Review of the Year 2011

What was 2011 like in the theatre? Okay, British theatre. Okay, London theatre. Okay, just the things I saw.

It was an okay but not amazing new play year. I enjoyed Penelope Skinner’s riotous The Village Bike and debbie tucker green’s Truth and Reconciliation was fierce and precise. A late entry, Written on the Heart, was compelling and vividly current. I liked Steve Waters and John Donnelly’s pair of education plays at the Bush early in the year, Little Platoons and The Knowledge. I loved loved loved Wastwater by Simon Stephens, glacial and savage and yearning. Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs I read but didn’t see and was up there as one of the strongest of the year. The Acid Test, particularly in the first half, had some of the most brilliant and satirically funny dialogue. The two strongest pieces were by established writers. Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm was a sharp new direction for him: just two voices, two bodies in space, creating a world. His settings are usually integral to the action, shaping and determining the characters. Now it’s the other way around. And it was viscerally, compellingly played. And then there was David Eldridge’s Knot of the Heart, an almost overwhelmingly moving and truthful story of someone tearing themselves and their family apart and slowly being put back together.

There were some very fine revivals this year. From the post-war repertoire, I enjoyed the two Weskers, the Donmar’s Moonlight, Butley in the West End, Fen at the Finborough, Saved at the Lyric, and, maybe most of all, Inadmissible Evidence at the Donmar. For the entire length of The Browning Version at Chichester I was convinced that I was watching one of the greatest plays of the last hundred years, a conviction that has not left me. (I enjoyed Flare Path but still am not convinced that the play is all that). I’d never seen the Goldoni behind One Man, Two Guvnors, but the show works very well and is extremely funny. Nor had I seen Schiller’s Luise Miller but I’m glad I have, especially because of its strong version by Mike Poulton. Elsewhere, I’ve just seen the Young Vic’s Hamlet which was a strange but exhilarating experience. Maybe the most beautiful revival was Katie Mitchell’s A Woman Killed With Kindness at the National; stately, frozen, horrified, and shocking.

London Road and Matilda were stunning new musicals which could both - so easily - have been disasters. Probably the show I enjoyed most this year was actually not new this year, just new to me, and it was Lone Twin’s Catastrophe Trilogy, played out all day on a Sunday at the horrible Chelsea Centre, but was a blissful experience.  Also new to me was I Am the Wind, another fine Young Vic experience in a year of ‘experience’ theatre. The Lyric’s Aladdin was comfortably in an excellent groove, a complete delight.

Design-wise, I thought the Young Vic had it. There was Miriam Buether’s delightfully gaudy set for Government Inspector (complemented by Nicky Gillibrand’s wonderful costumes); Richard Peduzzi’s stark tilting raft for I Am the Wind, which, in its simple lifts and tilts in its small lake, created an epic journey for this splintered gem. And then Jeremy Herbert’s set for Hamlet, another pre-show walk-through, like Government Inspector, opened right out, embracing the audience, yet also working on our nerves, our desires to look, our fears. The lighting needs special mention here: Adam Silverman lit the show like nothing else I’ve seen. Stark and beautiful, functional and atmospheric, all at the same time. The most terrifying ghost, the cruellest Elsinore, and sitting in the Young Vic, it didn’t feel like an English theatre experience.

Not a great year, but there’s so much energy and excitement around, one feels there’s something waiting, ready to burst out.

Written on the Heart

David Edgar’s latest play for the RSC is a thorough delight. As good as anything since Pentecost, maybe better than Pentecost (and the first half of Pentecost is, I think, the best thing he’s written).

