...The Old Vic, Londres...
"Is this a golden age for theatre?"
É o título que se destaca na primeira página de um dos suplementos do The Guardian, de hoje. Mark Lawson ouviu 29 personalidades: dramaturgos, encenadores e actores.
Escolhi as seguintes frases:
"O que faz grande o teatro inglês é o facto da maioria dos seus talentos não estar concentrada em Londres. Mas isso exige um apoio: que exista um subsídio para todos aqueles que se envolvem nos teatros regionais.”
Samuel West, actor
“Existe um respeito exemplar pelos dramaturgos e uma relação exemplar entre os actores e os escritores.”
Simon Stephens, dramaturgo
“As peças inglesas têm o condão de serem várias coisas ao mesmo tempo: metáforas, polémicas... E isso até mesmo num pequeno estúdio de 40 lugares. Há a tendência para considerar, em Inglaterra, o teatro uma coisa rara, uma espécie de ‘croquet’. Não é. É um espaço para falar do mundo.”
Ian Rickson, encenador
E aqui vai o artigo de Lawson:
'A film magazine recently sent a questionnaire about the future of movies to a number of directors, including Sam Mendes. "They asked me if I was excited about the possibilities of 3D production," he says. "I said that I already do 3D. It's called theatre."
Speaking from New York, Mendes is in rehearsals for the second year of his Bridge Project, in which a group of British and American actors perform a pair of plays in both London and Brooklyn. Mendes's stagings of The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale were seen at the Old Vic this summer, and have formed part of the case for an argument that British theatre is going through an unusually successful phase: it now stands as one of the few businesses to have been largely untouched by the recession.
Largely resident in America, Mendes now observes this country's theatre from a distance; even so, he is convinced that these are special times. "This is the first time in my memory that every single one of the major subsidised theatres – the National, RSC, Royal Court, Donmar, Almeida, Old Vic – is being well and inventively run at the same time. It is unprecedented for all of them to be firing on all cylinders together."
This off-stage optimism was much in evidence at last week's Evening Standard theatre awards, where the common view was that the prizes handed out reflected a season of exceptional quality: Rachel Weisz's star turn in A Streetcar Named Desire, Lenny Henry's Othello, young playwright Alia Bano's urgent examination of divisions within British Islam in Shades. Unusually, after a long spell in which the hottest tickets have generally been classic revivals, original scripts were responsible for both the best actor prize (Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem) and the best director (Rupert Goold for his staging of Lucy Prebble's Enron). London producers predict that this momentum will continue, with heavy advance sales for Keira Knightley in The Misanthrope and James Earl Jones in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.
Theatre producer Sonia Friedman, whose shows include next year's West End transfer of Jerusalem and the current London run of Henry's Othello, is notably upbeat. "It is the most fertile time I have ever known in theatre. Everything I have done did better than I expected through the summer, and the stuff that's coming up is booking ahead of expectations." Nicholas Allot, managing director of Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, a producer of musicals and owner of seven theatres, is struck by the fact that even very established shows are defying the usual graph of gradually declining demand. "A good indicator might be Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera – both are up more than 25% on our projected budgets."
So how has theatre pulled off this fiscal trick of flourishing during a slump? Clearly, subsidised theatres have the advantage of a fixed income agreed in boom times, but commercial theatre is also soaring. It's here that, as in any good drama, a darker subtext begins to emerge. The belief of many of the people I spoke to in the theatre world is that the art form has benefited from a curious economic anomaly: that the recent box-office boost comes from those who used to be, in effect, too rich to go to shows.
"My own micro-litmus test," says Allot, "was the number of calls my office got for seats from friends of mine who always went away at Christmas, most of whom did not last year. There was a real perception that times were going to be chronically hard. Live entertainment worked to correct that in two ways. Firstly as a cheap alternative to a fortnight with the family in Verbier or Lamu, and secondly as a genuine escape from the prevailing doom and gloom. This pattern continued through the February half term and the Easter holidays, both of which were record-breaking for us."
One of the dirty little secrets of the 2009 recession is that a well-paid person who remained in employment and did not depend on investment income ended up relatively better off, as mortgage rates steeply dropped. Friedman agrees that theatre has benefited from the paradox of the well-off having more disposable cash in a recession. "When people cancel expensive luxuries – holidays, new cars, buying houses – £45 for a theatre ticket can seem relatively affordable. I think we become an alternative luxury item which is cheaper than the others. And a weak pound has hugely increased the tourist market."
