This is a quick response post on the article published today
in The Stage where Trevor Nunn said that the ‘National Theatre has duty to both new work and classics’. His comment is in response to Michael
Billington’s article, my thoughts on which can be partly read here.
So, I
realise Trevor Nunn’s time as Artistic Director of the National was quite
controversial. This is mainly because it is seen that he upped the amount of
commercial productions staged, especially musicals, with some not liking that public
money helped to fund My Fair Lady
which went on to have commercial gains. However, he did achieve a balance
between the amount of revivals and new plays he staged between 1997 and 2003. There
were just under 50 new works staged at the NT under his time as AD, including
Patrick Marber’s Closer, Tanika Gupta’s
The Waiting Room and a world premiere
of a Tennessee Williams’ play, Not About
Nightingales. There were roughly 40 revivals (if anything slightly less
than the amount of new work), including A
Streetcar Named Desire, No Man’s Land
and The Duchess of Malfi. I should
note that about nine of these were Shakespeare plays which Billington excludes from
his thoughts on revivals. But overall, it is quite a healthy balance.
But Nunn
was AD for a shorter time than (I imagine) Norris is hoping to be at the
National and so Norris’ longer term plans might be different. What’s more, to
reiterate what I said in my last blog post on this, Norris is staging revivals this year including work by Shakespeare,
Kushner and Sondheim, and has staged many revivals so far in his tenure. Also,
I agree with what one writer said (I forget which), that in a time of potential
political turbulence regarding Brexit and Trump, our National Theatre should be
leading the way with work that that helps us understand the changing politics –
although revivals can do this as well, Hytner’s production of Henry V is often a popular example of
that.
My main
point though is that this new obsession with the binary of ‘new/ old work’ is a
possibly problematic view of how theatre is and should be made. During Nunn’s
tenure, he staged about 20 works based on old texts given new versions, such as
Ostrovsky’s The Forest (1871) in a
new version by Ayckbourn, The Villains’ Opera based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan (1940-43) in a
new version by Tanika Gupta. Norris has done similar things with Marber’s Three Days in the Country, after Turgenev’s
A Month in the Country, Marber’s new
version of Hedda Gabler and Suhayla El-Bushra’s
The Suicide after Erdman. Billington’s
views, in my opinion, come with an underlying belief that the writer is
autonomous and highly regarded. This is perhaps an old-fashioned way of looking
at theatre making. Rather than the black and white Venn Diagram sort of
programming that only sees productions on terms of whether they are old or new,
isn’t it better to also remember how they can be based on older texts even if
they are reworked to a more contemporary style and practice? I don’t know how
planning a season at the National works (but I imagine it’s difficult!) but I
imagine a lot of different boxes have to ticked and many quotas met. I’d prefer
for the NT to carry on trying to concentrate on whether diversity (and all of
the many things which that word encompasses) is being achieved rather than strictly
having to ensure that they are balancing the amount of old work and the amount
of new work that they are producing.
The
National Theatre do have a duty to stage both classics and new work, which I personally
think they are achieving, but thinking of their productions in a more fluid way
rather than just the black and white terms of ‘is it new or is it old?’
might help how we see and approach theatre-making to move forward.
I have
been referring to Daniel Rosenthal’s tome The
National Theatre Story for statistics.
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