British Theatre in the 1950s

I'm on a panel at the National Theatre next Friday. On a panel and not chairing it, for a change. We're considering British Theatre in the 1950s. This accompanies the National Theatre's new production of Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea which has recently opened to enormous acclaim.

Alongside me will be Michael Billington, veteran theatre critic of The Guardian of course, and also Julius Green, who has just published a pugnacious defence of Agatha Christie's theatre career, arguing that she is the most successful playwright of the 1950s. The panel will be chaired by Rachel Cooke, who wrote Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties which I thoroughly recommend for its fascinating rediscovery of ten remarkable women who lived eye-poppingly bold lives.

The event is on 1 July 2016 at 6.00 in the Lyttelton Theatre. Tickets can be booked on the National Theatre website.

What Happens When Nothing Happens?

I gave the opening keynote yesterday at the Sorbonne's L'Esthétiques de l'absence/Aesthetics of Absence conference, organised Bastien Goursaud, Elsa Lorphelin, and Déborah Prudhon with the support of the VALE research group. The title of the paper was 'What Happens When Nothing Happens: Thoughts in Theatre, History & Absence'.

The theme of the day was 'absence' and I decided to look at in terms of historical absence - specifically how to take account for absence in history, by which I mean Things Not Happening. It's an important question for me, I think, because of the Naturalism project. In particular, Naturalism seems to me such a monumental and obvious idea in theatre, it can sometimes seem hard to imagine that it wasn't inevitable - or that it inevitably turned out the way it did. I have been trying to think about its contingency (that it was the product of decisions and encounters which might have been otherwise) and its specificity (that its forms and practices derived from and had specific significance in relation to its original context in a way less apparent to us now).

Both of these ideas - contingency and specificity - might seem to tend towards historical counterfactualism. If Naturalism was contingent, it seems to follow that it could have been different. And if it was historically specific, it seems to follow that if the historical context were different it too would have been different.

But, I argued in the paper, we should proceed with caution. Counterfactual history is philosophically and politically dubious. Philosophically, because it drives a coach-and-horses through the eternally intractable debate about free will and determinism. In a strictly determinist universe, counterfactuals are impossible because the way things are is the only way things can be. They seem to assume either indeterminacy (and some counterfactualists like to mention some findings in quantum science that proves it is possible) or free will as something that is uniquely self-causing. The problem here is that indeterminacy doesn't get you what you want - counterfactuals are stripped of their interest if historical causation is random; the counterfactualists typically want to believe that better decisions could have been made with predictable and better consequences. And free will is also not maybe the panacea the counterfactualists want because what is a free will? Is it completely free of prior causation? If so, it would start to seem like random indeterminacy. In fact, surely, the only free will worth having is the freedom to act on good reasons (rational self control). So I do x not just on complete arbitrary whim but because I have judged that x is the best thing to do given my knowledge and understanding, my projects, attitudes, aims, and so on. But hold on, because that starts to look like determinism: given  my knowledge and understanding, my projects, attitudes, and aims (let's call all of that y), I could only have done x - to the point where it seems hard to distinguish between saying (a) I did x because of  y and (b) y caused x. Once you get to the latter, the free will seems to be kicked off the pitch and once again counterfactuals are impossible.

(There is always compatibilism; the idea that you can have your determinist cake and freely eat it too, but I tend to agree with Kant that this is a 'wretched subterfuge' comprising mostly sophistry.)

Politically, there is an additional, though less important, concern, which is that most British counterfactual history enthusiasts over the last thirty years have tended to be right-wing ideologues: Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, Jeremy Black and so on. They make this ideological commitment very clear in their awful books which fulminate against the influence of Marxist in history (they construe Marx to be a very very strict determinist, which is a selective reading, to say the least). They nail counterfactualism's colours to the conservative mast because they say at its heart is, as Jeremy Black puts it, 'individualism and free will' (Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015, p. 9). However, as we've seen, it's not at all clear that free will does give you counterfactual history, unless you posit human beings as purely arbitrary and capricious beings, entirely divorced from history, which is a pretty absurd fantasy, even for neoliberal cheerleaders like Niall Ferguson.

So, the paper talks about the problems of setting out the kind of contingency and strong historical readings that I want to do and ends by trying to talk about one particular absence: a handling of homosexuality in Naturalist theatre (a topic I've talked about before). I try to show that there are ways of talking about absence which does not rely on counterfactuals but also doesn't secretly turn in into presence (as a deconstructive queer reading might do).

