Michael Billington’s Critical Comment column appears each month in What’s On Stage magazine. Michael Billington is drama critic of the Guardian and has been voted top critic by Whatsonstage.com theatregoers.

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Playwrights should look closely at how Harold Pinter builds dramatic structure. It’s the foundation stone for any well-made play.

I went to a fascinating exhibition the other day. The occasion was a private party to celebrate the British Library’s acquisition of the Harold Pinter archive. I’d recommend anyone interested in theatre to visit the Library’s Sir John Ritblat Gallery. In a room containing everything from a manuscript of Beowulf to Beatles memorabilia you find a section devoted to Pinter – letters, photos, sound recordings, even a first draft of The Homecoming. But, as I talked to a clutch of Pinter directors, including Michael Attenborough, David Farr, Ian Rickson and Patrick Marber, I was struck by Harold’s astonishing durability.

Something rare has happened to Pinter which I don’t think we have fully grasped: he has become a classic in his own lifetime. Most writers are subject to the swings and roundabouts of fashion and fall into neglect in their later years only to be rediscovered after their death, as happened to Rattigan and Osborne. But Pinter, now in his 78th year, is enjoying a golden period. This year alone sees revivals of The Birthday Party at the Lyric Hammersmith, A Slight Ache at the National with Simon Russell Beale and Clare Higgins, No Man’s Land with Michael Gambon and David Bradley and The Lover/The Collection in the West End. Pinter, I’d argue, has been accepted as a modern master to be mentioned in the same breath as Beckett, Ibsen and Chekhov.

(more…)

I had an odd experience the other day. I went to a Wednesday matinee of Iolanthe at the Gielgud. “Nothing odd about that,” you might say. Except that, for the first time in years, I found myself in the midst of an audience even older than I was. I’m so used, certainly at theatres like the Young Vic, Stratford East or many regional reps, to being surrounded by shining, eager young faces that it was a shock to see an audience all of whom would have qualified for a Saga holiday.

It also set me thinking about theatre’s need to cater for senior citizens. Don’t get me wrong. I passionately want to see young people going to the theatre as regularly as they do to the movies. I’m also delighted, incidentally, at government plans to give children five hours a week of culture in school and am appalled at the downright hostility displayed by established arts figures ranging from David Bailey to Michael Nyman. A love of the theatre usually starts young. And I’ve been thrilled, in recent months, to see hordes of adolescents flocking to the National’s War Horse, the RSC King Lear and, on a Saturday night, the unfairly vilified The Lord of the Rings.

I suspect we’ve all been guilty of intolerance towards the over-60s. In my time, I’ve had a go at the Chichester audience for its silvery seniority. I also remember taking part in an Oxford Union discussion where Kenneth Tynan mischievously suggested that, to counter the newly-opened Young Vic, the Old Vic should target elderly spectators. There would, he indicated, be special toilets for the incontinent and free deaf aids with every programme. When some young prig piped up, “I think that’s disgusting”, Ken wearily replied, “It’s what we used to call a joke.”

(more…)

We need to overturn the cliché thinking that consigns musicals to big theatres and plays to small ones.

Musicals are for big stages. Plays work best in small spaces. Right? Actually, no. On recent evidence, I’d say that the familiar rules have been reversed. In short, I’ve had some outstanding musical experiences in intimate theatres while I’ve seen a number of straight plays expand to fill larger houses.

Confirmation of the way musicals are often best in small spaces came with the Menier Chocolate Factory’s La Cage aux Folles. Back in 1986, when I saw it at the London Palladium, Arthur Laurents’ Broadway production struck me as a bland, feathers-and-frills spectacle. But what happens at the Menier? We become part of a raffish St Tropez nightclub. Philip Quast’s under-praised Georges comes before the pink, ruched curtains to woo our applause. Douglas Hodge’s Albin saucily ogles the guys at the front-row, café tables. We even get to peer into the cramped dressing room where the campy Cagelles are wriggling in and out of their basques. In short, we are complicit in the world the musical seeks to create: that of a louche Riviera niterie.

(more…)

Theatres opening on Sundays? Cheap ticket night in the West End? The way ahead for 2008? Or does hope spring eternal?

It’s a time of year for looking forwards. So, entering into the seasonal spirit, let me offer a short wish list of things I’d like to see happen in our theatre in 2008.

1. First nights to start at the advertised time. This may seem a parochial matter but, believe me, it doesn’t help the reception of a big West End show if it starts 20 minutes late. Indeed, for an overnight critic, the glamour of a West End premiere is not all it’s cracked up to be. You struggle through paparazzi snapping at a minor player from Holby City, hunt high and low for the press officer in a crowded foyer, then push through bingeing punters to attain your seat. Having slumped exhausted, you wait a long time for the show to start, especially if it’s a musical. Along with a senior colleague, I actually started a slow handclap on the first night of Hairspray. To avoid such future unpleasantness, I suggest curtains go up on time.

(more…)

Why don’t more plays tackle religion? After all, it’s one of the burning issues of the day.

We have plays about sex. We have plays about politics. Rarely, however, do we see plays about religion. It’s the big unspoken subject of the British stage. I was reminded of this fact by an odd coincidence. Last month I went to see to Wyndham’s Theatre to see William Nicholson’s Shadowlands, one of the few modern plays to deal with faith and doubt. That same afternoon I’d also been interviewed for a Radio 4 programme about God dealing with the way He (or She) is represented in literature, art and drama. I was forced to admit that the devil not only has the best tunes, he also gets a lot more stage time than God.

(more…)

Turning films into stage plays is hardly worthwhile when the big screen does it so much better.

What have Les Enfants du Paradis, The Ladykillers, A Matter of Life and Death and All About My Mother got in common? Easy. All are movies that have been adapted for the stage. The process is gathering momentum. This autumn we are promised Swimming with Sharks and the musical of Desperately Seeking Susan. Even now, director Emma Rice is probably eyeing up the possibility of turning Citizen Kane into a Kneehigh spectacular.

Does it matter? Some argue that theatre should seek material where it can and that there is a constant, two-way media traffic. Plays have long been turned into films. So why not the other way round? I remain sceptical. The case for making movies out of plays is largely pragmatic. Film is a vast industry that can only be sustained by raiding other media. A filmed play also has one distinct asset: it makes the work available to more people.

All the purist arguments about whether or not to film Shakespeare were for me knocked into a cocked hat by an experience I once had in America. I was on a panel with Kenneth Branagh shortly after his film version of Henry V had opened in the States. Branagh was mobbed by young people who were simply grateful for the rare chance to see and hear some Shakespeare. But the argument works the other way when you make plays out of films. Why go to all the trouble of seeing a staged movie when you can nip down to the local DVD clubvideo-store and rent the original for three quid?

(more…)

Is there still an audience for plays? It may seem a daft question. But I was having lunch with a leading theatre executive who suggested the demand for plays was diminishing. There’s plenty of evidence to support him. There are now 27 musicals in the West End; everywhere you look you find adaptations of old films and books. And the young show an increasing appetite for the kind of physical theatre provided by groups like Kneehigh, Punchdrunk or Complicité. So have traditional plays had their day?

(more…)