Esme I have my life here in this theatre. My life is when the curtain goes up. My work is my life. I understand nothing else.
– David Hare, Amy’s View, 1997
One of the key global events that defined the 1990s happened on 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. On that date, the Communist East German government announced that all its citizens could visit West Germany, sparking off mass celebrations that signified the end of the Cold War (the worldwide conflict that had savagely divided a democratic and capitalist West from a totalitarian and Communist East since the end of the Second World War in 1945). Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had split Germany in two since 1961, the country was reunited on 3 October 1990, while, further east, the Soviet Union disintegrated and finally collapsed in 1991. These massive changes in the geo-political system led to what was widely seen as a New World Order. Some commentators, such as Francis Fukuyama, enthusiastically and prematurely announced the ‘End of History’ and the triumph of the capitalist system. Fukayama’s pronouncements find an echo in Mark Ravenhill’s ironical 1997 play Faust Is Dead, in which Alain, the philosopher character, argues not only that history has ended, but also that ‘Man is dead’.1
Instead of a Cold War stand-off between two superpowers, the New World Order consisted of the USA as the one major superpower, while the Soviet Union fragmented into one large country, Russia, and several smaller independent states, such as Georgia and Kazakhstan. Likewise, the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe changed the political map of the continent. These changes provoked responses such as Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali’s Moscow Gold (1990), a play about power struggles in the Soviet Union told in a living newspaper style, and Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest (1990), about the Romanian revolution which toppled the Communist regime in that country. China remained politically Communist even while its leaders allowed a market economy to flourish. If, elsewhere, the decade started off optimistically, with the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the ending of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, soon local conflicts reasserted themselves. Although some politicians spoke of a peace dividend, what actually happened was a series of small wars which had devastating local effects. The Middle East remained a flashpoint. The first Gulf War, fought by a US-led Coalition against Saddam Hussein, resulted in his expulsion from Kuwait and his containment in Iraq. During the 1990s, the Middle East Peace Process made some progress with the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, signed in 1993. But, in Africa, the genocidal conflict in Rwanda in 1994 cost the lives of some 800,000 people. In Afghanistan, the Taliban, a radical Islamist grouping, took power in 1996. In the former Soviet Union, the brutal first Chechen war was fought by separatists in Chechnya who wanted independence from Moscow. In Europe, the Bosnian civil war (which influenced Sarah Kane’s Blasted) lasted from 1992 to 1995, with horrific casualties and atrocities. As well as Bosnia, there were other problems in Europe. Widespread migration from the developing world and the former Eastern Europe, plus arguments over European political integration in the EU, created social tensions. Alive to these changes, David Edgar examined the new state of the world with The Shape of the Table (National, 1990) – which looked at the transition from Communism to capitalism in a fictional East European state – and Pentecost (RSC, 1994) – which examined cultural conflict in the new Europe – while David Greig’s debut Europe (Traverse, 1994) focused on migration and European identity.
In the UK, most of the decade was overshadowed by John Major’s Conservative government, which became rapidly unpopular during the economic recession of 1990–1, a downturn costing thousands of people their jobs and their homes. Things got even worse when, after the Maastricht Treaty, the Conservative Party was split by furious arguments over Europe. The government continued Thatcher’s policy of privatisation by selling off the railways in 1993, although it refrained from introducing university fees. Despite Major’s efforts to promote a nation at ease with itself, his government became mired in sleaze and scandal, creating a climate of cynicism and apathy. On the Labour side, the reforms of the party begun by Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, and alluded to by David Hare in his semi-fictional Absence of War (National, 1993), failed to win him the 1992 election, but were continued by Tony Blair, who rebranded the party as ‘New Labour’. Dropping the historic Clause Four of the party’s constitution (which advocated nationalisation) in 1995, Blair moved the party on to the centre ground of British politics and narrowed the ideological gap between it and the Conservatives. Not everyone welcomed this move: one of the displayed scene titles in Caryl Churchill’s This is a Chair (Royal Court, 1997) was ‘The Labour Party’s Slide to the Right’. In 1997, Blair was elected prime minister in a spectacular landslide victory. His youthful image was enhanced by stories of his guitar-playing past and by the fact that his son Leo was the first baby to be born to a serving post-war British prime minister. Among the elements of continuity between the Major and Blair administrations, the most important was the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, which gradually ended some thirty years of armed conflict. Constitutionally, the partial devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland went forward, and the first steps to reform the hereditary House of Lords were taken. The first significant measure of the new government was the handing of policy over monetary control to the Bank of England, which signalled a light-touch attitude to regulating banking and credit. The first of Blair’s wars was fought when he successfully advocated the NATO bombing of Serbia to force it to withdraw from neighbouring Kosovo.
In the 1990s, despite the long political dominance of the Conservatives (who had been in power since 1979), there was a real sense of cultural change. Regardless of all the hype, the arrival of Britpop, Brit film and Cool Britannia contributed to a sense of cultural confidence, while the election of Blair brought a feeling of a new dawn, with the image of the nation rebranded as youthful, bright and optimistic. At the same time, British youth culture continued to be influenced by a darker sensibility, especially from North America. For example, the Canadian Douglas Coupland’s 1991 cult novel Generation X had an enormous influence, becoming a book that ‘distils the spirit of a moment and comes to represent a particular time’.2 Such blank generation literature offered a more disenchanted view of the world to set against the pervading currents of optimism. This was also a time when the huge forces of globalisation, which expanded mental horizons as well as economic markets, made a powerful impact on Britain, while artistic responses to these new realities took many forms: a retreat into private concerns, a dismissive cynicism or a renewed criticism of consumer capitalism. All of these were present in British theatre of the time.
In 1990, the system of arts funding in Britain was the traditional post-war cultural settlement of using the Arts Council of Great Britain, an arm’s length public body, to distribute government subsidy to individual institutions in partnership with local authorities and, increasingly, with business sponsors. The effect of cuts in state subsidy during the Thatcher-led 1980s was twofold: first, it made the whole theatre system increasingly driven by commercial objectives and, second, it encouraged an embattled psyche, what critic Michael Billington called ‘a siege-mentality, excessive prudence and the sanctification of the box-office’.3 As well as state subsidy, local authorities also funded theatres, and this sometimes led to problems: when the Merseyside Metropolitan Council was abolished by the Thatcher government, its successor was unwilling to subsidise Liverpool’s theatres, so the Liverpool Playhouse almost went bankrupt in 1990 was dark in 1998–2000, while the Liverpool Everyman closed in 1993.
During the 1990s, two important innovations were brought in by the Major government: the Department of National Heritage and the National Lottery. The Department of National Heritage was Britain’s first ministry for culture, responsible for the performing arts, film, museums, galleries, heritage, sport and tourism, while the Lottery rapidly became a national institution, whose weekly draws were broadcast on primetime television and which distributed its profits to the arts, charities and good causes. These two new institutions symbolise the spirit of the Conservative 1990s: on the one hand, the new government department offered a cosy, patriotic idea of heritage and historical tradition; on the other, the Lottery suggested a casino economy which mocked enterprise culture, and was regressive because the poor bought the most tickets while the middle classes benefited most from Lottery awards.
Conservative government policy was inconsistent. Timothy Renton, Minister for the Arts in 1991, publicly contemplated abolishing the Arts Council but, in the run-up to the 1992 General Election, actually increased its funding to £194 million, so theatre subsidy rose by 14 per cent. The Arts Council was thus able to bail out the RSC, which had accumulated deficits and had been forced to shut its Barbican base in London for four months in November 1990. Then, in mid-decade, Arts Council funding was cut again. Meanwhile, the organisation was restructured. By April 1994 ten Regional Arts Boards were created and clients were distributed between a central office (National Theatre, RSC and Royal Court) and the RABs (regional theatres). At the same time, ‘many of the specialist units that the Arts Council had developed in the eighties to promote general policies such as cultural diversity, the role of women in the arts and attention to disability, were wound up’.4 In 1993, the last year of the old Arts Council of Great Britain, this body tried various cost-cutting measures – such as reducing funding to ten theatres outside London – which all failed, and meant that the Arts Council lost the confidence of both government and its own clients. In 1994, the Arts Councils of Scotland and Wales were devolved, to be funded directly by the Scottish and Welsh Offices, and the London headquarters became Arts Council England. This restructuring was less important than pervasive fear of cuts to the arts’ budget.
Following the Thatcher years, business sponsorship remained a vital ingredient of arts funding. By the early 1990s, government was aiding business sponsorship by topping up private deals: ‘by 1994 the government had contributed twenty-one million pounds, in response to forty-three million in sponsorship’.5 But business sponsorship fell during periods of economic recession. Still, the trend of the 1990s was for corporate sponsors (often from the financial sector) to become a vital part of every major theatre’s core funding. In 1994, when the RSC concluded six years of sponsorship by Royal Insurance, it made a fresh deal with Allied Lyons worth £3 million over three years. This was, says Robert Hewison, ‘the largest arts sponsorship deal in Britain’.6 On a smaller scale, Barclays bank sponsored the Royal Court’s annual festival of experimental new work. But such deals provoked controversies that even affected educational charities: when in 1998 a £3 million grant by the Jerwood Foundation to the Royal Court was made conditional on the theatre adding the name Jerwood to both its auditoriums, there was an outcry. Despite such bitter disputes, the main trends were those of increasing sponsorship and commercialisation.
In 1993, the new Department of National Heritage, in charge of the Arts Council, seemed to herald an optimistic future. After all, it had an arts lover, David Mellor, as its Secretary of State. Similarly, the National Lottery, launched at the end of 1994, promised ‘to initiate the biggest expansion in cultural activity since the sixties’.7 What could go wrong? Well, quite a lot. It was typical of the sleazy image of the Major government that Mellor soon resigned because of a sex scandal involving an actress, Antonia de Sanchez. And the Lottery was such an enormous, and unexpected, success that the Arts Council found itself distributing £340 million of Lottery arts funding (for capital projects such as building refurbishment) compared to £191 million of regular arts funding (for running costs).8 The huge sums of money made available by the Lottery allowed new theatre building projects, such as the refurbishment of the Royal Court Theatre (completed in 2000). But decreases in core funding created ‘the paradox of cultural institutions dying of revenue thirst while drowning in lakes of capital funding’.9 Major’s last Heritage Secretary Virginia Bottomley recognised that the arts had been underfunded, with theatre outside London alone carrying deficits of £8 million, and she set up a stabilisation fund in 1997 to bail out the worst-hit theatres.
The advent of New Labour in 1997 reversed some cuts, but added lots of spin. The Blair government changed the name of the Department of National Heritage to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and its first Secretary of State Chris Smith played a boosterish role in hyping the Blair government’s cultural credentials: his book of speeches was called Creative Britain. Although this was part of what Jen Harvie calls ‘a crucial paradigm shift’, moving from talking about culture as art to marketing it as ‘creative industries’, the new government also did some good. For example, it commissioned the Boyden Report to look at the problems of theatre outside London.10 Thus the benefits of New Labour policies would be reaped in the new millennium.
By the end of the decade, following twenty years of glorifying the market, two trends were of the utmost importance: first, the mixed economy of funding – part state subsidy, part business sponsorship and part box office – was in crisis, especially in respect to theatres outside London. Second, the entire theatre funding system had been thoroughly commercialised, so that even subsidised companies were under pressure to be successful businesses. The outward signs of this were everywhere: theatres rebranded themselves, acquired logos, learnt to use niche marketing, made sponsorship deals, redesigned their foyers and expanded their bar activities. Audiences became customers, and shows became product. The box office was king.11 Added to this was a new creed: the arts should be assessed on their social impact: the hunt was on for new audiences and greater access. Within theatres, commercial pressure undermined the traditional relationship between directors and theatrical institutions, creating what Billington describes as a freelance culture in which directors found themselves in an open market: ‘Where in the past it had been companies and buildings that possessed a defining aesthetic, now that was something imported by individual directors who came bearing their own particular brand and style.’12 But how did these changes affect the shows that theatres put on?
The mainstream theatre landscape was divided between a commercial West End and a subsidised sector which was headed by the National Theatre and the RSC. In the mid-1990s, theatre suddenly, if briefly, became part of Cool Britannia, when publications such as Newsweek, Le Monde and the London Evening Standard hyped London as both the theatre capital of the world and Europe’s coolest city. As one epitome of traditional Englishness, Country Life magazine, put it: ‘London is the greatest theatre city in the world – the West End has twice as many theatres as Broadway.’13 Certainly, it is true that theatre was amazingly popular: critic Benedict Nightingale estimates that ‘roughly twenty-five million visits were annually made to English theatres in the mid-1990s, four million of them by foreign visitors’.14 Statistics suggested that about 30 per cent of tourists who came to London went to the theatre.
West End theatres were owned and run by commercial giants such as Stoll Moss, Apollo Entertainments and Associated Capital Theatres, and individuals such as Stephen Waley-Cohen. In 1999, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group bought Stoll Moss, adding ten theatres to the three that the impresario and composer already possessed. This was a big move in a big business: in 1996, gross box office for West End musicals was more than £330 million per annum, with eleven million people paying an average ticket price of £30. Nearly 16,000 musical performances a year were given and tourists spent 12 per cent of their entertainment budget on watching actors singing and dancing.15
As far as West End musicals go, the 1990s consolidated the triumphs of the 1980s. Andrew Lloyd Webber, the prince of entrepreneurs, made theatre history in 1991 with six shows running at the same time in London’s ‘Theatreland’. A year later, his support of the Conservative government was rewarded with a knighthood. In July 1993 his Sunset Boulevard opened with £4 million in advance bookings, and in January 1996 Cats (1981) – with its instantly recognisable yellow-eyed logo – became the longest-running musical in history. In 1994, he repeated his achievement of 1982 and 1988 by having three musicals running in London and three in New York at the same time.16 In 1996, Madonna starred in the film version of his Evita. In the 1997 New Year’s honours list, as a farewell gift from the departing Tories, he was made a life peer, a fitting climax to a decade in which he made regular appearances in the list of the top ten richest Britons. Likewise, Cameron Mackintosh, the other major musical producer, enjoyed continued success with Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boubil’s Les Misérables (1985), which had been developed by the RSC but was a commercial goldmine for Mackintosh. By 2000, Les Miserables had been running continuously for fifteen years and Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera for fourteen years, both making billions at the box office worldwide. Thus the aesthetics of the spectacular, a form ‘that seeks to impress an audience with financial rather than creative prowess’, was more profitable than even the most successful films.17 If the more sophisticated work of Stephen Sondheim was eclipsed by these mega-musicals, other work – such as Schönberg and Boubil’s Martin Guerre (1996), Lloyd Webber’s revamped By Jeeves (1996) or Cy Coleman’s ironical City of Angels (1993) – was markedly less successful. And musical turkeys included Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which lost a rumoured $12 million, as well as Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game. Jukebox musicals, led by Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (1989), in which a back catalogue of pop music hits were strung together in a feeble plot, presaged an unadventurous future.