There was a good conversation afterwards. One issue that came up genuinely puzzled me: what the difference is between counterfactual fiction and counterfactual history. The puzzle, for me, is that I have no problem with counterfactual fiction but I find counterfactual history rather suspect - and yet I'm not sure what the deep down distinction is. I am a bit of an Aristotelian in thinking that one can genuinely learn important things from art and literature, so it's not the 'cognitive' value of the two. I don't think I believe that history writing is pure impersonal fact and fiction writing pure personal imagination; the line is certainly blurred. I did like, however, the questioner's suggestion that counterfactual history is kind of like historiographical fan fiction...

Anyway, I was very honoured to be asked to speak at this event and pleased with how it went down.

Ross

Chichester Festival Theatre are reviving Terence Rattigan's little-known 1960 play Ross. The play is an historical epic about T. E. Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt of 1916 - and the production is being launched to mark the 100th anniversary of that event.

I've been asked to do a couple of things around it. First I was asked to do a programme note for the production. I've contributed 'Rattigan Inside Out'. It's often thought that Ross is a complete anomaly in Rattigan's oeuvre, being an epic war play in which bandits and terrorists and soldiersdebate British foreign policy in the Middle East - not the domestic tales of thwarted emotion for which Rattigan is perhaps better known. But I try to suggest int the article that Rattigan's domestic plays have a broader, outward-looking social dimension - and that this play in fact is powered by Rattigan's empathetic account of T. E. Lawrence's private sexual pain.

And then the wonderful Nick Hern Books are releasing an edition of the play and, as usual, they've asked me to contribute a new introduction. This involved a lot of research, into the history of Arab nationalism, the contested and controversial history of Lawrence, Rattigan's writing of the play, his battles with the Lawrence estate, and the history of the first production and revival. I've tried to make a caes for the play as something more experimental than has been generally acknowledged and a play that may only now be able to find its audience.

Whether it will find an audience remains to be seen. Fingers crossed. The production stars Joseph Fiennes and Michael Feast and is directed by Adrian Noble.

Emily Rises Again

My 2001 radio play Emily Rising is being reborn as a puppet theatre show for children. It opens at the Little Angel Theatre, Islington on 10 September and runs until 20 November.

Oliver Hymans is directing, and the rest of the creative team is Alison Alexander (Puppets), Jimmy Grimes (Puppet Mechanics), Rachael Campion (Set), and Patrick Furness (Sound). It's a co-production between Little Angel and Goblin Theatre, artistic director, Matt Bugatti.

We're workshopping the text and I'm reworking it, clarifying and reshaping it for the stage and for puppets, which is going to be a fascinating adventure.

Booking opens for schools and members on 31 May and to the public on 6 June. Book HERE.

See 3PO

The new production of Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, adapted by Simon Stephens, directed by Rufus Norris, has opened at the National Theatre to mostly very good reviews.

I was asked - rather at the last minute (maybe someone else fell through) - to write a programme note about Brecht. It came at a good time because in the last few years, Methuen (his publisher in Britain) have brilliantly revamped and expanded his works in translation with a hugely extensive reworking of the seminal collection Brecht on Theatre, but also new collections Brecht on Performance, Brecht on Art and Politics and a reissue of Brecht on Film and Radio. There's also been a translation of his novel The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar and - just about to appear in an eye-wateringly expensive hardback - his Me-Ti: The Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things. The journals and short stories were reissued too. So I'd been relishing the chance to look at Brecht anew and had been devouring the new books.

I was asked to write a piece about Brecht how the theory developed, what his theatre was about and so on. I had a couple of goes writing something quite serious. But then it seemed to me that wasn't the tone of his own work - not the theatre, not the plays, not the theory - and I decided to do something much looser and a bit more pugnacious. So the piece is called 'Ten Cheers for Bertolt Brecht' and it offers ten reasons to love Brecht, his theatre and his politics, under headings like fun, theory, emotion, smoking, music, and learning. And I don't mention the word 'alienation' once.

And you can read it HERE.

Seven Jewish Children

In 2009, Caryl Churchill wrote a short play to raise awareness of the Israeli Defence Force's attack on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) and to raise money for the British charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. The piece takes the form of a series of seven short scenes, taking snapshots of seven moments in the contemporary experience of the Jews and of the state of Israel; in each scene adults discuss how to explain to a young girl what is happening. Most of the dialogue takes the form 'Tell her...' This deferred and mediated structure is somewhat riddling and complex, the events being refracted through the child and the parents and relatives' various attitudes. However, almost immediately, Churchill was accused in some quarters of having written an anti-semitic play and even of having revived the medieval Blood Libel.