The play concerns the writing of the King James Bible. In tradition David Edgar style it jumps backwards and forwards across seventy-five years. The play comprises four scenes: Act I takes places in 1610, 1536, and 1586. Act II is continuous and takes place in 1610, a little after the events of the first scene. Reconstructed in chronological order, we see a young priest visiting William Tyndale in his cell in Flanders on the eve of his execution, the young man smuggling Tyndale’s English Bible out with him - in a scene reminiscent of the end of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, which Edgar wrote an English version of for the Birmingham Rep in 2005; then we are in the counter-counter-Reformation under Elizabeth I, with protestant and Puritan zealots roaming the country to seek out secret Popery in the conduct of Christian worship. In this scene we see a put-upon Churchwarden having his stained-glass windows broken and the concealed chalice revealed. Then in the present we see the various religious factions debating the creation of the King James Bible. There are the conservatives who think we are going too far, the Puritans who want to expunge every hint of Catholicism from the Bible, and the mediators, trying to keep the Anglican Church together. This is both a witty debate about words (‘flock’ or ‘fold’? ‘church’ or ‘congregation’?) and, of course, a debate about how we became the nation we are. In the final scene, we move into imagination, as Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, the overseer of the KJB, meets the ghost of William Tyndale, who is aghast the see how little progress has been made in connecting the Word of God to ordinary people. Together they begin work on a truly radical Bible for the people, Andrewes haunted by his earlier acts of brutal suppression, though this Bible is destined not to be completed. Andrewes is left reflecting that the Bible (and indeed God) is a reflection of the life of man, not the reverse.

It’s exhilarating. Not just because of the enormous amount of complex research compressed and set out for us, for the most part elegantly. This is a major attraction to the play and you get a sense of the intensity of the debates, the way they mattered to people in their souls and in their daily lives. But the play also makes vigorously clear how the King James Bible - about whose timeless literary qualities, in this quadricentennial year, we have seen much celebration - was a product of its age and, in many ways, a rather conservative document. Tyndale’s preference for ordinary speech is compared to the self-consciously archaic and ‘poetic’ form of the Authorized Version. The mixture of theologies at play in this translation is also made vividly theatrical by the different figures debating it. We hear familiar passages from the Bible shockingly defamiliarised in different translations. ‘When were children, we spoke and understood as children. But now we are men, we put all that away. No longer seeing through the dark glass of ritual and superstition, but in full light, and face to face. To know, as we are known,’ explains an Archdeacon in 1586, the words of 1 Corinthians 13 melting and resolving themselves as if seen in a cleaned mirror.

The form of the play is very powerful. Lengthy flashbacks in the first half, a continuous scene, perhaps taking place in Andrewes’s imagination, in Act II, also gives the play a drive and sharpening focus. A little like Glengarry Glen Ross the first half sets out the terms of the debate, bamboozling us a little on the way just to prepare us for the complexity of the issues, and then the second half drives into the guilt and politics that drive the making of this Bible. The play is also very funny in places. In particular, the debates between scholars which recall what Freud called the narcissism of small differences that has so often paralysed the Left. And, of course, ultimately, this is what the play is about. How shall we have our English revolution, in the twenty-first century as in the seventeenth.

The Limits of Criticism

In October this year, the Lyric Hammersmith revived Edward Bond’s great breakthrough play Saved. It was the first professional London revival for over 25 years. Most of the critics admired Sean Holmes’s clinically brutal revival, finding once again a horrifying persuasiveness in Bond’s portrait of an alienated, morally numbed generation, whose casual brutality is matched by their mutual neglect. On a bare off-white Lyric stage, there was no hiding, no coyness, just a stark, staring glimpse of who we are and might become. Never having seen the play before, incredibly, I was startled by the play’s vigorous dialogue, its mischievous theatricality, its unflinching bleakness. It united reviewers across the political spectrum. Michael Billington admired the ‘austere clarity that is beautifully realised in Holmes’s production’; Charles Spencer offered that ‘in Sean Holmes’s horribly gripping, brilliantly acted and sparely staged production, it is clear that this is a drama that still speaks powerfully of the way we live now’. Not everyone liked the production unreservedly. Some found the austerity and elegance of the direction took some of the force out of the evening. But everyone recognised the power and penetration of the play.

Well, nearly everyone. Quentin Letts, theatre critic of the Daily Mail, Britain leading newspaper of the far right, did not agree. ‘It is hard to see who will derive much satisfaction from Edward Bond’s unexpectedly boring play’ he begins, unpromisingly. Now, that this is a straight-up admission of his own failure of imagination, since a great many people derived considerable satisfaction from it. ‘The only notable scene is one in which a baby is stoned to death’, he continues. It’s a curious phraseology. If he’d said ‘the one’, I might have been persuaded that he’d heard of this play before and had some notion of what happened in this scene: a scene that is, let us remember, one of perhaps the three or four most iconic scenes in post-war British drama. While I don’t suggest that you need to do an exam to go to the theatre, I do feel that theatre critics shouldn’t be more ignorant than the ordinary theatregoer.

