2013 in Theatre

This has felt like a year of transition for the theatre. First, some of the biggest companies have seen new artistic directors appointed or hitting their stride (Royal Court, National Theatre, RSC, Donmar, National Theatre of Scotland, Almeida, Headlong, Bush, and more). Second, theatres have been trying new things: secret and surprise theatre, Open Court, new collaborations, ever more blurring between the new writing culture and live art, devised and director-led theatre. There were a couple of new theatres - The Park Theatre in Finsbury Park and the St James Theatre in Westminster (or was that late 2012?) - oh and I suppose I might mention our own new theatre at Royal Holloway which we were very proud to launch as the Caryl Churchill Theatre in the presence of the playwright herself.

There was late and sorry news just before Christmas when a section  of ceiling plasterwork at the Apollo collapsed during a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. This was traumatic, of course, for the audience caught beneath it and fortunately no one was seriously hurt, but it's also a very broad warning shot about the West End. The economics of running a West End Theatre appear to be pretty bleak; few people have much money to restore and renovate them and little secure prospect of getting a return on their investment if they do. The fact that virtually every West End theatre is locked down as a listed building means that conversion, restoration and rebuilding is doubly or triply complicated and expensive. Most of the West End theatres need much more than a lick of paint or a strengthened ceiling; they need to be gutted and remodelled completely. For what it's worth, I think we need a high-profile public consultation about the future of the West End, convened by the Theatres Trust, that would seriously consider a temporary de-listing all of the buildings' insides and making Lottery funds available to see a rolling programme of renewal and rebuilding, with an eye across the whole of the Estate, ensuring we have a range of different styles, sizes, audience-stage relationships. We need several more 400-500-seaters, more single rakes, more beautiful and flexible spaces, that still offer the West End's sense of event, its array of machines for imagining together, its traditions and elegance, but with more of a sense of the contemporary, the live, and the way we want to watch stories now. We need spaces that can take productions like This House and Curious Incident in the beautiful and thoughtful configurations for which they were designed. It would make a lot of sense to nationalise the West End theatre stock though there's not a hope of getting that (or, probably, any of this) from this ideologically-fixated market-fundamentalist Coalition government.

But how did you like the plays, Mrs LIncoln? The usual disclaimer: I live in London and didn't even make the Edinburgh Festival this year, so my non-London theatregoing was pretty attenuated. I went to Stratford to see Mark Ravenhill's brilliant assault on Candide (pictured, the play a bit better than the production, I felt, which was a little too broad in places, not quite as contemporary in feel as the script) and down to Plymouth to see Solid Air by Doug Lucie (where I felt the opposite; a rather lumpy script disguised by a terrific central performance). Other than that I'm afraid I did the metropolitan thing and sat waiting for the good stuff to come to me. And lots of it did: The Events was a brilliant example of the blurred lines between devising and writing, between new writing and director's theatre, between the precise formality of the written text and the crackling liveness of performance. This response to the Norwegian shooting two years ago had two actors playing a variety of roles alongside an amateur choir, a new one for each performance. The amateurs gave the performance a sense of vulnerability that was vitally precarious; the professionals told a story that organised the experience to enormously affecting ends. It's a lovely playwriting lesson that the most emotionally choking thing I experienced in a theatre this year was someone saying the absurdly simple line 'We both said me'. By the time the choir are singing 'we're all in here', the theatre has turned into the world and everyone around me in the Young Vic were in tears.