While in the past serious plays were regularly put on by the commercial sector, over the 1990s the number shrunk considerably. Producers such as Bill Kenwright and Duncan Weldon would bring plays in from Bath or Clywd, and you might see Jenny Seagrove, say, in a revival of William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker (1994). Occasional new plays by Ronald Harwood or Simon Gray, with Harold Pinter directing, plus transfers of popular work by Alan Ayckbourn and John Godber, joined old-fashioned genres such as courtroom dramas, thrillers or Ray Cooney farces. But gradually the energy ebbed out of serious commercial West End drama. Instead, new plays were developed in the subsidised sector and then brought into the West End. This led journalists to write perennial features about the decline of the West End, a local variant of the myth of Britain’s post-war decline. For although fewer and fewer commercial managements put on new plays, the West End was thriving. For example, three long-running entertainments – Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1952), Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of The Woman in Black (1983) and Willy Russell’s play with music Blood Brothers (1988) – offered shots of nostalgia, sensation and sentimentality throughout the 1990s. Comedy shows by Julian Clary or Eddie Izzard brought in the punters. And the decade saw one massive success which suggested that commercial theatre could be part of Cool Britannia: Art (1996), a play for three male actors by French playwright Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton, and produced by David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers. The original cast was Albert Finney, Tom Courtney and Ken Stott, but the production held the attention of audiences by constantly recasting, and actors such as Richard Griffiths, Henry Goodman, David Haig and Nigel Havers, as well as an all-American cast led by Stacey Keach, ensured that the production ran for seven years. But if it is true that the West End was, in critic Michael Billington’s words, ‘the ultimate exemplar of market forces’, it was also able to stage work with a critical attitude.18 For example, more than one million people saw Stephen Daldry’s revival of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, which started life at the National (1992) before running for almost six years in the West End. With its neo-Expressionist aesthetic and clear advocacy of Labour Party renewal, this play implicitly interrogated Thatcher’s comment that ‘there is no such thing as society’.19
Nor was all commercial theatre the same. When veteran director Peter Hall – who spent much of the decade presenting solid if unexciting revivals of the classics – took over as artistic director of the commercial Old Vic in 1996, he gave free rein to Dominic Dromgoole – formerly head of the tiny Bush fringe theatre – to stage new plays on this large stage. The main beneficiaries were playwrights Samuel Adamson, Sebastian Barry and April De Angelis. Hall also staged classics with star actors such as Ben Kingsley and Felicity Kendal. In central London, the 440-seat New Ambassadors Theatre, run by producer Sonia Friedman from 1996, staged the work of new playwrights Mark Ravenhill, Ayub Khan-Din and Gary Owen, as well as Lee Hall’s popular Spoonface Steinberg. The New Ambassadors also hosted populist theatre such as Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets, a two-hander that questioned Hollywood images of Ireland, and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, an orgy of feminism lite which recruited celebrities to lead mainly female audiences in reclaiming the word ‘cunt’. Other notable West End entertainments included Arthur Smith and Chris England’s An Evening with Gary Lineker at the start of the decade and Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, starring Maggie Smith, at its end. In mid-decade, even cutting-edge drama – Trainspotting, Closer and Shopping and Fucking – had respectable runs in Theatreland. Meanwhile, south of the river, another commercial venture, American actor Sam Wanamaker’s wood-and-plaster reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe, which opened in 1997 with actor Mark Rylance as its maverick first artistic director, was a monument to heritage which was to prove immensely popular with audiences.
In contrast to the commercial West End, the twin peaks of the state-subsidised sector were the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.20 The National, led by Richard Eyre in 1988–97, enjoyed a decade of what Dominic Shellard calls ‘stability and growth’.21 Eyre created a National that was both overtly populist and mildly oppositional, and his ‘good commercial sense’ was seen in repeated West End transfers and a renewed emphasis on national touring.22 He programmed a judicious mixture of popular musical revivals – such as Carousel (1992) and Guys and Dolls (1996), with black actors Clive Rowe and Clarke Peters – along with more critical work, such as Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1992), with Alison Steadman and Jane Horrocks. Other memorable productions included Tony Harrison’s The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus (1990), which debated high and low culture while featuring a fragment of a play by Sophocles, complete with satyrs sporting proudly protruding phalluses; and Alan Bennett’s frequently revived adaptation of The Wind in the Willows (1990), with its riverbank animals and nostalgic atmosphere. Shakespeare was well served by Eyre’s grand production of Richard III (1990), with Ian McKellen as a 1930s-style fascistic despot, Deborah Warner’s intimate and lucid production of Richard II (1995), with Fiona Shaw playing the king in a discomforting performance, and a moving King Lear (1997), for which Ian Holm overcame years of stage fright to turn in a thrilling performance.
Eyre’s National developed what has been described as the ‘new mainstream’ of new writing.23 David Hare became the house playwright, penning Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War (1993), which anatomised the Church, the Law and the Labour Party, three national institutions in crisis. As well as writing these state-of-the-nation dramas, which were revived as a comprehensive trilogy on the huge Olivier stage, Hare wrote a book about his research for them in which he commented, ‘A playwright above all other writers responds unknowingly to the mood of the times.’24 Unknowing or not, the trilogy was, in Eyre and Wright’s words, ‘a crowning moment in the life of the National Theatre in 1994. The plays all ask the questions: How does a good person change people’s lives for the better? Can an institution established for the common good avoid being devoured by its own internal struggles and contradictions?’25 Hare followed up with Skylight (1995) and Amy’s View (1997), two excellent plays which attacked the values of Thatcherism. In the former, the personal conflict between restaurant owner Tom (Michael Gambon) and younger teacher Kyra (Lia Williams), a couple who were once lovers, mirrors the tensions between Thatcherite market ideology (Tom, in Hare’s words, represents ‘capitalist endeavour at its most fleeting and heroic’) and a more caring attitude.26 At one point, Kyra cooks a spaghetti supper in real time, a scene archly parodied by Martin Crimp in his updated version of Molière’s The Misanthrope (Young Vic, 1997):
Man Remember all the good times that we had.
Woman The times that you call good now all seem bad.
Man Let’s dine out at my restaurant. The limousine is ready.
Woman I’d rather stay at home and cook my own spaghetti.
[…] They kiss beneath the leaking skylight.27
In Amy’s View, Judi Dench played an actress, Esme, who is eventually bankrupted by the fallout from the 1990s Lloyd’s insurance scandal. She is the mother of Amy (Samantha Bond), who marries Dominic, a television producer and symbol of the dumbing down of contemporary media. In Act Two, Esme and Dominic clash when the young man suggests that theatre is dead. Esme fights back, sarcastically characterising Dominic in this corrosive speech: ‘The country’s most famous, most influential programme which lays down the law on the arts. And it’s run by a man who seems to have only one small disadvantage. What is it? Remind me. Oh yes, I remember. It turns out he doesn’t like art!’28 The rasp that Dench gave to this rhetoric lingered long in the memory. Yet, despite Hare’s successes, the decade was characterised by a decline in political theatre: the most typical examples of new writing by new playwrights all focused on the personal rather than the political.
Eyre also had a love for history plays, tapping into a national love of the past. The success of veterans such as Alan Bennett, with The Madness of George III (1991), and Tom Stoppard with Arcadia (1993), proved that audiences enjoyed intelligent nostalgia. Bennett’s play featured an outstanding central performance by Nigel Hawthorne, and its theme of royal distress, solidly and sympathetically based on historical research, seemed to resonate with a public fascinated both by history and by the troubles of the contemporary Royal Family. Even more brilliant was Stoppard’s play, an immensely witty and stimulating story about present-day scholars Bernard and Hannah, who investigate what happened when Byron visited a country house, inhabited by Lady Croom, her daughter Thomasina and the tutor Septimus Hodge in 1809–12. With its sharp contrasts between the unfounded speculations of today’s characters and the real actions of the nineteenth-century ones, plus its themes of literature, biography, duelling, landscape gardening and chaos theory, it created a mood of wonder at the playwright’s virtuoso mix of imagination and hilarity from its first exchange, featuring the teenage Thomasina and the older Septimus:
Thomasina Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
Septimus Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.29
With its superb cast – Bill Nighy, Felicity Kendall, Rufus Sewell, Harriet Walter and Emma Fielding – and confident director, Trevor Nunn, the play was a perfect marriage of ideas and emotions. Its use of chaos theory as a scientific metaphor was thrilling and its design, by Mark Thompson, conjured up an English country house while echoing the themes of order within uncertainty. The final stage image involved couples from both eras – contemporary teenage savant Gus and Hannah; historical Septimus and Thomasina – dancing on stage at the same time. As John Fleming says, ‘music from both periods is heard, the moonlight and candlelight are joined by a lush, purplish glow that bathes the dancing couples. It is a beautifully, moving finale as these “bodies in motion” celebrate both the human intellect and the human heart.’30 Other new plays during Eyre’s regime included work by Caryl Churchill, Christopher Hampton, David Storey, Peter Gill and Patrick Marber. Yet the last one he chose to direct was another Stoppard play, The Invention of Love (1997), which starred John Wood as A. E. Houseman in an intriguing memory play set in several locations in early twentieth-century Britain and 1870s Oxford (with cameos of Ruskin, Pater and Wilde), and in which Houseman’s older self meets his younger self. As one critic wrote: ‘Eyre couldn’t have hoped to leave the National in finer style.’31
During his reign, the National also hosted the best Irish and American plays. The visit of the Abbey Theatre production of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa showed the influence of Irish playwriting and Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America or Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass illustrated the inspiring ambition of the American imagination. Dancing at Lughnasa is a tale set in the home of five Mundy sisters in Ballybeg in 1936, where their precarious way of life is destroyed by a modern economy. Its most uplifting moment is, in Nesta Jones’s words, ‘the magnificent dance sequence early in the first act, in which the sisters abandon themselves to “Marconi’s voodoo”’, a memorably exciting staging of a celebration of a harvest festival, Lugh the Celtic fertility god.32 But the story’s ending, when two of the sisters come to London and become destitute, gave it a sharp contemporary resonance. Later in the decade, Martin McDongah’s The Cripple of Inishmore suggested a more satirical, postmodern, view of Irish heritage. By contrast, although the hugely ambitious Angels in America (1992–3) was partly set in the 1950s, it ranged over a whole landscape of contemporary issues from gay sexuality to green politics, and felt completely engrossing. It was also an inspiration to British playwrights. If Eyre’s policy, as Shellard argues, of ‘pragmatism and populism’ echoed New Labour’s redefinition of the political middle ground, both were highly successful strategies as far as the public was concerned.33
When Trevor Nunn took over from Eyre in 1997, the year New Labour came to power, he continued his predecessor’s mission to produce a thoroughly populist programme – heavy on revivals of musicals such as Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady – with occasional sterling classics, such as his forceful The Merchant of Venice (1999), with Henry Goodman as Shylock. But he did not neglect new work. Despite producing duds from playwrights such as Stephen Poliakoff and Hanif Kureishi, Nunn staged one of the best new plays of the decade: Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998). Taking the form of a memory play which questioned whether we can ever be certain about either quantum physics or our recollection of the past, the piece examined the meeting of two scientists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in Denmark at the height of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Although the men certainly met, and may have discussed Nazi attempts to produce an atom bomb, Frayn advances various different explanations of their encounter. As Margrethe, Bohr’s wife, says, ‘When you tell the story, yes, it all falls into place, it all has a beginning and a middle and an end’, but in her mind reality is entirely different: ‘It’s confusion and rage and jealousy and tears.’34 Both science and memory are coloured by human emotion. Copenhagen was also part of a larger trend of plays about science, which suggested a keen public interest in the subject: two examples are Timberlake Wertenbaker’s After Darwin and Shelagh Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Airpump, both staged at the Hampstead Theatre. Although Nunn sometimes fell foul of controversy, as when he introduced invisible microphones for actors in the Olivier auditorium in 1999, his regime prepared the ground well for the even greater triumphs of his successor, Nicholas Hytner.
