Fifty years of British theatre

Contemporary Review, August, 2002 by Tom Phillips

While the RSC and National were establishing themselves as Britain's leading 'straight' theatre companies, however, another double-act came together which had an equally significant impact on commercial theatre over the ensuing decades. That double-act was Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and, having launched their career in the late 1960s with Joseph & His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, they took the West End by storm in the 1970s with Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. Loud, sentimental and melodramatic, these shows proved extremely marketable and, although the Lloyd Webber/Rice partnership did not last, the handful of productions they worked on together effectively set the pattern for just about every musical which has come along since, from Lloyd Webber's own Cats and Phantom Of The Opera to the blockbusters Les Miserables and Miss Saigon. By the late 1980s, this particular brand of lavish musical spectacle was dominating the West End and, throughout the 1990s, it showed little sign of slackening its grip.

Whether this dominance has been good for British theatre or not has been a matter of considerable debate. Some argue that it marks the triumph of style over content and keeps other more innovative productions out of Shaftesbury Avenue. Others that it is the result of audiences voting with their feet and proves that straight drama is now a strictly minority interest. That many of the shows which cornered the market in the 1990s are now closing leaves the West End more open than it has been for years and it remains to be seen whether this will herald a resurgence in other genres or another new generation of musicals like the recently premiered The Full Monty and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

At the opposite extreme, the last three decades have also seen the ongoing rise of a very different genre. Fringe theatre has flourished since the late 1960s -- again, thanks largely to the abolition of censorship and the attendant opening-up of British theatre to new ideas -- and, while August's Edinburgh Fringe Festival remains its most prestigious and internationally acclaimed annual showcase, there are now numerous small-scale venues and companies throughout the country staging everything from cutting-edge performance art and visual comedy to new or long-lost straight plays and classic revivals.

Its sheer diversity, in fact, makes it almost impossible to define 'fringe' in any meaningful way and, where once it suggested 'radical' and 'experimental', it now serves as a catch-all term to describe anything which is not produced by a commercial West End theatre or a big national or regional subsidised company. It could mean improvised drama in the upstairs room of a pub or it could mean a touring production by a nationally recognised outfit like Frantic Assembly or Peepolykus in a studio-sized venue attached to a regional main house. Either way, there is an awful lot of it going on, both in London -- where Battersea Arts Centre is usually described as Britain's 'national fringe theatre' -- and the regions.