I gave a paper - Theatrical Images & the Theatrical Imagination: the scandal of Seven Jewish Children - at the Sorbonne's VALE (Voix Anglophones: Literature et Esthétique) research group. My basic claim is that the play is itself trying to speak about what it is possible and not possible to speak about. I suggested - rather clumsily - that the play is trying to hold open a space for complexity and ambiguity. By ambiguity, I don't mean it is trying to be even-handed or to sit on the fence: it is fairly clearly trying to understand why the Israeli Jews, having been on the receiving end of such suffering, are now able to mete out fairly brutal suffering on the Palestinians. (And let me say quickly, nothing in the play tries to suggest that there is any sort of equivalence between the Holocaust and the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, which would be a crass thought.) What the affair reveals, I think, is that those who wish to close down cultural debate often resort to a kind of literalism about culture that closes down the imaginative spaces that art is particularly adept at opening. Art's ability to be metaphorical, ambiguous, to offer what Kant calls 'aesthetic ideas', that is, representations, references, concepts corresponding to the world but which have a kind of movement in them, a shimmer that allows them to slip their moorings and function in different ways, making lateral associations and new connections.

The talk provoked some interesting debate. Some doubted that the play is significantly ambiguous at all and that in fact it offers a fairly clear, polemical line against Israel (though no one in the room took seriously the suggestion that it is anti-semitic). It was suggested that the play's meanings are limited not by the rhetorical devices of its detractors but by our shared knowledge of Israel's history. When one of the parents says 'Don't tell they're Bedouin', I suggested the line could be understood as both a sincere and an insincere statement - and certainly could be played either way. The counter-argument is that there are historical facts to be considered: the indigenous Palestinian Arabs weren't Bedouin and that must arrest the ambiguous movement of the play.

As I was working on the paper, I found the play more and more elusive, which slightly hamstrung the presentation, but it was interesting to give some very provisional thoughts an airing and to have to defend them from some enjoyably robust questioning.

I'm Looking Through You

I gave a paper at the Alternative Victorians and Their Predecessors: New Directions in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Performance Research conference at Warwick University, co-organised by  Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film & University of Warwick.

It's part of the Naturalism project. I'm trying to think through what the 4th wall idea might have meant in its specific historical context. To that end the paper tries to argue for the historical specificity of the 4th wall (distinguishing it in the 1880s from certain potential precedents for it). I then try to make the invisible wall visible, by trying to say what the 4th wall would actually have looked like if we could see it. In the process that reveals some interesting things about the nature of Second Empire architecture, the separation of private and public space and of private and public morality. And finally I then try to think through what its invisibility might have meant in context and that takes me further into Haussmanization and the Commune.

I think it's an interesting piece and I hope to develop it further for TaPRA this year. Baby permitting.

Theatre 2016

Theatre 2016 is the biggest UK theatre conference ever, apparently. Organised by BON Culture and its partner organisations, it ran at the Piccadilly, Lyric and Arts Theatres in London over 12-13 May 2016. It had something like 1000 delegates. I was asked by the excellent David Brownlee (cofounder of BON Culture) to give the opening keynote, presenting our British Theatre Repertoire 2014 report (of which David was a co-researcher), but also a report by BON & partners on the 'Hopes and Fears' of the theatre sector for the state of the industry now and over the next decade. I was pleased with how it went, given that I was a bit sceptical that what the theatre industry wanted to kick off their conference was a lot of pie charts, but they liked the jokes and actually gasped at some of the facts. That's particularly satisfying, given that I think this data is rather remarkable but it can be quite tricky to get people excited about facts and percentages. In addition, I think we made some excellent connections with some other industry bodies to build this dataset and make it something even more comprehensive a picture of what happens on British stages.

British Theatre Repertoire 2014

Last year, David Edgar and I (for the British Theatre Consortium) produced a much-cited report, British Theatre Repertoire 2013, gathering together and analysing the most extensive set of data ever assembled about what happens on Britain's stages. Well, we've done it again, producing  a comparable report on the British Theatre Repertoire in 2014. Again we've been supported by Arts Council England and the report was researched and written in collaboration with UK Theatre/Society of London Theatre and with David Brownlee of BON Culture. Its findings were launched at a plenary session of the Theatre 2016 Conference, on 12 May 2016.

The main headline of the report is that the transformation ofBritish theatre repertoire which reported last year has remained firmly in place. New work still dominates the repertoire, and London the theatrical landscape. British theatre continues to defy austerity: in 2014, British theatres made over a billion at the box office.

