men and women who have space to fill in weekly columns. It occurred with his excellent play about Iraq, Stuff Happens. It’s happened again with Gethsemane, his fascinating new play at the National Theatre which refers obliquely to recent scandals but which is really about New Labour’s lack of Utopian vision.

The play itself got mixed overnight reviews, which is fair enough, but what fascinated me was the rash of columnitis that followed. Ian Jack in the Guardian told us that it wasn’t “a play for today”. David Lister took the same tack in the Independent, informing us that plays like Hare’s “can all too rapidly become rather last season”. And Dominic Cavendish, who is at least a critic, went further in the Daily Telegraph, suggesting that Gethsemane was proof of theatre’s recent ineffectualness as “a podium for oppositional thought”. To all of which my main reaction is a polite raspberry. (more…)

Actors act. Directors direct. Critics criticise. Right? Well no, not exactly. Sometimes we invade each other’s patch. I’ve just emerged from a month directing LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Drama) third year students in a triple bill of Harold Pinter plays. And, while I couldn’t possibly comment on the quality of the finished product, I can honestly say I’ve learned a lot about Pinter, the theatrical process and possibly myself as a result.

My point is that people with a passion for theatre shouldn’t be confined to a single role. Antony Sher acts, writes and paints. Michael Pennington and Simon Callow have as great a talent for putting words on paper as they do for projecting them from a stage. Mark Ravenhill is an adroit columnist. But, when a critic ventures into new territory, there is invariably shock and surprise. A decade ago, four critics, including myself, were invited to direct a season of plays at the Battersea Arts Centre. We were treated by the media as a freak show. And although Nicholas de Jongh earlier this year wrote an excellent play, Plague Over England, there was faint astonishment that a critic could challenge regular practitioners on their own turf. Why on earth not? (more…)

How long, ideally, is a play? In a way, it’s an absurd question. It all hinges on what the writer has to say: Pinter’s One For The Road at 30 minutes feels as right as King Lear at three-and-a-half hours. I’ve no wish to tell dramatists what to do. But a recent week of theatregoing led to some unexpected conclusions. Having sat through a nine-hour Robert Lepage epic and two 80-minute pieces, I began to wonder whether we weren’t succumbing to the inordinate or the needlessly cryptic and losing sight of the middle ground.

The happiest night of my week was spent at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. This was partly because this restored Georgian gem is, for my money, the most beautiful theatre in England. It also helped that the play, a rare piece by Elizabeth Inchbald called Wives As They Were and Maids As They Are, was a jolly account of the late 18th-century sex war and ran exactly two-and-a-half hours. At that length I felt this charming piece had, as Jane Austen’s Mr Bennet said of his daughter’s piano playing, “delighted me sufficiently”. (more…)

Something rare happened this summer. A revival of a 408-year-old play became hot news. No prizes for guessing why. The idea of the current Doctor Who, David Tennant, playing Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon provoked a media frenzy. Newspaper front pages showed a woolly-hatted Tennant addressing Yorick’s skull. The BBC’s Ten o’Clock News featured a live report from the Courtyard Theatre. I also found myself taking part in a discussion with Simon Russell Beale on Radio 4’s Today programme that one paper rightly judged “inane” – not, I hope, entirely our fault.

In one way the Hamlet hype was encouraging. It showed theatre had the capacity to capture the popular imagination. It drew attention not just to a striking performance but also to a first-rate production. And it meant that young people packed into the Courtyard as they doubtless will into the Novello when Gregory Doran’s production transfers. Some people get sniffy about all the stress on Tennant’s Time Lord credentials. But the reality is that audiences relish seeing stars. And all the Doctor Who-haa about Tennant reminds us that, in the modern world, theatre must in some way to be an “event”. (more…)

It’s been 40 years since the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil was banished from theatres, but that’s no excuse for critics to censor their own moral values.

Everyone has been banging on about 1968. But people tend to forget one of the most significant events of that year – the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s power of censorship over British theatre. I’m not sure whether any celebration is planned or what form it should take. Maybe Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, Bill Gaskill and other luminaries who suffered from the censor’s prescriptive power could gather outside his old office in St James’ Palace and utter a few choice expletives. Or maybe someone could sing a medley of numbers from Hair, the first show to benefit from theatre’s new-found freedom. (more…)

There’s a lot of drama in sport. So why, I wonder, is there so little sport in drama? The thought came to me while watching Richard Bean’s The English Game on tour at Guildford. This cracking play (it arrives at Kingston’s Rose Theatre this month) uses cricket as a metaphor for the splits and fissures in English life. Yet, as I watched a Surrey audience lapping up Bean’s joke-filled state-of-the-nation play, I found myself puzzling over why theatre still takes a slightly sniffy attitude to sport.

Cricket hasn’t done too badly. Richard Harris’ Outside Edge caught the tension amongst the tea-making wives on the boundary: I remember my old sports journalist mate, Frank Keating, coming up to me on the first night and wittily describing it as “Ayckbourn off a shorter run”. And the great Ayckbourn himself included an off-stage cricket-match in Time and Time Again. You could also add to the list Terrence Rattigan’s TV play and film The Final Test, and the cricketing metaphors that pepper Pinter’s work. But it’s taken Bean to realise that cricket has a lot to tell us about who we are: just as the spirit of cricket is being eroded, so, Bean suggests, our native tradition of tolerance is being capsized by saloon-bar racism and the anti-Islamist stance of bullying media pundits.

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Suddenly epics are everywhere. Ardent cycle addicts can see all eight of the RSC’s Shakespeare Histories at the Roundhouse in the space of four days. A six-hour version of War and Peace has been occupying Hampstead Theatre. Even a living dramatist, Mark Ravenhill, lately came up with a set of 18 plays, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, admittedly lasting only 20 minutes each.

Why are we so hooked on epic structures? Mostly, I think it’s part of theatre’s need to be seen as an “event”. We are bombarded daily with a ceaseless flow of information and entertainment. We also talk of “dropping in” to a movie and often give television half our attention. But theatre confirms its special-ness by making inordinate demands on us. People fought for tickets for the recent Covent Garden Ring cycle. And I’m told the first seats to sell out for the RSC Histories were the eight-pack weekend cycles.

I’ve sat through a lot of day-long shows in my time. It all began with Peter Hall’s The Wars of the Roses back in 1963. Since then, we’ve had numerous comparable events: The Oresteia, The Mysteries, Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and the David Hare trilogy at the National; John Barton’s ten-play version of The Greeks at the RSC; Tantalus at the Barbican. And something extraordinary happens on these days. You start talking to complete strangers. You feel an unusual bond with the actors. Daily normality retreats into the background. So hermetic is the world created during these theatrical marathons that I suspect some people discover, or possibly even lose, their life-partners.

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