Robert Lindsay stars in The Entertainer. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Have you seen The Entertainer at the Old Vic? If not, do go. It's not only a cracking play that encapsulates the mood of England in the late 1950s. It also contains a fantastic performance from Robert Lindsay as the clapped-out comedian, Archie Rice. But, as I watched the play, I was struck by a sudden thought. Who today is writing the kind of fat star part that sums up the zeitgeist and yields great acting?
Obviously theatre, like society, has changed a lot in the 50 years since Osborne wrote The Entertainer. We have seen the rise of directors' theatre, the growth of the democratic ensemble and an increasing distrust of the dominant individual. As a contrast to The Entertainer, you could hardly have a better example than Attempts On Her Life at the National. Martin Crimp's play has no specific characters or plot. Eleven actors share out the 17 scenarios and are never individually credited. And, if the evening has any kind of star, it is the director, Katie Mitchell, who treats each scene as a separate movie set-up with the action projected onto giant video screens. It's intriguing to watch but it left me, like Mitchell's recent Waves, stonily unmoved.
This may be an extreme example. But if you look at theatre today you find a bias towards the group event rather than an exploration of the individual. Kneehigh, for instance, are currently all the rage. But although I disliked their recent Cymbeline as much as I enjoyed their version of Nights at the Circus, the two shows had much in common: they were celebrations of the ensemble ethic rather than of individual performance. And the same could be said of the multiplicity of avant-garde companies, from Shunt to Forced Entertainment, at work in Britain today: the actor simply becomes a unit in the creation of a collective vision.
Even our best young playwrights don't seem that interested in creating star parts. Roy Williams, for me, is one of the liveliest playwrights in captivity. But, while Sing yer Heart Out for the Lads is a wholly persuasive study of the way racism percolates through society, it is essentially a group play. Similarly Williams's more recent Days of Significance, although vividly acted, left me with a generalised impression of the way an ill-educated underclass is exporting its ignorance and prejudice to the combat zones of Iraq.
Perhaps all this is inevitable. We live in an age that is suspicious of heroic individualism. But I also think something is being lost: the capacity to epitomise the contemporary mood through an expressive character. Brecht did it in Galileo. Arthur Miller did it in Death of a Salesman. And, amongst living playwrights, David Hare did it in Plenty, where Susan Traherne embodies the sense of defeat and disappointment that many found in post-war Britain. But I'm hard pressed to think of any dramatist under 35 equipped to write a part, as Osborne did in The Entertainer, that attracts the greatest actors of the age. Simon Russell Beale, for instance, is currently doodling away the time in Spamalot. But where is the young writer who could tempt him back into trousers with a star part that expresses the tenor of our own confused times?