At the RSC, with its new patron Prince Charles, the decade started badly following the ‘national scandal’ of the closure of Barbican due to cuts in state subsidy.35 But the story of the 1990s was the story of artistic director Adrian Noble. He took up his post in 1991, with the aspiration of making the theatre the best classical company in the English-speaking world, and began with star-studded productions of the classics: Kenneth Branagh played Hamlet (1992), Antony Sher was an athletic Tamberlaine (1992) and Robert Stephens’s Lear (1993) was rich in pathos if painfully slow. After this, the latter’s son, twenty-four-year-old Toby Stephens, played Coriolanus (1994), and was hyped as ‘the youngest Coriolanus anyone can remember’.36 The plays of both the older and the younger Stephens fed into the public debate, which had arisen in the wake of the Jamie Bulger murder, about violence in the media. After defending the representation of violence in the arts, critic Michael Coveney described one incident in King Lear: ‘Simon Russell Beale as Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, a madman, finally crosses the insolent servant Oswald and instead of merely killing him with his dagger, stoves in his face with a pike staff. Again and again and again. Until his body lies limp, and we flop weakly in our stalls.’37 With similar in-yer-face directness, the poster for Coriolanus featured the younger Stephens’s face covered with blood. As the RSC marketing manager wrote in the Independent, ‘It is gratifying that sales of the poster to thrilled theatre-goers have soared.’38
In attempting to revitalise the RSC as a classical company that explored the repertoire, Noble also staged Sam Mendes’s productions of Troilus and Cressida (1991), The Tempest (1993) and Richard III (1992), all of which had Simon Russell Beale in the cast. His barefoot Ariel was tough and sinister, although his active, humpback Richard had its London run cut short when he slipped a disc. But two of the decade’s most striking Shakespeare revivals had nothing to do with the RSC: Canadian Robert Lepage’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream visited the National while American Peter Sellars’s The Merchant of Venice was seen at the Barbican. Both were poorly spoken, but visually memorable – Lepage’s muddy waterlands evoked dark fantasy while Sellars’s video cameras and contemporary dress alluded to the Los Angeles riots. At the RSC, other classics were also tackled: for example, John Barton’s Peer Gynt, with Alex Jennings in the title role, offered an original take on the play, seeing it as a dream.
Noble was also keen on using his theatre spaces more imaginatively. At the Swan Theatre, Chekhovian naturalism was well realised in Terry Hands’s The Seagull and Noble’s beautiful Cherry Orchard. But his unwillingness to maintain the RSC tradition of a permanent directorial team meant that some critics found his company lacking a coherent style or approach. Still, the appointment of Katie Mitchell as artistic director of the Other Place in 1997 opened an arena for experiment, and productions of Koltès’s Roberto Zucco (in a translation by Martin Crimp) suggested a renewed interest in the best of modern European drama. Mitchell’s The Phoenician Women and her Ghosts were characterised, like all her work at this time, by intense acting, visual austerity and psychological clarity. But, in general, British new writing was comparatively neglected, and Noble appeared to be obsessed with one American writer, Richard Nelson, five of whose now-forgotten plays were staged during the 1990s. Exceptions to this rule, such as Peter Shaffer’s The Gift of the Gorgon (1992), were similarly unmemorable, although Peter Whelan’s two Renaissance history plays The School of Night (1992) and The Herbal Bed (1996) successfully and engrossingly evoked the world of Elizabethan England. Most impressive, however, was David Edgar’s Pentecost (1994), a superb example of an ambitious state-of-Europe play, boldly debating culture and politics in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like Arcadia, Pentecost used a vivid theatrical image – in this case a newly discovered Giotto-esque fresco – to provoke a discussion about the history of Europe. The play mixed pessimism about a future during which Communist ‘prolecult’ has lost out to American Rambos and Schwarzeneggers with what one critic called ‘the inspiring, hopeful message’ that ‘diaspora can create a rich cultural inter-weaving’ and ‘a non-tragic sense in which “we are the sum of the people who invaded us”’.39 Its vision of a European culture where, in the words of the art historian, ‘every frontier teeming, every crossroads thronged’ felt both exciting and contemporary.40 Despite this triumph, Noble’s stewardship of the RSC tended to neglect new work and seemed deaf to the political relevance of the classics he so assiduously promoted.
Artistically, Noble – like Nunn – was a conservative cultural populist, and his RSC was condemned by critic Michael Billington as retreating ‘into a reactionary mode totally alien to the spirit of its founding fathers’.41 As the company swelled in size, becoming an international entertainment corporation, Noble struggled to keep control over its productions and its budget, accumulating a £1.6 million deficit. He tore up the traditional idea of permanent company, favouring stand-alone productions, and developed a huge but hubristic plan, Project Fleet, which aimed to demolish the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in favour of a hugely expensive Shakespeare Village, while abandoning the Barbican, the company’s London base. This over-ambitious idea provoked a crisis that led to his resignation in 2002, finally defeated by, in the words of Colin Chambers, ‘the clash between the demands of monetarism and the desires of public service that was played out across society in the 1990s’.42 The mixed fortunes of the National and the RSC exemplified the highs and lows of the decade’s state-subsidised flagships.
Surrounding the main flagships and the commercial West End was a vigorous Off-West End sector, which included a range of medium- and small-scale state-funded theatres. The best way of understanding the main Off-West End venues is to distinguish between the trendy boutique theatres and the less glamorous but equally significant community theatres. Boutique theatres, such as the Donmar Warehouse in the centre of town and the Almeida in Islington, north London, had a good decade. As Billington says, ‘Depending heavily on private finance, they were perfect products of the post-Thatcherite era.’43 Community theatres were led by the Theatre Royal Stratford East, once the home of Joan Littlewood, and the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London. Equally significant in the general ecology of British theatre were, for different reasons, touring companies such as Cheek by Jowl, Tara Arts and Tamasha.
Let’s start with the boutiques. The trendy Almeida, led from 1990 by actors Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid, specialised in well-cast and well-designed revivals of mainly European and American classics. At this fashionable but cramped venue, where in the foyer you might be jostled by a superior kind of person, there was a lot of world drama from Euripides to Lorca, and from Dryden to Brecht and Pirandello. As one critic wrote, what you’d expect at this address is ‘A state-of-the-art Racine revival, perhaps, or something piquant and rare by Griboyedov. The world premiere of a lean-cuisine Pinter or a hot-off-the-grid avant-garde opera about a titled nymphomaniac would raise few eyebrows here.’44 From the beginning, the Almeida attracted star actors: Glenda Jackson in Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution and Claire Bloom in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. Exceptional performances included Diana Rigg in Medea (1992) and Kevin Spacey in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1998). Dressed in a blazing red gown, Rigg’s commanding presence combined the character’s sharp intelligence with her ferocious, lacerating anger. Spacey’s Hickey was both silver-tongued charmer, a born-again messiah of the bandwagon, and a man desperate for human connection. The theatre also played an important part in the 1990s rehabilitation of playwright Terence Rattigan – who had been eclipsed by the Kitchen Sink dramatists of the 1960s – by staging a 1993 revival of The Deep Blue Sea, with Penelope Wilton. As well as programming a repertoire that might be the envy of any national company, the Almeida also promoted new work, especially the last plays of Harold Pinter: Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993) and Celebration (2000). The venue revived Pinter’s Betrayal and No Man’s Land, in which Pinter played Hirst opposite Paul Eddington’s Spooner. As well as these, other productions of Pinter plays – The Birthday Party at the National and The Hothouse in the West End – indicated a late flowering for this playwright. Other Almeida premieres included David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, his rather unsuccessful account of the last days of Oscar Wilde. Newer writing talents were represented by Phyllis Nagy (Butterfly Kiss) and Louis Mellis and David Scinto (Gangster No 1). The Almeida also pioneered the trend for a theatre company to expand out of its base and temporarily occupy other venues. So Ralph Fiennes was seen at the Hackney Empire giving his head-bowed and slump-shouldered Hamlet (1995), Rigg in repertory in the West End with two Racine tragedies – Phèdre and Britannicus – and Fiennes again in Richard II and Coriolanus at the Gainsborough Film Studios in Shoreditch in 2000.
If the Almeida was the prime boutique theatre of the decade, the Donmar ran it a close second. Opening in 1992, this small 250-seat theatre is located in a Covent Garden building that had once been a banana warehouse and then an RSC studio in 1977–82. The brainchild of director Sam Mendes, the new venue opened with the British premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and – despite having to wait four years for Arts Council subsidy – Mendes ensured that it was a lively theatre which specialised in a mix of classic American work and revivals of neglected plays in the current repertory. Here you could see classy revivals of Brian Friel’s Translations or David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Its musical hits included Sondheim’s Company and Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, which starred a reptilian Alan Cumming. Acclaimed performances from glamorous actors secured the venue’s reputation as a place which provided some of the decade’s most memorable, and award-winning, theatrical experiences. Nicole Kidman starred in The Blue Room, Hare’s adaptation of Schnitzler’s Reigen, in a performance described by one critic as ‘pure theatrical Viagra’.45 Other starry revivals included Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending (Helen Mirren), the same playwright’s The Glass Menagerie (Zoë Wanamaker and Claire Skinner) and Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus (Jim Broadbent and Imelda Staunton). Ace directors were also welcome: Katie Mitchell (Beckett’s Endgame), David Leveaux (Stoppard’s The Real Thing) and Michael Grandage (Peter Nichols’s Passion Play). As Matthew Warchus, who directed Simon Donald’s The Life of Stuff and Sam Shepard’s True West at the venue, said, ‘Although the Donmar is a small theatre, it has something epic about it: there is a kind of electricity in there; the fact is, there’s no place to hide.’46 Like the Almeida, the Donmar bowed to celebrity culture; unlike the Almeida, it avoided the more difficult corners of the international repertoire. While such Off-West End venues continued the tradition of sharply designed and well-acted revivals, other Off-West End theatre developed different traditions.
Under Nicolas Kent, the Tricycle Theatre was devoted to political theatre. Perceiving that the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the end of Apartheid in South Africa had dampened some of the burning issues of yesteryear, Kent decided to investigate more contemporary scandals. The form he chose and pioneered was verbatim tribunal theatre – using a text made of edited speeches from public inquiries. By doing so he found an aesthetic alternative to the fictional political play, which was seen as old-fashioned and irrelevant. The first example of such tribunal theatre was Half the Picture (1994), a stage version of the Scott ‘Arms to Iraq’ Inquiry, written by veteran radical playwright John McGrath and journalist Richard Norton-Taylor, who had met Kent while playing tennis. In 1998, two other tribunal plays – Nuremberg and Srebrenica – examined the reality of genocide in the past and present. But the theatre’s greatest triumph was The Colour of Justice (1999), a play composed of extracts from the Macpherson Inquiry into the Metropolitan Police’s botched investigation into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. If the numerous instances of racism by police and white suspects made for grim watching, this kind of play was rather inert as a theatrical experience – consisting mainly of men in suits asking and answering questions. Yet The Colour of Justice did have two memorable moments: in one, a senior policeman dismissively screwed up a note given to him by Lawrence’s mother and, in the other, at the very end of the play, the actor playing Macpherson, chair of the inquiry, said: ‘Would you stand with me for a minute’s silence.’47 The whole audience rose in respect. Kent says, ‘The piece has had a lasting impact on race relations. It’s been reprinted and is used as a training tool and video at Hendon Police College. When it was televised, it was seen by millions.’48 As well as promoting socially committed drama, the Tricycle also staged work which reflected the ethnic mix (Irish, Asian and black) of the local community. And Kent was not averse to presenting wonderfully entertaining work such as Ain’t Misbehavin’, the celebratory 1995 Fats Waller musical, which he co-directed with Gillian Gregory.
A similar mix was on offer at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where artistic director Philip Hedley programmed a lively mixture of plays. Like Joan Littlewood, with whom he’d once worked, Hedley used his venue to represent the experiences of the area’s black and Asian community. Playwright Winsome Pinnock called the venue ‘one of the few theatres in London that can lay claim to the description multicultural, both in terms of the plays produced and the audience that attends the performances’.49 So vocal were audiences that critics were often tempted to review not only the show but also its spectators. Audience reactions frequently enhanced the meaning of the shows. For example, performances of Roy Williams’s award-winning debut, The No Boys Cricket Club (1996), were often accompanied by protests from black matriarchs who objected to the fact that, at one point, the young Michael character hits his mother Abi. Hedley also wanted local people to use the theatre on a regular basis so he developed a contemporary version of variety entertainment, with sketch shows such as the Posse’s Armed and Dangerous (1991–2), the Bibi Crew’s black women’s show (1992), the young Asian D’Yer Eat with Your Fingers? (1994) and Funny Black Women on the Edge (1995). On one occasion, when Angie Le Mar, in the last-mentioned show, came on after the interval, a woman in the stalls called out: ‘You’re the man!’ Hedley also promoted Moti Roti Puttli Chunni (1993), the first British Bollywood musical. Other popular successes, and West End transfers, included Clarke Peters’s jazz musical Five Guys Named Moe (1990) and Ken Hill’s spoof Edwardian musical The Invisible Man (1991), with its enjoyable stage illusions. In 1999, Hedley began the Musical Theatre Initiatives scheme to encourage new writing in musical theatre.
Other Off-West End venues, such as the Young Vic and the Lyric Hammersmith, also staged a mixture of significant classics and new work. At the Young Vic, David Thacker promoted the work of Arthur Miller, especially his The Last Yankee (1993) and Broken Glass (1994), becoming the American playwright’s foremost British interpreter. He was followed by Tim Supple, who had a poor first year and then directed an outstanding revival of John Byrne’s The Slab Boys Trilogy, a seven-hour cycle of plays set in 1950s Paisley. Supple’s vividly macabre and cutely surreal version of the Grimm Tales, written by Carol Ann Duffy, was the highly praised Christmas show in 1994. After that, Supple further redefined the venue’s mission and raised its profile. At the Lyric, artistic director Neil Bartlett staged his own productions, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1994), and worked hard to show how complex a gay sensibility could be. His studio space hosted Ryan Craig’s debut, Happy Savages, and Mark Ravenhill’s Handbag in 1998. Handbag has two strands – a contemporary story about gay parenting and a historical story involving characters from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest – and said more about Wilde than many of the countless revivals of his work in the decade. Elsewhere, the Orange Tree Theatre, in Richmond, moved in 1991 from its room above a pub into a new theatre in the round, where the indefatigable Sam Walters programmed forgotten Edwardian classics, European plays from Vaclav Havel and Michel Vinaver, and new plays by local authors.