This is the second report so while we can begin to establish the consistent patterns, it is too early confidently to describe trends (with only two years of data, it's not possible to tell whether a change is a genuine trend, random statistical variation, or the product of one anomalous year). We hope the funding will be continued. With another couple of years of data, we should be able to see a dynamic picture of where the theatre is going.

However, some changes can be seen.

• Within new work, new writing has slightly declined and devised work markedly increased. In terms of attendances and box office, London has pulled further away from the rest of the country. 
• Wales seems to be experiencing a surge in theatregoing leading the country in percentage of potential attendance and box office.
• Classical revivals are dominated by Shakespeare and women’s revivals by Agatha Christie.
• More than half of the National Theatre's and RSC's new plays were by women.

The full report is embargoed until Thursday May 12 - at which point you'll be able to read it HERE.

Sarah Kane article # 2

On the heels of Sarah Hemmings' article, there's a good piece by Andrew Dickson in The Guardian today looking back at the premiere of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis (on the eve of an operatic version of the play).

I'm not specifically mentioned in the piece which I am absolutely fine about. I had a phone conversation with Andy to help with the research for it and he begins the piece talking about the day I got Sarah over to Royal Holloway - about which there is much else on this website.

What I like in this piece is the sense that the dust is settling a bit on Sarah's reputation. We're not so bowled over by the intensity and the violence and the shadow of her suicide has shortened. We can even note that, while this does not exhaust the play by any means, 4.48 Psychosis is in part a suicide note of an unusually rich and complicated kind. I also love the comment by Sarah's brother, Simon, that 'Mental illness is so often sentimentalised, or portrayed as madness – I hate that word. Sarah wanted to convey that while it may be pathological, it isn’t necessarily illogical'  which seems to me exactly right about the play..

Zola Award

The BBC has an internal radio award ceremony, the Radio Awards. I was nominated once before but didn't win, to the Corporation's unending shame.

But Animals - episode 1 of series of of Émile Zola: Blood, Sex, & Money - was nominated and tonight it won.

I couldn't make the ceremony, being in Paris, so I haven't seen the award itself though it seems to be made out of a slate from the original roof of Broadcasting House, which is, goodness me, what a thing. And what a day, having my 4th Zola episode go out live this afternoon and having the first one win in the evening.

It's a prize for Best Drama Production (or reading), which means that the award is absolutely shared with Pauline Harris (producer) and Steve Brooke (sound designer) and, of course, an extraordinary cast that included Glenda Jackson, Robert Lindsay, Ian Hart, Fenella Woolgar and many more.

The judges citation reads: 'The judges said this was a gripping, entertaining piece of drama which conveyed the turbulent times of the Second Empire through the personal lives of its players. It was wonderfully well paced and varied, setting the tragic alongside the comic, interweaving the heroic with the grotesque and the pathetic.'

Routledge Drama Anthology

A few years ago (2010), I contributed to a big old textbook about Modern European and American drama published by Routledge under the title The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. I handled the section on Naturalism and Symbolism, offering a long introduction and overview to these movements and also translating Maeterlinck's Interior and 'Tragedy in Everyday Life' and Pierre Quillard's 'On the Complete Pointlessness of Accurate Staging' . Well it's gone into a second edition. My section hasn't changed but much of the rest has. And it's got a slightly snappier title. If you want a one-volume guide to some of the most exciting movements in experimental western theatre, you can't do better.

Gale, Maggie B., John Deeney, Dan Rebellato, and Carl Lavery. The Routledge Drama Anthology: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance. 2nd ed.  Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.

Royal Holloway and the Performing Arts

The QS World University Rankings produce annual league tables of university institutions broken down by subject. They are measuring reputation and impact and they ask the opinions of other academics and employers and gather data about the impact of research based on citations and other measurements.

Very pleasingly, my institution, Royal Holloway, has been voted 14th in the world for Performing Arts and 6th in Britain.

1. Royal College of Music
2. University of Oxford
3. Royal Academy of Music
4. Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
5. Guildhall School of Music and Drama
6. Royal Holloway, University of London
7. University of Cambridge
8. King's College London
9. University of Southampton
10. University of York

The rankings reflect the strength of Drama and Music at Royal Holloway but you'll note that all of the institutions above us on the list are either conservatoires or academic institutions that don't teach Drama (Oxford), so of institutions that teach an academic degree in Drama, we're first. (Not that it really works like that.)

This is particularly pleasing because we've done a lot of work focusing our research activity, rebuilding the research staff, raising the profile of the research and creative practice, and reshaping the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. This already had a strong impact on our REF score last time and this is further evidence of our growing reputation.

