New Theatre Voices of the Seventies: Sixteen Interviews from Theatre Quarterly 1970-1980 ed. by Simon Trussler (review)

Book Reviews SIMON TRUSSLER, ed. New Theatre Voices oj the Seventies: Sixteen Interviews from Theatre Quarterly 1970- 1980. London: Eyre Methuen Ltd. 1981. Pp. xvi, 200. £4.95. From the pages of Theatre Quarterly Simon Trussler has selected and edited a series of discussions with influential playwrights and directors of the seventies. Those interviewed , who have all done their major work in (he British theatre, consist of Howard Barker, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, William GaskiIJ, Trevor Griffiths, Peter Hall, David Hare, David Jones, John McGrath, David Mercer, Tom Stoppard, Kenneth Tynan, Arnold Wesker, and Snoo Wilson. If some of these names are less than familiar on the international scene, this is in large part a consequence of the attitudes many of the playwrights display toward established theatres, establishment audiences, and established processes for securing name-recognition. For many of them, the preferred perfonnance arena is not London's National Theatre or West End, but a regional working men's club, church hall, or school theatre. When they have sought mass audiences, they have tended to do so on national television or radio rather than in the large auditoriums of commercial theatres. The desire for alternative theatre has, of course, been recurrently visible in the ~ast hundred years, but in the seventies in England it became increasingly urgent. Trussler sets out to clarify the basis for this sense of urgency, to establish it as a major unifying principle of British theatre of the decade. and to use it as the prime means of linking the sixteen interviews published here together. The political events of 1968, he argues. were as important to British theatre of the seventies as the 1956 perfonnance ofLook Back in Anger was to the theatre of the sixties. The interviews repeatedly refer to these political events, to the playwrights' and directors' class origins and political views, and to their attitudes toward established theatres, establishment audiences, and possible alternatives . These attempts to impose an overall structure on the collection of interviews and on the attitudes shared by the "new theatre voices of the seventies" are not always Book Reviews 501 successful. The names of Peter Hall, Bill Gaskill, Kenneth Tynan, and Arnold Wesker look somewhat out of place under the banner of new voices ofthe seventies; the political events of 1968 that seem so crucial to the interviewers often seem less so to the interviewees; and the book's uncertain foc~s is registered in the resort to two separate introductions: one by the editor and one from another less-thaD-new voice in the theatre, that ofMartin Esslin (his introduction is alternately referred to as an Introduction and as a Foreword). These problems of structure and focus are never adequately resolved, nor is it immediately apparent how they could be. Theatre generations are not so neatly divided, theatre movements are rarely unified in aim or achievement, and the editor concedes at the outset the problematic nature of auempts to link changes in "generations" in the theatre with changes in decades on the calendar. [n spite of the difficulties the editor encounters in presenting an appropriate overview of what the book contains, he has nevertheless collected a series of valuable interviews with a set of intelligent and articulate figures whose powerful views on contemporary British theatre fully justify his decision to publish them together. Though the notion ofa distinctive theatre of the seventies is premature, these interviews will be of great help to anyone seeking to locate in retrospect threads of coherence still emerging in post-war British theatre. Particularly useful in this respect are Gaskill's and Tynan's views on controversies that developed during the early years of the National Theatre, Tynan's provocative critique of the career of Peter Brook, and Hall's illuminating analysis of his work on Pinter's plays. These, however, are the not-50-new voices ofthe British theatre, and it is to the other interviews that we must turn for the genuinely new voices with their extensive concerns for alternative theatre and for the viability of a revival of political theatre. Political theatre in the seventies in England means, of course, political theatre of the left, though the playwrights...