Some theatre companies, set up on a shoestring during the 1980s, matured during the 1990s into internationally significant players. Chief of these was Cheek by Jowl – led by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod – which explored English and European classics such as Alfred de Musset’s Don’t Fool with Love (1993), Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1995) and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1994). The company was something of an unofficial acting academy, numbering Daniel Craig, Sally Dexter, Anastasia Hille, Paterson Joseph, Matthew Macfadyen, David Morrissey, Lloyd Owen, Saskia Reeves and Michael Sheen among its more famous alumni. Added to this, Donnellan played an important, and occasionally controversial, role by casting black actors. In 1989, for example, his Fuente Ovejuna at the National was a milestone in the advance of colour-blind casting for European classics. Likewise, his revelatory all-male As You Like It (1991) starred Adrian Lester as Rosalind and Tom Hollander as Celia, with its gender-bending men playing women playing men playing women, and appealingly warm atmosphere. Other stylistic devices pioneered by Donnellan and Ormerod included overlapping scenes, spatially geometric oppositions, economy of gesture, austere costumes and colourful, streamlined designs. In the early years, the effect was described as a ‘mannered exuberance’, which ‘burst afresh upon their audiences’ (at the time of his Angels in America directed for the National in 1992), and Donnellan’s distinctive style always embodied a theatre where the actors came first.50 Cheek by Jowl concentrated on long rehearsal periods and constantly refreshed the acting during lengthy international tours.
Shared Experience, whose name emphasised the relationship between the actors and the audience, was a touring company which specialised in stage adaptations of classic novels. Led by Nancy Meckler, greatly aided by director Polly Teale and playwright Helen Edmundson, the group created vividly theatrical versions of Anna Karenina (1991), The Mill on the Floss (1993), War and Peace (1996) and Jane Eyre (1996). By concentrating on novels which the public might be familiar with, the company was able to sell tickets to shows which were remarkable for the overtly theatrical nature of their stagings. In most cases, the visual elements of the story were the most memorable, as for example, the image of Count Vronsky (in the famous racing scene of the book) riding his lover Anna Karenina onstage as if she were a horse: when Vronsky’s horse falls and has to be destroyed, Anna is likewise destroyed by her affair. As with Cheek by Jowl, Shared Experience put simultaneous scenes to good effect. In Anna Karenina, for instance, ‘We simultaneously watch Levin’s ecstatic happiness as Kitty accepts his proposal, while on the other side of the stage, Anna is first bitterly rebuked by her husband and lies in feverish agony after childbirth. It is a scene that thrillingly captures the full emotional range of the book with its intersecting arcs of despair and hope.’51 In The Mill on the Floss, an adaptation of George Eliot’s novel, three actresses played the part of Maggie Tulliver, one the wild childhood Maggie and the others two different sides of her adult personality (spiritual and sensual), creating a thrillingly resonant view of women’s experience in Victorian times. In Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic was the alter ego of the restrained governess, while the Russian epic War and Peace, presented at the National Theatre, was a rollicking, riotous re-creation in which a ball becomes a military charge and sexual temptation appears to a prude in the guise of a man with bandaged eyes. Edmundson’s version also stressed the political aspect of Tolstoy’s story by creating imaginary conversations between the hero, Pierre, and Napoleon, as the former matures from youthful debauchery into middle-aged radicalism – and ends up as one of the Decembrist conspirators against the Tsar. Finally, the company’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, directed by Teale, featured a scene in which two illicit lovers are drawn to each other, even though they are in different rooms in the house. As both undress, Eben in the downstairs kitchen pulls himself up on a beam and kisses the ceiling, while Abbie in the upstairs bedroom lies down, mouth to the floor. It was a stunning moment of magnetic desire.
Tara Arts – led by Jatinder Verma – specialised in Asian versions of European classics, as well as staging work from the subcontinent. It was briefly made welcome at the National, as the first all-Asian company to perform at this flagship, with an Asian take on Molière’s Tartuffe (1990), set in Mughal India. Creating a rich linguistic tapestry which mixed Urdu and English, Verma also used Indian popular theatre conventions, such as Bhavi, which, like Commedia dell’arte, has a satirical edge. He also introduced theatrical conventions of his own – for instance, offering translations of Urdu passages – with an eye for the comic. At one point, he remembers,
Orgon’s children exchange verses from the Indian epic romance of Heer and Ranjha (an equivalent of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet). As the verse-exchange in Urdu finished, one of the story-tellers strode forward to address the audience: ‘Another translation!’ she declared. By this stage of the performance, the convention having been well-established, a murmur of recognition would ripple through the audience. Pausing a moment, ‘Why bother!’, she’d say and run back to her position on stage, the house having erupted in laughter.52
Likewise, Tara Arts’ version of Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1994) – with a title that mixed French and English – transposed the story to seventeenth-century Pondicherry, a French colony in South India, and the farce dealt with an upwardly mobile colonised community which mimics their colonisers. Tara also produced versions of Shakespeare and, in 1992, the first English presentation of Waris Shah’s Punjabi classic Heer Ranjha. In terms of new writing, they developed Parv Bancil’s Crazy Horse (1997), a fierce father and son confrontation set in a run-down garage. Another company, Tamasha, also developed new work for Asian talent, creating popular musical shows and stage adaptations of novels. Set up in 1989 by Kristine Landon-Smith and Sudha Bhuchar, their work included the parodic but touching Bollywood homage Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral (1998), and stage adaptations of novels such as Ruth Carter’s Women of the Dust. The company also documented history: A Tainted Dawn (1997), for example, was based on several short stories about the Partition of India. In terms of new writing, they commissioned Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East (1996) and Sudha Bhuchar and Shaheen Khan’s Balti Kings (1999).
Other companies included Talawa, an Afro-Caribbean group led by Yvonne Brewster, which worked hard to establish a black presence on the British stage. Their straight version of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1990) didn’t alter a line, but the mere fact that the actors of this English classic were black was subversive of expectations – and boosted the comedy of the piece. Taking up temporary residence at the Cochrane Theatre, they staged shows such as Ntozake Shange’s The Love Space Demands and Derek Walcott’s Beef, No Chicken. By contrast, the aptly named Classics on a Shoestring was a company that provided a launching pad for director Katie Mitchell, while Stephen Unwin’s English Touring Theatre (ETT) produced excellent versions of classics such as Hamlet, with Alan Cumming in 1993, or The Seagull, with Cheryl Campbell in 1997. ETT’s new writing included Jonathan Harvey’s Hushabye Mountain, with Andrew Lincoln. Finally, Actors Touring Company (ATC), under the leadership of Nick Philippou, produced strikingly contemporary versions of European classics such as Miss Julie or Ion, as well as some of the early plays of Ravenhill. On the other hand, a company such as Mike Alfreds’s Method and Madness focused on ensemble acting. All in all, these touring companies provided the variety and the specialist skills so often missing in the mainstream building-based organisations.
New writing is a distinctive genre of contemporary work which is often, although by no means exclusively, written by newly arriving or young playwrights, and characterised by the distinctiveness of the author’s individual voice, the contemporary flavour of their language and themes, and sometimes by the provocative nature of its content or its experimentation with theatrical form. As well as other major venues, there was a group of state-subsidised theatres in London which specialised in new writing: the Royal Court, Bush, Hampstead and Soho theatres. These were joined by two significant new writing theatres outside the metropolis – the Traverse in Edinburgh and Live Theatre in Newcastle upon Tyne – as well as some unsubsidised London fringe venues with a proven track record in staging new plays, often within a mixed repertoire. These included the Finborough, the King’s Head and the Old Red Lion. Once again, some touring companies – especially Out of Joint and Paines Plough – made a vital contribution, despite their small size, to producing new writers.
Following cuts in state subsidy during the 1980s, the genre of new writing was widely perceived to be in trouble at the start of the decade. As playwright David Edgar remembers, there was ‘a growing belief, among directors in particular, that new work had run out of steam’.53 Other theatre people agreed, arguing that financial constraints led to ‘small casts in simple sets, performing plays written for small spaces and expecting short runs’.54 In May 1991, Michael Billington summed up: ‘New writing for theatre is in a state of crisis.’55 But just as the obituaries of new writing were appearing in the media, a revival was beginning in the smaller theatres and hidden corners of the British new writing system. In January 1991, Philip Ridley’s debut The Pitchfork Disney was staged at the Bush, whose new artistic director Dominic Dromgoole noted that the play upturned expectations and, by introducing a new sensibility, ‘was one of the first plays to signal the new direction for new writing’.56 At the Traverse, artistic director Ian Brown was promoting playwrights such as Anthony Neilson, whose debut Normal shocked audiences at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival with its depiction of a brutal murder, and whose Penetrator (1993) successfully transferred from Edinburgh to London. On 21 November 1994, eighty-six playwrights felt confident enough to sign a letter to the Guardian challenging theatres nationwide to produce at least three new plays a year.
Gradually, the early work of Ridley and Neilson was joined by other new writing in London. Under the artistic directorship of Stephen Daldry, the Royal Court – London’s prime new writing theatre – gradually became aware of these new voices from the periphery, and soon began vigorously promoting first-time writers. Although at first better known for his interest in gay shows, Daldry produced Joe Penhall’s Some Voices and Judy Upton’s Ashes and Sand in autumn 1994. Then, for January 1995, he programmed Kane’s debut, Blasted, directed by James Macdonald, and the resulting media furore over the shocking content and unsettling form of the play put British new writing on the map. Despite the sheer hysteria of some of the show’s reviews, which were answered by the stout defence of her work by Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond and Harold Pinter, a new and exciting sensibility had arrived. In the summer, Jez Butterworth’s dazzling Mojo – hyped as the first debut play to be staged on the Royal Court’s main stage since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 – strongly suggested that new plays by young writers were both fashionable and a box-office draw. One year later, this was confirmed by the arrival of Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, which, says Dan Rebellato, ‘insinuated itself into the popular consciousness more successfully than any play’ since Look Back in Anger.57 Soon journalists and cultural pundits were hailing the renaissance of new writing. This excitement tended to overshadow Daldry’s other project, to revive modern classics, most memorably David Storey’s The Changing Room in 1996. But although a couple of emerging young playwrights did enjoy West End transfers, most of their plays remained in the risk-free spaces of state-subsidised new writing theatres, often performed for short runs in small studios.
But the work was both disturbing and pertinent. Although Kane’s Blasted played to a total of only about a thousand people, it was, in the words of Graham Saunders, ‘one of the key plays of the 1990s’.58 With its evocation of the violence of civil war, its stories of appalling atrocities, its fraught stage images – rape, blinding and cannibalism – and its raw language, it brought Bosnia unforgettably to Sloane Square. It was also an indictment of the media’s failure to tell the stories no one wants to hear, in this case about the extreme horrors of war. A similar concern with storytelling was one of the themes of 1990s drama, as evidenced by Ridley’s plays, and by Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, whose title inspired jokes as well as nervousness, and which showed a group of young people struggling to get by in a recognisably contemporary world where sex has been commercialised and consumption sexualised. It included rude stories about the royals, and an oft-quoted speech by one character, Robbie, which begins, ‘I think we all need stories, we make up stories so that we can get by.’59 By contrast, the stories in Neilson’s Penetrator were paranoid, nightmarish or pornographic: they made for very uncomfortable viewing, and its knife fight was one of the few genuinely hair-raising experiences in the decade’s theatre. Also at the Court, Judy Upton’s Ashes and Sand was the first play to focus on a girl-gang while Nick Grosso’s laddish Peaches and Sweetheart explored the bewilderment wrought by testosterone. Most of the plays were angry at social injustice: Penhall’s thrilling Some Voices was fuelled by his disgust at the iniquities of the Conservative government’s policy of Care in the Community, while Rebecca Prichard’s Essex Girls portrayed teen pregnancy, and suggested reasons for its prevalence. David Eldridge’s Serving It Up at the Bush was an emotionally powerful tale of working-class kids.
This loose group of young writers formed something of an avant-garde, sharing a similar sensibility, which has been labelled ‘in-yer-face theatre’.60 The term itself appears in several reviews in the 1990s: for example, in April 1994, the Independent’s account of Philip Ridley’s Ghost from a Perfect Place described the play’s girl-gang as ‘the in-yer-face castrating trio’, and when, in 1995, Trainspotting transferred to the West End, The Times commented: ‘The two previous productions of the play brought actors within inches of the audience, and such in-yer-face realism is inevitably reduced when it is staged, this time by Gibson, for a tour of proscenium arch theatres.’61 In November 1995, Neilson told a journalist that ‘I think that in-your-face theatre is coming back – and that is good.’62 Indeed, during this decade, some of the clearest examples of this style of playwriting came from the keyboards of Ridley, Neilson, Kane and Ravenhill, with the latter two especially having been influenced by, among others, the work of Crimp, which seemed to be at once coolly detached, cruelly direct and also experimental in form. In the wider culture, the term ‘in-yer-face’ seemed to echo with the zeitgeist. Simon Napier-Bell’s account of pop culture exclaimed, ‘This was the nineties – the “lottery age” – the “in-yer-face” age.’63 As early as 1991, 808 State named a dance track ‘In Yer Face’, and in 1996 the iconic song of the moment of Cool Britannia, the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’, included the line: ‘We got Em in the place who likes it in-yer-face.’
In-yer-face theatre was both a new sensibility and a series of specific theatrical devices. In terms of sensibility, these playwrights were drawn to the depiction of psychological and emotional extremes, some of which – such as sexual abuse or viciousness – were truly distressing. They insistently broke taboos and used direct, powerful language, often with fast and furious dialogue. Their sensibility relished the idea of provocation. As a series of theatrical techniques, in-yer-face theatre involved a stage language that emphasised rawness, intensity and swearing, stage images that showed acute pain or comfortless vulnerability, characterisation that preferred complicit victims to innocent ones, and a ninety-minute structure that dispensed with the relief of an interval. In-yer-face theatre depended on certain material conditions, mainly the ready availability of studio spaces (typically seating between fifty and eighty people) which provided ideal conditions for the kind of experiential theatre where audience members felt as if they were actively sharing the emotions being depicted by the actors. Unlike other names, such as ‘New Brutalism’, which have been used to characterise these plays, in-yer-face theatre describes not just the content of a play but rather the relationship between the stage and the audience. In other words, it strongly suggests what is particular about the experience of watching extreme theatre – the feeling of your personal space being threatened, or violated. This kind of theatre was a radical break with much of the drama of the 1980s. At its best, its aim was to use shock to awaken the moral responses of the audience – its desire was no less than to help change society.