Letts then describes the scene in prurient detail, and compares it to ‘the death of Banquo’s children’ in Macbeth, a scene which better-informed theatregoers will remember doesn’t take place at any point in the play. Undaunted by this he movingly describes the scene as ‘one of the most upsetting in theatre’. But how does Bond’s scene compare to a scene that doesn’t exist? Not well, it seems. ‘Mr Bond’s scene, although 100 times more lurid, lacks power. In the middle of it all, I found myself succumbing to a huge yawn’. The pose is a familiar one: the play is trying to shock; I refuse to be shocked; to demonstrate how unshocked I am, I affect boredom. Of course, I suppose it is possible that Letts was bored, that he can watch the torture and murder of an child without it stirring any interest or feeling. That is a conversation Letts will have to have with himself.

But then Letts brings out his intellectual big guns. ‘Bond is a dogmatic clunker, so intent on his nihilistic sermonising he forgets the truth of human love’. Enough with the posing, here’s his serious critique. I would be interesting to know what Letts means by any of the words in this sentence. Is Bond dogmatic? Is he sermonising? The play seems to me to editorialise very little; it paints a picture and invites us to see patterns and shapes in it. That doesn’t strike me as sermonising. But Letts can invent entire subplots to Macbeth so conjuring up a sermonising subtext is child’s play. But then, is it nihilistic? The reviewers for the Evening Standard, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Metro, Independent, Time Out and the Mail on Sunday all found glimmers of hope, optimism, even redemption. I find those glimmers there too. Letts however was busy hearing a dogmatic sermon, so is unable to find them. And then I’m not sure what he means by calling Bond a ‘clunker’. A play could be a ‘clunker’. Does Bond ‘clunk’? I’m not aware of this but I think that if a person clunks in the privacy of their own home they should be permitted to clunk without adverse comment. On the other hand, this play is certainly not a clunker. As for the meaning of the truly sermonising phrase, the ‘truth of human love’, Letts doesn’t explain. What is ‘irresponsibly optimistic’ about the play, as Bond famously described it, is Len’s persistent love for Pam, his determination to make things better rather than always to tear them down. But Letts, fingers in his ears to keep out an imagined sermon, doesn’t see any of this.

In his manufactured boredom, Letts fancifully decides to let his attention wander. ‘Around me at the state-sponsored Lyric,’ he reports, ‘sat teenagers on some sort of educational trip (paid for from public funds?). One or two tittered. Others played on their mobile phones, ate sweets, dozed, sighed. The schlock-horror failed to grip them’. He has no evidence that these children’s tickets were paid for by public funds; it just tickles him to stir things up, as does his passive-aggressive little reference to the Lyric being ‘state-sponsored’. (And who paid for your ticket, Quentin? That would be the state-sponsored Lyric.) Of course, if this had been a school party they might well have been there by virtue of public funds: most likely that their school is there by virtue of public funds. I hope, but I am not sure, that Quentin Letts does not object to state-schoolkids going to the theatre. And notice how weirdly he builds his case against the play: one or two them tittered. Indeed so? I think I probably laughed only a little. It’s a pretty bleak play. They ate sweets? Well, yes. The theatre sells them. Some people, Mr Letts, can eat sweets and watch a play at the same time. Kids are famous for their multi-tasking. They sighed? There are moments of aching regret in the play. I think I sighed too. Perhaps they dozed too. I’ve dozed in plays. Even plays I’ve been enjoying. Sometimes I am very tired and I find myself dozing. Stop checking out the kids, Mr Letts, and pay attention to the stage. That’s your job.