Still, it's quite wrong to suggest that theatre has entirely ducked the impact of the credit crunch. Michael Attenborough has run the Almeida theatre in London during an impressive period of revelatory revivals (Granville-Barker's Waste, Tennessee Williams's Period of Adjustment) as well as bold new plays: Neil LaBute's In a Dark Dark Wood, Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. These schedules, he says, have kept the theatre "almost full for five years" but times are now biting. The theatre has an income of around £3.2m a year, comprised of roughly a third from Arts Council subsidy, a third from box-office income, and another third from sponsorship and donations. The latter has fallen steeply. "I particularly notice it in the area of people who give us £500-£10,000 a year," Attenborough says. "Every day on my desk, there are handwritten letters from people saying, 'We have always supported you and really hope that we will again in a year or two – but, really sorry, we just can't make it work this time.'"
He has so far been able to protect the repertoire – he is currently rehearsing a Measure for Measure with a cast of 17 – but has implemented a regime of non-artistic trimming. "We've started cutbacks in the areas that we can without damaging the productions. For example, in the offices, we've always taken every paper every day in order to look for reviews or articles that might be useful. We've cancelled those. It's £6 a day but a couple of dozen of those kinds of cuts and you're saving decent money."
Goold, who directed Enron, started that production in Chichester and previously ran Northampton; but he is concerned that the current energy in theatre is heavily localised. "I think the story of the last 10 years has been that London theatre has become more and more vibrant and diverse, whereas regional theatre, sadly, has become moribund."
Recent Arts Council England (ACE) accounts support Goold's theory. The council has set up a Sustain fund to give emergency relief to those affected by the recession, and the list of recent payments paints a red-ink picture that contrasts with the bullish portrait from London. Among those receiving relief cheques over the last few months are the Northampton Theatres Trust (£940,000), Oldham Coliseum theatre (£459,824), Northern Stage (£376,000), Nottingham Playhouse (£362,572) and Manchester's Royal Exchange theatre (£300,000). Other petitioners have been refused and, ominously, ACE notes that some theatres have been given less than they asked for.
An optimist would point out that, of those theatres cited by Mendes as going through a golden age, only the Almeida has turned to Sustain (it was granted £175,000). And the generally large audiences in theatres everywhere can't only be made up of people too skint to go to Biarritz. Nor do audiences decide to see a show purely on the basis of their disposable income. Theatre would not have survived the slump as well as it has unless there were shows that people wanted to see. The last 18 months have brought three of the greatest revivals I have seen in 30 years of theatre-going: the Donmar's Twelfth Night and A Streetcar Named Desire, and Waste at the Almeida. New writing – in recent years, frequently a wasteland – has also bloomed: unarguably one of the best dramas of the 21st century so far, Jerusalem, could give a tough fight to many from the 20th.
And, in this respect, the genre has benefited from financial-crash damage elsewhere. The severe contraction in both the television and movie industries has released a stream of actors, directors, writers and technical staff who otherwise would have been on a film set. Those who commute between theatre and film all note the greater creative freedom available in the playhouse. Before returning to playwriting this year – with two plays, Jerusalem and Parlour Song – Jez Butterworth had spent years in which his major work was screenplay writing; lucrative but often unproduced. "I always think," he says, "that writers in theatre are treated like a painter. Writers in movies are treated like someone hired to paint someone's house and, when they've finished, they're expected, like house-painters, to get the fuck out."
But even here there is a caveat: recent surveys of contemporary playwriting by the Arts Council and the Writers Guild found that many stage dramatists are concerned by a "filmisation" of commissioning, in which producers and script editors have increasing power over texts. Legally, a theatre contract prevents any changes to the script without permission, whereas film scripts are routinely rewritten by anyone who happens to be passing. Plays are also less prone than screenplays to panic over characterisation and content: Jerusalem features a central character who is a drug dealer and possibly a pederast; Enron dramatises several living financiers in an unflattering way. At the BBC or in Hollywood, such scripts would be subject to worries over unsympathetic protagonists, libel and life rights; theatre tends to be less bureaucratic.
Ian Rickson, director of Jerusalem, says: "You could get me started here and screw up any chance of a career in film and TV for me. But, yes, I think it is a problem that you have so many pairs of hands down your pants when making something for TV and film – the integrity of the work can suffer. It has a neutering effect on the play. The great thing about theatre, especially subsidised theatre, is that they do just let you get on with it." Sam Mendes agrees: "I've been lucky that I've never had, in cinema, the sense of a film being killed by committee, which does happen. But it's impossible in movies not to be aware that you are spending vast amounts of other people's money."