Despite its wide acceptance by theatre practitioners, critics and commentators, the term in-yer-face theatre remains controversial. Sceptics have pointed out that although playwrights such as Ridley, Neilson, Kane and Ravenhill shared some of the same contemporary sensibility in their work, they all wrote in distinctly different styles. While the Kane of Blasted, Phaedra’s Love and Cleansed seems to share many of the preoccupations of her peers, her final two plays – Crave and 4.48 Psychosis – align her more with older playwrights such as Crimp and Churchill, and with a more Continental modernist tradition, than with the more naturalistic styles adopted by playwrights such as Penhall and Upton. In a similar vein, the initial response to the undoubted sensationalism of some 1990s drama has now given way to a consideration of its moral seriousness, and its pictures of a fragmented society and alienated individuals.64 On the other hand, Mike Bradwell, artistic director of the Bush Theatre in the second half of the decade, is surely not alone in pointing out that ‘there are as many clichés in “In Yer Face” Theatre as there are in Boulevard Comedy’.65 Other critics of the concept of in-yer-face theatre argue that foregrounding the much-hyped geezer-chic Royal Court plays, such as Butterworth’s Mojo, with its motormouthing gangsters and casual viciousness, neglects quieter talents. Lauding the loud and violent boys eclipses many of the female playwrights of the era. The achievements of Max Stafford-Clark’s final years at the Royal Court – he was the venue’s longest-serving artistic director (1979–93) – tend also to be downplayed in this rush to applaud the new. Yet, under his leadership, the venue bravely battled against grant cuts and in the early 1990s staged important plays such as Marlane Meyer’s Etta Jenks, Winsome Pinnock’s Talking in Tongues, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field.66
Likewise, too great an emphasis on in-yer-face plays artificially elevates a London-centric phenomenon. ‘In terms of sensibility,’ says Ben Payne of Birmingham Rep, ‘there are several writers who don’t really fit into London scene’, such as Bryony Lavery, Paul Lucas and Sarah Woods.67 Some commentators also argue that Scottish playwrights ‘set themselves an agenda very different to the fashion-victim, “shopping and fucking” introspection of 1990s London’.68 As the editors of one collection of studies point out, ‘a far greater degree of variety and complexity existed within the various forms of playwriting in the 1990s’ and these powerfully ‘challenge certain tenants of in-yer-face theatre’.69 Similarly, the Encore Theatre Magazine website comments that ‘the wave of new writing which followed [Blasted] swept away an intriguing moment in British theatre when new writing was represented by Paul Godfrey, and Gregory Motton, and early Martin Crimp’.70 A revisionist account of the decade has to remind people that Godfrey’s imaginative vision, Motton’s dense texual poetry and Crimp’s severity with form were all once part of a playwriting avant-garde. It could also look at other new talents of the early 1990s, such as Nick Ward, Clare McIntyre and Karen Hope (not to mention older writers such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sarah Daniels and Winsome Pinnock), who were swept aside by the wave of in-yer-face plays. As indeed were quieter voices, such as those of Peter Gill, Robert Holman and Richard Cameron. Who today remembers Sheila Yeger?
One influential playwriting style that was distinctly different from the in-yer-face brashness of many UK metropolitan playwrights came from Ireland. At the start of the decade, the Bush Theatre staged Billy Roche’s The Wexford Trilogy, three life-affirming plays that explored the claustrophobic mindset of a small town with Chekhovian preciseness and absorbing characterisation. Equally lyrical and emotionally true was Conor McPherson’s The Weir, which began life in the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1997 and then transferred to the West End for almost three years, then Broadway, its box-office success being crucial to the theatre’s fragile finances. Dromgoole describes its redemptive magic as ‘the most awesomely assured bit of storytelling, controlling and manipulating the audience with a sure and kind touch’.71 Many Irish plays were deeply felt, a sublime example being Sebastian Barry’s magnificent The Steward of Christendom (1995), with a riveting central performance by Donal McCann as Dunne, the Roman Catholic police chief of Dublin who once served the colonial Brits, and now finds himself in a home, aching for the vanished world of the past. One critic summed up McCann’s striking appearance: ‘He looks like a medieval saint with sad simian features and a mouth that opens to an O, then freezes in twisted contemplation of the story it tells.’72 Likewise Marina Carr, whose The Mai and Portia Coughlan visited London, gave voice to an Irish female experience, along with echoes of tragedy and myth, which with ‘her attention to narrative, her rich use of language and dialect, and her choice of rural settings arguably situate her as the contemporary heir to a Syngean legacy’.73 Other writers whose work pulsed with the distinctive linguistic rhythms of Ireland, as well as having a joy in wordplay, include Enda Walsh, whose unique talent was first evident in the exciting Disco Pigs, one of the most adrenaline-fuelled plays of an exciting decade, and Martin McDonagh, a London-born writer whose highly successful Leenane Trilogy was thrillingly plotted and hilariously satirical. In his work, as Patrick Lonergan argues, ‘there are few accurate references to local geography’, despite the real names of their settings – McDonagh cares more about character, plot and laughter than rooted authenticity.74 In such plays, ‘the mythical surface of the Irish island idyll is hollowed out by homophobia and almost atavistic violence’.75 Other new Irish playwrights, such as Daragh Carville and Dermot Bolger, abandoned rural locations and embraced the same kind of urban settings as their English contemporaries. At their best, as for example in Mark O’Rowe’s blistering Howie the Rookie, their plays mixed bravado storytelling with a strikingly vivid sense of fantasy.
While equally vibrant, Scottish new playwriting was less successful – for no good reason – in London. The main exception, Trainspotting, Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s contemporary novel about Edinburgh junkies, was successfully staged all over the country in the early 1990s. The work of David Greig – Europe, The Architect, Caledonia Dreaming and The Speculator – was clearly innovative and superbly written, yet failed to journey southwards. Only occasionally, as with his Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (1999), did metropolitan audiences get to see his plays. Likewise, an international hit such as David Harrower’s lyrical Knives in Hens (1995) was preferred, south of the border, to his more contemporary work, such as Kill the Old Torture Their Young (1998). The plays of older writers, such as Chris Hannan (The Evil Doers and Shining Souls) and Simon Donald (The Life of Stuff) were performed in London, but Mike Cullen, whose Anna Weiss, a sex abuse drama starring Catherine McCormack, moved from the Traverse to the West End in 1999, was an exceptional case of a young Scottish writer finding success in the metropolis.
Although many critics and commentators applauded young playwrights – often specifying the ages of new arrivals such as Eldridge or Prichard – older playwrights were similarly productive. As well as safe hands such as David Hare and David Edgar, a younger generation which had emerged in the 1980s – especially Crimp, Doug Lucie and Terry Johnson – all produced excellent work. In 1997, Crimp wrote Attempts on Her Life, arguably the most influential play of the decade. Jettisoning traditional ideas of character and plot in favour of staging a series of scenarios in which an unspecified number of onstage actors tell stories about a woman named Anne, the play was thrilling in its originality and aptness to the theme of the construction of individual identity. At one point, Anne is even imagined as a make of car. Other Crimpian images, of terrorism, pornography and war, infused this fierce tone-poem of a play, making it both contemporary and visionary at the same time. Another Crimp play, The Treatment (1993), anticipated the in-yer-face sensibility with its stage images of explicit sex and violence. Older veterans also broke new ground. Churchill collaborated with choreographer Ian Spink in The Skriker (1994), a typically imaginative play about death, which featured Kathryn Hunter in the title role, her shape-shifting presence ‘evocative of the twisted, distorted body of the hysteric’ in a story that challenged both conventional and feminist views about the role of women in society.76 Equally provocative was Churchill’s breathtaking Blue Heart, two plays which tackled the highly emotive subject of fractured families and lost children by using the linguistic devices of manic repetition and language collapse. As Philip Roberts notes, ‘Like a computer virus, all normative language is replaced’ by the words ‘blue’ and ‘kettle’ in the second play, yet a convincing ‘picture of longing and distress’ emerges.77 Similarly powerful was Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, staged at the Royal Court in 1996, a visionary two-hander in which a couple talk about an abusive sex game while remembering an incident that suggested a genocidal regime in Britain. Work such as this seemed to be responding to the challenge thrown down by playwrights such as Kane.
Equally important was the renaissance of gay and lesbian drama, which gradually shook off the heritage of the militant coming-out dramas of the 1970s and of the AIDS plays of the 1980s, to present a more rounded view of life and sex. (An exception was Bill Russell’s Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens, a 1992 review of AIDS victims based on America’s Aids Memorial Quilt.) More typical were Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (Royal Court, 1994) and Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing (Bush, 1994), which gave the genre of gay theatre a makeover, avoiding clichés and grounding their stories in character. The first, which starred comedian John Sessions, was about a group of friends whose relations are all gradually revealed as having been affected by Reg, who never appears, and who symbolises the thrills and threats of promiscuous sex. The second was a tender love story about two working-class teens, which also featured a hilariously eccentric neighbour, Leah, who is into drugs and the records of Mama Cass. Both plays were widely influential, the first being screened on BBC2 television, and the second made into a film in 1996. Yet, in mid-decade, gay theatre was still controversial when it moved into the mainstream. In September 1994, the Evening Standard’s former critic, Milton Shulman, bemoaned the fact that plays such as Beautiful Thing and My Night with Reg successfully transferred to the West End. Yet the ‘Stop the Plague of Pink Plays’ controversy didn’t last, and within a couple of years such views were laughable. But gay theatre itself remained controversial. As Alan Sinfield says, commenting on the genre’s dissident origins in the 1970s, ‘Gay/lesbian drama doesn’t have to be dissident […] I don’t think Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg is dissident.’78 On the other hand, Nicholas de Jongh argues that ‘Beautiful Thing was revolutionary. It did away with a theatrical tradition in which gay men were usually depicted as middle-class, arty, adult, well-dressed and neurotic.’79
Over the decade, the Royal Court, the Traverse and the Bush led in the discovery and development of gritty urban dramas. By contrast, two other new writing venues in London – the Hampstead and the Soho – dealt with different sensibilities. The Hampstead was headed by Jenny Topper, who disliked ‘tiny slices of life or cocky lad’s plays’, preferring ‘the well-made play that is crammed full of ideas and hides its subversive heart in a cloak of laughter’.80 Although she supported dangerous new writers such as Ridley, she also staged a wide variety of plays, from the likes of Michael Frayn, Stephen Poliakoff and Jonathan Harvey. One big success was Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (1992), a Beirut hostage drama involving an Irishman (Stephen Rea), an Englishman (Alec McCowen) and an American (Hugh Quarshie). By contrast, the Soho, led by Abigail Morris, concentrated on first-time playwrights, which meant that other venues benefited from the development work this venue put into emerging talents. Both these theatres held well-received new writing seasons; both promoted female playwrights, often in the teeth of the fashionable laddish tendency of the decade. Playwrights Timberlake Wertenbaker and Phyllis Nagy had plays staged by the Royal Court, namely Wertenbaker’s Break of Day and Nagy’s The Strip, but they could see which way the wind was blowing. Nagy criticised ‘this ridiculous promotion of men and bad plays and misogyny’ and Wertenbaker condemned the Royal Court, saying that ‘suddenly they were hungry for a different kind of play: male violence, homoerotica’.81 Here, the aesthetic policy of a theatre works, in the words of Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, ‘as a form of censorship’, a way of excluding other sensibilities.82 This can be seen by contrasting Royal Court productions of April De Angelis’s Hush (1992), a poetic account of politics, with Prichard’s Yard Gal (1998), a much more visceral account of a girl-gang. Other female playwrights had a good decade. As well as Churchill, Pam Gems had a National success with Stanley (1996), about the painter Stanley Spencer, and a West End success with Marlene (1999), about the film star and cabaret artist Marlene Dietrich. Both plays illustrate the popularity of the biographical play. Elsewhere, one of the most popular plays at the Hampstead was Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water (1996), a wonderfully warm comedy directed by Terry Johnson, about three sisters and their memories of their mother, infused with the playwright’s characteristic obsession with death. In the early 1990s you might have seen Moira Buffini perform the often-remounted Jordan – a play she co-wrote with Anna Reynolds about a woman who kills her own baby – before Buffini became a versatile playwright, penning Gabriel (1997) and Silence (1999). And the most popular plays produced by the Soho, often making temporary use of venues such as the Cockpit Theatre, included Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport (1993) and Amanda Whittington’s Be My Baby (1998), both of which gave sympathetic views of female experience in the past, the first treating the subject of Jewish child refugees from Nazi Germany and the second looking at pregnant teenagers confined in a mother-and-baby home in 1960s Britain. So despite all the complaints about macho plays, the 1990s offered more opportunities to female playwrights than ever before.
Occasionally, the National also discovered a new writer. The best example is Patrick Marber. His plays Dealer’s Choice (1995) and Closer (1997) thrilled critics and audiences with their punchy, frank dialogue. The highly popular Closer especially seemed to capture the essential facts about contemporary relationships between the sexes. The sharpness of the writing – at one point the human heart is called a ‘fist wrapped in blood’ – and its perceptiveness led one critic to write ‘of the many four-letter obscenities in Patrick Marber’s thrilling London love story for the Nineties, “love” is undoubtedly the most brutal’.83 The play has an early example of an internet exchange realised on stage by means of a projection of an online chat, and there was also a scene set in a lap-dancing club which, together with such moments as the phone-sex scene in Shopping and Fucking and the porn actress scene in Attempts on Her Life, criticised pornography while perhaps being inadvertently part of its domestication. But, as well as promoting Marber, the National also contributed to the decade’s new writing trends through its Studio, which offered facilities to writers to develop their work, and then passed their plays on to other theatres. Tanika Gupta’s Voices on the Wind (1995), about her great-uncle Dinesh Gupta, a fighter against colonial rule in India, was developed by the Studio.
