{"id":1053,"date":"2015-02-03T23:13:36","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T23:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1053"},"modified":"2015-02-04T09:05:25","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T09:05:25","slug":"the-living-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2015\/02\/the-living-dead.html","title":{"rendered":"The living dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Living<\/a><\/p>\n

Are we losing the classics?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost everything I learned about classic theatre, I learned at the theatre. My early exploration spiralled out of being an Eng Lit geek with a serious Penguin Classics habit. I collected black-spined Ibsens and devoured them like thrillers, and read thunderous bits of Jacobean shockers out loud (still do).<\/p>\n

Going to the theatre was like the world\u2019s best library come to life. While a teenager, I saw not just scads of Shakespeare and lashings of Chekhov, but also Jonson and Behn, Racine and Ostrovsky. During my student years, the RSC explored plays from the long 17th century in the Swan, while Cheek By Jowl<\/a>, Jonathan Miller\u2019s Old Vic, Katie Mitchell\u2019s Classics on a Shoestring and the Almeida<\/a> tugged rare masterpieces from the cobwebby corners of the European repertoire. Marivaux! Etherege! Gorky, Lessing, Goldoni!<\/p>\n

I saw loads of new works too, of course \u2013 some of which are now pretty darn canonical (Churchill, Stoppard, Hare and Kane<\/a>). But for this lucky London boy, the theatre within reach was thrumming with plays old and new \u2013 and some old texts so unfamiliar they seemed like premieres.<\/p>\n

Two reports this week suggest that the equivalent adolescent oddbod, holed up in his bedroom with The Revenger\u2019s Tragedy<\/em>, might not be able to experience such diverse treats. From Britain, Dan Rebellato<\/a> introduced an interim report <\/a>from what looks likely to be an invaluable piece of research led by the British Theatre Consortium. Analysing the repertoire performed by 273 theatres in 2013, its headline finding is that \u2018new work dominates the repertoire; it is substantially over half of the work programmed and generates almost two-thirds of our theatres\u2019 income.\u2019 As the Stage<\/em><\/a> reported, \u2018this is the first time since records have been kept that new work has overtaken the number of revivals staged.\u2019<\/p>\n

Fight to the death<\/strong><\/p>\n

Equally provocative is a finely-argued lament responding to the announcement of this year\u2019s Theatertreffen<\/a> programme, an annual festival in Berlin of the best of German theatre. Holger Syme <\/a>calls it \u2018seriously troubling,\u2019 lamenting the unusual paucity of classic work among the 10 productions \u2013 nothing from before 1896, when Ibsen\u2019s John Gabriel Borkman<\/em> <\/a>was premiered (it will be seen in Karin Henkel\u2019s production from Hamburg, pictured top<\/em> by Klaus Lefebvre ). Instead, there\u2019s a skew towards new plays and adaptations. In previous years, he argues, the \u2018young directors also grappled with the classics of the European dramatic canon. Not in order to take a break from the present \u2014 but precisely to say something topical, to speak about and to the present moment through a performance refracted through the old text.\u2019<\/p>\n

This piece has already occasioned a certain amount of eye-rolling \u2013 we should all have such problems, sigh observers from Australia and Canada \u2013 but Syme makes a superb point that \u2018the German reliance on a canon of classics plays a key role in authorizing actors to play with their text, and directors to put that text to whatever purpose they choose.\u2019 In other words, staging classic works doesn\u2019t tame theatre, but acknowledges that a production can be an argument, even a struggle, opening up a productive distance between text and production: \u2018the staging of an old play can feel and look like a fight to the death with the text.\u2019<\/p>\n

Spring from the grave<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why does this matter? Don\u2019t we want a theatre ecology in constant evolution, refreshed by new, responsive and provocative work? We surely do. And no one wants a museum repertoire. That\u2019s largely what ballet suffers from \u2013 as I argued last year<\/a> \u2013 not just a niggardly amount of new work, but a shrinking selection of existing pieces. It\u2019s stifling.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a thrill\u00a0in seeing an old play spring from the grave and hit the ground running. It was no accident, I think, that the rich seam of productions I experienced came during an intense interest in identity politics, so that classic plays could delineate the cage of long-surviving gender roles or watch people rattling the bars. Restoration comedy flourished during the boom and bust years, the mainstreaming of boutique gentrification and coffeeshop culture, and the peacocking rise of the meterosexual. Jacobean tragedy is always current, because there are always unscrupulous overlords who play politics and economics with a Renaissance cardinal\u2019s corrupt disdain. And you\u2019ll always feel like killing the bastards, possibly via weaponised cherubs.<\/p>\n

To make those connections, to relish the work, you need to see it \u2013 I suggested here<\/a> last week that the rich early-modern repertoire of the Globe\u2019s new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse allows audiences to discover the differences between Jacobean tragedies by Webster, Middleton and Ford.<\/p>\n

The lure of classic work for the lonely reader trembles beautifully in Alan Bennett\u2019s The History Boys<\/em><\/a>, where a teacher sighs \u2018it\u2019s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.\u2019 But theatre is a social act \u2013 you may feel that lone thrill of connection, but you can also get the excitement of a defiantly undead play reaching forward and grabbing you by the throat, insisting on an urgent story the room needs to hear.<\/p>\n

I can imagine there are pressing economic reasons for British theatre\u2019s turn towards the new \u2013 large-cast classics, written for an age when bodies were cheaper than scenery, are expensive to stage. But, as Rebellato noted in a tweet yesterday, the problem extends to productions of existing work by living authors, too. \u2018Lots of writers only make a living because they get revivals,\u2019 he said. \u2018If revivals go, so does new writing.\u2019<\/p>\n

All of these\u00a0arguments especially\u00a0resonated after a couple of things plunged me back into my fervid early theatregoing. One was the death of the brilliant actor Geraldine McEwan<\/a>, whose Mrs Malaprop<\/a> in The Rivals<\/em> was one of the first \u2013 and still one of the funniest \u2013 things I saw at the National Theatre. I later caught her in Congreve and Ionesco, and leapt on reviews from her earlier career, liberating Shakespearean ing\u00e9nues at Stratford and tweaking Strindberg and Feydeau at Olivier\u2019s Old Vic<\/a>. With her extraordinary rollercoaster of a voice \u2013 fluttering at the highest register and then plummeting to the lowest, unimprovably shrewd and dotty \u2013 she reshaped the repertoire she played.<\/p>\n

\"Forbes<\/a>

Forbes Masson and James McAvoy in The Ruling Class. Photo: Johan Persson<\/p><\/div>\n

Jamie Lloyd\u2019s vivid revival of The Ruling Class<\/em> <\/a>by Peter Barnes not only frames an incandescent star turn from James McAvoy, but also vindicates an author who has fallen off the theatrical radar<\/a>. Barnes\u2019 work flourished during the 1980s and 90s at the RSC and on radio, but was already leaving the stage before his death in 2004. He wrote and plotted with a baroque pungency \u2013 not unlike his beloved Jacobeans \u2013 but Lloyd\u2019s inspired advocacy reveals how unexpectedly well this idiom works on stage. It isn\u2019t pastiche, it isn\u2019t waxwork. It\u2019s alive!<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the point. Repertoire is fragile. If it isn\u2019t on stage it isn\u2019t ever, quite, alive. Or, at least, it\u2019s in a persistent sleep, waiting for a call from the present.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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