Fifty years of British theatre

Contemporary Review, August, 2002 by Tom Phillips

Stoppard, meanwhile, remained at the top of his profession. His plays have attracted both popular and critical acclaim even though many of them are selfconsciously intellectual and are best enjoyed by those who have had time to bone up beforehand on their arcane cultural and historical sources. Every decade, in fact, has seen at least one major Stoppard and any list of great twentieth century plays would be certain to include his 1972 comedy, Jumpers, 1982's brokenhearted love story, The Real Thing, and 1993's pan-historical Arcadia. His screenplay for the hit film Shakespeare In Love earned him a new audience and the premiere of his latest trilogy at the Royal National Theatre this summer is already being touted as the biggest theatre event of the new millennium. Coincidentally, Ayckbourn also has a new trilogy due to open in London this year and while he has not received the same level of critical acclaim -- he is, perhaps, a good playwright rather than a great one -- he remains extremely popular with a certain kind of theatre-goer. In the mid-1970s, he achieved the unusual feat of having five plays running in the West End simultaneously and his ongoing dissection of middle class foibles never seems to fall out favour.

As well as Stoppard and Ayckbourn, the latter half of the 1960s also saw the emergence of Alan Bennett (his Forty Years On with John Gielgud premiered in 1968), Peter Nichols (whose Joe Egg and Privates On Parade have both been revived with considerable success in recent years), and a group of writers who, together with the already established Bond, gave British drama in the early 1970s an unusually political bent. Among these were Trevor Griffiths, author of Occupations and The Comedians, Howard Brenton, whose 1980 play Romans In Britain prompted one of the few post-censorship challenges to free expression, and David Hare, who formed a long-running association with the National Theatre in the late 1970s, produced a trilogy of state of the nation pieces in the early 1990s and most recently hit the headlines with The Blue Room, a re-working of Schnitzler's infamous La Ronde which starred Nicole Kidman almost nude.

If the 1960s were good for writers, however, they also saw the rise of internationally renowned directors Peter Hall and Peter Brook. Both started working long before the formation of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961 but it is their work in the 60s at the RSC alongside younger talents like Trevor Nunn (who directed many of Andrew Lloyd Webber's hit musicals and ran the National from 1997 to 2002) which established them at the forefront of their profession. As well as reinventing the way Shakespeare is performed, replacing hollow musicality with a muscular approach to verse-speaking, their tenure at the company saw the famous 1964 Theatre Of Cruelty season which introduced the revolutionary ideas of Antonin Artaud through ground-breaking productions like Brook's Marat/Sade, and polemical performances like US, the 1966 tirade against America's war in Vietnam. Hall left the RSC in 1967, subsequently going on to head the National Theatre -- another child of the 1960s, founded by Laurence Olivier and others a t the Old Vic in 1962 -- and oversee its move to its specially built three-auditoria South Bank HQ in 1976, while Brook departed for Paris to set up the International Centre For Theatre Research with Jean-Louis Barrault in 1970 following his famous white box production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.