Other playwriting highlights for me this year included Dennis Kelly's monstrous The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromus at the Royal Court, a restless, shape-shifting play which dared to ask difficult questions about our attitude to morality and did so in darkly theatrical ways (why are the villains always the best roles?). It featured perhaps the trendiest cast in London theatre and, with every scene, designer Tom Scutt reimagined the Royal Court stage thrillingly. The moment when the Royal Court proudly tweeted a link to Quentin Letts's one-star review may come to be seen as the symptom of a tectonic shift in the relationship between the print and online critics. Letts's hostility was directed at the play's politics; while I think it was more interested in morality than politics as such, there was a trend this year of the theatre being much more explicitly political in its approach. When you walked into Chris Thorpe's There Has Possibly Been an Incident, the pre-show music was being played into the auditorium at conversation-cancelling volume and the play, despite its quiet precision and pared-down staging, was a similar assault, the words filling the space and the ideas filling your head, taking us from Anders Breivik (again) to Tianenman Square with riddling fluidity. There was the Calm Down, Dear festival of feminist theatre at Camden People's Theatre; who would have imagined such a thing even five years ago? I also really admired Kieran Hurley's Beats which ended up at the Soho Theatre in the Autumn. On the face of it, unpromising - does anyone care any more about the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 which outlawed the M25 rave scene? - but it was a hypnotic, funny, finally enraging show. I found peculiarly fascinating the ending, its own set of repetitive beats, in which Hurley just repeats and repeats the line 'It doesn't mean nothing': a double negative of affirmation that speaks volumes about our bleak political times and the persistent spirit of revolt. I was won over by If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep, probably the most traditional political play of the year; it reminded me of David Edgar, whose If Only... at Chichester was a beguilingly chilling analysis of the Coalition's immigration strategy, built around a brilliant intellectual trick about how to divide 17 camels. Routes by Rachel De-Lahey was a confident and informative examination of the UK Border Agency seen from below.

There were several plays that didn't seem to fit into any particular trend but were no worse for that. Pigeons, a strong and assured new play by Suhayla El-Bushra in the Court's brief weekly repertory season in the Downstairs theatre, sadly notable for the final performance by Paul Bhattacharjee before he took his own life. Elizabeth Kuti's Fishskin Trousers interwove three long monologues telling a haunting and beautiful story of hundreds of years lived on the Suffolk coast. Its poetic quality was a rare one this year. Bitch Boxer was Charlotte Josephine's literally pugnacious debut, a ferocious one-woman play (pictured) about a woman boxer - but also about girls and their fathers, and what we do with our tender hearts - performed by the author with an amazingly winning mixture of cockiness and gawky vulnerability. One of my most enjoyable theatre evenings of the year.

There were some excellent revivals this year. Arnold Wesker's Roots at the Donmar looked good as new, with two fine performances by Jessica Raine and Linda Bassett. By a very clever bit of casting, Lindsay Posner showed that The Winslow Boy was more than just a brilliant piece of pastiche, but actually a rather affecting portrait of a family torn apart by justice. Port at the National started slowly but Kate O'Flynn (in the lead role) and Marianne Elliott (director) eventually found a scale and grandeur in the play that filled the Lyttelton. Headlong's The Seagull with a hilarious and weirdly sensitive text by John Donnelly was pretty great. I saw two good, very different Ibsens: Richard Jones's crazy 1970s Public Enemy has stuck in my memory for good reasons; Richard Eyre's crisp Ghosts was superficially traditional but made it feel like you were watching the play for the first time. The same might be said of Nick Hytner's Othello a play which, God help me, I studied for A Level and yet was so clean and clear that whole scenes took place that I swear I've never seen or read before. As we left for the interval, my wife said 'That was amazing - I can't wait for the next episode' capturing brilliantly the production as Your Next Box Set. After being disappointed by Jamie Lloyd's shock-and-awe assault on Macbeth at Trafalgar Studios, I enjoyed Eve Best's Globe production of the play, which managed to be surprisingly funny (The Globe always makes plays funny) and genuinely supernaturally fearful. I mostly adored the all-female Julius Caesar, a prison riot of a production which featured, from Cush Jumbo, the greatest Mark Anthony I've ever seen. The most richly fulfilling revival was, in truth, a complete reinvention that turned the play inside out: Katie Mitchell's Fräulein Julie (pictured) was Strindberg's play as seen through its apparently least important character, while we watched much of the play silently through exquisitely-composed live video projection of scenes which we could only glimpse through windows onto a film set. 

