Outshining the West End ... young actors are worth seeking out. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Here's a question for you. Where, in the past week, have I seen a rare revival of a German romantic tragedy and a new play by a living British writer with a cast of 27? At the National Theatre? At one of the more adventurous regional reps? In fact, I saw both plays at London drama schools. And it's a reminder that these academies offer the best theatrical value in London: you see unusual plays done by tomorrow's stars at low prices. Which makes me wonder why drama school shows are persistently ignored by the national press.
In recent years I've had a number of exceptional evenings at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Malet Street. I've caught Ibsen's Love's Comedy, which no one ever does, and Pillars of the Community which was just as exciting as a subsequent National Theatre revival. And this week I caught Kleist's 1808 drama, Penthesilea, vigorously translated and staged by RADA's new artistic director, Edward Kemp. Written when Kleist was 31, it's an astonishing play about the murderous love-hate relationship between the titular Amazonian queen and Achilles. It harks back to Euripides' The Bacchae in showing the heroine's frenzied slaughter of her lover. It also anticipates Strindberg in showing the close kinship between sex and combat. But what amazed me was the success of the young actors in portraying the Amazonians: no suggestion here of a ladies hockey team on the rampage but, especially in the brilliant performance of Jo Herbert as Penthesilea, a real evocation of wild-eyed warriors.
Drama schools are good at resurrecting the past. But they also offer living writers the chance to work on a scale you rarely find in the modern theatre. At the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, which has a handsome theatre in Earl's Court, they have a policy of developing long-term projects. In the past this led to a staging of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, adapted by Di Trevis from the Pinter film script, which ended up at the National. And last week LAMDA put on a new play by Doug Lucie, Still, which evolved through an 18-month workshop period with the actors and the director, Penny Cherns. The result was extraordinary: a mosaic of London life over the past 270 years taking us from the ruinous speculations over the South Sea Bubble to mass protests against Iraq. I've always thought of Lucie as a precise observer of contemporary mores. Here he created a modern socialist epic about London life: not something you ever see on our national stages.
But why is so little known about work of this calibre? Drama schools themselves are often to blame in that many believe students should be protected from exposure to critical gaze. To me, that's a false argument because students, sooner rather than later, will have to confront criticism. But I think newspapers should also do more to alert readers to what's happening inside the academies. Both Penthesilea and Still were 10 times more exciting than much of what occurs on West End stages. So I recommend a radical change of attitude on both sides of the fence. Drama schools should open their doors to the press. And newspapers should abandon their belief that the West End represents the beating heart of British theatre.