Elsewhere, black writers such as Roy Williams joined Gupta in taking the journey from exploring the worlds of their own heritage to dealing with contemporary urban problems. Williams’s 1999 Royal Court play Lift Off, for example, examines the appeal of black street culture to both white and black urban youth, while using his trademark street-hard dialogue. As Amelia Howe Kritzer says, the young men ‘admire and emulate a particular black stereotype. The young men’s ideal, which accords with Thatcherism in some respects, combines toughness and self-sufficiency.’84 Similarly contemporary was the plight of the women in Winsome Pinnock’s Mules (1996), commissioned by Clean Break Theatre Company (which makes theatre by and for women prisoners), and whose theme is the exploitation of young black women as ‘mules’ in drug trafficking. Other black writers such as Zindika, Biyi Bandele and Trish Cooke also emerged. By contrast, one of the most successful Asian plays of the decade mixed comedy with its sorrows: Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East (1997) is a semi-autobiographical look at a 1970 Salford family, which has a Pakistani father and a white mother who run the local fish and chip shop. Known as ‘Genghis’ Khan to his kids, George the tyrannical father has to deal with the aspirations of his six offspring. What’s beautifully observed are the arguments not only between the parents, but between the children. Each asserts their own identity in a different way – each has to cross a no man’s land between being Pakistani and being British. Each has to redefine their relationship with their parents.
A lot of the fuel powering 1990s new writing came from America. After Crimp read the work of David Mamet, his own dialogues became more energetic.85 When Ravenhill saw Canadian Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, he was inspired to write his own version of American blank fictions. Talking of American dramatists, the Royal Court successfully staged John Guare’s glittering if brittle Six Degrees of Separation, starring Stockard Channing, in 1992, and one of its greatest successes came from South America: Chilean author Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden (1991), a political play in which Juliet Stevenson gave an inspired performance as Paulina, the torture victim who meets, or thinks she meets, her torturer from fifteen years previously. In 1993, the Royal Court American Season included Mamet’s Oleanna, a controversial play in which a university lecturer is confronted by a feminist student (David Suchet and Lia Williams directed by Pinter in this production). Seen by many as a misogynist attack on political correctness, the lecturer physically assaults the student at the climax. At one performance, men in the audience called out, ‘Smack the bitch’, and the show report for 3 July stated that ‘there was loud applause for the fight but those clapping were told to stop by others [in the audience]’.86 In the same season, Crimp’s The Treatment was especially memorable for its stage picture of a blind New York taxi driver. Elsewhere, the vogue for the dirty realism of some American writers was so strong that Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe, which opened just after Kane’s Blasted in January 1995, got much better reviews. In general, American theatre was as inspiring as Irish theatre. David Edgar says, ‘The two texts that really turned things around were Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and David Mamet’s Oleanna in 1993 – they reminded British theatre of the sort of play we used to do so well. A lot of people sensed that if American writers could write seriously and imaginatively about today’s issues, then so could younger British writers.’87
Touring companies were also vital to the development of new writing. After leaving the Royal Court in 1993, Max Stafford-Clark set up Out of Joint with producer Sonia Friedman, and this small company was responsible for some of the most striking work of the decade, from The Steward of Christendom to Shopping and Fucking. They also produced Wertenbaker’s Break of Day, Churchill’s Blue Heart and Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids. As Philip Roberts and Stafford-Clark say, other plays by April De Angelis, Simon Bennett, Judy Upton and David Hare reflect the company’s ‘lifelong preoccupation with new writing’.88 Building on his experience with both the Royal Court and Joint Stock in the 1970s, Stafford-Clark developed the workshopping approach to theatre making by involving the actors with the playwright in generating ideas. Similarly, the touring company Paines Plough, led by Vicky Featherstone, helped Kane, Ravenhill, Greig, Parv Bancil and a host of other new talents. The feminist touring company Sphinx produced work such as Bryony Lavery’s Goliath (1997), a tough piece inspired by Beatrix Campbell’s book about the riots that exploded across Britain’s housing estates in 1991. Other touring companies, which had an explicitly political remit and had been important in previous years, such as 7:84, died a slow death in the 1990s.
Over the decade, the main thematic trends in new writing, as summarised by David Pattie, were ‘a preoccupation with masculinity’, ‘a welcome tendency to treat gay and lesbian relationships as entirely normal’, ‘an interest in the marginalised and excluded’ and ‘a wider exposure for writers from other parts of the British isles’.89 If the dominant themes were the crisis of masculinity, violence and sexuality, and one of the commonest settings the poverty-stricken underclass estate, the idea of storytelling also interested playwrights. In the final analysis, the sheer variety and richness of British playwriting left a lasting impression on both critics and audiences. The following examples all successfully transferred: Hare’s Via Dolorosa, a monologue performed by the playwright himself, was an autobiographical account of a visit to the Middle East, and addressed questions of faith; Johnson’s Hysteria and Dead Funny were superbly structured farces – one about Freud and Dali, and the other about the British comic tradition – whose lightning wit and emotional depth delighted audiences; plays such as Lavery’s Frozen (1998) and Charlotte Jones’s In Flame (1999) presented different and occasionally difficult aspects of women’s experience; populist entertainments such as Lee Hall’s Cooking with Elvis (1998) and Ben Elton’s Popcorn (1996) covered disability, movie violence and pop culture. If new writing began the decade in a parlous condition, it ended it on a high. Given its richness, and its success in many countries abroad, it is surely not absurd to claim that it gave British theatre an international boost.
In the 1990s, many experimental companies moved decisively into the mainstream. The best example is Théâtre de Complicité, a so-called physical theatre company which since 1983 had explored the visual and movement aspects of theatre in highly innovative productions. It was welcomed by the National, where it staged Street of Crocodiles (1992), based on the work of Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, and Out of a House Walked a Man (1994), based on the writings of Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms, as well as enjoyable versions of Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1991) and Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1997). The Visit was memorable both for the manic miming of the railway station scenes and for Kathryn Hunter, whose Clara had a viciously rasping voice, hoarse from decades of cigarette smoking. Led by director Simon McBurney, who worked with regulars such as Hunter, Marcello Magni and Lilo Baur, the company’s other notable successes included The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994), an unsentimental view of French peasant life based on John Berger’s Pig Earth, and Mnemonic (1999), the company’s most resonant, meaningful and inspiring production: at its start, audience members had to put on an eye mask and hold a leaf, with McBurney – who also playfully took a call on his mobile phone – asking them to think of its veins as their family tree. Then the epic play unfolded through two strands: twenty-something Alice’s journey across Europe in search of her father’s identity, and the discovery in the Alps of an ice-man, a body from prehistoric times, which spoke of humankind’s collective heritage and identity. When a Neolithic mass grave was mentioned the parallels with Bosnia were strongly suggested.
Here and in its other work, the company’s style was distinguished by imaginative use of simple props and the bodies of the performers. Typically, the performers’ fingers would become bushes or books become birds. McBurney describes how, in Street of Crocodiles, through a process of improvisation, ‘the actors physically learned to shift together, like a flock of starlings. They learned to dip and wheel and found a fantastic pleasure in it.’90 Other magic moments included the haunting slow-motion procession from Bohemia to Sicilia as the cast of The Winter’s Tale (1992) changed from being travellers into mourners, in funeral garb; the breathtaking opening of Street of Crocodiles when an echoing library came to life, as one character ‘walked’ down a wall, another emerged from a packing case and others rolled across the stage; in The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, the company became trees, or offered their fingers to Lucie for her to pick berries from them; in Mnemonic a wooden chair tenderly becomes a corpse. But as well as using these poor theatre techniques, the company was also well marketed. Rebranding itself as Complicite (dropping the foreign elements of its name) it toured internationally to great acclaim during the decade.
Straddling the divide between live art and written theatre were companies such as the Sheffield-based Forced Entertainment, which adopted a style of quiet conversational delivery, suggesting through its fragmentary scripts that its grip on reality was tentative. Led by Tim Etchells and a handful of regular performers, the company also delighted in childish props, animal masks, pop-culture references, and often parodied other forms of entertainment such as cabaret or children’s TV. Their best shows – Speak Bitterness (1994) – involved using everyday expressions and language to create an emotional crescendo. In Speak Bitterness a line of seven performers at a long steel table on a bare stage delivered a script made up of real and imaginary confessional statements, from murder and mayhem to white lies and cowardice, delivered deadpan to the audience. Other shows offered more visual variety: in Emmanuel Enchanted (1992), performers came on and off the stage wearing placards with names such as ‘The Hypnotised Girl’; in Club of No Regrets (1993), a character called Helen X bossed around a pair of performers inside a tiny box set, helped by two incompetent assistants; in the comical Showtime (1996), one performer was dressed in a suicide bomber vest and another as a dog; in Pleasure (1997) a sexually aroused pantomime horse was teamed up with a weary, melancholic nightclub MC.
Some of the most exciting experiences of the decade came from the mixture of dance and theatre. The most impressive and influential company was DV8 Physical Theatre, with its director-choreographer Lloyd Newson and performer Nigel Charnock, who developed a style of narrative-led dance that used contemporary music and movement in a particularly forceful way. DV8’s masterpiece, Enter Achilles (1995), featured a group of men drinking and fighting in a pub, and was – like so many written plays in this decade – a meditation on masculinity. As Newson wrote in the show’s programme, ‘“Unmanly” behaviour is often considered threatening, particularly by those who uphold rigid precepts of how men should behave. Why should non-conformity produce so much abhorrence and fear? […] we will look at how the pint, shared between men, can become a metaphor for bodily fluids / our life source, and how the qualities of the glass (the pint) can represent our rigidity, fragility and transparency.’91 Other shows had similarly provocative subject matter: Strange Fish (1992) was about religion and belief; MSM (1993) – whose title derived from the sociological term Men who have Sex with Men – used interviews with gay men who had experience of cottaging. Likewise, The Happiest Day of My Life (1999) was about the desire for sexual excitement and romance, featuring a first half in which the idea of 1990s hedonism was to the fore, and a second half set on a small island in a swimming pool, a visual metaphor for one married couple’s emotional estrangement: will this couple sink or swim? Striking visual effects included a larger-than-life film of a gyrating woman projected on to the spray from a shower and a lone man dancing with an upended sofa. Other similarly dynamic dance companies included V-TOL (Vertical Take-off and Landing), formed in April 1991 by artistic director Mark Murphy, and Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures, whose 1995 all-male Swan Lake was an enormous success. These developments were partly indebted to the work of German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch.
All of these companies continued to inspire each other. For example, Volcano, a physical theatre company resident in Swansea and specialising in provocative work, inspired Frantic Assembly. Set up in 1994 by Scott Graham, Steven Hoggett and Vicki Middleton, Frantic Assembly mixed dance moves and thumping music with a playwright’s text. Their first manic phase involved The Generation Trilogy – three hip, rave-infused plays called Klub, Flesh and Zero (1995–7) – the first two with texts by Spencer Hazel and performed with hazardous physical energy. The subject matter was thrillingly cotemporary: drugs and club culture (following the death of Leah Betts), selling your body (from performance to prostitution) and millennium angst. Regularly characterised as the future of British theatre, Frantic Assembly ended the decade with a 1998 hit Sell Out, text by Michael Wynne, and Hymns (1999), written by Chris O’Connell. The process of creating Sell Out involved a questionnaire put together by Wynne, which asked about relations and emotions. The resulting show was, in the words of Graham and Hoggett, ‘full of back-stabbing and sexual shenanigans’ which ‘debunked the “friends are the new family” notion so popular at the time’.92 By contrast, Hymns was about a funeral, death and male competitiveness.
Old campaigners from the 1960s, such as the People Show and Welfare State International, soldiered on during the 1990s, but their energy was on the wane. The Bethnal Green-based People Show continued with their edgy brand of surrealism: in The Solo Experience (1992), actor Mark Long expounded Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; in Fetch the Gramophone Out (1997), old age was explored using waltzing armchairs; and shows such as A Song without a Sound (1999) featured Josette Bushell-Mingo, a People Show regular. Whenever the company couldn’t think of a title, it just gave their shows a number. Meanwhile, the Cumbria-based Welfare State International, led by John Fox, specialised in large-scale participatory public spectacles, using processions, puppets, folk song and fireworks. In 1990, they delivered the biggest lantern festival in Europe for Glasgow City of Culture, as well as creating the Feast of Furness, the climax of a bold seven-year project at Barrow in Furness, with eleven shows devised in collaboration with local community groups. The grand finale, The Golden Submarine, an outdoor spectacle which played to a local audience of about 5,000, was characterised, says Baz Kershaw, by huge ‘extraordinary’ visual effects, although this ‘spectacular imagery’ was offset by a story ‘which had all the simple predictability of agit prop at its crudest’.93 Being inclusive and celebratory, this kind of local carnival was also heavily dependent on local government funding.
