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British Theater's Premature Burial
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10604 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
2,155 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
During the past winter and spring the British theater has been subjected to yet another spate of apocalyptic comment and complaint. Various righteous hacks complained that new works were not inspiring and there were too many musicals, so audiences were staying away in droves. It was all very familiar. For the last two and a half decades there have been periodic bouts of lamentation on the state of British theater; at one time or another it has been "dying," "irrelevant," "fading," or succumbing to down-market competition from films and/or television.
A few years ago, during one of these gloom-and-doom periods, I had occasion to discuss the state of the British theater with the famous director Peter Brook. He was not impressed by the pessimistic outlook in the press: "I think we really have to step out of these false discussions of 'can the theater survive?' Theater . . . is a natural function. And as long as man is built the way he is . . . the theater exists."
He spoke of the 1960s-'70s movement away from traditional forms as healthy and right, but warned that it had to "go a long, long way" because we are "at the end of a long process of culture becoming a bourgeois luxury."
Like most of the theatrical artists of his generation, Brook, like Kenneth Tynan before him, reflected the radical chic flavor of the postwar British artistic elite, supposing that theater would--eventually--become nonbourgeois and widen its scope and horizons across the whole class spectrum of British society. In those decades much work by playwrights like John Osborne, Edward Bond, Trevor Griffiths, Howard Barker, and others, written from a harshly dissident viewpoint, seemed to bear out these hopes (though Osborne--not at all working class but petit bourgeois--later recanted in his own plays). A shallow Marxism became the order of the day--that is to say, the prevailing fashion--in "new" British theater.
Of course there were exceptions. Robert Bolt, though he made the common man his narrator for A Man for All Seasons, generally kept his mildly left-wing convictions off the stage; Peter Shaffer, Christopher Hampton, and Tom Stoppard managed to create novel forms of slick West End (i.e., Broadway) writing, while Harold Pinter's blank dramas avoided political posing. And beyond (or behind) these writers, the standard fare of the West End--drop-your-trousers farce, thrillers, classical revivals, and the occasional Irish play--continued to amuse the small minority of British society (between 1 and 3 percent) who actually patronize live theater.
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