Safe as playhouses ... London's West End. Photograph: Sarah Lee
In Friday's Evening Standard Nicholas de Jongh became the latest in a long line of critics to bemoan the proliferation of musicals and lack of "straight plays" in the West End. On the face of it, his arguments look timely and reasonable, are backed up by some perfectly good examples of when the situation looked a bit different, and acknowledges times when it was much worse.
This kind of slow-news-week hand wringing shouldn't really alarm us, should it? The cynical may even wonder if his complaint that on Shaftesbury Avenue "the Apollo, Lyric and Gielgud, all of them best suited to straight plays, are dark" is prompted by the fact that he has a well-reviewed play just aching to hop into the West End for a leisurely summer's run all of his very own.
There is substance to his observation that the West End is currently representing musicals well, but isn't home to so many "straight plays". The numbers speak for themselves. But does this really point to a long-term downward trend?
De Jongh notes in passing "apart from the brilliant hybrid version of Brief Encounter playing in a Haymarket cinema there are just six plays in the West End this week." Why make the distinction? No, Kneehigh's Brief Encounter is not a "straight play" per se, but does that really matter? Sure, if the argument is the number of "straight plays" then I guess one shouldn't count it, but why is the article so keen to make the division? If it is "brilliant" theatre, as he suggests, what on earth is the problem? De Jongh is concerned that "The best crowd-pulling playwrights of today, from Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard to David Hare and Christopher Hampton prefer to have their plays at the National and Royal Court". The best crowd-pulling playwrights of today, perhaps; but also the best crowd-pulling playwrights of 1980.
At the end of his piece, De Jongh proposes that "West End producers should also spark commercially valuable controversy. Imagine a five-play themed season devoted to resistance and rebellion against the established order". He goes on: "If we are to avoid [the West End] becoming a theme park, it needs to take such risks." Stirring words indeed, but his suggested season, like his list of the "best crowd-pulling playwrights", is hardly going to upset any "established order" that I'm aware of.
Are revivals of Saved and Spring Awakening, plays by Sartre and O'Casey, plus an obscure bit of 1920s Americana really going to make the slightest ripple in any pond at all? I can't imagine a less controversial season, at least not if they were staged in the inevitable respect-the-text British tradition of directing by safe-pairs-of-hands like Howard Davies. In fact, the only way such a season would cause a controversy is if the texts of these plays were handed over to Katie Mitchell, Thomas Ostermeier, Chris Goode and Jan Klata. Then there would be an almighty fuss, but it wouldn't be about the substance of the plays, it would be about how these directors hadn't done them "properly".
I have nothing whatsoever against quality revivals of classic texts, but let's not kid ourselves that it would represent a "risk" or provoke "controversy". It would be the essence of safe. It would be the cosiest thing imaginable. De Jongh may still imagine himself as an anti-establishment subversive working to bring the system down from within, but the fact is, he's the lead theatre critic of the London Evening Standard with a taste for well-made naturalistic drama. That's fine, and, yes, classic plays can still be subversive, but as a solution for challenging the status quo, well it looks mightily like challenging it with the thing that is exactly the status quo already.
Surely what would be more radical and controversial would be seeing disturbing and experimental forms in the West End and having such work championed by the lead critics of the national press. After all, of course any West End producer could in theory book one of Giselle Vienne's astonishing collaborations with Dennis Cooper into the Gielgud for a three-month run, but in Britain's current cultural climate, I can't help but think that such work would be panned as impenetrable, obscurantist, "European" horrorism and would close within a week. It isn't impossibly difficult or intellectual, and I would like to believe it could be appreciated by a mass audience - but without the necessary hype or cheerleading that will never happen.
Is it really the producers who have become risk-averse, or is the West End being slowly strangled by an upper echelon of critics for whom "different" has just become a synonym for "wrong"?
