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The MonsteristsDateline: 11th September, 2005One of Philip Fisher's top recommendations for London theatregoers this week is Richard Bean's Harvest. It's an unusual play because of its epic scope, covering 100 years of a Yorkshire family's life and comes in at three hours - a real contrast to the modern trend for small cast plays of between an hour and ninety minutes. As Michael Billington says in his Guardian review, "If I warm to Richard Bean's new play, it is because it defies all the rules of modern drama. It runs three hours rather than the standard 90 minutes. It covers the period from 1914 to today. And it is set on a Yorkshire pig farm rather than a rundown housing estate. Even if Bean's abundance leads to dramatic excess, it is a price well worth paying." Bean is one of the Monsterists, a group of playwrights who have banded together to promote new writing of large scale work. The other members of the group are Moira Buffini (Dinner), Ryan Craig (What We Did To Weinstein), David Eldridge (Festen), Rebecca Lenkiewicz (The Night Season), Jonathan Lewis (Our Boys), Shelley Silas (Calcutta Kosher), Colin Teevan (The Bacchai), Roy Williams (Little Sweet Thing) and Sarah Woods (Through the Woods). According to their website, the group's key tenets are:
Does that sound familiar? It could almost be Shakespeare they are talking about, couldn't it? A few months ago I interviewed Peter Flannery, author of Our Friends in the North, and he talked about epic theatre. "The problem with epic plays on stage," he said, "is that they never get done again."To a large extent, that's almost certainly a matter of economics. Epic plays usually require large casts but, because they are unknown to audiences, a return on the required high investment is uncertain. Do a production of Hamlet or Lear or almost any other Shakespeare, and you know you'll get an audience: do something on a similar scale by A. Newriter and, unless you are the National or the RSC, you daren't take the financial risk Whilst one might be tempted to disregard Billington's comment about rundown housing estates as being the product of the critic in splenetic mood, he does have a point. Much of modern drama tends to focus on the effects of deprivation (spiritual as much as material), for that is a major concern of our times. Such subjects do not readily lend themselves to the epic style - unless you are American August Wilson who follows the same vision over a series of ten plays. It is absolutely right that playwrights should focus on contemporary concerns but there is also a place for the sweeping overview, but while economics dominate our theatres (and how do we get past that?), we must reluctantly agree with Peter Falnnery: "You can do things bigger on TV than on stage." Good luck to the Monsterists and all they stand for!
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