Letts describes the characters in a cursory way: Pam is a ‘shouting trollop’. Harry is a ‘voyeuristic father’. Mary is an ‘ageing mother’. These are precisely the kinds of capsule dismissals that the play is striving to undermine and which seem to generate the characters’ anomie. It’s not knowing of him to say this; it’s just snooty, pompous, middle-class contempt. And he sums up his little analysis: ‘Apart from trying to intellectualise random violence against a baby, that’s about it.’ In what sense does the play ‘intellectualise’ the violence? In what way is the violence ‘random’? In what way can a play offer ‘intellectual’ analysis? These are interesting theatrical and social questions, but answers from Letts come there none. He has a question of his own: ‘Can the Lyric’s director, Sean Holmes, think of nothing better to stage?’

Edward Bond’s Saved is a classic of post-war British theatre. It has been performed across the world, thousands of times. Edward Bond is feted in France, Germany and elsewhere as one of the great playwrights of his generation. The play has been widely written about, analysed, acclaimed, debated with. It is a course that appears on syllabuses in schools and universities. It is regularly anthologised. Bond has tended not to give permission for revivals of the play, not trusting many directors with this key play in his career. It was, then, a coup for Sean Holmes to get Bond’s support for the production and a privilege for all of us to see. So no, I suspect Sean Holmes could not think of anything better to stage because it is a great play and an excellent choice.

But everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Quentin Letts’s opinions may be stupid, misanthropic, snobbish, ignorant, bilious and ugly, but he is entitled to them. It would be a funny thing if we all thought the same. It takes all sorts to make a world. Etc etc etc.

And it might have ended there. But here’s what Quentin did next. Not content with writing his review and expressing his opinion, Quentin Letts found the names of the private sponsors of the Lyric and personally rang them up, pointing out the many brutal events that take place in the play, with the evident aim of persuading them to withdraw or at least not renew their sponsorship.

Yes, you read that right. A theatre critic is actually personally, directly attempting to have a theatre closed down.

Is there any precedent to this? Theatre critics have done terrible damage to individual artists’ reputations. Tynan did for Rattigan. Harold Hobson stuck the knife into Rodney Ackland. There are critics who have returned time and again to berate a particular artistic director or theatre company. Charles Spencer has it in for Mark Ravenhill. Michael Billington is no fan of Katie Mitchell’s recent work. But most critics accept that their theatre reviews are platform enough. They have had their say, their voice amplified many times louder than any other member of the audience. They are read by hundreds of thousands. They are quoted on posters and leaflets, in adverts and sometimes on the backs of printed playtexts. But I don’t imagine Michael Billington lobbies Nick Hytner personally to persuade him not to employ Katie Mitchell. I doubt that even if Charles Spencer had the power to stop Mark Ravenhill from writing, he would actually use it. But Quentin Letts is seriously, earnestly, practically attempting to have the Lyric closed down.

Let’s note, too, that he’s trying to choke off private sponsorship. What does this mean? He perhaps thinks that the companies that sponsor the Lyric are stupid or ignorant; that they have no idea what the Lyric is like, that they just wrote their cheques without any interest in the theatre. This is a theatre, let’s recall, that staged Sarah Kane’s Blasted last year. Sponsors usually get tickets to previews or press night. I’m sure they knew what they were getting. And they made a market decision; they decided where they wanted to put their money. It seems to me very likely that they are much more intelligent, well-informed, thoughtful and sensitive to the subtleties of art and culture than is the Daily Mail’s theatre critic. It’s even possible that they, unlike Quentin Letts, were aware of Saved. Perhaps one of the sponsorship team went to a state-sponsored school where public money was frittered away educating them about one of the great plays of the post-war world. Perhaps a director of the company takes an interest in theatre, in its ability to talk to the world around it, to engage with the way we live, and felt that the programme being set out by Sean Holmes showed a thoughtful, sombre, engaged and responsible theatre alive to the violence and cruelty in our society.

It’s possible that they didn’t know, of course. The market system would like everyone involved in a market transaction to have perfect information, but as most advocates of the system conclude perfect information is never achievable. Which is why free-marketeers say we should assume that individual members in a market transaction know enough about what they’re doing. (The market, according to the theory, decides what is right and wrong; this is not a judgment that can be made before the market mechanisms go to work.) No sponsor of the Lyric has been misled; it’s been clear what the Lyric’s profile is like: serious, responsible, theatrical, community-minded, focused on new writing. So Quentin basically doesn’t have the courage of his market convictions; he wants to impose his tittle-tattling censorious morality on private sponsors and a public theatre.

