This, That and the Other: The Critic and the Alternative Theatre

This, That and the Other: The Critic and the Alternative Theatre MICHAEL ANDERSON MRS. JAMES What would you say was the function of critics, if any? WYATT Critics are sacrosanct. You must make it clear to your readers that they are simply and obviously more important than poets or writers. That's why you should always get in with them. You see, what we chaps do may be all right in its little way but what really counts is the fact that if it weren't for the existence of critics, we shouldn't be around at all or would just be on the dole or running chicken farms. Never make cheap jokes about critics. You've got to remember this: the critic is above criticism because he bas the good sense never to do anything. He's up there helping us poor little guys to understand what the hell we're doing, which is a jolly helpful thing, you must agree. And if he stops you from writing at all then he's done the bestjob possible. After all, who wants to read or listen to what some poor old writer has pumped out of his diseased heart when he can read a balanced and reasoned judgement about life, love and literature from an aloof and infonned conunentator. John Osborne, West olSuez (London, 1971), pp. 73-74 The relationship between critics and creative artists has always been a prickly one and, as Wyatt's diatribe suggests, the contemporary British theatre has not been without its share of open hostilities. But behind the irony of this author's attack there lies a sense ofthe inevitability ofcritics: "jolly helpful" or not, they seem as much a part of the landscape as Wyatt himself. Critics themselves, of course, are not slow in coming to the defence oftheir craft and although, ifthey were pressed, their claims might be more modest than those ascribed to them by Wyatt, they might not find it too difficult to argue the place of objective, evaluative judgement in the artistic scheme of things. Now while this uneasy but apparently enduring relationship is characteristic of the phase in the British theatre initiated by Osborne himself with Look Back MlCHAEL ANDERSON in Anger in 1956, it seems to have been ruptured in the sector which has been variously called fringe, experimental or avant-garde, and has in recent years more frequently taken the title of alternative theatre. It is over a decade now since the "events of '68," which Peter Ansorge' and others take as a starting-point for the expansion of the alternative theatre in Britain, and yet - in sharp contrast to the reception of new plays in the preceding decade surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to the drama it has produced. Although factual documentation is becoming available, an anthology of authoritative criticism of the alternative theatre would make a very slim volume, and indeed a recent collection of post-war British theatre criticism, whose tenninal date is 1978, includes among the plays and revivals selected for attention only one piece, Lindsay Kemp's Flowers (1974), which can even tentatively be placed among the products of the alternative theatre.2 In the pre-war period described in Nonnan Marshall's study ofwhat he called "the othertheatre," 3 a handful ofexperimental or innovative companies, mostly starved of funds and proper facilities, were overshadowed by a commercially powerful and artistically unadventurous theatre, but today the alternative sector seems in many ways in better health than the theatre it sets out to challenge. In the Entertainments Guide to a recent edition of The Guardian (26 June 1981), I was able to count less than twenty non-musical plays advertised for the London stage, while the Alternative Theatre Guide published in the same newspaper on the following day listed over thirty-five new plays. Some duplicates are excluded from the first list, and the further elimination of revivals (Dangerous Corner, The Devil's Disciple and Presellt Laughter) and long-runners (The Mousetrap and No Sex Please - We're British) makes the comparison even more stark. Clearly this is a rough-and-ready guide, and some of the listings in the alternative...