In the context of experiment, there were two playwrights whose work was sufficiently distinctive to merit special attention. Howard Barker, with the Wrestling School – a state-subsidised company devoted exclusively to his work – continued his mission to trouble the audience’s notion of naturalism, developing a drama that dissolves literal representation and connects more with the passions of the unconscious than with conscious reason. Instead of reconciling audiences in togetherness, he aimed to fragment responses. Most successful was The Europeans (1991), a dark drama set in the aftermath of the 1683 Siege of Vienna and featuring Katrin, a woman whose agonising ordeal exposes a world of unreason in a poetic text that felt like a chance meeting between Voltaire’s Candide and Lautréamont’s Maldoror. As a mutilated victim of the Turks, she refuses either to turn the other cheek or to suffer in silence. With its strong stage images and visionary intimations of a cultural struggle between Christianity and Islam, this is one of the most underrated plays of the decade. Barker’s prolific output included Uncle (Vanya) (1993) and Hated Nightfall (1994), which revisited Chekhov’s play and the death of the Romanovs in 1918, respectively. Towards the end of the decade, Und, Barker’s one-woman show about the symbiotic relationship between the torturer and victim in the Holocaust, pushed the boundaries of his theatre. Likewise, Ursula was a richly poetic play about the violent tensions between sexual love and spiritual sacrifice. Although many of his plays had a historical subject, Barker was clear that ‘the only things worth describing now are things that did not happen’ and his plays created a highly emotional and allusively imaginative world.94 They were not historical documentaries. Similarly, Edward Bond continued with his project to write difficult, non-naturalistic work, and to devise a distinctive dramaturgy with which to present it, one aimed at forcing audiences to make a moral choice. In the 1990s, he directed, for the RSC, his Shakespeare-inspired, if long-winded, In the Company of Men (1992) – which looked at the connections between capitalism and violence by examining the relationship of an arms manufacturer and his son – to largely uncomprehending reviews, and this contributed to his marginalisation from the mainstream. In response, he moved increasingly into theatre-in-education, especially with Big Brum in Birmingham, while at the same time enjoying productions of his work on the Continent, especially in France. For Big Brum, he wrote plays such as At the Inland Sea (1995) and Eleven Vests (1997), which examine humanity in times of authority and genocide. His most important 1990s play was Coffee (1996), which imagines a nightmarish war, in which civilians are executed and the individual’s left-field moral stand is seen as vital to survival. It was produced by a mixed company of amateur and professional actors in Wales. In the words of David Rabey, ‘Rather than present an allegory or thesis in fundamentally consistent terms which imply a correct explanation, Coffee provides an expressionistic dreamworld odyssey of dislocating experience and discovery, like Early Morning.’95 Other once-experimental practitioners such as Steven Berkoff lost much of their energy in the 1990s. Berkoff’s 1990 version of Kafka’s The Trial at the National, for example, featured a quietly intense performance by Antony Sher along with an immensely self-indulgent one by Berkoff himself. The most characteristic Berkoff play of these years was ‘Dog’, one of his three-part One Man show (Garrick, 1993), in which he played a rabid Rottweiler and its skinhead owner, a binge-drinking Millwall supporter.
As well as companies and playwrights some venues were important. The most notably experimental fringe theatre was BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) in south London, headed by Tom Morris from 1995, who provided countless opportunities for theatre companies to develop their work at this venue. Beneficiaries included Complicite (Mnemonic, later staged at the Riverside Studios), Frantic Assembly, Told by an Idiot, Improbable Theatre and Ridiculusmus. New directors such as James Menzies-Kitchin plied their craft. At BAC, a handful of resident producers monitored the projects of dozens of groups and individuals, covering everything from opera to puppetry. BAC pioneered adventurous seasonal programming, the idea of ‘scratch nights’ (when work in progress could be shown), and hosted an annual festival of visual and devised theatre which brought in performers from all over the world, and even gave mime a good name. As one journalist summed up, ‘Under Morris’s artistic directorship, BAC has been transformed from a marginal fringe venue into a buzzing powerhouse of experiment and development that is setting the agenda for the next generation of theatre-makers.’96 But while BAC often produced new work, equally important in London in the early 1990s was the ICA, which hosted companies from all over the UK, such as Forced Entertainment. Another fringe venue, the Drill Hall, specialised in gay theatre and one of its big successes was Claire Dowie’s Easy Access (for the Boys) in 1998, a riveting but excruciatingly painful show about child abuse, in which Dowie controversially used a video of her own daughter playing in the park, with a voiceover describing a sexual fantasy. While plays such as My Night with Reg and Beautiful Thing showed that gay theatre could succeed in the commercial mainstream, other gay performers – such as Neil Bartlett’s Gloria company, Bette Bourne and Bloolips – played to a narrower audience. Gloria (Night after Night, 1993) was especially significant in its attempts to reclaim the genre of the musical and the notion of theatrical pleasure from the exigencies of sentimental commercialism.
Some fringe theatres in London, often located above a pub and completely unfunded, played a crucial role in the mid-1990s in staging the first plays of writers who later came to wider prominence. In May 1993, the Old Red Lion theatre hosted the London New Play Festival, run by Phil Setren, which included early plays by Mark Ravenhill and Joe Penhall. Eighteen months later, Ravenhill’s Fist at the Finborough pub theatre attracted the attention of Out of Joint’s Max Stafford-Clark, and led eventually to his production of Shopping and Fucking. As Dominic Dromgoole remembers: ‘In the mid-1990s, there was a more vibrant garage-band feel when anyone could get their play on at the Old Red Lion or the Finborough. And people would enjoy that. […] You were as likely to have a good evening on the fringe as at the National.’97 This ferment of youthful energy at the margins fed into the main new writing theatres and, occasionally, reached the West End. For example, American playwright D. M. W. Greer’s Burning Blue, about anti-gay prejudice in the US Navy, travelled from the King’s Head pub theatre to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1995. Likewise, a tiny theatre such as the Gate in Notting Hill was completely unsubsidised but managed to stage artistic director Stephen Daldry’s revelatory season of Spanish Golden Age plays in 1991; at various times, you could see a rare Botho Strauss or Thomas Bernhard here or even work by Kane; other heads of this hot venue were director and writer David Farr and director Laurence Boswell.
Most fringe theatre took place in traditional theatre spaces. However, a theatre could also be an attic, basement, converted cinema, abandoned warehouse, hillside or an open street. Director Deborah Warner’s St Pancras Project (1995) used the ruined neo-gothic Midland Grand Hotel next to King’s Cross railway station as a site-specific venue for a fantastical walk in which audiences of one person at a time followed a route which felt as if it was haunted by ghosts from a past era, with glimpses of maids, bell-boys, tea services, leather shoes and petticoats. One room was planted with grass; in the distance a girl sobbed. Several other companies such as Artangel, Artsadmin and Station House Opera explored the possibilities of site-specific work, which crossed over into art installations such as the Artangel project of Rachel Whiteread’s controversial concrete House (1993) in east London, a Turner Prize winner. Even when a play was confined to a traditional theatre, there was room for experiment. Warner’s version of Beckett’s Footfalls in 1994 spread itself across the balconies and gangways of the Garrick Theatre in the West End, and was promptly stopped by the Beckett estate for failing to obey the author’s strict stage directions. In 1994, Daldry remodelled the whole of the Royal Court’s auditorium to stage his revival of Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen and in 1997 the National’s Olivier auditorium was given the same treatment for Complicite’s version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
The St Pancras Project was produced by the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), an event which occurred every two years and was a strong reminder of the ability of London to attract, and be inspired by, international talent. Over the decade LIFT brought many delights from afar, such as George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, a hilarious show in which black Americans satirised themselves, as well as several visits from Bobby Baker, performance artist extraordinaire who took the mickey out of shopping, cooking, female roles and performance art itself. The Market Theatre from South Africa and the Maly Theatre from Russia, the Craiova Theatre from Romania and Societas Raffaello Sanzio from Italy, all testified to a new internationalism and opened the eyes of local audiences to different theatrical possibilities. Most spectacular of all was Periodo Villa Villa, by Argentinian group De La Guarda, a wild and joyous airborne show which sprinkled the audience with water and amazed it with the performers’ sense of sheer euphoria. LIFT also produced straight plays, most notably Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden. Other festivals included the National Review of Live Art (held in Glasgow and at the ICA), It’s Queer Up North (Manchester) and Mayfest (Glasgow).
Elsewhere, much experimental theatre was hived off into the ghetto of live art. As Baz Kershaw comments, following the partial demise of the state-of-the-nation play, ‘Live art – or time-based art, or performance art – became the new “political theatre” of the rising generation.’98 New groups such as Blast Theory (1991), Stan’s Café (1991) and Third Angel (1995) devised various ways of creating fresh forms of theatre entertainment. Blast Theory’s early work used club culture for multimedia performance; their Invisible Bullets (1994) was a crime scene reconstruction in Hoxton, and in Kidnap (1998) two willing members of the public were sequestered while the event was streamed online. Stan’s Café’s Voodoo City (1995) involved a long incantation, wild dancing and slapstick magic; their Simple Maths (1997) was an hour-long show in which five performers changed the order in which they sat on six chairs. Third Angel collaborated with Forced Entertainment in On Pleasure, a short film about the latter’s devising process. In Senseless (1998) three corridor spaces held three blindfold performers for three ten-hour days, each with a different task: measuring time, taking photographs, drawing every room they’d ever lived in. Other performers were even more extreme. In 1996, at the ICA, body artist Franko B – in the several parts of I’m Not Your Babe – cut himself and bled, using his body as a site of mutilation and pain, which was a powerful statement about human fragility, an image of self-sacrifice and an echo of the concerns of many playwrights with physical mutilation.99 In Scotland, Suspect Culture – led by director Graham Eatough and playwright Greig – produced two experimental masterpieces, Timeless (1997) and Mainstream (1999). Other UK companies, such as Red Shift or the David Glass Ensemble, strove to inject some physicality into stale stagings. Although these kinds of experiments did push out boundaries and troubled taboos, the commercial sector also benefited by assimilating softer versions of many of these techniques. In the words of John Bull, ‘the relationship between the mainstream and the avant-garde is more parasitic than symbiotic’.100 In the 1990s, commerce proved stronger than experiment.
Theatres outside London had a bad decade: they were the main victims of the cuts in Arts Council funding and, by 1998, about thirty regional reps had deficits totalling more than £10 million. The situation was so bad that John Bull could accurately comment that ‘regional theatre has fallen into a state of financial panic in which even the proven products of the established mainstream appear a dangerous risk’.101 The strains of creaking budgets in the regional reps, that network of established repertory theatres most of which had a proud tradition of productions of all kinds, could be felt all around the country, from Bristol and Bath to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, and in places as diverse as Stoke or Salisbury, with news that first one and then another of the smaller theatres outside London was in serious trouble. For example, the Cheltenham Everyman stopped producing its own shows in 1993, the Redgrave in Farnham closed in 1995, the Thorndike in Leatherhead followed suit in 1997, and the Wolsey in Ipswich went dark in 1999. By 1997, when New Labour came to power, the years of Conservative underfunding of theatres outside London meant that, in Olivia Turnbull’s words, ‘approximately three-quarters of Britain’s provincial producing houses had had to severely pare down activities and had proclaimed imminent close in the face of enormous accumulated and operational deficits’.102 In 1999, Peter Boyden – on behalf of Arts Council England – undertook to investigate the Roles and Functions of the English Regional Producing Theatres, and his findings were that of forty-five producing theatres, thirty were operating with a deficit, and this was reported as a crisis in which ‘most of the country’s best regional theatres are technically insolvent after 20 years of chronic underfunding’, followed by the obvious conclusion that ‘a failure to take risks for fear of further losses was cramping creativity’.103
Lack of funding did indeed lead to a contraction of the repertoire, which was characterised by David Edgar as a nation witnessing ‘major outbreaks of Seagulls, Blithe Spirits, Doll’s Houses and various Ostrovskis; as the 1990s draw to an end, it appears that it is once again Three Sisterses and Hamlets that are breeding beyond epidemio-logical control’.104 In most of the reps, revivals of classics were seen as less risky to stage in box-office terms than new work because at least the public was familiar with the play titles. Such brand recognition also extended to star actors, who preferred to act in classics than in new plays. This also meant that many young directors gravitated towards the classics because that was where the work was. In general, costs meant that managements preferred plays with small casts to plays with large ones. New plays with large casts by unknown writers were simply rejected. The most frequently revived living authors were Ayckbourn, Godber and Willy Russell, whose plays could be characterised as new writing lite. In many places, even being a museum of safe plays was not enough for some theatres – there was a strong trend towards musicals, comedy shows and other populist entertainments.
As Kate Dorney and Ros Merkin comment, ‘crises run like a sore’ for the past quarter century in theatre outside London.105 In the early 1990s especially, Conservative government policy exacerbated the problem. By 1993–4, the whole network of regional reps appeared to be under attack: the government cut £5 million grant-in-aid to the Arts Council, there were news reports of a hit list of ten theatres, and the resignation of veteran farceur Brian Rix from the Drama Panel of the Arts Council contributed to a sense of acute turmoil. The 1990s saw an erosion of artistic leadership as the new managerial culture supplanted artists with executives, and marketing departments grew. Despite this dismal picture, there were resourceful theatres and some glimmers of hope. The Theatre Royal in Plymouth, led by Simon Stokes, managed to stay out of debt, and so did the Palace Theatre in Watford, under Lawrence Till. Although it ended the decade in the red, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, newly created in 1990 and headed by Jude Kelly, was a regional powerhouse. A typical example of its imaginative resourcefulness was getting Complicite’s Kathryn Hunter to play the title role in King Lear. Kelly also promoted new writing, such as Crimp’s Getting Attention (1991), a child-abuse drama, and Trevor Griffiths’s The Gulf Between Us (1992), a political play about the first Gulf War. Its co-production of Ben Elton’s Popcorn (about Hollywood movie violence) with the Nottingham Playhouse in 1996 transferred to the West End. In 1997, the West Yorkshire Playhouse also produced Dona Daley’s Weathering the Storm, a love story set in the context of post-war migration from the West Indies.
Other high-profile theatres experienced a chequered decade. The Birmingham Rep, for example, in 1992 staged a disastrous production of Biko, a chamber opera about the black South African political activist Steve Biko. But the arrival of Bill Alexander as artistic director in the same year raised the theatre’s profile nationally. As Claire Cochrane sums up: ‘National critical approval, awards, regular London appearances: all were indicative of a company which was establishing itself as an artistic force.’106 Despite ongoing deficit problems, Alexander promoted multi-racial casting for classics and directed memorable shows such as Jonson’s The Alchemist; under his eye, Terry Hands’s The Importance of Being Earnest came to the Old Vic, and Lucy Bailey created a version of Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll (1999), which transferred to the National. The theatre hosted ace Romanian director Silviu Purcărete. New work was developed by Anthony Clark, who in 1992 staged Rod Dungate’s Playing by the Rules, about male prostitution, and Sarah Woods’s Nervous Women, a post-feminist ghost story (both writers had been students on Edgar’s influential MA in Playwriting course at Birmingham University). Other new playwrights included Kate Dean, Bryony Lavery, Paul Lucas, Nick Stafford and novelist David Lodge. Ben Payne’s appointment as literary manager in 1995 led to the creation of the Door, a studio dedicated to new work. Memorable work included East is East, a co-production, which, says the historian of the rep, ‘came across in Birmingham as simultaneously comic, shocking, surreal and warmly sympathetic’.107 Likewise, Andy de la Tour’s The Landslide (1997), co-produced with West Yorkshire Playhouse, correctly anticipated Labour’s election victory, while Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, a paedophile murder drama with EastEnders star Anita Dobson, was a hit.