What spurred Quentin Letts to action? He claims to have been bored by the play - he found himself succumbing to a huge yawn - but his actions tell another story. His actions tell the story of someone very shocked indeed, so shocked that he felt the need to warn other people, who he assumed are as ignorant as he is, and so he took the extraordinary step of writing to them so that he would never have to be shocked like this again.

And what this reveals is that although I might tolerate Letts’s opinions, he doesn’t tolerate mine. I happen to think Saved is a good play but I think you ought to be able to see it to decide for yourself. He thinks Saved is a bad play and wants you not to see it, not to be able to see it. He wants, in other words, for his critical opinion to prevail over everyone else’s: it is not enough for the little tyrant of the Mail that he slags the play off to his readers; he wants to erase all other opinions too. He wants to close the Lyric and he’s trying to close the Lyric.

What should a critic be? A critic should respond truthfully to what happens on stage. And let’s use Bernard Williams’s notion of being truthful: a critic should respond sincerely and accurately to what they see. Ideally, a critic should be open to each production they see, not prejudging, asking themselves, right to the last moments, what is this production, this play, this performance trying to do? Why is it trying to do these things? Has it achieved them? How did it achieve them? Were those aims worthwhile? And a critic should be aware that they are contributing to a public discourse; yes, they’re selling tickets, but they’re also contributing - en masse - to a broad public conversation about the theatre. It is because their voice is so amplified in that conversation that they should take write with care and responsibility, so they don’t shout people down. Quentin Letts has fallen very short of this definition of the critic’s role. The critic opens up a conversation. Quentin Letts does not. He closes things down.

Because he’s not a critic. He’s a troll. He enjoys stirring up indignation because that’s his job. The Mail likes it because whenever he writes one of his stupid reviews, gullible idiots like me retweet or Facebook it and send more traffic to the Mail’s site. And that allows them to charge more for advertising. Letts is, in the perfect words of Stewart Lee, someone with ‘outrageous politically incorrect opinions which he has for money’. He really is no different from Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Littlejohn, Liz Jones, even ‘Mad’ Melanie Phillips (though she is, in fairness, much more intelligent than he is). I’ve probably given him too much space on my blog and in my head already. No one I know who works in theatre takes his opinions seriously. But this really is something different.

Quentin Letts is an ignoramus and like so many ignorant people he is consumed with malice for those things he does not understand. His behaviour is that of a censor, unable to accept that his opinions should be weighed against others. His actions over Saved have crossed a line. A critic has sufficient power in their review column; to go further, as Letts has done, is incompatible with his role as a theatre critic. He is a disgrace.

** UPDATE: In the spirit of justice and balance, I should say  that Quentin Letts emailed me today, 16 December 2011 - in good humour - to deny having made these phone calls. I heard the rumours of his behaviour a month ago and had it confirmed by three people close to the Lyric this week. But I wasn’t on the other end of the phone back in October, so of course I can’t prove categorically that he made them. But this should give us pause; he may not have made the calls; he may have encouraged a colleague to do it; or, indeed, there may be a Quentin Letts impersonator abroad.

However, let’s also remember that he’s done exactly the same thing in print. This is from the Daily Mail on Saturday 15 October 2011, p. 44. And a week later, 22 October 2011, p. 42, he has another go . And this is the headline of his piece on the RSC’s Marat/Sade. And this is his review of Blasted on 5 November 2010, p. 68. And let’s not forget his gloating over the arts cuts earlier this year. Quentin Letts has form, sadly, and it’s obvious that not only has he crossed a line with regard to Saved, but he’s been crossing it for a long time..

Matilda the Musical

What to say about a production that does not put a foot wrong? It is everything great musicals are.

