Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary Mainstream Theatre by John Bull (review)

Book Reviews 353 many of the virtues of the negative theatre ecologies of Pinter, Marnet, and Beckett, but she chooses to move to a frontier of hope epitomized in the multicultural theatres of African, Latino, and Asian America, not to advocate some expanded version of, say, Afrocentrism, but to reveal that the multicultural experience is the root experience of all Americans, a point to recall and build upon rather than to deny, and struggle to erase. Place is a problem that resists resolution in OUf cultural flow. Chaudhuri shows us how the theatre place has cryst3IJized the problem of geographic - or any other sense of - place, and suggests a positive movement in both landscapes toward resolution. WILLIAM W. DEMASTES, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, BATON ROUGE JOHN BULL. Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary Mainstream Theatre. New York: St. Martin's Press 1994· Pp. 251. $39.95. In Stage Right, John Bull is conscious of the departure he has made from New British Political Dramatists (1983) in focusing his attention on what he refers to as the "new mainstream," a tradition of ~ork consciously opposed to that of the politically committed writers he promed earlier. The historical turning point here is not 1968, but the Conservative Party victory in the General Election in 1979. Bull examines the impact of the new monetarism and the effects of economic retrenchment of British theatre in order to demonstrate how a new window of opportunity opened up for what he terms "the recovery, both of territory and of 'health,' of the mainstream" (13). Because of the growing reliance of major subsidized theatres on West End transfers to make up shortfalls in funding, Bull argues that this sector began to welcome more commercially viable playwrights - with their small-cast plays and non-controversial themes - and that these writers in tum "sought to redefine the model of serious theatre" (36). The book is divided into two pans. The first section traces the political and economic factors that resulted jn favourable conditions for the recovery of the mainstream after 1979. Bull offers some useful statistics, and examples of the proliferation of musicals in London theatres (commercial and subsidized) in the I 980s. He also devotes two chapters to the theatrical roots of the new mainstream, beginning with the "revolution" in the 1950s. Bull claims that the developments in those years (at the royal Court and the Theatre Royal, Stratford EasO, forced a separation between a "serious" theatrical tradition and one consis.ting of nothing more than drawing-room inanities. He attributes to the new mainstream the role of "bridg[ing] this gap" and "regain[ing] a credibility for the traditional against the effons of an increaSingly politicized avantgarde in the late 70S" (56). The playwrights of the new mainstream drew from the tradition of the well-made play, as well as from English Absurdism (distinguished from Absurdism as it developed in Eastern Bloc countries). Bull pays particular attention to the influence of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Part II of the book begins with a lengthy discussion of the importance of the "room" 354 Book Reviews as the seuing for mainstream drama, and.devotes the remaining short chapters to the most successful playwrights of the new mainstream - Peter Nichols, Simon Gray, Alan Ayckboum, Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett, and Tom Stoppard. His selection is intended to reflect "the variety of stances available in the POSl-1979 'serious' theatre." Bull discusses a variety of plays, with particular attention (0 turning points or new directions in the playwrights' careers. They clearly represent different political tendencies, ranging from those of Simon Gray, whose politics Bull locates "well to the right of the successive Conservative administrations of 1979 on" to those of Alan Bennett, whose plays might be considered "considerably to the left of the concerns of contemporary mainstream theatre." BUl Bull never goes far enough in developing these differences and the contradictions inherent in them. That may be due to his own ambivalence about this work; his analyses of plays suggest both impatience with the lack of political engagement , and admiration for clever plotting and stage tricks. While Bull's decision to examine mainstream theatre in its socio-political and economic...