New writing was evident at many venues, and especially at Live Theatre, Newcastle, a specialist new writing theatre, where artistic director Max Roberts worked with local writers such as Peter Flannery, Michael Wilcox, Peter Straughan and Julia Darling. Other talent included Alan Plater and Lee Hall, whose successes Cooking with Elvis and Spoonface Steinberg (starring Hunter) began life on Tyneside and Sheffield before transferring to London. In Coventry, Chris O’Connell worked at the Belgrade Theatre, for example staging Big Burger Chronicles in 1996, and his Theatre Absolute produced Car (1999), about four joy riders, the first in his Street Trilogy of plays about youth, poverty and violence. In Scarborough, in 1996, after six years of fundraising, Ayckbourn opened a two-stage home in the Stephen Joseph Theatre, a former cinema. Occasionally a local writer would move towards the metropolis: for example, Richard Cameron (born in Doncaster and for many years a teacher in Scunthorpe) had his plays produced by the Bush.
All over the country, the main centres had mixed experiences. Manchester Royal Exchange, led by Braham Murray and Gregory Hersov, did good work but was badly damaged by an IRA bomb in 1996, reopening some two years later. The first production in the restored and refurbished theatre was a restaging of Stanley Houghton’s classic Hindle Wakes, which had been running when the bomb went off. Andy Hay’s Bristol Old Vic, based at the Theatre Royal, which opened in 1766 and is the oldest theatre in the UK, managed to produce large-scale shows such as a revival of The Marat/Sade, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and an admirable version of Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with Tara Fitzgerald. New work included plays by Jim Cartwright, Catherine Johnson and Kwame Kwei-Armah. At the Newcastle Playhouse, the internationally minded director Alan Lyddiard produced Orwell’s Animal Farm (1993), which stayed in the repertoire for twelve years, touring extensively abroad. In 2001 he created a version of the same author’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Anthony Burgess’s own stage adaptation of his novella A Clockwork Orange (1995) was another keynote production. Elsewhere, venues such as the Sheffield Crucible and the Leicester Haymarket soldiered on. Lesser theatres, such as the Derby Playhouse, sometimes struggled to find populist plays: it often fell back on John Godber’s populist work, a big success being his On the Piste in 1991.108 Sometimes, a theatre could have a crucial if barely visible role: Daldry’s outstanding National revival of An Inspector Calls was first mounted in a smaller version at the York Theatre Royal, where a lack of money paradoxically freed his imagination.109
Some English companies were formed as an explicit challenge to the theatre of the metropolis. Based in Halifax, Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides was set up in 1992 with a mission to perform Shakespeare and the classics with what Shellard calls ‘a Yorkshire sensibility and celebrating the region’s distinctive speech patterns’.110 Performing with a fast pace, minimal props and often in unconventional spaces (cattle markets, riding stables, churches, mills), the company created memorably fresh productions of Richard III (1992), with Rutter in the title role, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1994), and Yorkshire writer Blake Morrison’s version of Kleist’s The Cracked Pot (1995). Elsewhere, touring companies such as Kneehigh, Trestle, Millstream and Compass did good and often innovative work, while community plays all over the country offered exceptional opportunities for large-scale participation by local people, and could be anything from a nostalgic celebration of a place’s historical past to an innovative, site-specific experiment.
In the 1990s, Scottish theatre expanded its vision. Due to changes in the political structure after New Labour introduced partial devolution, theatre shifted from being, in Adrienne Scullion’s words, ‘much preoccupied with issues of colonialism, marginalism and parochialism’ to being a ‘site of national political and social debate, as well as of aesthetic and dramaturgical innovation and experiment’.111 At the forefront of this was the Traverse Theatre, which promoted not only Neilson, but also David Greig and David Harrower, whose Knives in Hens was one of the best new plays of the decade. Set in a rural society that was deliberately ambiguous in its historical reality, this resonant and evocative piece explored language, literacy and desire while at the same time telling a clear story with a freshly minted language. By contrast, his Kill the Old Torture Their Young (1998), with its figure of the Rock Star whose life spent flying across the globe means that he is almost untouched by the various problematic local identities of the other characters, was less successful. It was, however, Greig who emerged as the country’s most influential playwright. At the start of his career, he immediately dropped the clichés of Scottish playwriting and, with Europe (1994), presented a powerful image of a railway station in central Europe at the crossroads of change, in a finely wrought play which ends with its female characters embarking on a migratory lifestyle as the burning station consumes their fathers. Greig’s work is highly individual because, in the words of Dan Rebellato, of ‘the conscious and artful way in which he is trying to come to terms with the immense changes being wrought across the world by globalisation: a perspective shaped and enhanced by his experience of a multiple and ambiguous Scotland’.112 Greig’s characteristic themes – the struggle to communicate along with intersecting lives – were beautifully realised in both The Architect (1996) and The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, whose exploding space rocket resonates through the lives of a variety of characters. Greig was also a powerful advocate for Scottish playwriting, arguing as early as 1995 that there was a ‘flowering of Scottish plays’ while at the same time urging the theatre community to trust and support new playwrights.113
In terms of identity politics, Scottish playwrights threw aside clichés of traditional Scottish identity and created, in David Pattie’s words, ‘a sense of identity in general that is fluid and transforming itself – while at the same time showing themselves to fully aware of how divisive and fragmented the experience of identity in the modern world might be’.114 So older writers such as Chris Hannan and Simon Donald produced work which was contemporary in its language, sensibility and visual images: in Hannan’s extraordinary and anarchic Shining Souls (1996) themes include the search for spiritual meaning and the politics of place. In his The Evil Doers (1990), set in Glasgow, the characters exist in a limbo land in which the working-class Sammy renames himself Danny Glasgow, and offers to guide tourists through a city that is fast becoming unfamiliar to him. Similarly, Stephen Greenhorn’s ‘road movie’ Passing Places visualises Scotland as a new country full of newcomers from other parts of the UK and Europe. In Donald’s The Life of Stuff (1992), there a grimly humorous episode when a stoned young woman nibbles a severed toe she has mistaken for a sausage: the picture the play paints is a bleak urban nightmare of violence as well as laughter. More traditional in content, although presented in an excitingly theatrical way, Sue Glover’s Bondagers (1991) – about women who worked the land in the 1860s – was the latest in a long line of plays that reclaim the lives of women lost to history. Similarly, former pitman Mike Cullen’s The Cut (1993) explored the world of the miners, a traditional subject, by using a punchy, revenge-thriller format. On the populist side, Liz Lochhead’s crisply written Perfect Days (1998) brightly explored the desire of Barbs – a thirty-eight-year-old hairdresser played by Siobhan Redmond in a shockingly carrot-coloured wig – to have a baby in a show that was part sitcom, part contemporary issue play. Other women playwrights such as Rona Muro, Nicola McCartney and Zinnie Harris also made their debuts, plus gay writers such as John Binnie. Indeed, the 1990s saw a huge variety of work in Scotland. For example, the Glasgow Citizens – run by Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald – created an appealing version of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt, which made it to London’s West End in 1993. Another Glasgow venue, The Tron Theatre, also produced both new writing and revivals of the classics. Director Annie Wood led a renaissance in theatre for children, TAG worked in schools and 7:84 took drama to local communities.
Although most Scottish playwriting developed independently and had its own agendas, it also had a profound effect on English playwrights, and on the in-yer-face sensibility. If Irvine Welsh’s 1999 play You’ll Have Had Your Hole seemed to glory in its own sadism, the adaptations of his novels Trainspotting, Maribou Stork Nightmares and Filth brought in new young audiences. Especially important were the various productions of Trainspotting, which with its dirty, nihilistic image of hopeless urban squalor resounded in the minds of metropolitan playwrights. Other influences were more subtle, if equally deep. Ian Brown at the Traverse staged influential playwrights such as the Canadian Brad Fraser, whose Unidentified Human Remains and the Nature of Love (1992) had scenes of explicit sex that London theatres had been too frightened to touch. Similarly, the Traverse promoted the work of Neilson, very much a pioneer of experiential theatre, and, of course, Kane’s style of playwriting was heavily coloured by her experience of Jeremy Weller’s Grassmarket Project, in Edinburgh, which used non-actors and improvisation to create compelling, fraught and hard-hitting dramas. These were not just casual influences; they were crucial to the development of each of these writers. Seen in this perspective, London’s in-yer-face theatre was kick-started by an injection of Scottish theatricality.
Neither Wales nor Northern Ireland could compete with Scottish theatre. In Wales, Clwyd Theatre in Mold increased its reputation as a producer of fine revivals, some of which even came to London. Brit Goff, led by Mike Pearson, investigated local Welsh myths and traditions in a site-specific performances – Haearn (1992) and Lla’th (Gwynfyd) (1998) – which were innovative in their use of disabled or amateur actors along with a core of professionals. The major playwright of the 1990s was Ed Thomas, whose Gas Station Angel was a co-production with the Royal Court. As Roger Owen says, ‘Thomas used theatre as a means of creating exciting new myths for Wales, by releasing any previously held view of Welsh identity from its historical shackles, and by injecting an anarchically playful, consciously self-inventive element into his dramatic dialogue and its performance.’115 Thomas’s work, including East from the Gantry (1992) and Song from a Forgotten City (1995), might be derided as verbose by English critics, but the picture it painted of Wales was contemporary and true. In a similar vein, the influential Swansea-based and politically radical Volcano Theatre Company toured extensively outside Wales, and tried to connect with its local community. In the 1990s, provision for the arts was devolved in Wales, as it was in Northern Ireland, where the much larger political changes following the Peace Process meant that the traditional ‘Troubles play’ soon went out of fashion, and playwrights began to address the new realities of the place. Foremost among them was Protestant Gary Mitchell, whose work – especially In a Little World of Our Own (1997), As the Beast Sleeps (1998) and Trust (1999) – investigated the psychology of Loyalism in a context of rapid social and political change. Other local writers include Marie Jones, whose highly successful one-man show A Night in November (1994) examined Protestant identity, Anne Devlin, Owen McCafferty and Daragh Carville. New companies such as Tinderbox became more important as older companies, such as Field Day, lost momentum. Yet Irish theatre north of the border could not compete with the creativity of the Republic.
All history, no matter how well balanced, tends towards a uniformity that is contradicted by experience. In the 1990s, British theatre was not simply in-yer-face, nor flagship dominated nor newly commercialised, nor even a mix of all three. For those who went to the theatre, it was a time characterised – as all eras are – by exceptions and oddities as much as by safe and predictable experiences. In this decade, you might have been lucky to catch the work of directors such as Garry Hynes, Phyllida Lloyd or Annie Castledine, or that of Terry Hands, Michael Boyd or Lindsay Posner. You might have seen great performances by Simon Callow, John Hurt or Alan Rickman, or by Julie Walters, Frances Barber or Indira Varma. A theatregoer’s experience might have included seeing Debbie Isitt’s The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband on its first outing in 1991 or Alan Cumming in David Hirson’s La Bête (1992), a verse drama which seemed to anticipate Crimp’s more sophisticated adaptation of The Misanthrope later in the decade. They might have caught Prowse’s breathtakingly lavish set design for The White Devil in the Olivier (1991), or comedians Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson in a genuinely funny Waiting for Godot in the West End (1991). They might have seen Rachel Weisz in David Farr’s Neville Southall’s Washbag at the Finborough (1992) or its West End transfer, renamed as Elton John’s Glasses. They might have enjoyed the expressionistic high-tech set of Daldry’s Machinal or seen Eileen Atkins in The Night of the Iguana (both at the National, 1993), or Pam Ferris playing Her Majesty in Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I for Out of Joint (1994). Or talked about male rivalry after seeing Jonathan Lewis’s Our Boys (1995).
They might have heard the gossip about Stephen Fry walking out of Gray’s Cell Mates in the West End three days after its opening, and hiding out in Bruges after a case of stage fright in early 1995. They might have seen Paul Merton and Caroline Quentin in Arthur Smith’s Live Bed Show (1995) or they might have roared at Alison Steadman in the West End transfer of The Memory of Water. They might have appreciated Judi Dench singing ‘Send in the Clowns’ in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, or watched the planets descend in Godfrey’s The Blue Ball (both at the National, 1995). They might have seen Paul Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave in Eyre’s John Gabriel Borkman (1996), or Marie Jones’s Women on the Verge of HRT (1997). They might have goggled at Johnson’s Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick (1998), his tribute to Carry On films, or caught Roy Williams’s magic-touched Starstuck (1998), or watched as the entire cast of Nick Grosso’s Real Classy Affair (1998) listened in silence to Rod Stewart’s ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’. They might have admired the radiant Janie Dee in Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential (1999), or shuddered to the camp grote-squerie of the puppets and props in Improbable Theatre’s Shockheaded Peter (1999). They might have witnessed a musical that flopped – such as Cliff Richard’s Heathcliff (1997) – or one – such as Abba’s Mamma Mia! or Disney’s The Lion King (both 1999) – which then went on to run for more than a decade. This kind of complex account of shows seen, and shows missed, forms the texture of an individual’s experience of British theatre in the 1990s. Depending on where you lived, and what else you did, this was a decade of many different memories. In an individual’s personal experience, the exceptional and the odd is often more memorable than the usual accounts given in standard histories, which at best offer a general distillation of events.