It’s very adult and it’s very childish. It’s very funny and it also had me sobbing like a fool. The book by Dennis Kelly captures just how strange and jagged and horrible Roald Dahl’s world was. Anyone who might have thought Kelly was an odd choice for librettist forgets Debris and Monkey Dust and of course his endless dark humour. Tim Minchin’s songs have a mixture of musical theatre and pop sensibility and completely come off; there are moments of Sondheim cleverness (the alphabet song), and then there are just adorable folk-pop songs like ‘When I Grow Up’ (it reminds me of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s ‘Our House) but which punch a hole of beautiful innocence, longing and comedy that is the special province of the musical. Matthew Warchus’s production knows exactly when to take things seriously and when to go for the gag. ‘When I Grow Up’ is staged breathtakingly on swings; and I mean breathtaking - the production takes a moment for a long breath and dream, which reminds us what is being aimed for, prepares us for the return of love, and the end of brutality. I’ve written elsewhere (oh and here too) about my love for the unintegrated musical, and there are some wonderful divertissements, including the entr’acte ‘Telly’, in which Mr Wormwood sings a music-hall hymn of praise to the box in the corner. I think it’s the best score for a British musical since, what? Oliver!?

The cast is faultless. I really don’t want to single anyone out, but it would be crazy not to mention that Kerry Ingram, the Matilda when I saw it, has confidence and stage charisma that knocked me over. Without seeming to be at all stage school brattish. Bertie Carvel - okay, I am singling people out - does a superb turn as Miss Trunchbull, ugly, savage, witty, physical. He should get all awards going. Lauren Ward as Miss Honey was perfect and delightful. The Wormwoods were magnificently carried off by Paul Kaye and Josie Walker.

And let me just tell you about the last five seconds, because it made me catch my breath with emotion and delight. Miss Honey has won the Wormwoods’ agreement to adopt Matilda. The birth-parents depart leaving the new mother and daughter alone, burnished by a sunny backlight. They turn to walk off together. And in the fading light, as they walk upstage and off, they both do a single, slow, simultaneous cartwheel. And the lights fade. It’s the most beautiful expression of togetherness, love, contentedness and joy I can remember experiencing in a theatre and it brought me choking to my feet for a standing ovation, along, I might say, with the entire rest of the audience.

Inadmissible Evidence

Inadmissible Evidence is a play I know pretty well but the only production I’d seen before yesterday was the rather chilly production by Di Trevis at the National almost twenty years ago, a production probably most famous for the author reputedly being banned from the rehearsal room. From memory that was a large-scale production and Trevor Eve’s Bill Maitland was rather lost on the Lyttelton stage. Mind you, I watched it from the Circle and since I’ve rarely ever enjoyed anything from the Lyttelton Circle, my memory, like Bill Maitland’s, is not to be trusted.

It’s strange in some ways that Osborne is such an influential figure when he is so totally sui generis. He’s not a formalist really; it would be hard to say he’d really shown people new ways of writing, just a new way of being a writer. All you can say is that you detect a bit of Osborne in any character who is savagely articulate and seems determined to wind up and horrify everyone around him. Butley for example. His major plays are actually all so different - the savage Look Back in Anger, the almost Brechtian The Entertainer, the austere historical drama Luther, the high-camp historical drama A Patriot for Me, and the intense monodrama Inadmissible Evidence - that he left no clear lessons in dramaturgy, except to let yourself go, be ruthlessly honest, don’t pander to anyone, and never censor yourself. He wasn’t what Foucault calls a ‘founder of discourse’, someone like Pinter who just makes possible a new way of writing. He just wrote extraordinary plays and embodied a deathless attitude to the role of the writer.

Oh and his first major play changed British theatre kind of forever, but let’s leave that to one side for a moment.

There’s a thing you can do on a bike which isn’t good for the brakes but sometimes helps your stability, where you ride against the brakes. Sometimes on a downward hill, either to freewheel or to ‘pulse’-brake can risk you losing control of the bike and it feels more in control to slightly brake and pedal at the same time. I thought of this while watching Inadmissible Evidence, because it struck me that Osborne writes best when he feels the friction of resistance.