Still, people working at subsidised venues in the UK are spending quite large amounts of taxpayers' money. Mendes, with his transatlantic perspective, observes that the British funding system means that productions are under less pressure to compete like Stock Exchange listings. "In New York theatre, you feel that it is preordained that there will be only two or three hits in any nine-month season. And you feel people ticking those off, with everything else being declared a flop. There's a competitiveness in America which isn't always helpful. In Britain, that doesn't happen: you can have three hits opening in the same week."
It might seem a tautology to point out that one factor which Britain's current theatre successes have in common is that they are all so theatrical – but there is an important point here. In recent years, many writers and directors have seemed engaged in a subservient and defensive imitation of film and TV: video projections, short scenes. But the recent stand-out productions are full of elements which work best live on the night: the animals created from mime and design in War Horse; the three hours of physical and vocal contortions demanded of Rylance in Jerusalem.
Rickson agrees that the older medium may be losing its screen envy. "Over the last decade, if you asked young writers in theatre what their influences were, they wouldn't say Oedipus Rex and King Lear or whatever, they'd say Magnolia and Short Cuts. And I think, for a very long time, that impressionistic, short-scene style did become very influential, for good or ill. One of the things about Jerusalem is that it's actually quite an old-fashioned play in many ways."
Rickson warns, however, that we should be "wary of any kind of triumphalism" over the current state of theatre. For all the relief that the recession has not emptied our theatres, which many feared, there are still concerns within the industry. The most frequent of these is the prevalence of movie-star-casting. The optimist celebrates the fact that a translation of Molière in the West End more or less sold out before it opened; the pessimist points out that it is only because Keira Knightley has chosen it for her stage debut.
Privately, several writers and directors express concern about the coinage of a new adjective, formed from a noun: "event", as in "event theatre". A new play by an award-winning British writer, with two award-winning British actors attached, was recently turned down by London commercial managements because it was said not to be "event enough".
That allegedly non-event script was not offered to Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, which concentrates on musicals, but Nicholas Allott is happy to address the complaint about celebrity casting. "Many grumble about the integrity of star casting in the West End, but it brings an audience to see plays that would otherwise stay at home and watch those same stars on television. Television is a potent force: even though she missed most of her run, Martine McCutcheon's name contributed hugely to the £10m pre-opening advance that My Fair Lady had four years ago."
Sonia Friedman is unrepentant about putting screen stars behind the safety curtain. "I think you often do need a big star. The big box-office is for monster stars." Allot acknowledges that his company has benefited greatly from TV-casting shows such as I'd Do Anything: "I've always felt it ironic that the light entertainment departments of the BBC and ITV have been able to do more to promote the West End in the past few years than the best-intentioned arts departments of those broadcasters ever could."
One alternative to selling tickets through TV reality shows would be to cut prices. Ian McKellen, given a special award at the Evening Standard awards last week, used his acceptance speech to urge producers to sell the first few rows of every theatre for £10, in emulation of the (Travelex-sponsored) tenner-entry scheme run by the National Theatre. Sam Mendes agrees that this kind of pricing is vital: "I think you have to give the praise to Nick Hytner and [executive director] Nick Starr at the National Theatre, who almost single-handedly brought a new generation of audiences into British theatre with the £10 Travelex season. I think there was a clear cause and effect, and other theatres have benefited from those audiences."
One caveat to any celebration of theatre's condition is that almost all of the new plays that reach the West End still originate in subsidised theatre, with its heavy protection from market forces; the real test will come next year, when we can judge the success of the commercial runs of Jerusalem and Enron. And, whatever the result of the next election, Arts Council funding cannot expect to escape the general emergency cuts in public spending.
Rupert Goold's concern is that post-credit crunch budgets may damage smaller companies most. Enron was originated by his Headlong company and he points out that several recent successes were driven by relative minnows: Live Theatre created Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, Kneehigh was responsible for Brief Encounter. Goold's fear is that "small companies are easier to cut. There wouldn't be the fuss they'd get if they closed a big regional venue."
And, though his staff may not read this article in print because the Almeida can't afford to buy newspapers any more, Michael Attenborough warns: "Next year is going to be a key moment. The point is that everyone in theatre is walking a very thin tightrope. Things are pretty good at the moment but it can go downhill very, very quickly."
...José Régio, num magnífico óleo de Ventura Porfírio...
