On May 8, 1956, the curtain rose at the Royal Court Theatre to reveal two young men lounging in a smoky one-room Midlands flat, bickering over the Sunday papers while a woman stood stage-left ironing. The play was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and it “changed the course of theatrical history,” according to one of the many histories of the Royal Court, London’s best-chronicled theater.
The play told the story of Jimmy Porter, an intelligent but resentful working-class man; his wife, Alison, a colonel’s daughter; their lodger, Cliff; and Alison’s friend Helena, who becomes Jimmy’s lover. Its treatment of relationships and social mobility seems tame and talky today, but in 1956 the audience started gasping the minute they saw the ironing board and didn’t stop until they exited the theater. Of course, that description gives too much credit to the set and too little to the shock of Osborne’s realistic writing style and subject matter. In a public lecture, David Hare described Osborne’s work as “an ideal of theatre founded in recognition: spectators charged up by the presentation of their own lives.” Fifty years ago, talking on stage about working-class lives—even the lives of educated, socially mobile young people—was revolutionary.
Look Back in Anger was the third production mounted in the English Stage Co.’s new home at the Royal Court, and it had been selected from 675 plays submitted in response to a newspaper ad seeking new work. The company took this unheard-of step because it was determined to find new playwrights—Osborne was a struggling actor when he wrote Look Back. In Hare’s words, the Royal Court “was to be a theatre committed to the uncommon notion, to this day both revolutionary and banal, that at the centre of all great dramatic adventure belongs the unpredictable, uncompromising figure of the living playwright.”
In the decades since, the Royal Court has self-consciously dedicated itself to nurturing radical new voices—styling itself “a writers’ theatre,” where, according to a publicity brochure, plays challenge “the artistic, social and political orthodoxy of the day, pushing past the boundaries of what was possible or acceptable.”
All of London seems to be marking the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary—there’s a photography exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, another at the Theatre Museum, and BBC Radio 4 is giving over the Saturday Play to “a season of groundbreaking plays” that had their start at the Royal Court. The theater itself, obsessed for 49 years with looking forward, is devoting this year to celebrating past successes. Most notably, between January and March it staged a wonderful series of 50 rehearsed readings of plays that had debuted at the Court, including works from Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Hanif Kureishi, Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh, and Caryl Churchill.
This trip, I had the ultimate Royal Court experience: attending the first public performance of a new work, Simon Stephens’ Motortown. What’s more, it hit the Royal Court trifecta: It contained scenes of senseless violence; the action constellated around a foul-mouthed psychopath; and it was shockingly powerful. (When you’re sitting less than 100 yards from someone who seems to be on the point of setting fire to another human being, it’s hard not to be excited, no matter how appalled you are.)
Motortown—a day in the life of Danny, a former soldier freshly returned from Basra, Iraq—focuses on the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of a trained killer returning to “normal” family life. It reveals the cruelty of sending soldiers into a war zone and then failing to talk with them about their experiences when they return. So many thrills, all of them guilt-inducing—the illicit frisson of violence, the squirminess of inappropriate sexual tension—and, for a New Yorker, the added shock of seeing eight excellent actors in a 100-minute play, many of them used in just one scene.
Billy Elliot, the smash British musical adapted from the 2000 movie, couldn’t have transferred to the stage without the theatrical revolution inspired by the Royal Court. The story of an 11-year-old miner’s son who longs to become a ballet dancer, it’s directed by former Royal Court Artistic Director Stephen Daldry (as was the movie) and features new music by Elton John and a book and libretto by screenwriter Lee Hall.
The musical avoids many of the historical misrepresentations about the 1984-85 miners’ strike that were so annoying in the film, and despite the suspension of disbelief required for musical theater, the narrower focus makes the stage version more plausible than the movie. The show is peppered with salty language, though plenty of kids attended the performance I saw. My guess is that the creative team felt profligate use of the F-word was necessary—like the sauce bottle on the Elliots’ kitchen table—to establish that the family is working class (which shows what a bunch of middle-class posers they are). And while the striking miners’ loathing of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is undoubtedly accurate, it’s still shocking to hear, as the refrain of the big production number that opens up the second act: “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher/ We all celebrate today/ Cos it’s one day closer to your death.”
While I was in London, I asked 29-year-old Fin Kennedy—who first came to my attention in March when he published an impassioned defense of young playwrights in the Guardian—if there was too much hype around “new writing” in British theater. Kennedy reckons London is still suffering a “hangover” from the new-writing explosion of the 1990s, when a number of visionary directors, most notably Daldry at the Royal Court, mounted lots of new plays for short runs. Like most booms, it ended in bust. In his book The Full Room, Dominic Dromgoole, who ran the Bush Theatre in the early 1990s, says that by the middle of the decade, “Directors, literary managers and agents were … seeking out new talent like pigs on a truffle-hunt, and behaving with the same decency and decorum.” For Kennedy, much of the writing from that period was “extraordinarily narcissistic and self-indulgent.”
Earlier this year, Kennedy won the prestigious John Whiting Award for How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, which had been turned down by every theater in London. It was the first time in its 38-year history that the prize was awarded to an unproduced play. (How To Disappear … has since been accepted by a regional theater and should premiere in March 2007.) Kennedy has also been commissioned by London’s Tricycle Theatre to write Selling Babylon, about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. He’s excited about the gig because it will allow him to explore experiences beyond his own. “I have never set foot in Iraq nor in an auction house, nor do I know anyone who has,” he told me. “But that doesn’t stop me writing a play like Selling Babylon. I can’t wait to get down the Edgware Road and start chatting to Iraqis, or down to New Bond Street to meet the auctioneers at Sotheby’s. It’s only like this that we’re going to put theatre back in touch with its raison d’etre. All of us—writers, directors, and the rest—need to move beyond ‘This is what it was like for me’ and toward ‘This is what it was like for them—and this is how it affects us.’ “
