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State of the Nation
By Michael Billington
Faber and Faber £25
435 Pages
Dateline: 21st October, 2007
"British Theatre since the war has acted as a uniquely informative
mirror to the shifts and changes in our society".
The Guardian's theatre critic for so long is a man who has written
about the stage for over forty years. That makes Michael Billington
the perfect person to write a book about British theatre since 1945.
He views his subject as a "vehicle of moral enquiry" and
brings to bear wide experience, astute opinion and diligent research
to write what for many might become the definitive book on theatre in
the period between the departures of Churchill and Blair, neither greatly
lamented by the author.
In State of the Nation, Billington combines social history with
an innate ability to understand and analyse plays and the motivations
both personal and societal that led to their creation.
He opens with a period of Post-War hope, exemplified by the productions
at the Old Vic under Olivier and Richardson in 1944-1946 before the
disastrous interference of politicians and administrators held up the
establishment of the much-needed nirvana of a National Theatre for a
further decade.
In view of his current reputation as something of a lightweight, it
is a surprise to see that the man who initiated the State of the Nation
play, without which this book would have no title, was J.B. Priestley.
He did so both in his works of this period such as the ever-popular
An Inspector Calls but also as a seer and cultural commentator
with his "radical vision of an ideal theatre".
Rather than Look Back in Anger, Billington identifies the now
sadly forgotten John Whiting's Saint's Day as the first post-Second
World War play that is not merely an extension of the style and themes
of earlier times.
That does not mean that he undervalues Osborne, writing extremely well
about both Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, setting
them in both theatrical and historical contexts.
As the 1960s welcomed the arrival of a National Theatre and the Royal
Shakespeare Company, another influence from the momentous year of 1956
became even more apparent in the work of Bertolt Brecht. It was not
only the writing but also the Berliner Ensemble's Brechtian stagings
that made such an impact on our theatre and still do so today.
While Billington takes a thorough and detailed attitude to research,
avidly reading vast swathes of source material to add to his encyclopaedic
knowledge of the subject, his writing is anything but stuffy. He offers
opinions modestly but firmly and has a wicked (in both the old and new
senses) turn of phrase. How could anyone not love a writer who describes
bland musicals of the 1970s as shows "which resonated with all
the excitement of a damp fart".
He also has problems with the direction that today's West End is taking,
heading towards a new location that he wittily describes as Hollywood-on-Thames.
Billington is particularly good at anatomising the commercial musical
phenomenon that has led it there.
This genre that became such a feature of the Thatcher years was fuelled
primarily by the efforts of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh.
While Billington identifies other musicals that were artistically worse,
his criticisms of the RSC's Les Misérables, co-produced
with Mackintosh are instructive. "It also represented a degradation
of standards and a vulgarisation of taste that seemed neatly to encapsulate
the philistine spirit of the Eighties." Presumably, he did not
vote for Maggie.
State of the Nation also focuses on perennial favourites such
as Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, David Hare and Tom Stoppard before
moving on to consider the incredible energy of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill
and the In-Yer-Face phenomenon before looking at life in the
Blair years, especially through the microscope of verbatim theatre.
The book ends on a note of hope by identifying a series of younger writers
whom Billington believes will provide for a healthy theatre over the
next few years.
This book should be a must for the Christmas stocking of anyone interested
in theatre in this country. It will give readers hours of pleasure and
in many cases, the odd splutter of indignation as a forthright opinion
does not fit in with their own. That is the mark of a good critic and
Michael Billington is one of the very best.
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