I don't see a lot of musicals but everything I saw this year I liked. The Scottsboro Boys is a jaw-droppingly brilliant satire on racism, with Kander and Ebb's unflinching political edge and performed by a sensational ensemble cast. The revival of A Chorus Line was great; a really innovative and still remarkable show, completely without spectacle. This could not be said of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a production which got quite outrageously scorned by a lot of the critics, principally for failing to be Matilda and for being expensive. In fact, it's an inventive, touching, tuneful and slightly subversive show and I'd urge you to give it a try. Douglas Hodge gives one of the performances of the year.

At the other end of things (is it the other end?), I thought Forced Entertainment's Tomorrow's Parties was their best show in years, a steely battle over the future, filled with nostalgia for the time to come. Bryony Kimmings's Credible Likeable Superstar Model was another explicitly political piece, timely in its earnestness (it felt somehow part of the year's brilliant Everyday Sexism and No More Page 3 campaigns), but subtly complex in its complicated use of the child performer. I loved Anthony Neilson's Narrative, upstairs at the Court, a show about which one will eventually say that everyone who saw it went out and formed a theatre company, so brilliantly, idiotically enjoyable was its collage. Ontroerend Goed's Teenage Riot skewered precisely my prejudices by dividing me internally between the shock of seeing young people's perspectives taken absolutely seriously and the stern wish to see them clear this bloody mess up and go to your room. At the same venue was Henry the Fifth (pictured), a retelling of Shakespeare's play and the historical story by Ignace Cornelissen, that was completely delightful and endlessly enjoyable. And then there was Tim Crouch and Andy Smith's what happens to the hope at the end of the evening which, as ever with these guys, asked us to think about who we all are, what friendship means, by asking us to think about theatre. It's one of the great evenings I've spent in the theatre this year.

There were several evenings I failed to spend in the theatre this year, including Chimerica, Grounded, Leaving Planet Earth, Scenes From a Marriage, My Generation, Mission Drift, Crime and Punishment, Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, and Fatherland, because of cupidity or indolence or just failing to book for things. I saw loads more than this but if it's not here I either (a) hated it or (b) have inexplicably overlooked it. An evening of theatre that I enjoyed, despite not spending it in the theatre, was the National Theatre's 50th anniversary celebration which was broadcast live on BBC4 and, it seemed to me, showed that finally how far we've come in representing theatre on video. It's not theatre, but it's also not just florid-looking people shouting embarrassingly on telly either. The evening was well judged - lack of women writers aside, which is more the fault of the previous 50 years than the celebration itself - nicely affectionate without being sentimental, with just a few gobsmackingly great moments.

Overall, I thought this was a good year. And it's the ever-greater proximity between experimentalism and new writing that made what happens to the hope... and The Events and There Has Possibly Been an Incident my shows of the year.

Verdict

On a plane recently I watched The Verdict, a 1982 Sidney Lumet film, starring Paul Newman and James Mason. It's a creaky and dated film, saved by some very good performances. It's got a great reputation; voted by the American Film Institute the 91st greatest screenplay of all time. Adapted from a novel, the movie concerns a drunken and washed-up lawyer (Frank Galvin, played by Newman) who is gifted an easy medical malpractice case, where the thing to do is just to press for a good out-of-court settlement, make everyone a bit of money and get his own career back on track. In fact, he decides to take the case to trial, and against all the odds succeeds.

The screenplay is by David Mamet. There are some good character touches and Mamet keeps things gritty, rather than sentimental. But the moves in the plot are pretty clunky and the ending is out of nowhere much. Possibly Mamet's just following the novel - I haven't read it - but what might work in a book as a kind of legal procedural needs some rethinking in narrative terms. The drive to find the hidden witness ( a nurse who knows that a key document was falsified) evaporates in court when the judge rules her evidence inadmissible. The problem is you feel cheated, but in narrative rather than moral terms. It also features Mamet's characteristic misogyny: Galvin meets and starts a relationship with Laura (played by Charlotte Rampling). Some way through the trial, Galvin discovers that Laura is in the pay of his trial opponent and is spying on him, feeding his strategy back to them. Galvin's reaction is to find her and punch her to the ground. At the end of the film, Laura is now the washed-up drunk and we see her sprawled in her bed tearfully phoning Frank; the final scene has Frank in his office moodily ignoring the phone. It seems as if the great triumph of the movie is his grand repudiation of women.