Local Hero

Rebellato, Dan. "Local Hero: The Places of David Greig." Contemporary Theatre Review 26, no. 1 (January 2016): 9-18.

I gave a paper at Lincoln for a symposium on the work of David Greig a couple of years ago and a revised version of the paper has now come out in Contemporary Theatre Review. You'll probably need institutional access (unless you have wisely chosen to take out a personal subscription). It's part of a special issue on Greig's work, which I thoroughly recommend.

The first fifty of you can download the article HERE.

Sarah Kane article

There's a nice profile of Sarah Kane by Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times today, with some great contributions by Katie Mitchell, Vicky Featherstone, Alistair McDowall and others. It coinciding with Sarah Kane's premiere at the National Theatre with Katie Mitchell's production of Cleansed. I've written a programme note for that which I'll stick on here in due course.

But for now, here's the article:

• Sarah Hemming 'A ‘long overdue’ debut for Sarah Kane' Financial Times 12 Feb 2016

Home Economics

I've written a short play for Radio 4 and it's on this evening, Saturday 6 February 2016, at 7pm. It's in the From Fact to Fiction slot, which is intended for short, punchy plays that address topical issues. Mine looks at austerity economics. It's directed by the brilliant Polly Thomas and has a tremendous cast of Frances Grey and Sion Pritchard.

Link here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06zh291

It's repeated tomorrow at 5.40pm and it'll be in the iPlayer for a month after that.

Katie Mitchell & Cleansed

I'm doing a National Theatre platform, talking to Katie Mitchell about her production of Sarah Kane's play Cleansed. The platform is at 6pm on 2 March 2016. We will try to avoid spoilers so you can see the production that evening. Katie is always fascinating talking about her work and this looks set to be a remarkable production of (IMHO) Sarah Kane's greatest play.

Tickets for the platform are available here.

Writing Writing

Two years ago I went to Hong Kong to give a talk. I may even have told you at the time. In fact I did. Anyway, I gave a talk there which I later buffed up and puffed out and sent them and it's now been published in this:

• 甄拔濤 (編)。(2015) 《躍動的交鋒：閱讀新文本》。香港：國際演藝評論家協會(香港)分會及前進進戲劇工作坊。

Okay, here's a reference in English in case your Cantonese isn't as awesome as mine.

• Rebellato, Dan. "Writing Writing: British Playwriting in the Twenty-First Century." A Leaping Battle: Reading New Writing. Ed. Yan, Pat To. Hong Kong: International Association of Theatre Critics & On and On Theatre Workshop, 2015. 128-78. Print.

Mine is actually the only English-language contribution in the book. As it's for a Hong Kong readership, it begins with a survey of waves of British playwriting since the second world war. I then talk about British playwriting in the twenty-first century, which I suggest has not been characterised by a single movement. Instead I talk about some trends across the last fifteen years: Big Plays, Small Plays, Collaborative Writing, Verbatim, and Playing with Authorship.

This last section is probably the most original part of it. It builds on the argument in my article for Vicky Angelaki's book but tries to get under the skin of the peculiar nature of the performance text, something neither/nor both/and performance event and literary text.

Anyway, I'm not sure how you'll ever get to read it so alas my extraordinary powerful insights will, for now, only work their magic on the theatre communities of Kowloon. Maybe I'll scan it and put it up here after a decent interval

PS. My Cantonese is not awesome. It is non-existent..

Naturalism Panel

To coincide with the current production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf at the Almeida (and the forthcoming production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya), I'm speaking on a panel at the Almeida on Naturalism, its historical meaning and significance for us now, alongside David Eldridge who did such brilliant versions of Ibsen and Strindberg for the Donmar and Royal Exchange. The excellent Andrew Haydon is chairing. And there are other guests, still to be confirmed.

You can book tickets at the Almeida website.

UPDATE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND REPLACED WITH A RECORDING SESSION; THE RESULTING PODCAST WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE ALMEIDA WEBSITE..

Bruntwood Prize

The Brentwood Prize is ten years old and it's the biggest playwriting competition in the UK. It's awarded prizes to 17 playwrights in that time and the work of these writers has been seen in 28 venues across the country. Playwrights who have been discovered through this process include Phil Porter, Duncan Macmillan, ben Musgrave, Vivienne Franzmann, Fiona Peek, Andrew Sheridan, Alistair McDowall, Janice Okoh, Anna Jordan, Luke Norris, and Chris Urch.

I was very pleased and flattered, then, to be asked to write a short piece for the 2015 Brentwood Prize Award Ceremony programme. The piece is above. Click on the pick for a bigger version.