Reality Sucks: The Slump in British New Writing

The distinguished film director David Lean once said, "Reality is a bore." He was talking about the fashion in 1960s cinema for social realism, for kitchen-sink drama, for angry young men. You can see his point. Ever since the advent of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger—whose fiftieth anniversary in 2006 was celebrated in a rather listless fashion by Ian Rickson, the Royal Court's outgoing artistic director—British theatre has been in thrall to a mix of social realism and naturalism whose hegemonic power remains a problem even today. So pervasive is this strand in the culture that the title of the Arctic Monkeys 2006 CD is Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, a direct steal from defiant Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz's 1960 social-realist film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Today, given the anxieties created by the digital age's affront to old and established views of reality, and to the ongoing global uncertainties unleashed by the War on Terror, the British public's desire for reality is more intense than ever—and this is manifested not only in a seemingly insatiable appetite for reality TV, but also in a need to be assured that the best theatre is somehow "real," explanation enough perhaps for the current vogue for verbatim drama.

But the hegemony of social realism and naturalism is, like other hegemonies, not just an innocent preference for one aesthetic over another. No, it's a cultural mind-set that only works by excluding, by marginalizing, by belittling any theatre that doesn't obey the right dress code. Like an attack dog, it needs victims. In 2006, for example, director Katie Mitchell staged a new translation of Chekhov's The Seagull at the National Theatre. Out went all the clichés associated with this master of naturalism: there were no samovars; no chirping birdsong; no melancholic silences. Using a radical new translation by Martin Crimp, which ditched the patronymics and Russianisms so beloved of British audiences, the production was an aesthetic success—and a slap in the face of this flagship theatre's regular patrons. But one smack can provoke another. Mitchell received hate mail, with one spectator scrawling "RUBBISH" on the program and sending it back to her. A similar confrontation between this director and one part of the National's audience took place in 2007, when Mitchell staged a rare revival of Crimp's 1997 masterpiece, Attempts on Her Life. This time both play and production (which saw the actors used as filmmakers who shot parts of the stage action which were then projected onto massive screens) proved scandalous. Critics savaged the production: one called it a woeful example of "Mitchellitis—a dreadful form of directorial embellishment" (Evening Standard) and another "two hours of debasing trash" (Daily Mail), with Crimp's writing characterized as having "an off-putting coldness, and an ironic, self-advertising cleverness that proves ultimately repellent" (Daily Telegraph). Internet message boards, such as What's On Stage, rang with yobbish snorts of "indulgent theatrical wankery" and "pretentious, insulting nonsense."

These kinds of passionate responses clearly show how central the aesthetics of social realism and naturalism are to British culture. For once, something really is at stake. And, if ever there was an anti-naturalistic play, it's Attempts on Her Life. With Crimp's open text, and disregard for the usual literalistic markers of a naturalist play (characters, scenes, dialogue, and plot), the piece positively heaves with potential for imaginative stagings. And, in Mitchell's version, it came across as a phantasmagoria of video effects, fast-paced acting and visual bravura. It is theatrical theatre par excellence. It uses film, but you couldn't make a film of it.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss such events, which are happening at the National Theatre—that bastion of Britishness—as somehow irrelevant to the rest of the country's live performance. Yet the truth is that this flagship has, under the leadership of artistic director Nicholas Hytner, become a trendsetter, a place of innovation...