It made me think about Mamet and his bizarre drift from perhaps the most brilliant playwright in America to a washed-up, right-wing jobbing writer, incapable of capturing even a flicker of his previous quality. His drift to the right has been a long time coming; the sort of comments he made to the press around the time of Oleanna (1992) suggested contempt for liberal values, but it was only in 2008 when he wrote a notorious essay for Village Voice entitled 'Why I Am No Longer A Brain-Dead Liberal' that he came out as a fully-fledged neo-liberal conservative, an admirer of Hayek, a Romney supporter, an opponent of gun control, and a scourge of liberal pieties. This has been accompanied by a decline of his playwriting powers. He would undoubtedly like to believe that his plays are still great, it's just that the liberal theatre establishment has turned against him. But it's just not true; the plays are now thin and shapeless. His once-famous dialogue has decayed into a series of barbs and one-liners, smart remarks about this and that. In particular there's a strange tendency for the characters to twist their words into gnomic utterances that one fears the author believes is wisdom. This from the beginning of 2012's The Anarchist:

ANN. What have you been doing?

CATHY. I've been studying. As usual.

ANN. And what have you learned?

CATHY. In the larger sense . . .

ANN. . . . all right.

CATHY. I hope that I've learned to be reasonable. At least I have studied it. Most importantly.

ANN. Most importantly. 

CATHY. Yes.

ANN. Reason more than patience?

CATHY. One might think the pressing study would be patience. But patience, of course, implies an end.

ANN. "Patience implies an end".

CATHY. Well, yes.

ANN. As?

CATHY. One may be patient only for something.

ANN. Such as?

CATHY. A deferred desire, or the cessation of discomfort . . .

ANN. Revenge?

CATHY. Well, that would fall within the rubric of desire deferred.

ANN. And reason teaches?

CATHY. Reason would teach the abandonment of the unfulfillable wish; and, so, of the need for patience. It therefore may be said to be the higher study.

(The Anarchist, New York: TCG, 2012, pp. 7-8)

They sound like an impersonation of intelligence. Compare it to Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), his masterpiece I think, which early on gives us this exchange:

LEVENE. [...] All that I'm saying, things get set, I know they do, you get a certain mindset . . . A guy gets a reputation. We know how this . . . all I'm saying, put a closer on the job. There's more than one man for the . . .  Put a . . . Wait a second, put a proven man out . . . and you watch, now wait a second – and you watch your dollar volumes . . . You start closing them for fifty 'stead of twenty-five . . . you put a closer on the . . .

WILLIAMSON. Shelly, you blew the last . . .

LEVENE. No. John. No. Let's wait, let's back up here, I did. . . will you please! Wait a second. Please. I didn't 'blow' them. No. I didn't 'blow' them. One kicked out, one I closed . . .

WILLIAMSON . . . you didn't close . . .

LEVENE. . . . I, if you'd listen to me. Please. I closed the cocksucker. His 'ex', John, his ex, I didn't know he was married . . . he, the judge invalidated the . . . 

WILLIAMSON. Shelly . . . 

LEVENE. . . . And what is that, John? What? Bad luck. That's all it is. I pray in your life you will never find it runs in streaks. That's what it does, that's all it's doing. Streaks. I pray it misses you. That's all I want to say.

WILLIAMSON. (pause) What about the other two?

LEVENE. What two?

WILLIAMSON. Four. You had four leads. One kicked out, one the judge, you say . . .

LEVENE. . . . You want to see the court records? John? Eh? You want to go down . . .

WILLIAMSON. . . . no . . .

