Beyond Timidity?: The State of British New Writing

It's January 2005, ten years since Sarah Kane's Blasted opened at the tiny Theatre Upstairs studio at the Royal Court. Although this was not the first play of the 1990s to have a raw in-yer-face sensibility, it quickly became the most notorious. Kane was soon patronizingly characterized as the "bad girl" of British new writing for the theatre, a reputation which her last two plays, Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (2000), with their obviously experimental approach to theatrical form, did much to challenge. In the years since her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, British new writing has expanded apace—but how does the scene look at the start of 2005?

The first paradox is that although Kane's work has been extensively staged in many different versions all over Europe and beyond—recently, she was more often produced in Germany than Schiller—her importance in British theatre has already faded. Although, in September 2000, a 15-year-old newcomer, Holly Baxter Baine (whose Good-bye Roy was part of the Royal Court's Exposure season of young writers) could convincingly say that her favorite playwrights were Brecht and Kane, the fact is that Kane was soon worshipped more in the academy than by practitioners. Since 1999, her work has practically never been performed in Britain, except for the Royal Court's season in April-June 2001. Even so, this theatre only staged three of her five plays, and only one, Blasted, was given a new production. (Crave and 4.48 Psychosis were revivals of the original productions, and her other two plays were only given rehearsed readings.) Apart from a couple of new versions by the Glasgow Citizens theatre, and a production of Crave by Matt Peover's Liquid Theatre company, there have been no other stagings. Perhaps for this reason, there remains a great deal of ignorance about her work—despite her legendary reputation. In their glossy book, Changing Stages (2000), for example, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright wrongly summarize the plot of Blasted as "an abusive relationship between father and daughter."

One reason for the lack of Kane productions is British theatre's relentless search for novelty. The explosion of creativity in the new writing scene in the mid-1990s—which I have documented in my polemical account, In-Yer-Face Theatre—spurred theatres to look for the next new talent, with the result that very few new plays ever get a revival. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s, there was more new writing in British theatre than ever in its history. Names such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, David Greig, Joe Penhall, Philip Ridley, Conor McPherson, Anthony Neilson, Martin McDonagh, Phyllis Nagy, Patrick Marber, Tanika Gupta, David Eldridge, Marina Carr, Rebecca Prichard, and Roy Williams became known outside the narrow ambit of new writing specialists. It's relatively easy to make a list of more than 150 new British playwrights who have made their debuts in the past ten years. It has also been calculated that between 500 and 700 writers of stage plays, radio plays, and television drama make their living from writing in Britain. These are really remarkable figures, and unique in Europe. All this is evidence of a buzz in the air: as new work attracted the attention of the general public, it also woke up the funding authorities. Across the country, there have been abundant crops of new writing programs, new writing competitions and new writing festivals. New writing is now better funded, more diverse and more widespread than ever.

At the same time, with the new millennium starting, signs of crisis also appeared. Sure, the emergence of even more new talent—such as Charlotte Jones, Simon Stephens, Zinnie Harris, Enda Walsh, Abi Morgan, Gary Owen, Debbie Tucker Green, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Joanna Laurens—was heartening, but such a blossoming of new work couldn't conceal...