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A Thousand Years of British Theatre History (Part 6c)The Twentieth CenturyDirector's Theatre If the nineteenth century was famed for its actor/managers, the twentieth introduced the concept of the director. Granville Barker was perhaps the first director in the modern sense with his productions of Shakespeare at the Savoy between 1912 and 1914, but it was in the second half of the century that the concept of director's theatre really grew. Undoubtedly it was Peter Brook's influence whch established the position of the director as we know it today. Since Brook, of course, we have had a succession of highly influential directors, most of whom are still working today - Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble, Sam Mendes, Nicholas Hytner, Jude kelly, Michael Bogdanov. The Eighties and Nineties The heady expansion of theatre in the sixties and seventies came to a shuddering halt in the eighties. To those of us who lived through the decade, the most used word seems to have been "cuts", for, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, the idea of the intervention of the state into any aspect of people's lives was anathema, and, in financial matters, the market was all. This meant subsidies were cut, often to the bone, and theatres and theatre companies were forced to find private sponsorship or live off their box office takings. Many theatres and companies, both small and large, died. Even those which survived were forced to cut back on experiments and play safe. The success or failure of a production could mean the difference between staying open and closing down completely. Many of the civic theatres were in a particularly parlous state for, no matter how much the local authority may have wanted to support them, the money available to councils was also being cut back, both through low increases in government grants and capping of the rates, so that many of the receiving houses, being generally large and expensive to maintain, brought in less and less straight theatre and relied on sure-fire audience winners. Many, in fact, turned to one-night pop concerts, middle of the road music evenings, with the occasional ballet or opera companies, which, because of the rarity of their appearances (often one week a year), could fill the house. Stages which had once echoed to great drama or experimental theatre now welcomed Andrew Newton: Hypnotist and other such shows. The arrival of the National Lottery in the nineties promised to be a way of replacing the axed funding, but insufficient thought was given to how this money should be spent, and millions went on refurbishment, rebuilding and even some new building, and this left us with some superb theatres which the companies and managements could not afford to run, and which therefore staggered from financial crisis to financial crisis. The End And so we come to the end of this history of a thousand years of British theatre. To do justice to such a vast subject in such a small space is, obviously, impossible. What we have done over the last few weeks has been to skim over the surface of the main points. Much that is important has been, out of necessity, omitted, but what is there is, I hope, a coherent outline of the main strands of the development of one of the world's great dramas. Links
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