LEVENE. . . . do you want to go down-town . . . ?

WILLIAMSON. . . . no . . . 

LEVENE. . . . then . . . 

WILLIAMSON . . . I only . . . 

LEVENE . . . then what is this 'you say' shit, what is that?

(Plays: 3, London: Methuen, 1996, pp. 5-6)

Everything that is great about this latter scene is bad about the former. This scene is incomprehensible: it's a shock - we are thrown suddenly into a world, with terminology ('closer', 'leads') that we are unfamiliar with. In The Anarchist, we're thrown into a set of ideas being sedately exchanged that we don't care about. In Glengarry, a baffling situation starts to resolve into a personal relationship; we begin to feel that Levene is being aggressive because he's on the back foot; Williamson is more diffident in the debate because he holds all the cards; there's a story here and we want to know more. In The Anarchist, no such relationship truly emerges; it's static on a deep level. In Glengarry, we begin to paint a whole world around this scene: the leads, the judge, the court, the ex, the situation where we are, the situation where we're not - brilliantly, he sets the first act of this workplace play not at work - but in The Anarchist it just remains static and empty and arid. Levene has a speech that feels like someone speaking wisdom - the speech about luck - but we know it's got a purpose; it's being said to have an effect; it may not be something Levene particularly believes. In The Anarchist we sense that the ideas are not part of any kind of situation; Mamet actually cares about these ideas and wants us to follow them and engage with them. But they are neither followable or engaging. The halting rhythms are now not about character or situation or even realism, they are the unlovely self-love of a writer who has stopped being interested in language, only in the things he wants to express. And that's why he's stopped being any good.

But what struck me, watching The Verdict, is that the reason why Mamet used to be so good is that he has always been attracted to the Right: the cut-throat entrepreneurs of Glengarry Glen Ross, the hopeless individualists of American Buffalo (1975), the illiberal liberals of Oleanna, the vicious misogynists of Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) - and indeed the vested interests and crude misogynists of The Verdict. Horrible though the ending is in moral terms, it's probably the most profound and stirring moment in the movie. It was because he was drawn to these people, fascinated by them, but troubled by his own feelings for them that he is driven to show them, expose them, lay them bare, in all their complexity and fascination to him. There was a transition period in the 1990s, where these tensions were brought to thrilling crisis: in particular, Oleanna, a play which he seems to have written as an attack on political correctness, but with such troubled complexity that the play is one of the most brilliant presentations of the complexities of the debates over liberalism, free speech, gender, and sexual exploitation that I know, even if I suspect Mamet doesn't realise how good his play is. It's a play that comes from a great playwright trying to explore his troubled feelings.  

Now, unfortunately, he is untroubled by his feelings about this right-wing world and the writing has consequently become thin and flat. The Verdict isn't as great as Mamet could be, but it's still better than anything he's been able to write in the last decade. Mamet has become a terrible writer which is a pity, because at his peak, there was no one in the world who could write like David Mamet. 

The Day of the Doctor

It must have been a thrilling moment when Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat realised that the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who would fall on a Saturday. A propitious opportunity to celebrate the programme where it belongs: on a Saturday night, in the heart of family television. Their second thought must have been, but how the hell do you write a 50th anniversary special? It has to do so much: it has to celebrate its past, but still stand alone as a satisfying story; it has to pay tribute to previous doctors, but not take the shine off the current incumbent; it needs to be bigger and more epic than ever before, but since the 2005 reboot, Doctor Who has become at times preposterously epic and getting any grander would be, to put it mildly, a risk. In 1972 and 1983, there were shows that celebrated the past: The Three Doctors united Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee to fight Omega; the The Five Doctors brought Troughton, Pertwee, and Davison together with Richard Hurndall standing in for the now-deceased Hartnell and a few stray video clips of Baker to fight, um, The Master, Cybermen, Daleks, Yeti, a balletic silver robot, and President Borusa.