In the first scene, Bill Maitland finds himself summoned before a Court of his own imagination. Bill’s opening monologue is a wheedling, rambling, extremely funny plea of self-justification. And it struck me how often Osborne adopts this tone; his writing so often proceeds with the certainty of judgment; that is, he and his character anticipate that they’re going to be judged, found wanting, condemned. Osborne pre-empts this judgment with a mixture of aggression (despising the judge), declarations of love (wooing the judge), and confession (pre-empting the judge). Close to the end of the play, there is a  perfect instance of this: Bill’s daughter shows up in his office, comes in and sits down. Bill starts speaking to her; nervously, he admits that he is not going to attend her birthday party because he’s going to Blackpool with his mistress. He then talks about how he adored her and ends explaining how he despises her. And she sits silently, saying not a word before she leaves again.

This silence may be silent judgment or it may be that Bill has battered her power of judgment from her. This ambiguity expresses the essential dissatisfaction in the heart of Osborne’s work and maybe even in his life. His sense of judgment is so acute that his characters tends to reject those they love, even before finding out whether they judged him at all. Alison in Look Back in Anger is the classic example who he drives away through his constant battering, though all we really see her do is iron his shirts. Of course in that play, Osborne’s fort-da game sees her come back to him in the end, but in Inadmissible Evidence, successively, his secretary, his clerk, his daughter, his telephonist, his mistress all reject him, leaving him alone at the end of the play.

And I’d include the audience in the targets of Osborne’s pre-emptive strikes. There is an attitude to the audience of pre-emptive rejection in a lot of the plays that says ‘I know you’re going to hate this, so I’m going to make sure you hate this, and I’m going to incorporate your rejection or silence it altogether’. Like Pinter, he saw his relation to the audience as a boxing match and relished being pursued by a (probably exaggerated) violent mob after the first night of Paul Slickey. And this isn’t just a personal attitude, it’s dramaturgical. In its mild form, it’s the way Jimmy Porter’s or Bill Maitland’s monologues overflow the realistic conditions of their scenes and appear directed to the audience; it’s the way Archie Rice is acknowledged as bad from the outset but still ends the play heckling the audience; and it becomes the scripted walk outs in A Sense of Detachment or the final stage direction of Déjàvu which instructs that ‘in the unlikely event of audience dissent at the end of the performance, the loud playing of martial music can be effective’. Even that ‘unlikely’ is an expression of the idea that the audience might even deliberately fail to rise to Osborne’s provocation.

Jane Maitland, Bill’s daughter, never speaks in the play. Bill’s speech to her - all ten minutes of it - is an astonishing piece of rhetoric, bruised wit, deep feeling. To me, the sequence is also unsatisfactory in some way. Why is the daughter so silent? If she’s this pushy little thing that Bill describes, why doesn’t she try to butt in? If she isn’t this pushy little thing, then why is he trying to smother her with his words? Well, maybe because this is what Osborne’s characters do with all the people they love. John Heilpern’s biography of John Osborne reveals that Osborne rejected his own daughter, Nolan, in a letter of similar viciousness and articulacy.

The problem personally with this attitude is you push away everyone you love, by pre-emptively causing the very rejection you fear. In dramaturgical terms, this causes a different problem: are the characters outside the author’s consciousness or inside it? If outside, they are effectively silenced (Jane); if inside, then they are really just a paranoid  extension of the writer’s own consciousness. And this is what you see in Inadmissible Evidence, as the visitors to the solicitor become semi-hallucinatory, each new client played by the same person. Either way, the characters kind of offer no resistance and resistance, in all the plays, seems to me what Osborne longed for and feared. He wanted someone to stand up to him (this is what Jimmy Porter explicitly demands) and yet was terrified that he would be rejected and crushed by it. So he wanted them and hated them. He drew character but either rendered them cyphers or silent.

Of course, I’m being too schematic here. Alison does stand up to him, precisely through her silence and the metronomic thump of the iron (I know, I know, not exactly feminist fury, but in theatrical terms is emphasises the failure of Jimmy’s rhetoric, its collapse into silence). But I think Inadmissible Evidence may be his best play because it’s the point when he sensed resistance most strongly - it’s entirely a play about rejection - and this made him work harder and bring those neuroses to their psychological and dramaturgical peak.

This production brings all that off enormously well, with great humour and savagery. Douglas Hodge, as Bill Maitland, gives a performance that, if Mark Rylance weren’t strutting his astonishing stuff in Jerusalem, would be talked of as one of the great performances of the new century.