The Five Doctors showed exactly what the problems with these celebrations can be. In the desire to reflect the whole history of the programme, the story ends up being a jigsaw of Doctors, former companions (the Brigadier, Sarah-Jane Smith, Susan, Jamie, Zoe, Liz, Mike Yates...), and arcane bits of Time Lord history. The story, such as it is, is squeezed. Indeed, the story - in which various doctors and companions are plucked from their time streams to do battle in a 'Death Zone' - is as close to just saying 'we're just going to put these actors in a room and let them do what they want' as makes no odds. The story was entirely backward looking.

By comparison, this year's The Day of the Doctor is a triumph. It's a decent story, with only three Doctors (one of whom is basically new, but more of that later), two villains from the past (Daleks and Zygons), a little bit of Timelord history being rewritten, and a lovely lovely lovely cameo for Tom Baker, who turns up at the end, barking mad as ever, stealing the scene from Matt Smith. There are some rather good Moffatisms (aliens hiding in paintings, some paradoxes with time, and some pretty brilliant jokes) but he's also channelled some Russell T Daviesisms too (the Tardis landing in Trafalgar Square with the Doctor hanging off the edge, the sneaky appearance of Peter Capaldi, the saving of Gallifrey). Matt Smith and David Tennant play off each other very well and John Hurt is a magnificent Doctor, with all three bitchily scoring points off each other (Matt Smith's Doctor calling David Tennant's Doctor 'Dick Van Dyke" being a particular joy).

What struck me watching it, though, is that the story was pretty well hamstrung by the refusal of Chris Ecclestone to take part. It seems kind of obvious that the story was originally conceived with Ecclestone playing the John Hurt role. Think about it: Ecclestone's Doctor was the one haunted by the Time War and his part in it. The story is therefore just about Ecclestone meeting his two successors who collectively rewrite history to save Gallifrey and absolve the Doctor himself from his moral responsibility for the destruction not just of the Daleks but of his own people too. In a sense, it's the conclusion of a story arc set in motion eight years ago. But Christopher Ecclestone refused to take part which spoiled the plans. Instead, Moffat is forced to create an extra doctor, the so-called War Doctor, who did all the things that plainly we have hitherto been assuming Ecclestone's Doctor did. John Hurt, despite being a very different actor, has the same dour demeanour, the same contempt for the childishness of his successors, that would certainly have been Ecclestone's attitude in the story. 

John Hurt is a bonus, of course. Certainly the most astonishing actor to play the role, he brought a level of gravitas to the story that even the deeply serious Ecclestone wouldn't have managed. But it's at a bit of a cost. Basically, it's rather messy: Steven Moffat has been rather scornful of the fans worried about whether this means all subsequent doctors are shunted up, Ecclestone moving from tenth to eleventh, Tennant from eleventh to twelfth, and so on, but he's wrong. Either John Hurt was the tenth doctor or he wasn't. There is a bit of internal Doctor Who mythology that says the Doctor can only have thirteen incarnations; now, this will be easy to revise (and, in fact, in The Five Doctors it seemed this could be extended by the Time Lords, if they wished), but it hasn't been revised yet, so Peter Capaldi, being the 13th Doctor (including Hurt) should be the last. Moffat's scorn for this as some kind of nerdish fanboy consideration is mistaken; it's about the internal consistency of the fictional world,l the pleasures of the show's mythology, and the nature of the viewer's engagement with different levels of narrative. In some ways, Moffat's disdain for the niceties of his decision remind me of the increasing tendency of his stories to be tied up by high-concept low-coherence technobabble rather than serious narrative resolution. This decision, I think, was forced on him by Ecclestone's intransigence, but it doesn't do to fudge it and then mock people for pointing out the fudge.

That said, it's a pretty good story. The Zygons are a bit superfluous and their story sort of evaporates, but there was so much rip-roaring narrative glee and the performances of all the principals were so good that it would be hard to hold the Doctor-chronology against Steven Moffat. He managed to square a circle and provide the programme with a wonderful celebration of its first fifty years.